5341

I’m just going to toss this out there, but 30 minutes of quest time (if that,) gets you at least one fence in game. You could also do it with all speech perks, but that’s a lot of speechcraft and a lot of perks wasted.

I’m not sure why they make fences quest only, that’s a little baffling. I’m not even sure if you can talk to Tonia before questing, or if they will let you into the Ratway.

5342

So you get one or two fences with the thieves guild. Then you steal a tun of amulets and gems and whatnot. Then they are out of gold after a few items and you are still stuck. Now if fences had like 5k gold or so… then it would not be a problem.

5343

Be sure and do the quests for Vex and Delvin. Doing enough in a hold unlocks a ‘special quest’ from Delvin, and each of those unlocks another fence. It also ups the amount of gold they have, fully upgraded, that’s 7 fences with over 4K gold each.

The best fence though, honestly is from the main Thieves Guild quest and is unlocked not far outside Whiterun, with his very own fast-travel point. Once you get that guy, the rest are just gravy (and also bump up the amount of gold he has due to finishing the ‘special quests.’

5344

Level 30, yo. Still working the Companions quests, but I did finally assign some perks. Not all of them (I haven’t needed armor perks yet so I’m still holding off on making that decision until it becomes necessary, and I’m guessing I’ll have to buy five all at once when I finally work my way up to Winterhold and dudes who actually have different, more advanced spells for sale), but some of them.

There’s some screwy scaling in this game, though. For instance, I’ve arrived at the town at the foot of the twenty trillion steps or whatever and there’s a bunch of stuff to do here. Among the things to do are Scooby Doo Cave and Go Murder This Dragon. So I do Scooby Doo Cave first. The guy in there just absolutely trashes me. Seriously. Three of those force lightnings and I’m gone. I don’t think that it has anything to do with my armor, and it can’t be resistance (don’t have any to anything), so I guess maybe it’s a shock problem I’m having. Either way, I solve the problem by running up on his pansy ass and clubbing him to death with my Ebony Mace, because it turns out that he’s not so tough once you get close enough to smell his breath. Rest of the dungeon ensues and goes pretty much the way all the dungeons go - nothing exceptional happens.

Then I go do the dragon and it turns out that now I’m a big enough boy that the game wants me to kill a Frost Dragon. I still have zero resistance to everything, so I assume that I’m about to have my ass handed to me. After the first fight wherein I fall off the tower and get stuck in a crack and have to restart, it turns out that I can stand in his breath for three full runs without even trying to heal. I’ve got to hit him with, like, all the Fire Bolts, and it takes a while (though things speed up once he bugs out and sticks to the ground and I can just start lobbing crap at him without having to wait for him to come to a stop so I can aim), but he’s just absolutely not doing the kind of murderous damage Scooby Doo villain was doing.

So is that the game being weird or me being weird or both or neither? Or is lightning just, like, the win button for the game? Or does Heavy Armor amplify lightning damage, because I was rocking an exquisite set of dwarf gear at the time?

5345

Armor does nothing w/r/t magic. Doesn’t provide defense, doesn’t amplify. Often dungeon bosses are tougher than dragons, so it’s probably that.

5346

Random dungeon mages are more deadly than 90% of the dragons you’ll encounter. I have no idea why they decided to make most of the dragons so pathetic, but they just are.

5347

I assume an early mod will be deadlier dragons.

Just hit hour 100 / level 30 and united the land under the Stormcloaks (or divided it, depending on your point of view, I guess).

Still loving it. I think I’ll finish the main quest and then maybe focus on each region (I haven’t spent nearly enough time in the Reach). I’m also thinking my next character will be an evil, daedra-worshipping mage. Pretty much the opposite of my nice (if a bit racist) Nord two-hander.

5348

Because you can prepare for the dungeon bosses and, in most cases, going after them is completely voluntary. Most dragons just swoop down randomly while you’re out in the countryside. If they were all as nigh-unbeatable as Brian’s mage, that would be no fun at all.

5349

Oh, he wasn’t unbeatable. A flame atronach, a few potions to cover my sprint up to his face, and then a few thwacks with my trusty whoopass stick did wonders to him.

The really weird part is that the magic people in the Companion quest (I don’t think that’s a spoiler without any context at all, is it? I can tag it if anybody’s super freaked.) couldn’t even touch me. The first time they farted one of those gigantic fireballs at me I got a little scared because it looked so huge, but when I checked my red bar it had barely moved. But the spriggans in some random quest dungeon I stumbled across while en route to that quest slapped me around pretty good (though, in fairness, I was splitting my energy between trying to whomp them and trying to pump hit points into the idiot that was foisted upon me by the quest).

It can’t be resistance, because I have none to nothing. My armor might be a little low because I haven’t committed to a perk path yet (nearing 50 in each armor discipline, and I’ve got the perks sitting there to allocate as soon as the physical damage starts to outpace me, but rather than getting bigger, it’s like I’m taking less physical damage from everybody but a couple of melee bosses, who I can cheese around), but I’m not having a problem with physical damage. I won a physical race with two bears in a row with no healing, just bonking them about the face and neck with my mallet, so I’m starting to think that I might get out of the game with no perks in any armors if nothing changes soon, unless I get really tired of hauling around all this weight.

Weird scaling. It’s cool, though. Because at least for now resistances wouldn’t matter anyway if I understand the current state of the game. Just have to remember to save frequently so that I can adjust my tactics when I hit one of those little lightning powered bumps in the road.

5350

It’s not about making them nigh-unbeatable. It’s about making them always at least threatening. The vast majority of dragons I encounter are trivial to kill, even though previews indicated they were supposed to be these menacing beasts you would spend most of your time running away from. Every once in a while I run into an ancient dragon that means business, but it’s a bit ridiculous that what are presumably the biggest, baddest monsters in Skyrim are often easier to deal with than random dungeon trash.

5351

I see.

That has not been my experience.

5352

My horse once killed a dragon…on its own.

5353

I thought dragons were pushovers until bumping up the difficulty, and running into my first set of ancient dragons, versus blood or frost. This coincided with the patch though, so I’m not sure if that was the key. If it was, then I really actually like that change to the dragons.

But, similar to Brian, I had problems with a lightning wielding mini-boss, some sort of ancient vampire. What made it harder was that I was able to wound it, then it ran two rooms away and trained back some other friends.

5354

I don’t mind that they’re not difficult for the player. Being the dragon born, I can imagine some sort of ingrained dragon fighting prowess. It breaks the narrative for me when they’re easy pickings for the fauna as well (particularly giants and mammoths.) Even town guards usually do pretty well against them.

When the CK is released, I’ll probably try this:

  1. Something to keep their aggro on the player more. It’s far too easy to distract them with summons and npcs.
  2. Fear effect on all their attacks. That should again help with the dragon vs npcs fights.
  3. Knockback on attacks? Right now if you have a good resistance (or lots of potions) against their breath, their-on-the ground breath attack means a few seconds of free hits. One of their problems is that they attack too slowly and infrequently.
5355

There’s at least one dungeon that I know of that has a Hargraven that will run away into the next room a few different times throughout the dungeon. you do finally get into a very anti-climactic fight a the end of the dungeon though.

5356

The Wolf Queen struck me like that. Tough fights getting to her, then a fight that became much harder than I thought it would be, then a fight when you think it’s over, followed by a fight just to make sure you were paying attention.

I haven’t done that Hargraven yet, though. I don’t look forward to it. The one I did fight at the top of a huge Forsworn fort/ruin was a real bitch to kill.

5357

I would think the reason they had to compromise with dragons is because if they made them tougher to kill, they’d probably wipe out the entire population of the game.

5358

So I got tired of waiting for the patch to be patched and finally started playing. The introduction was super-confusing – I already knew about the choice of sides and wanted to join the noble Nord resistance but still ended up accidentally joining the vile Imperial oppressors instead because I didn’t realize that this particular moment was supposed to be the choice. Reload time…

And right after the daring dungeon escape (still not qualifying as a spoiler I think) my new best friend says I should join the uprising, but he also says we should part ways and I should visit his sister. Then he walks ahead and waits for me to catch up. Um, what exactly should I do now if I want to both visit his sister and join the uprising? Go with him or not? I don’t want an important NPC stuck in limbo somewhere. Choice is good but the presentation of the first choices is really pretty terrible.

On the graphics side, I had first set the game to 720p with Ultra and 8xAA because I thought hey, it’s a lame console port, right? Sure enough, it didn’t look to great and wasn’t even very smooth on my 6970. Then just as an experiment, I went for the full 2560x1440 resolution without AA and shadows turned down to High (the flickering was annoying anyway). Wow, what a difference! The game actually loads high-resolution assets, shows great detail at extreme viewing distance, and most surprisingly runs faster at 2560x1440 than at 1280x720. I know that AA and shadow detail make a difference but I’ve never seen that kind of inversion. Very strange… but nice!

5359

Just to let you know, the person you go running off with at the beginning doesn’t make the choice for you. You make that choice quite deliberately a ways into the game when you go to one place to join one group or another place to join another.

5360

You didn’t need to reload anything. You didn’t make any kind of lasting choice between the Imperials and the Stormcloaks in the opening.