4941

Get (or enchant yourself) a 20% fire resist necklace and a 20% fire resist ring, put them on when you see the dragon breathe fire, and drink your fire resist potion. When getting your ass kicked, stack resists. End of problem.

4942

Well, if it isn’t the whole named thing holding back the DE (I just assumed it was because I’ve only noticed the limitation on named stuff, and dupe effects), then I guess it’s the effect, which would suck because I was hoping to find a paralyze item I could DE at some point.

4943

Well, I’ve killed three of them, so what have I learned.

0.5. First rule - don’t stand in fire. If the dragon is breathing on you and you’re not killing him hard as fast as you can, you should probably try to…

  1. Hide. Dragons, like virtually everything in this game, are exploitable if you’re willing to poke at their brains a little. Specifically, if you can find features in the environment to creep behind, you can get out of the fire (mostly). I dropped the one at the dragon shrine on the north face of that little mountain range between Starter Hold and Swamp Hold by hiding behind the conveniently located column on the right and popping out from time to time to hit the dragon with an arrow, or…

  2. Destruction Magic. This stuff doesn’t scale, and the upside to that is that without any points in it, it’s still at least feasible to use as a fallback in the twenties. The Blood Dragons I’ve fought are considerably more durable than the Dragon dragons I’ve fought (no clue what the difference is), but they still drop after between 15 and 30 Fire/Ice/Lightning Bolts. Finally…

  3. Drink Potions. Hella potions. Potions are how you cheat at Skyrim on the 360. They take effect immediately and they’re accessed from the pause menu, so when you find yourself dying, that’s your emergency fallback. Pause the game to get to the menu and start chugging potions like Diablo. At any given time, I try to have somewhere between 5 and 20 healing potions of various strengths. Don’t sell the ones you cook to build your Alchemy skill. They may only give you 22 points at a time, but 5 of those still gets you close to full.

That’s how I’ve cheesed my way around the fact that I can’t stand in fire for long enough to kill a Blood Dragon, anyway. I’m sure that there are actual legitimate approaches you could take, but these will work.

4944

Here’s the full list.

** Improved occasional performance issues resulting from long term play (PlayStation 3)
** Fixed issue where textures would not properly upgrade when installed to drive (Xbox 360)
** Fixed crash on startup when audio is set to sample rate other than 44100Hz (PC)
** Fixed issue where projectiles did not properly fade away
Fixed occasional issue where a guest would arrive to the player’s wedding dead
 Dragon corpses now clean up properly
** Fixed rare issue where dragons would not attack
** Fixed rare NPC sleeping animation bug
** Fixed rare issue with dead corpses being cleared up prematurely
** Skeleton Key will now work properly if player has no lockpicks in their inventory
** Fixed rare issue with renaming enchanted weapons and armor
** Fixed rare issue with dragons not properly giving souls after death
** ESC button can now be used to exit menus (PC)
** Fixed occasional mouse sensitivity issues (PC)
** General functionality fixes related to remapping buttons and controls (PC)

Elder Scrolls games have the best bugs.

4945

I NEVER THOUGHT I’D SEE THE DAY BETHESDA WOULD DO THIS

4946

I expected a few more crash related bug fixes, I do hope those get fixed over time.

4947

What is the point of getting married and how do you choose who you will get married to? I mean, can you pick any NPC and get married to him / her / it?

4948

On my archer I tend to just sit there and take the dragon breath, then use the time when they’re flying around to heal. I find it not worth the effort to hit circling dragons with arrows, since arrows move so slowly. If I need a little more healing and a breath attack is coming, I can find some cover and hope the game chooses to respect line of sight.

I find dragon melee attacks more dangerous than the breath. The breath is a slow steady decrease in health, so you can plan when you need to get out of it.

Eventually dragons really just stop scaling, and become laughable. Plus, dragons are pretty much pushovers in my opinion compared to high end bears, or non-quest giants. Dragons are dumb, and give you far much time between attacks just circling. They’re also pretty frail compared to high end weapons and talents.

4949

“Bioware did it”

As for the rest of your question, the answer is in googlese for “SKYRIM ROMANCE”

Something to do with a necklace of Mara

4950

It’s no use. I now tab out of windows in all my other games. 70+ hours of Skyrim has broken 30 years of gaming.

4951

Because you are a Lonely Epic Male who craves a waifu.

4952

Also, conjured Fire Atronochs are your friend. Not only do they draw fire, but when the dragon is looping around in the air and you just can’t seem to figure out where he is, your Atronoch buddy will be wheeling out a bunch of fireball anti-aircraft fire that will help you locate your enemy and use the terrain appropriately.

Especially helpful to idiots like me who tend to overshoot with the Xbox’s analog stick.

4953

Geezus, where do you find the time??? I got the game 2 or 3 days after release and have only managed about 25 hours.

4954

Have you tried playing from the disc? This issue only occurs when you install the game. And I noticed it must load a lot into memory because after initial loading the load times really aren’t that long, nor do I hear the 360’s drive clanking and squealing.

4955

What level are you at? Without spoiling anything, there are later dragon types which readjust to your level. They don’t introduce anything new, but they do scale up the HP and DPS of the dragon.

4956

I have a level 58 character…they don’t scale to keep pace much past the mid 30s, and they’re relatively low threat enemies the whole way.

My archer is level 35. It’s a slower kill than my dual wield melee, but still not a risky kill.

4957

Yeah, at level 35, I was all of a sudden was having trouble with the Elder Dragons (nothing a few resist potions couldn’t cure). But that went away by the next level or two. I expect that to happen again whenever a new type is introduced, but not for very long.

4958

I see Tom has his usual “contrary” review up for Skyrim. Linked on the front page. I can seem some of what he is saying, but I don’t think it overwhelms the good enough to justify the 7/10 score he gave it. And he’s rather vague on just exactly what some of his issues are. Making it sound like Skyrim is a typical Bethesda game when it comes to stability and bugs is completely opposite my experience. It seems notably better polished then Oblivion or Fallout 3 were.

Not that he’s going to come here and explain himself. ;-)

4959

I’m iffy on his review, too. Then again, I’m of the opinion that Skyrim may be the best game of this generation. Although the underlying tech is shaky, the game is an absolute smorgasboard of player agency and worldbuilding. So I may be biased.

4960

It may be that Tom is just more of a fan of story driven RPGs then open world ones. His complaint about time not mattering struck me as an odd nit to pick given thats true in just about all RPGs. People bitched about Fallout having a very generous time limit to the point where it was removed in an early patch. People bitched at the beginning of Deus Ex HR where there are some consequences to taking your time. RPGs rarely really enforce a time limit.