2941

I hadn’t played Skyrim for weeks until last night, and I’ve found myself hooked again. I just completed The Black Star, which had a totally unexpected ending. When:

Quest details

Azura suddenly says “I know. I’ll warp you INSIDE the star” I actually double took.

2942

Holy crap I had a good fight last night. It was in a dungeon that I think I was supposed to kind of run through. It turned out to be populated by a bunch of magic-users, though.

On our side, there was me, and a mercenary I hired that’s a spellcaster, mostly it seems he uses lightning and shield spells, but he throw fireballs occasionally.

On their side were at least 5 mages, all of them using fireball. One of them was a “Fire Mage” or something like that who could one shot me if he hit me.

I must have died, reloaded, and tried a different strategy at least a dozen times. At one point I was convinced it was impossible and I’d have to come back at a later level. It went something like this.

“Stay here. I will sneak up behind them and kill a few. Maybe I can then reanimate their bodies with a spell.” I move out. They hear me, spin around, and nail me.

Same plan. This time I take off all my clothes so I will be quiet as a mouse. Two feet from backstabbing, they spin around and kill me.

Same plan. This time I take an invisibility potion. They somehow spot me coming a mile away and my body is flung around the room with fireball explosions again.

This time I take a bunch of buff potions and spells to make my armor better, my one and two handed better, my health regenerate, and my magicka regenerate. This time there will be no more sneaking around. We charge in together. And die together.

The next time, I send him forward, listen to the sounds of combat from afar, and then try to get in behind them. The first thing I see when leaving cover is my mercenary’s body flying over my head and bounce off the wall. Another fiery death for me.

This went on for a long time, and I was just determined to win this encounter. I was even doing stuff like casting Mass Frenzy, which they all resisted, Calm, shooting arrows from afar and trying to pick them off, trying to use dragon shouts to close the distance or make them stagger… nothing is working.

Finally, just when I was about to admit defeat and come back much later, I found a ledge where I could get into a sniping war with the head mage. I whittled him down then buffed up and charged him, finally killing the bastard.

Just when you think you’ve seen it all in this game, a new challege comes along, with a million solutions. That’s what I love about it.

2943

Once in a while the game will serve up a great encounter like that. IMHO, the game’s at its best when it’s hard. Alas, at some point the challenge will cease to exist. I’m level 42 or so and at this point in the game there are still a number of challenging fights, but all of them can be made trivial by drinking potions. FWIW, I’m playing on normal difficulty. I haven’t even checked, but it would be nice if the higher difficulty levels made it so you couldn’t spam potions and win every fight with ease.

2944

The higher difficulties do make it so actually. I’ve been playing on Master difficulty from the beginning, and there’s a large amount of enemies in the game that kill me with one hit kills. Potions don’t really help too much with that. You just have to make sure you don’t get hit. Most of the time, the one hit kill people are either badass warriors that come and trigger a cutscene skewering animation, or archers that are spec’d to get criticals almost every time, or mages with really devestating spells. I’ve also gotten killed by shouts where the enemy will shout at me, the camera switches to an external shot of me getting ragdolled into a position that I can’t get up from, and then I fall through the world when I try to get up from an upside down position in a corner somewhere.

The nice thing about falling through the world is that the game then puts you at the start of that dungeon, but I always reload a save game, just in case falling through the world could lead to bugs in the future in that timeline.

2945

Even on normal difficulty you’ll fall victim to a one-shot kill every now and then. I can see how it might be thrilling to try and avoid getting hit by those guys, but if you’re melee-focused, you’re screwed. It would be nice if they had made potions heal damage over time so you couldn’t spam them.

2946

You can always just not carry around tons of potions. It might be fun to make a character who always sells every potion, and then relies on just what can be found in the dungeon. That sounds pretty fun actually, I might do that for my next character.

2947

At first my thief refused to buy potions, preferring to break into alchemists’ shops and steal them instead. But that’s becoming more and more inconvenient, and when you have 30,000 gold on hand, it doesn’t seem like much trouble to buy a few potions. I’m role-playing a character who has mellowed with wealth and success!

2948

Yeah, same happened to me. At first I stole everything that wasn’t bolted down, but as time wore on and she earned ridiculous amounts of money, I just started buying everything. Hell, I will buy ingots from a blacksmith rather than walk down the street and get them out of my house. Sure I already have the ingots, but I also have about 150,000gp… spending a few thousand to save myself 2-4 load screens is a no-brainer.

Oddly enough I think my interest in Skyrim is waning, now. I find that I like the idea of playing it more than I seem to like actually playing it, if that makes any sense.

2949

This is kind of analogous to the modding syndrome that some people get, including myself. I started enjoying the possibilities and ideas of modding more than actually playing the game.

2950

Huh, yeah - that’s what gets me interested, thinking about all the possibilities in the game. Possibilities for cool stories, crazy events, memorable battles or just random interesting things you run across. But when I’m actually sitting down with one of my characters and I’ve just spent 20 minutes fighting to get my carry weight down below 200 lbs, I’m suddenly bored and getting a headache and wondering why this sounded like a good idea in the first place.

2951

There are a bunch of mods to help with inventory issues by making a lot of stuff lower weight or no weight e.g., alchemy components. I don’t want to give myself unlimited carrying capacity, but I don’t want to make regular trips to my house to offload crafting components. Lower weight leather, no weight pick axes, no weight dragon scales, and no weight alchemy components = less time running back to town and less time farting around with my inventory. This of course means you can focus on the interesting parts of the game, exploring and questing.

2952

It’s not really a secret, when you see it the first time you use the spell, so it’s not like people saying this aren’t taking it into account. All three of the elements have bonuses. You’re still doing only half the damage. For someone using Destruction as their source of DPS, it’s not even remotely worth it.

You’re using it as a secondary effect as an archer. Your bow + arrows are doing the brunt of the damage. It’s not the same.

2953

I played for a bit with the HUD opacity turned all the way down – because I was taking some picturesque screenshots – and was surprised at how much more immersive the game became. I may try playing that way a bit, though it gets a bit tricky to figure out when your health is low (I guess there’s still the heartbeat sound effect).

2954

Shouldn’t those damn tools be out soon?

2955

Anybody ever had a WordWall just not trigger? I hear the chanting but just don’t get the Word learning bit…

2956

Did you walk right up to the wall? I had a similar problem with one word wall, but turns out I was just too far away.

In my current game, I had an intriguing radiant quest to do (radiant quests aren’t really spoilerish, right?).

It is part of the companions where I need to go sort someone out by way of brawling. That’s all well and good, been there and done that a few times. The crazy thing about it though is that the person who needed to be brought into line was a follower of the High Divine of Mara, the Goddess of Love apparently. And in the middle of this temple, surrounded by a heap of followers, I pull up this guy (by chance I should add) for conversation, see he is in fact my target for a quest I didn’t really care about, and starting the good old fisticuffs in the middle of the temple, with other followers yelling at him to take me down.

Goddess of Love? Yeah, right. That must’ve been the most excitement that group had seen in a while. Suffice to say, everything went back to normal once the fight was over. The people of Skyrim are a strange sort.

2957

Done at last. 81 hours, level 47, if anyone is still curious about typical game time. Leveling slows way down past 40 if you stick with your main skills (that are likely maxed at that point).

Not much more to say at this point. The main quest satisfies in the end. The biggest “disappointment” overall is still the mechanics of fighting dragons. I enjoyed normal combat when I was getting one-hit kills with the bow – I’ll never get tired of watching enemies crumble. But the combat engine can’t always handle epic moments like the dragon fights. Fortunately they’re so cool it makes up for it. It’s just the one big thing I wish they would have worked on some more.

With the performance improvements from the last patch, I’ll be ready to dive in again sooner than I planned. Maybe this summer I’ll make a mage to tackle a few more questlines and the west half of the map. By then we might get some interface mods and maybe some magic mods.

2958

I’ve hit level 22 and while there is lots of neat stuff I’m still enjoying, I’m getting pretty sick of the same old foes/creatures in every dungeon…

2959

I lasted a long time before I started wishing for more enemies. I encountered a good mix at first.

I made the mistake of doing three or four undead dungeons in a row before finishing the main quest. Not a good idea, especially on Master.

2960

Draugr wights can be a real bitch when you’re lower level.