4281

LOL. Don’t ever dare to defend Bethesda on this.

They still have the same loophole with alchemy/enchanting that was in Morrowind, that 2002 game (you know, the one used to beat the game in a few minutes).

Or the already explained disparity between mana regen. and cost reduction. These two are the two main ways to boost your character for magic users. A style and B style. Was that much to ask for a bit of balance between A and B?? They had years to do it. People literally needed only 4 days to notice the unbalance.

4282

I started seeing it over the weekend, which was when I ditched sillyhat and the reward outfit for more specialized gear. So really two days was enough to math it out and see the difference. Would have been quicker had I picked up how enchanting worked faster.

Not all that complex a system. Not sure why game devs don’t hire crazies like myself who spend their time breaking systems to, uh, explain to them why their design needs restructuring.

4283

Maybe they’re afraid they won’t be able to get rid of you when the game is done.

I can buy now how some of this could be fixed just as quickly as the interface. So carry on.

4284

I don’t even really care that it’s balanced, I don’t mind if some playstyle is worse than others. Ok maybe destruction is underpowered maybe it’s overpowered compared to melee, big deal. But putting points into destruction and magicka should be the right answer to “How do I make the most destructingy destruction mage”, not putting points in enchanting and health.

Anyway this is just nitpick fun on a game I’m enjoying thoroughly and will do for the next 300 hours or so.

4285

Health isn’t super useful as a mage, so I put all my points into magicka. However there is an alteration spell that lets you convert health into magicka, and if you can cut that to zero with cost reduction gear it would mean infinite magicka.

4286

No I know I’m just making a point, if I’m casting zero mana spells I might as well take more health to survive attacks. The mana then would only be useful for auxiliary spells.

4287

Ah yes, Equilibrium. Even without gear you can make mana from thin air pretty easily, but at least it takes time. Since I was melee heavy I used that to handle the guy who drops the crazy hat, as there was a lot of retreating to heal.

While I don’t mind balance issues so much in single player games, the issues with alchemy/enchanting are pretty obvious. Most games handle them with some sort of scaling factor, hard limit, or stacking penalty.

The fortify <enchanting/alchemy/blacksmithing> effects should probably just be removed, or if they wanted to be fancy implemented as “If you don’t have a multiplier of at least X, the effect gives you X”

4288

Skyrim is a single-player game. They can afford to hand out perks like “you do 20% more melee damage” at the same cost as “20% easier lockpicking”. They don’t need to produce a perfectly balanced mathematical construct.

The difference is huge when you compare it to something very obviously meticulously built like the diablo3 or WoW skill system, with each choice closely balanced and playtested for thousands of hours. You don’t see any “you do 20% more damage” abilities there. They have abilities that increase some resource regen by 4.7%, and they have to carefully balanced against 3 other abilities that also must offer no more or less than 4.7% performance, because otherwise nobody would take them. That’s the key difference in a nutshell right there.

So what if magic is weak compared to melee? It’s only a real issue on the highest difficulty if you get your character to high level, and you can always turn the difficulty down to where you feel comfortable. Nobody’s judging. It’s a single-player game.

4289

Magic is far stronger than melee with the right gear is the problem. Like, infinitely stronger. Like, AOE power attack for ZERO stamina at range with multiple dangerous side effects stronger.

Which is the problem.

4290

What is this hat people are referring to?

4291

I look forward to breaking the game with magic Aeon; thanks for figuring it out first. Not sarcasm.

It really surprised me to hear about how horrible magic was, but Oblivion/Morrowind this is not, and the way magic works now seems to have thrown people a bit for a loop. It seems like a big difference here is that in Oblivion low level spells never quite became obsolete where here it seems you really have to keep moving on to the next Big Spell (or item, weapons, ect) and take all the staking perks to make it work.

However, it will be weeks before i get there (level 36+ already guys??).

4292

Don’t be a fucking tool.

4293

My woman lives in PA, I live in NYC. Also she had some sort of game last weekend, and thanksgiving is weekend after so I’ve dedicated these nine days to powerblasting through Skyrim. People are great and all, but fuck it I am gonna have my goddamn fun!

There was a similar mechanism for breaking magic in Oblivion using weaken magic resist + a buff spell on yourself that enabled you to get tens of thousands of mana because the weaken magic resist spell amplified the effect of the buff spells. They actually patched that though. Also probably why they removed spell crafting; if it was still in you could eyefuck this game’s magic into supremely broken state.

4294

Numbers aside they nailed the fireball spell so well in this game. It’s my favourite fireball since Curse of the Azure Bonds.

4295

edit: erm, spoiler tags not working?

4296

Re: magic brokeness

I can kill a daedra lord with fireballs, kitting him. But polar bears are very fast (hard to kit) and my mana is depleted before doing some serius damage to the creature. So I have decided to stack %destruction gear, and ignore everything else.

Nerf bears!

4297

Cave and polar bears seem to be more dangerous than dragons…

Dragons really have WAY too little health. I’d enjoy a simple mod to scale their health by a factor of at least 5, so the battles felt more epic. Aside from frost dragons their damage output is a joke, and you can kill them in a couple power attacks.

4298

Their fire/ice breath may fill up your entire screen, but it seems to do about as much damage as one bear’s swipe. And since the dragons only do one breath attack before going airborne, the DPS ends up being much lower than the bears. I’m easily more scared by the bears, giants and mammoths than by the dragons.

4299

Yea, I’m chomping at the bit for the construction kit. I went mage at first and I just ended up a potion-guzzling drunk so I tried a sneak archer and it was so overpoweringly good that the game got boring, especially when I… obtained a particular item.

I love the game, so I’m debating putting it on hold until mods can tweak it a bit to my liking. I don’t want to burn out on it and see everything there is to see before the mods hit, but it’s a really fun game and I’m having a hard time setting it aside.

EDIT: And I gotta agree on the bears - fuck those ursine bastards.

4300

I think the first thing I would do is go in and scale up their damage hugely. Getting caught in a dragon breath weapons should ruin your day.

Can’t wait for the editor kit.