CaptainChaos

Shields are supposed to grant 50% resistance to cold, with the correct perk, which I have. So is Nord resistance. Yet, when I fight against a cold dragon, and I use a shield (and I am a Nord) I still take cold damage. It's Master Difficulty but still, shouldn't it be 100% resistance?

Im 27th level, 270 points of armor, playing on Master Difficulty. Sure, I get owned often, but nothing kills me instantly like bows and arrows - even crap bows cause ridiculous amounts of damage. Bandits with swords might take 20 hits at this point, but only 5 with arrows. Worse, powerful monsters like Draugr Deathlords kill me with two arrow shots, yet it would take 4-5 melee blows. What the ?? So, do arrows, ignore armor or something? Thanks for any insight...

Something else to consider, which someone above also was good enough to point out: if you spend all your perks in smithing, then when you are 20th level, you will have great armor but few fighting skills - yet many of the creatures will have leveled up with you, posing a great threat to you, even in all that great armor. As a strong corollary, I recommend playing Master Level Difficulty. The game is a total joke without it, no matter how you play. If you are a warrior, by 27th level, you plow through everything otherwise. Currently, I have a combined armor score of 270 or so from a combo of Dwarven and Steel Plate armor and I still can get owned (except by dragons, oddly). At 10th level I couldn't even beat Sabertooths; at 20th level they were a challenge. Now, finally, I can hold my own easily with them, but I feel like I E A R N E D that after the long hard slog. And, I doubt dragon scale/whatever armor would make that big of a difference. And, in order to survive my combats, I have spent THOUSANDS of gold on health potions despite maxing out armor, shield and weapon perks. That is your money sink that gives you a reason to keep going out and exploring and making money and finding good stuff. Anyway, that's my advice for challenging game play. I have 60 hours and have seen less than 15% of the map.

So, I'm playing on Master level and despite having a 70 one handed and lots of perks, i can barely dent a regular troll which keeps regenerating. Incidentally, I tried fire, to see if that works, and my Destruction was only18, and I didn't do any noticeable damage, which leads me to believe that maybe skills do feed into that after all (I mean aside from perks). Anyway, I run for my life, between two towns, where there was a boulder trap that ALREADY went off. The boulders were just lying there. The troll tripped on the bolder and died!! LOL. I guess they really didn't fix bugs like that from Oblivion, which is slightly disappointing, but so funny! I mean, it just walked over the STATIONARY boulder, keeled over and died. Haha.

I did an extensive search today, but I still couldn't find anything that replaces or fixes how ugly the walls look up close. Sort of breaks the immersion for me. Does anyone know if there is anything to touch them up? I have skyrim HD 2k but I'm not sure that fixes that. Thanks for any suggestions...

I'm guessing this is not i the UI in the game, in the middle of combat, is there anyway other than pausing and checking the Active Effects screen, how long my Oakflesh spell or Poison Resistance potion will last? I guess that's "realistic" you don't have a timer, but still it would be nice to know immediately, what's in effect. Similar issue with hotkeying clothing. If I switch to my +15 speechcraft amulet in town, it doesn't say that - I just hear a clothing shift sound, but I'm not sure what clothing it is, necessarily.

btw, use the nightsky mod. I thought it would be like whatever - it is AWESOME!

hmm... i changed all my keys so it's hard for me to remember. I think the default is F key to favorite an item and there is another key that brings up the favorite menu. There is also another problem that if you have two items, and you favorite one (say like #1 = iron shield, and you have two iron shields) the favorited #1 will disappear if you change your shield to a spell (or whatever) and they press #1 again. It just won't work. You need to drop one of the shields and re-favorite #1 again (and leave the shield on the ground preferably).

that's another question - does it matter how much skill you have in 2 handed weapons or is it all about the perks? Would I cause more damage with 100 2h skill than 10 2h skill, even if I did NOT use extra perks in the 2h tree?

Yeah, I'm sorry, I wasn't complaining. I like the games to be balanced and enriching. It's like a lot of people here are upset that smithing is too easy to break the game. It's not their fault for breaking it - the skill set just wasn't designed well. The game should encourage you with reasons to go out and explore. Same thing with lockpicking. I used to play a lot of thieves, and I would be excited to play one here with lots of useful skills - but the lockpicking tree just seems a waste and that's a shame - it's just not designed well. If they made it a requirement, like in Fallout 3, etc., you would get really excited!! about having that extra skill level. And you would be SPECIAL against those classes that did not bother to invest in it. Why is it my current barbarian can pick locks like a pro with no experience? or should someone's necromancer be able to show up a thief? IMHO, they should design the perk trees so everyone feels like they made an individual choice the rewards their style of game play, that's all I meant.

Wow, that's good to know. And disappointing. I thought Nexus MM was supposed to make this easier! I'm not a modder, nor do I have any kind of real experience programming or hacking these files, other than the ini files, so despite modding Oblivion quite a bit, I guess deep down I'm still very noob. I am not sure I have any kind of XML editor. Also, where would these XML files go? Are they in the Data directory? I couldn't find any there (I guess the mods I DLd were textures). Also, more embarrassingly, I am not sure of how do I check the archives and for what am I looking exactly? Thanks again for all of your help. Mods really make the game go from excellent to unbelievable. Oblivion mods turned my game into an entirely different one at the time - I couldn't believe all massive mods and game play changes they had, so I am looking forward to experimenting here as well.

Hi, I just started using Nexus Mod Manager. I downloaded a few mods (I can't believe how productive the community has been in only a week!). Anyway, it has an "!" exclamation point next to the version number of a mod I downloaded (glowing ore veins) and I'm not sure what that means - is it outdated? is it safe? is it something technical a lay person like me does not need to worry about? any insight is appreciated. Thanks!

Is it me, or is there generally little point to investing perks into this skill? If you played F3 and FNV for a few hundred hours, even the Expert locks in this game are fairly easy to pick, right? So, why bother upgrading? They should have used the Fallout System that would force you to upgrade locking picking skills in order to pick advanced locks rather than make it easier, IMHO...

I'm disappointed by the total uneveness of the graphics. Some are STUNNING, like dragons. Others, like walls - they look like they haven't changed much at all since Oblivion. Come on. PCs should enjoy the ability to have high texture walls I could stare and marvel at. I mean, I see walls all the time. I little high def would go a long way toward eye candy. The hardcoding of certain keys - ARG. If I can use the arrow keys to move, why not manipulate the map, pick locks. Bethesda, if you played your game on a PC with a KEYBOARD, you would see how frustrating this stuff is - more so b/c it was SO SIMPLE TO FIX. Thankfully the modding community did that, and the game has been out for less than a week. Why couldn't B, right out of the box? Some other minor things - if you knock something over in the story, they comment on it, which is AWESOME. But no one ever puts it back? days later? um... Yet, there is no getting around it - I clocked in 40 hours and am enjoying this game a lot. Well done, but iron out the edges, and don't cheap on the PC market. PCs and the modding community is what makes your games legendary.

Does anyone know this? or shields?

the monsters do level up around you a bit, but they shouldn't be respawning that quickly. What kind of a character are you? Have you been upgrading your PERKS? If you are a warrior, put heavy perks into armor, shield or weapon. Carry lots of potions, stamina and health (or magicka if you are a wizard). If you are a thief, try attacking from cover, a long ways off, and stay crouched so you have a chance of remaining undetected.

I had a situation where I would hot key favorite my shield, then switch to a spell, then try the hot key again, but it didn't work. I know someone else to whom this happened. Solution: The reason for this is because I had two shields of exactly the same kind. As soon as I dropped one, and hot keyed the remaining one, it worked just fine. When I picked up the other shield again, the hotkey stopped working. Stupid, but there it is. I dk of any solution other than getting rid of the duplicate item.

NYC. Server works great, then it doesn't, etc.

Does anyone know how much it costs to train? Sorry I did a search both here and the Wiki and couldn't find it. I was training a for a bit and it seemed expensive but reasonably priced, about 500gp to get from let's say Heavy Armor 40 to 41. Then after I hit 50, it cost 1500!! I was staggered. I wonder if the higher levels are much more expensive to train? like geometrically more expensive. I asked someone else to train me in alchemy from 15 to 16 and it was way cheap, like 100. Anyone know?

Not that it's a big deal, but I like the new feature that you can see where you cleared, so you don't accidentally repeat it (if it respawns). Anyone know if forts are clearable? unless i missed a secret door or something, I killed everyone there and went through every room, but it still does not read "Cleared" on the map. Any thoughts?

I don't understand how you got so much stuff so quickly? I have been playing for 30 hours and the strongest piece of armor I found is a Dwarven helmet? Of course, I'm on Master Difficulty but still... where did you find the materials to make Daedric armor etc. so quickly?

Here are some observations about leveling up and training: 1. Training appears to be use it or lose it. If you don't train 5 points in that level, that opportunity is gone forever. Given how fast you level, this may not be such a big deal. 2. I can't figure out how cost is based. It seems to go up 10 gold every level of training, but it does NOT appear to cost 10x the skill level. 3. You can wait to level up to finish training HOWEVER if you gain enough experience for two levels, you do NOT appear to have the choice to level up ONCE and then wait. Apparently, you WILL level up TWICE whether you want to or not, so you miss the training from that in between level.

it's like they moved backwards in progress.

the game is very inconsistent with graphics. Some, like dragons, are jaw dropping - others like walls - which are everywhere, are awful. I mean really, why? to get it to fit on one DVD? Booooooooooooooooo. Don't get me wrong, I love the game and will put 300 hours into it, but why go half-effort?

yeah, definitely some annoying things - 1 ring, low res textures up close, so far as i can tell, enemies behave stupidly like Morrowind where they don't follow you out of their house/cave whatever to finish you off, the UI - i both love it and hate it - def a junky console port, but it looks cool and works well enough mostly, but def will be improved by mods, and yep the map is gorgeous but not as useful as i hoped. Combat is much better than I remember in Oblivion but still clunky as heck. Gothic 3 and Risen, by far, had the best combat system. All that said, IT IS AMAZING. 22 hours and going. It's really more of the same with better graphics, more voices and better radiant AI supposedly (we'll see). And I do not want to jinx myself, but it is running well on my PC. No problems although I need to keep it High rather Ultra to avoid some occasional slow downs. On Master Difficulty it is very rewarding. CRAP. Now that I posted this, I had my first crash, sigh.