4341

Yeah, I honestly don’t think combat skills increase in effectiveness with level, only allowing you more perks.

4342

Are you sure? In the case of armor I am really skeptical it is just a damage reduction percentage. Having armor 150 is better than 50. I don’t think have a skill 30 makes any difference than 60.

4343

The smithing level #s are a series of gates, rather than smooth improvement. So at 15 you can upgrade things to “fine,” at 20 superior, at 40 exquisite, and so on (with material perks). So increasing 38 -> 39 doesn’t help, but 39 -> 40 does (as it unlocks the exquisite upgrade).

Both weapon damage and armor defense is affected by skill. This is easy to test with an item that boosts skill: put it on and watch the numbers go up.

4344

It effects the armor value of the armor.

4345

Yes, it’s important to remember that when you look at a sword or piece of armor and see the defense and damage #s, those are the numbers that you will get, due to your skill/perks/enchantments, NOT the “base” attribute of the item, which is impossible to see. So when your heavy armor skill goes up, the defense rating of each piece of heavy armor you look at will go up.

4346

Incorrect.

Weapon damage definately improves with skill level, it’s what makes the +20% perks so incredibly powerful. Skill, base item (Ebony, etc.), and perks all contribute.

The guide even mentiones it as well. The items displayed in the guide show base damage with a 15 in the related skill.

Armor skill increases your armor bonus.

These are not big increases, but they are happening.

As you level up your magic skills, those related spells cost less and less. At 70 when I first got access to Thunderbolt it was 199. Now it’s 89 (perked to be 50% cheaper) at Destruction 88, for example.

All of the skills have incremental bonus based on skill, but not nearly as much as Perks provide.

4347

Ok - thanks for the info! Thats good to know. It does make it a bit strange that spells doesn’t follow the same rule then.

4348

So, I restarted as a sword and board fighter since most people are going Sneaky McSneakerson. Breton so I get the magic resistance. Going to add as much magic resistance as possible and keeping to light armor. Also, noticed the block tree gets an elemental block, so I’m going to go with that, too. Head to head dragon slaying for the win.

4349

It seems to me like Bethesda wanted a blanket solution for all the magic stuff. Like, how should upping your skill improve magelight? Cost is the only thing every spell has in common.

4350

So, the weird thing I’m noticing? The cost reduction doesn’t make sense with what is essentially an infinite resource. Decreasing the total cost of damaging spells, rather than increasing their damage, indicates that the design intention was to maintain a static DPS, but to govern how long you could effectively stay in the fight. The problem, though, is that you already have an effective fight timer for mages in the Magicka resource. That just seems like a straight up mistake, as every other offensive choice has, you know, not-static DPS.

It’s like the inverse of the Mesmer weirdness from Guild Wars (in short, for those who didn’t play, the primary stat for Mesmers - which is the special stat that cross-class members couldn’t take - decreased casting time, allowing the Mesmer to theoretically barf out spells much faster than any other caster, but the combat system as a whole was mostly about effectively managing your very limited resource pools over the duration of a fight, so the class was put in a position where their primary benefit actually worked in opposition to the way the game wanted you to play it). I’m actually kind of interested now to hear the designers explain why they made this decision. I assume there was a reason.

4351

You are correct thank god. When I used a Fortify Light Armor potion which raised my LA skill from 27 to 36 my Armor class increased from 62 to 64 not huge difference but something. The difference is slight enough that I can see why we didn’t notice.

So that is bizarre that destruction spells don’t follow the same rule, although reducing the cost of the spells is obviously helpful.

4352

Destruction mage builds are 100% viable. I played one, personally, to 36. Just run the mages guild, and wear robes/dragon priest masks for their regen/boosting powers. There are indeed variations on spells (higher level versions,) and, no one here has found the ritual spells yet - those are amazing.

Enjoy!

4353

They do increase. And by a pretty good amount.

Everything gets better with more skill. Armor gives more armor, weapons do more damage, stealth is sneakier, etc.

The difference is magic becomes cheaper. Which is fine for most things, but for Destruction it makes it fall behind the other combat skills because you tend to cap out on damage since there are no “X% more damage from Destruction” enchants, whereas there are those enchants for 1H, 2H and Archery. Which means a physical combat character can be rolling with +75% or more damage from enchants, plus the bonuses from high skill, plus 100% damage from perks, whereas the Destruction mage is left at +50% damage from perks and thats it.

Destruction really could benefit from a base skill that increased damage ala the other “combat” skills. Or just fold a %damage boost into the Adept/Mastery/etc skills.

Keep in mind dragons bite really hard, so head-to-head with em will still be risky with light armor, though if its perked out you should be okay. I took em head on, but I had heavy armor and a shield. The resistance is pretty sweet, but the bigger dragons can still light you up and nearly kill you. Make sure to shield bash em when they breathe on you or power attack and you should be good.

4354

How does defense factor in? Is magic only affected by resistances or does armor play a part too? If armor isn’t applied against magic, that would probably balance things a bit.

4355

Well they follow the same rules for spells, that is they get cheaper.

Which works fine for most schools, but Destruction runs into the issue of being able to cast a spell more doesn’t matter if that scary SOB can catch you and kill you before it kills him.

4356

Magic ignores armor. Enemy magic is brutal and can drop you in seconds in Dragonbone. Player magic doesn’t seem nearly as brutal though. Plus most races/creatures have some sort of magic resistance, so the armor ignoring isn’t necessarily that amazing.

4357

I swear the Destruction problem has to be the result of a game system change that it didn’t get updated for or something, its too blatant of a problem. I’ve got about 70 hours in the game already (vacation) and have tried various archetypes and its night and day the difference.

Equipping a bow or sword, even without perks, is a lot more effective in most situations than relying on destruction spells. If you perk, smith, or enchant to boost the sword or bow its not even on the same scale anymore.

My enchanted and smithed bow at L25 hits for something like 70+30 elemental damage, gets x6 sneak damage (used to be x3 which was already insanely good), staggers enemies, and slows time when I fire. It also is effectively limitless resource as arrows are plentiful.

Oh, to make it worse, I haven’t even enchanted my armor for +archery damage yet, so if I focus on that like a mage would focus on -destruction cost, I’d be looking at about 1000 damage sneak attacks just by using game mechanics as designed, not even trying to break the system.

Once I realized that bosses would always die before they realized I was there, I retired the character. I don’t think it’s just destruction that’s broken, I think a lot of skills are but they’re on opposite ends of.the spectrum.

4358

Probably true, but I do like I can just walk around with my bare hands and light shit up. I would say my argonian pure mage and then this new warrior I just started are my preferred characters to play. The sneaky type just feels too gamey for my tastes, though it is satisfying to get the backstab animations.

4359

Hold on, there are special backstab animations? Do they only trigger when you kill someone with one hit? I don’t think I’ve seen anything with my 6x backstab.

4360

Oh, I’m sorry. Maybe I’m misleading you, I’ve only done this with swords, not daggers. But you almost always get the impale through the back animation. At least I have.