5661

How shouts are determined

Word placement is fixed, at each wall you get the highest word you can for the shout represented by the wall.

5662

Nope, but console commands can get around it.

5663

how to…

Do in this order:

open the console
target an NPC by clicking on him/her
type: setrelationshiprank player 4
type: addfac 19809 1
type: addfac 5a1a4 1

One can also use similar commands to set many NPCs (but not all, and you need to be careful which ones you try this with) as friends so they can become companions. There’s a mod somewhere at skyrimnexus that does the marry and friend thing with batch files.

5664

Well, for those of us playing on consoles, console commands are no help (ironically enough.)

5665

You do actually have to speak to the priest too. Then the dialogue opens up.

5666

I’d say finish the civil war first, without doubt. I’d been saving it, and all the quests turned out to be hugely formulaic and repetitive. (I was in the upper 30s, though, if that makes a difference). Plus the ending was hugely anticlimactic.

I’d been reading that the main storyline just ends and was a big anticlimax, which I don’t get at all. I was really impressed, and completely satisfied with it. Pretty epic.

5667

I’ve read that if you get to a certain point in the civil war, you can actually screw up the main quest making it impossible to finish.

5668

Really? Is this a “known” bug, I haven’t heard this before. It would truly suck to go through the civil war and complete it and then find you could not finish the main quest line.

5669

I had an issue where a sub-quest wouldn’t get issued to me - but that could have been because a dragon attacked and interrupted the NPC.

Man, being a Mage with weapons is annoying. There aren’t enough hot keys :/

5670

Being anything is fairly annoying. 8 hotkeys isn’t remotely enough.

As a pure mage I was reassigning stuff every fight because I used up most of them for default spells and the like and had to swap between combat spells depending on what I was fighting.

I got pretty good at it after a while, but it never stopped being pretty annoying, especially when your hotkey list started getting massive.

5671

I will probably just move around the favorites list and be done with it. It is a shame that combat has to suffer from so many pauses though.

I also will probably go bow and magic only and forget about weapons altogether. A wasted hotkey slot and more fiddling!

5672

This could work, if you give up the oppertunity to hit with both weapons at the same time. Which, to me, is all the fun about dual wielding…

As for the discussion about archery: I think it’s fine as long as you don’t combine it with stealth. It takes a bit off before they get into meleerange, but not so much as to be cheezy…

5673

Okay. So. Quick question. I assume that the Elder Dragons are peppered about the environment in fixed locations? Because I had to go near a dragon lair to get some books for a librarian, so I figured I’d drop in and drop him, because why not do that why I’m here? He’s an Elder Dragon, though. About three billion times the hit point total of the Frost Dragons that occasionally appear out of the aether to try and gank me and with a breath attack that actually hurts. And apparently a little dead wizard friend if you actually walk up to where he lives to try and grab cover behind some unexplained poles.

5674

That little dead wizard friend is an asshole if you fight him early on.

But to answer your question, Elder Dragons start appearing once you reach a certain level. If you go there at, say, level 1, it should just be a normal dragon, or a frost dragon – but the Wizard will still be an asshole.

5675

One of my characters is a spellsword (the NPC’s even refer to my character as such): Destruction, Conjuration, 1 Hand, light armor, smithing and speechcraft. I took speechcraft because I need to purchase training in the magic schools as they rarely level. In the 60’s now (skill wise, L30) it’s getting really expensive to train. I read somewhere trapping an enemy and casting bound sword repeatedly works, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that (Daggerfall flashbacks!) I don’t use a bound sword, or raise dead (my guy hates all things undead) but instead summon frost or fire atronachs all the time (since I’m a menace to my companions I’m now going solo.) Still doesn’t go up, and playing on Xbox I can’t use any mods. :( Any other conjuration spells that might help? (Candlelight doesn’t work either.)

5676

Or later. That was not a fight that needed to be harder. He’s actually the reason I gave up on it, because my clever plan of trying to drag the dragon into the nearby Giant encampment didn’t work out quite as well as I had planned and the fact that I hadn’t found any of the advanced magic distributors meant that I didn’t have any tools at range to do significant damage (and I still don’t know how you’re supposed to beat a dragon in melee when they seem to randomly do that whole eat you trick). I could have still managed to bob and weave behind the poles to get out of the fire and plonk the guy to death if I only had to deal with the dragon.

Guess that means it’s time for me to run through and spend another bunch of keistered perks. At a minimum, I need to get the third tier magic cost reduction ones (and I need to find that damnable Illusion merchant, because I’m pretty sure he was invisible in the Tower of Acclamation or whatever that one the professionals live in is called, because I kept hearing somebody sneaking around and on at least one occasion I got hit with an unexplained, entirely harmless magical effect), and it might be time for me to lay my money down on one brand of protective covering or another (I’m not sure, though, because the only people who do lots of physical damage to me are people with other effects, like a fire weapon - when an Elder Dragon isn’t just eating me because he’s big, the damage I take from a bite is no more than a fifth of my health bar, and I’ve been neglecting health on level-up).

5677

Sort of let down by the Thief and Dark Brotherhood quests, they are mostly combat. You don’t need to do much sneaking or finesse like that. I liked the Mages Guild but it felt quite short to me.

5678

I haven’t done the Dark Brotherhood quest yet, but the Thieves Guild missions were full of stealth. Of course, it helps that my character is a thief archer, so sneaking around is how I handle all the dungeons.

5679

I spent around 6-7 hours on the mages guild quest…thats more than most modern games!

5680

As a note on Conjuration, it also levels up simply by your summons being engaged in combat. I assume from them inflicting damage and/or getting smacked in return.