4361

There’s a throat slashing animation for backstab with daggers.

4362

Yea there are assassination animations but you have to kill with the backstab and it won’t fire every time. There’s a throat-slitting dagger one, for instance.

4363

Also got the throat-slit with a sword. Never got a backstab animation with an axe yet though.

4364

Isn’t that why there is a perk in destruction that lets you stagger an enemy? Staggering takes a considerable amount of time to recover from.

4365

That only works if you game the -% destruction magic system though; as listed those numbers don’t work without a LOT of potions.

Also - I’ve said before, I’ll say again - I don’t believe an entire skill should be good or useless based on any one way to use it (dual casting, specifically WITH this perk, for example).

4366

At a story level this doesn’t bother me that much as Skyrim and the Nords are not “supposed” to be as magically inclined. I actually like that magic is on some level a kind of foreign thing that most players, and most NPCs, are not good at.

OTOH, i’m stuck beating some Hagravens on Very Hard with my Breton Mage. Fun :)

4367

True, haven’t gotten them yet and am really focused on seeing what the hell happens with illusion at high levels.

Also I want paralyze SO FUCKING BAD. There is a mass paralyze spell, zomgzorz must have. Imagine a mass paralyze spell with gear reduction lowering the cost to basically nothing.

Hi motionless enemies, I am now going to backstab you all one by one purely because I can! Also these black soul gems I have? Yes, yes you will be powering my future gear! How thoughtful of you!

I break systems in the normal course of play. It isn’t my fault that developers don’t think through stuff like, say, cost reduction enchants that allow me to reduce costs to zero.

They don’t scale perfectly, but they do scale well enough. I think the bigger problem is that melee/bow damage is just absurd. I’m playing on master level difficulty and am in the high 30s right now. Haven’t quite hit the 40s, but I’m close enough that a couple more days should do it.

4368

We all know the real reason you want the paralyze spell: to trick small furry animals to leap at you so when you paralyze them they tumble pathetically down the hill.

(I’m at work so I can’t find the Oblivion video, but it’s great.)

4369

Actually yes.

I had a sabrecat leap at me last night and dual incinned it, so that it spun off perpendicular from my head, smacked into a tree and then smacked back into me. I snorted beer all over the monitor as my character went spinning down a mountain due to this seriously unlikely act of retribution on the part of the careening corpse.

Had I paralyzed him first, I wouldn’t have needed to reload!

4370

Just wondering. I never did the 100% chameleon in Oblivion either. I just don’t understand the compulsion to do it.

I loved my chameleon suit, though I hadn’t assembled it until after I’d finished the main quest. I rather like the breakability of Elder Scrolls games – it adds a bit to the open-world sense, the sense that you can actually become godlike in your power. Most games make such a fetish of “balance” that I find stuff like the chameleon suit charming. But I also like to discover the exploits as I play; it’s less enjoyable if you scour FAQs for them and just zero in on the optimal path like a laser beam. Since Elder Scrolls is single player and nobody else is on the hook if you screw up (unlike an MMO), there’s not as much pressure to reach Optimal in a hurry. At least, not for me.

4371

There’s a seeming bug with archery where the skill can turn red and go to very low numbers (mine went from 60 to 15). If you check the active status page, there’s nothing listed as a disease affecting archery.

The way to fix this is to go and get trained in archery (once is enough) … sleeping does not help, nor does the skill seem to level up on it’s own while under this bug.

Not sure if this can happen to any other skills or when the bug occurs.

4372

I’ve had it happen with my One-Handed skill. Once I leveled up, the problem went away.

4373

I like the freedom of the game, and the flexibility of the magic system is so good that you can do a “invisible suit” but I don’t like the breakability part. Even with a suit like that, there should be a better AI capable of react against invisible enemies, doing blind attacks or running away or using their hearing, and in that powerful, flexible system there should be also stuff like counter spell against it, or special true seeing in some enemies, etc etc.

From a realism world standpoint, in a world with powerful magic like this one, there should be guards equipped with anti magic items or wizards escorting important npcs.

And in general, permanent magical effect should be very hard to do, almost in a logarithm manner as you approach 100% effect or infinite uses.

4374

Enchants scaling additively is a huge oversight. You never let power scale additively like that. The perks should be additive, sure, but anything after that should be applied multiplicative.

4375

I think I’d be perfectly happy with an additional three perks in destruction that added a further +25% to each element’s damage. Or the suggestion I made in one of the threads that each of the mastery perks in destruction should add 10% to damage.

Slightly more damage would bring me back to being able to one shot all non-boss enemies with a single dualcast. Right now, it requires dualcast + 1 handed for the strongest non-boss guys when using bolt spells like incin.

That said, I’ve found ice storm is possibly even better than fireball as a go to spell for most enemies. It goes slow enough that they can take 120-160dmg from a single cast (40dps) so a dual cast does 300+ fairly easily. And while it might not kill them, the high damage to stamina it causes practically guarantees that they will not be power attacking you, and the slowdown it causes gives you plenty of time to follow up with yet more frosty death. Frost atronachs also have an aoe knockdown (they take one weird little spiky arm and smack it point down into the ground, causing nearby stuff to fall over) and ignore all frost damage, and frozen enemies are easy meat due to low health and immobility. I’ve been leaning on it heavily especially for mass battles. Doesn’t work against enemies like archers or mages that tend to dive out of the way, but for swarms of melee tards charging you it gives some SERIOUSLY sexy results for practically zero mana.

I mean, ice storm slows them, eats a ton of health and stamina, doesn’t damage your best tank and can freeze things. If you’re fighting slow stuff or charging stuff you can’t beat the efficiency. Dual cast it also knocks things down with the impact perk.

So I swapped up how I fight like this: ice storm against all melee foes, incin or tbolt against mages (they don’t wiggle much) fireball against fast moving stuff that I need to KD or wiggly fucking archers. Dragons get a tbolt because fuck you stop flying so much.

The more I play with destruction, the more deadly it becomes. I might not be super amazing at killing a single high hp enemy compared to a dual weapon specced super enchanted high armor warrior, but I can effortlessly eat groups of foes on master and hold my own against bosses.

Biggest beef is with staves. Why can’t I make staves?!

4376

Can’t you? My character has a staff of raise zombie that I found. Never tried to wield it as an actual weapon though.

4377

You can find em. You can buy em. You can’t enchant and make your own. Stupid stupid stupid.

I really very badly need a stave of detect life and a stave of give me some fucking armor (you do NOT want to come up against archers without armor spells on when you have 100hp) and possibly a stave of atronach now right here.

All of these things eat loads of my mana that I need for stuff like, uh, blasting the shit out of enemies. Why I can’t just craft them is beyond me. Would be a nice way to let mages do something fun with smithery and wood, but noooo.

4378

You can find enchanted staves, but I’ve yet to see a plain staff that you can smith or enchant.

Apparently a stout piece of wood is beyond our smithing ability. Maybe i’ll see if i can equip some of that firewood sitting in my inventory.

4379

Yeah there are no unenchanted staves. I’m in dire need of a mod for it, because I’d also like a staff of paralyze.

4380

I have a staff of fireballs, and I really wanted to find a second one. I thought dual wielding staves would be super fun. :)

Also I have a staff of Paralyze, and it’s crazy powerful. I often forget I have it, which is for the best, since filling up and finding gems isn’t a problem at all, and it has like 8 charges on it. Not sure what skill it’s charges are based off (staves have more charges based on your skill with the corresponding school) but I’m guessing Illusion, as I have like a 27 in that school.