4901

Two things … just a misnomer if it’s the name on an item, it doesn’t do anything special (that I’ve found,) and is only one use. If you have the perk of that name though, poisons last for two hits versus one hit.

Perhaps they were supposed to last for two hits, similar to the perk, but I have not seen that being the case. To be honest, it’s hard to tell in game though.

4902

Jesus, 135 hours! I’m only at about 45 or so, and I was out there at midnight on release night. Still, I have a family, so there you go.

Couldn’t agree more about Best Game Evar – I have explored only about a third of the map, and so far I see no reason I’m not going to explore all of it, using only my one dual-wielding mageblade speed-killer character.

4903

Yeah I’m way behind due to Thanksgiving weekend and Batman.

4904

I agree both armor skills are probably not necessary and it’s hard to see how to maximize your effectiveness by splitting there. Right now my light armor strategy is to kill the bad guys before they have a chance to hit me back, and getting all the dual wielding perks, plus buying stamina like a cage fighter, is pretty much setting me up to do just that.

I am probably going to make some stamina buffed gear so I can get to four consecutive dual-wield power attacks on a single stamina bar. Abusive? Yes. Fun as hell? Also yes.

4905

I went stealthy archer, but your style intrigues me, Repo. I may try that at some point. I still haven’t even re-rolled a new character. 135 hours … same initial guy, not even done with the main quest, and only just finished two of the side questlines, mage guild and thieves guild.

4906

Here is my uber, nearly unkillable build:
2H weapon (sword is my choice)
Heavy Armor
Alchemy
Enchanting
Smithing (Heavy armor)

Get your daedric armor and weapons, using enchanting to make a smithing set (and alchemy boost set of armor). Also brew a strong armor skill potions. Improve your armor and you can easily get an AC of 1400 or more. Your weapons will hit like a truck.

Use double enchanting on your boots, ring and amulet to create 90%+ resistance to fire, frost and lighting.

You can take on small armies of NPCs with almost no effort. I did stop playing this build after completing the main quests in the game because it wasn’t challenging at all. It was what I set out to do. I wasn’t sure it was possible, but it is.

My next character will be the sneaker / archer type. This one is definitely challenging so far. I need those healing potions if something gets into melee with me.

I am not sure if it is worth putting more points into the base stealth talent since they only give you 5% more stealth. I am using a 1h sword and shield although I am not sure Ill put any points into 1h weapons or light armor. I am certain I will not put anything into blocking.

I have put a few talent points into the pick-pocketing tree although this might be a waste since I have a barrel full of stolen items I can’t sell. I am not going to dump a bunch of points into speech so I can get a fence (and the thieves guild ones are too few and do not have enough gold to make theft worth-while).

I want to level enchanting too, but so far I have not found a single soul-stealer weapon so I can’t learn that enchant yet. Too bad you can’t pick-pocket merchants and steal their inventory.

I do wonder if Archery can be a main weapon, even in melee. I have not gotten that 30% bow draw perk yet. I still need far more archery skill. That might make the difference.

4907

Surprisingly, no. Most enemies still drop in two sneak attacks from a steel arrow, which is how I will preferentially kill everything all the time because I’m a deeply evil, sneaky person. The only enemies that give me problems are the ones I can’t sneak up on and the “boss” mobs. I’ve even potioned my way through a few dragons at this point. With 150 health and about 38 in each kind of armor, nothing seems to kill me straightaway in one hit or two (though that one leader from one of the Companions quest made a run at it, some experimentation showed me that I could take three hits if I just had the damn sense to run away), and one-on-one I can generally melee my way through fights with human-sized opponents with just my Superior Skyforged Steel Long Sword and my Superior Steel Shield. Where I really have problems are situations where multiple people are all trying to whomp me at the same time. Universally, really, because that dragon wouldn’t even have killed me if it hadn’t been for that bear running up behind me. So I can take damage like a champ - I just can’t make it all good, particularly when there’s multiple targets that I have to balance.

I do games stupid. But I guess this means that Normal difficulty is, like, really, really easy if I’m still making it, apparently despite my best efforts to be horrible.

I’ll just have to pick a path and attack it and hope that this save weirdness I’m experiencing (trying to keep ten rolling saves, but when I tell it to save over things it seems to never save over things unless I’m saving over, like, the last save I made) doesn’t crap me out of the chance to play around some after I make my commitment. Because I know me, and I know that the day I roll an alt is the day I should just give up entirely and put the game on the shelf. The fact that I can’t not sneak tells me that I have to go with Light Armor, anyway, and if I want to be able to even get the skills up my mana pool tells me that I’ve got to put at least five points in all the schools to make the spells, you know, castable, so I guess I’ll do that.

4908

I have not found a single damned enchanted smithing boost item yet, so I have nothing to disenchant and clone. Not going to ask for any spoiler tips on where to find one, though – I’m doing reasonably well without that level of abuse yet, and once I do find one it’ll be like woohoo, Christmas!

Skipper, if you go that route, I strongly recommend getting the Conjuration bound weapon perks (especially the “bound weapon captures souls” one). Dual wielding a bound blade and an enchanted one-hander is really good at filling up your empty soul gems. Like, really really good. You will never lack for souls this way, and you’ll never need to cast Soul Trap yourself. Plus the perk-buffed bound blade is no slouch damage-wise.

Just make sure you always have some empty petty/lesser gems, or you will find your grand gems filled with petty souls, which is lame. You can, for the moment, drop a gem to empty it (it will be empty when you pick it back up), but this is a bug and will get patched out soon, no doubt.

I’m less concerned about challenge than about maximizing my explorational velocity. Uber-boosting stamina helps with that, too – sprinting straight over a mountain is good fun :-D

Brian, you don’t need five points in all the magic schools, are you crazy? You only critically need points in the schools you actually cast all the time, and only for the spell levels you cast all the time. I cast Stoneskin compulsively; that’s an apprentice-level Alteration spell, so I only have the first two Alteration cost reduction perks. Not planning to get the next ones until I happen to find the next level armor-buff spell, which hasn’t happened yet (at level 29!).

4909

Good lord, DeepT, I imagine you could wreck some stuff with that build. Some answers on your stealthy archer though, I’m playing that now.

Yep, keep those healing potions stocked at all time. Buy extras until you get a good amount.

Skip anything over the single point in the base stealth perk. Your stealth will go up like mad anyway, it’s overkill. Especially so with the armor sets from the thieves guild. I’ve not used blocking at all, but the light armor perks are worth it, as they have kept me alive many times.

Unless you just want to strip NPC’s naked, only put in what’s needed to get the +100 carry weight perk. You’ll make plenty of cash in either case.

Yes it can be, with the sneak perk for more bow damage, high sneak, a well upgraded bow, and good arrows. Your only real cost is buying new arrows of whatever the best type you see at the vendor. You even get a perk to help with that later, recovering more arrows from fallen foes.

I also do dagger kills, but it essentially gets game breakingly cheesy at that point. With just being a stealth archer and then trying to fumble through combat once stealth is broken, I don’t ever feel like I’m incredibly overpowerful, and I use potions to get through a lot of fights. It’s the dagger damage that takes stealth over the top, so use it sparingly unless you just like that style of play. I can’t stress that enough. The perks and subsequent benefits from armor sets and quests (i.e. Dark Brotherhood,) make daggers and stealth way overpowered in this game.

4910

I want to be able to cast every spell because, you know, I’m me, and that’s just going to happen. I am going to be able to cast every spell, smith every weapon or armor, enchant every enchantment, and so on. I only have frigging access to Novice and Apprentice level spells at this point (I’ve only done that Swampy hold that I call Swampton because I can’t remember its name and the starting one at this point - maybe other towns have better stuff), but I’ve noticed many of them taking a considerable chunk of my piddly little 200 Magicka bar already, so I assume that the only way you CAN use the better-than-apprentice stuff for most of them is if you take the “make things cheaper” perks.

Am I wrong? Because that would be awesome. Because one of the things I started keistering perks for was spells I can’t afford to cast.

4911

Post this stuff in the build thread. No one’s ever going to find this useful information on page 163 of the announced thread, unless vBulletin lets us search on Brian Seiler’s personal compulsive disorders.

4912

The problem with the armors you get from those guys is that you can’t upgrade them like you can with glass or dragon armor. They should allow you to disenchant them to learn those abilities, but they do not. As for arrows, I got that handled. Steam had some list of top 10 mods for Skyrim. Some of those were extra armor smithing recipes. Among many of the things you can make, Arrows of all types are one of them. It lets you recycle some arrows, like iron arrows, and then make your own glass or daedric arrows if you like.

Do poisons work on bows? I am betting slow or paralyze would work great against tough monsters.

4913

what makes a big difference in archery combat is the 50% stagger skill you get, once you get that, it’s pretty much I win in either stealth or just flat out combat with bow.

4914

So, I’m just now realizing that when a lot of the mages at the mage guild died during certain events, it was just a fluke and not a scripted event. That was twenty hours ago, so I can’t go back, but I’m kind of bummed to be missing those npcs/trainers. Poking around on the web, it sounds like I can’t get the best destruction spells either, which is really disappointing since I’m playing a straight destruction mage.

I’m not sure where to go with this character, it seems kind of pointless to continue down the mage path when it’s not possible to see the top mage stuff. I may have to take a break and start a new character after some new content is released.

Anyway, be ye warned, keep those mages alive!

4915

Actually, you can upgrade all of those armors. For Thieves/Guildmaster it’s just leather needed, for Nightingale it’s void salts needed. I’m not sure about Dark Brotherhood stuff but I assume it’s similar. I have about 90 smithing skill, and only two perks, the first one, and the one needed to upgrade magic armor/weapons.

Poisons do work on bows. A very nice tip on poisons, go to your inventory and select the biggest stack of poisons you have (probably most used) and favorite it. Now pull up your quick menu of favorites, go to that poison and give it a hotkey (1-9 on keyboard if you are on the PC.) Then when you are about to shoot something you want to do extra damage to, just hit that number key to apply poison. Both paralyze and slow are the bomb when used on a bow.

4916

Volbard - if the bodies are still there enter console with the ~ key, click on the body, type “ressurect”, enter, close console.

4917

Is there a paralyze magic effect? A spell? I want to enchant a weapon or staff with paralyze like I had in Oblivion but I haven’t found anything to disenchant yet.

Kind of sad they took out the custom built spells. Also gone are a lot of the spells that made the earlier games fun like flying, the ridiculously high jumping spell from Morrowind, etc. It’s a single player game, if I want to “cheat” by flying over some wall, then let me!

4918

Thanks, I’m playing on xbox though. I’m sure I’ll buy the PC version eventually, I always end up with both for Elder Scrolls games.

4919

It definitely exists as a weapon effect.

4920

This is the one and only paralyze weapon I’ve seen after playing three characters into their 30s so far:

I can’t disenchant it because it’s named, and the character who has it doesn’t use bows at all. I use potions with the effect in the mean time, but I don’t know the recipe for making more (and I haven’t wanted to spoil it by using my guide).