4261

I’m wondering if it makes a huge difference if all your gear is “of Destruction”. My 22 mage has all mana regen gear and if I’m in a room with a two-handed bandit plunderer orc it’s all over, I fire off four fireballs and I’m out of mana (with putting almost every level-up into mana) and either chugging ineffective potions or dodging ineffectively.

4262

My mage had a midlife crisis last night, bought some light armor and a sword, paid for a bunch of one handed training, and put a couple perks into the damage bonus. The dwarven automatons he banged his new sword against seemed largely unimpressed, so eventually he faced reality. He’s a mage. It’s the path he’s chosen and he’ll have to see it through.

4263

How is that even possible? I mean as a mage you should be hitting something like 2-300% mana regen with a massive pool. Hell I don’t even run out on my Battlemage and I’m an Atronoch. If you take the perks, spells cost basically nothing to cast.

4264

Magic regen is penalized pretty heavily in combat I thought?

4265

A guide

http://skyrimguide.blogspot.com/2011/11/skyrim-respec-guide-for-pc.html

4266

Yes, you are dying because you dedicated your gear to regen. Regen sucks, it cannot possibly keep pace. You’ll spend five times as much on spells, and regenerate only two or three times more than the anemic in combat base regen. Just not worth it!

Since I spend about 1/5th what you spend on my bread and butter skills, I have an effective mana bar of 5x yours. My base mana pool is somewhere over four hundred. My effective mana pool on destruction spells is thus somewhere upwards of two thousand when using the base spell costs after relevant mastery perk. Think about this another way. Without cost reduction, a 50 mana potion is one fireball. With cost reduction, it is five fireballs. That means a 50 mana potion with a 1/5th reduction in cost is equivalent to a 250 mana potion without that reduction in cost. So while your base regen for non-destruction skills is 2 to 3 times mine, my base regen for destruction skills is 5x base and thus better than yours. Get it? You can’t match that. You can’t even come close to matching that AND matching my significantly higher effective mana pool.

See why cost reduction is so powerful now? It hugely increases your efficiency and makes even cheapo mana potions incredibly effective. Sure, I’m not as good with illusion or restoration or conjuration as a result, but that really only hurts me with Ward spells (30m per second SUCKS). Good timing makes up for that, and the fact that most of the casts from those schools are maintained handles the rest. But I still wince when I cast an atronach because, shit, that ~one hundred mana is effectively five hundred destruction mana!

Summary: Mana regen sucks huge dick and is totally worthless. Cost reduction is fucking godly and should be abused as much as possible.

4267

Yayyyy for Bethesda! 7M Skyrim copies shipped already! Almost a half billion dollars booked just from the launch shipments and many restocking orders already coming in. Fucking awesome.

Looks like they came goddamned close to MW3’s all-time-record $400M sell-through in the first 24 hours, which is extraordinarily impressive for such a massive old-school RPG.

4268

Yep, that’s basically what I did, except I used player.setskill rather than player.advskill as it was quicker.

4269

Foolish of me to have assumed Bethesda is math enabled enough to have given out mage gear worth wearing on their mage quests.

4270

…aaaaand one more crosspost, just to be safe.

Forgive me for cross-posting this to a couple of threads here, but I wasn’t sure where to repost.

I’ll say from the start that I’ve been doing some tweaking of .ini files quite a bit. Not surprised if perhaps something I set in there did…something…to a game file.

At any rate, I got to the point last night where I was crashing to desktop every 15 minutes or so. It was very frustrating.

And I’m posting this because–for me at least–I fixed it.

Two things to make sure you do:

  1. Go to your sound setting on your PC. Make sure you have selected a default of 44100 and 24 bits.

  2. Now, open Steam. Right-click “Skyrim” in your library, select “properties”, and verify integrity of the game cache. Even though I bought and installed the game on a physical disc, I still managed a corrupted game file of about 1.3 gb that was re-downloaded from Steam.

Having done both of these things, I am now playing back on Ultra settings with no crashes over hours and hours of game play.

4271

If I could hit a key (or key combination like shift 1) and have a buff in each hand, cast them and then hit that key again to go back to my previous combo I’d be happy.

Oh and a little indicator when they expire would be nice.

But yes, as currently implemented buffs are painful.

4272

The mana regen is good, but it doesn’t let me chain cast like I would need to to kill an “elite” bandit like a plunderer without him shoving his sword in my face the 3-4 times needed to kill me, even with Stoneflesh. Four fireballs might be an exaggeration but the entire mana bar takes him down to half health on Adept difficulty.

4273

My current hotkey setup:

  1. Stoneskin
  2. Bound Sword
  3. Fast Healing
  4. Orcish War Axe of Fire
  5. Summon Flame Atronach

The 4 key pulls up my axe in my right hand. The other keys change the spell in my left hand. This basically lets me dual-wield a spell/axe combo. I keep my axe up all the time, so dungeoneering is: hit 1, hit 2, run around, kill shit, when my buff goes down hit 1 again, when my sword goes down hit 2 again, when shit gets real hit 5 and get an atronach out (and then, sadly, hit Q and stop time to get my other real axe out).

It’s quite usable in that form, but yes, it would be a lot better if the number keys mapped to both-hand combos; then you could have 1 for your buffs, 2 for your weapons, etc. Mods ahoy!

4274

Most of the gear seems admirably designed for someone interested in playing a light armor wearing battle mage. Specifically a hat you can pick up, which would be great for someone looking to whack things to death while popping the occasional long duration spell. There’s a specific quest reward robe that gives 15% cost reduction for every school that is fine until you can get an expert level robe in your chosen specialization. You’ll probably be able to enchant better than that, but if you can’t (I can’t yet) it’s pretty awesome. At the least get a novice robe and disenchant it so that you can have the correct enchant.

Craft a ring and an amulet of -X% cost, and either buy or make a hat that does the same. As far as I can tell there aren’t any useful enchants for hands or feet, just resists. I’d like some +magicka or something enchants for them, but nerp.

But yes, the gear they provide sucks because it ignores the basic reality that lowering costs is always more efficient than increasing ability.

4275

Bethesda has never been math enabled at all. Their systems always break with the slightest push. 100% chameleon anyone?

If you want to go crazy, get your enchanting up (and alchemy if you really want to be abusive, and use alchemy to boost enchanting and vice versa) and stack -spell cost until it goes to zero. Enjoy your infinite mana bar, without spending a single point in magic.

4276

Man that’s true, you could get away with 6 perks in destruction and get absolutely everything you need to be a fire mage. You don’t even need to put any levelups in magicka, just put it all in health. BETHESDA!!!

4277

It just amazes me how a company can make this amazing world with hundreds of hours of engaging gameplay and huge amounts of voice acted characters, and then shortchange their character development systems game after game.

4278

I like how if it’s not PERFECT AND UNBREAKABLE it’s ‘shortchanged’ or ‘broken’.

4279

You can make that kind of comment about a mouse and keyboard interface. Hire a couple guys to get it right.

But I can easily see how as a team they might not care that much about character development systems. It’s not a simulator. I doubt they care if it’s balanced since it’s singleplayer. They want to create those worlds and people instead.

The other thing to remember is they disguised it better this time. Some of the mechanics in Oblivion were so boring you couldn’t help treating it like a spreadsheet. In Skyrim if you make a broken character, at least it looks cool and it’s somewhat fun to play.

4280

Usually when people figure out how to break a system in like a couple days, that’s a bad sign.

Magic is pretty easy to break for some fairly standard and seriously obvious reasons, and the easiest fix would be capping it so that you can only put cost reduction on cloth hat and cloth robe, and cost reduction can’t go past 40% on either.

Bamf, problem solved. 80% reduction is fairly reasonable considering how the game works and equivalent to the massive hit in effectiveness you got when wearing combat heavy gear in Oblivion. Just put differently this time around, because bonuses are more fun than maluses.