5581

Stealth does get silly. At 100 Stealth and a bow you can sit within 3 feet of a dude and shoot him with 8 arrows in a row and he’ll never find you. The creature AI really just needs to move towards incoming hits. I may not see a dude firing a bow, but I can trace the arrow stuck in my chest back to the general direction it came from.

The AI does that at first and then just ends up standing there doing nothing while you keep firing shots into them. Its especially bad for draugr in that regard.

5582

Nope, with Dead Thrall you get them permanently AND if they get killed in combat they don’t turn to ash so you can raise them again.
Add the twin souls perk and you can have two permanent summons, in my case a sabre cat and a bear. :D

5583

Ahhh you son of a bitch. I was all set to roll a destruction mage but that sounds god damn awesome.

Did you take Resto for more powerful healing of your minions? Does this draw aggro to you?

5584

It even gets silly because you can raise two Forsaken Pillager mages who will summon Frost Atronachs for themselves and you basically get a 5 man party… PERMANENTLY. Or if you are feeling monty pythonesque you can give them staffs of conjuration and they will conjure the Frost Atronach AND another summon bringing your personal army to the grand total of 7.
Edit: almost forgot, add a regular companion and
spoiler

and another companion you get during the main quest + the ghost of the DB leader guy

and that makes 9 people. If you are one of those crazies (like me) you might even give your companion a staff too so if rounds to 10. Now try invading a fort/town/whatever with that party.
By the way, humanoid zombies equip weapons if you store them on the corpse, not armor though.

Aggro is of no consequence but there is one thing that effectively breaks the game at around level 25: Illusion. A Conjuration/Illusion combo means you get an army of zombies AND you can calm/fury/fear everything including draugr, you basically become the Lich King.

5585

did they fix the leveling of companions so you don’t have to dismiss them and use a console command?

5586

Interestingly, I’ve never really seen this with my stealth archer. Thel is around 33 or so now, Sneak is in the 90s and well perked (I think there’s just the one in the opening perk, though), and I’ll get about two arrows into the tougher enemies before they beeline right at her. Then bad things happen.

Mind you, if I don’t attack I can frequently be within two feet directly ahead of an enemy and they won’t see me. And in dungeons I snicker whenever I attract attention then escape by repeatedly shoulder-rolling around a few corners. But aside from that, I’ve never had the pincushion-with-impunity effect frequently described for the build. Maybe the random number generator just hates me.

5587

The Lich King. Too awesome. Maybe I’ll start leveling Illusion once I max out my current Alteration-heavy dual wield build. An invisible, time-accelerated, hyper-stamina, undead-horde-commanding ninja? WHY NOT?

5588

I actually shelved my conjuration character until Christmas, I’m currently playing a warrior but side-building him as rogue; as a rogue if you manage to get illusion to 70, buy invisibility and complete the DB quest line you basically become the Ninja God: confuse entire bands of enemies, vanish in thin air and kill them all.

I’m amazed at how awesome Illusion and Conjuration are and how lacklustre Destruction is in comparison. The only thing they needed to do was to scale Destruction or at least allow the player to augment it, it’s silly how little damage Destruction does compared to, well, every other damage source in the game.

5589

There’s a problem with a summoning build, though: your skills don’t increase from a battle, beyond the initial summoning spells. You’ve got to get your hands dirty eventually to get some armor/weapon skill increases, and therefore levels and perks.

5590

Holy shit, a summoned bear on your side would wreck faces.

5591

Jesus this sounds fucking incredible.

5592

Sounds like a pretty sweet way to get Skyrim to crash/drop to 10fps.

5593

Please oh please make a video for us!!

5594

I don’t find the perks worth enough to warrant switching characters. I went through the Civil War and the Main quest with my 2h/Heavy Armor/Destruction/Enchant/Smith dude, carrying Uthgerd the Mule around, and then after that I changed it up and switched to light armor and sneaking. Went through the DB quests and now my sneak is 60, and my archery is catching up. Forged an eeeevvvillll dagger.

Now, I am playing at normal, so my non-optimal skilled sneaky guy can still do ok.

5595

Sorry if this is common knowledge, but I saw this on Bethesda’s twitter feed and wanted to smack my forehead:

Equip a pick axe and swing it (as if it is a weapon) at an ore vein to mine faster than simply activating the vein.

Sigh. I’ve mined a ton in this game, and I’ve just spent the whole time staring at the mining animation…

5596

What skills exactly?
Conjuration levels up by raising undead, summoning atronachs or bound weapons in combat and in order to get to this level (where you can get permanent summons) you will need Conjuration at 100 so it’s probably one of the easiest ways to level: just play normally and keep summoning them.
Illusion works the same way, in an overpowering way actually, because you can always keep ahead of the curve and have your calm/fury high enough to use them on all enemies AND get a double deal: want to level armor? Leave one weak enemy alive and let him attack you; want sneak? Calm random bandit, go behind him and stab/slice/whatever and get sneak level ups.

The conjuration/illusion combo works with pretty much everything though I’d argue it’s more of an in-your-face build; hell, you can even go full magic and let your minions tank while you stand back and fire destruction spells or go non-stealth archer and have your pets tank while you turn the enemy into a pincushion.

Also, let me just add that leveling the armor skill is, well, dependent on what class you are playing and how much damage you dish out; on my necromancer (conjuration+illusion+heavy armor+one handed+tradeskills) I have armor on par with conjuration while on my hunter (conjuration+illusion+light armor+archery) I have conjuration at the same level as my bow but my light armor is very low because my sabre cat usually mangles everything it can jump on. :)

Like I said, leveling normally (no silly powerleveling of the tradeskills of course) you will remain ahead of the curve and have loads of fun, just try it.

5597

Ayup.

You can also dual-wield the pickaxes for super-fast mining. Or if your goal is to mine some very underleveled place that poses no challenge, use them for fighting too so you don’t have to waste time switching.

5598

I just imbue mine with fire damage so I can smelt the ore as I mine it.

5599

Just tweeted: “Oh my god, another town! Don’t talk to anyone! Keep moving! I don’t need any more quests!” #theskyrimeffect

I am doing an ok job of reigning in my gaming OCD.

5600

Repetition