RavingRavec

Sorry for my third post, cba to multi-quote. Yea, I am playing a breton with 75% resistance from gear enchants and the shield perk with 50% resistance to fire/frost/shock. I rape through everything, but when I fight against a mage that uses shock spells I sometimes just get two or even one shot. And I've got 600 health... Seems like shock is immune to a targets resistance lol. And when you play mage it does f*#@all damage in comparison

A great part of the fun of RPGing for me and many others is optimizing your character. As soon as a game becomes broken when you do that, it is the game's fault and not the player. Holding yourself back is extremely frustrating and is not a sollution for lack of difficulty. Master difficulty should be balanced with the best players in mind (hence the name "Master"). It should assume that you will use the maximum of your abilities. You call smiting an exploit, but it is has been designed to function this way by the programmers, so it is not an exploit, it is an example of bad design and it is up to the community to fix this. This exactly, I'm a 7 year WoW player in top end raiding guilds, I can't help it that I'm looking for the best way to do/approach things, the best ways to enchant and improve my gear. It's in my nature since thats what you are required to do on a MMO like wow. I play like this on Skyrim aswell, I maxed my enchanting and blacksmithing as first skills and that made me too strong even though I had a way to high level with low skill in the combat skills because of the maxed BS/Ench. So I put it on master difficulty and im still facerolling through, what I'm doing now is fighting naked, or with just visual items to feast my eyes. You can blame me for maximizing my character with every way the game allows me, but is it really my fault I just make use of/take advantage of the things the game offers me? I don't think so personally. Regardless, I spend 200+ hours in the game, I still love it, reaching level 75 soon on my main char and i've yet to reach 50% on the main quest line.

You think it is OK that you can defeat the last boss as if it were a normal mob, because it is a SINGLE PLAYER GAME? Every game needs balance especially RPGs. Where did I say he died faster than, or as fast as, normal mobs? I didn't. "Mere moments" is a pretty ambiguous amount of time, which generally implies it "wasn't very long." But, it also implies that it was not instantaneous, and that it took longer than "seconds." Also, this thread is about magic being too weak. So, the Alduin example was my counterexample illustrating why it is not weak when used properly. Your incredulous response makes next to no sense in this context. In fact, it's a bit of a non sequitur. The disagreement I have with this logic, is that because it is a single player game, you should only weigh how well you do versus the environment, not other hypothetical characters which do not exist as far as that particular save game is concerned. In multiplayer games, balance is much more of a comparison between what different players can do. In single player games, the comparison is weighted more heavily to how one fares versus the game's content. If mages are overpowered, and melee is MORE overpowered, then BOTH are overpowered. Mages are not by comparison underpowered in this scenario. That type of logic only makes sense in a multiplayer environment where the player community will tend to exclude classes/builds viewed as less powerful. In a single player game, being effective enough to be chosen for a group is a non-issue, and so the measure of overpowered/underpowered is a matter of whether or not a particular build can plow through the content without gratuitous challenge. That said, I've found my experience as a mage to be completely fine, and perhaps even a little bit easy. The game may need tweaks, yes, but it is a bit misleading to call destruction "underpowered." I'm also curious which enemies take 20 seconds to die, and which spell you're using against them? What level are you, and how many levels have you invested into Magicka? 40, 100 destruction 100 conjuration 2 flame thralls, incinerate and wall of frost. 100% reduction on cost 24/7 spamming. Still takes ages and a lot of duck&cover action.

Your changes would not balance any of the problems listed here. They would only make the game less enjoyable for heavy armor users. Yea its not really going to change a f***ing thing lol

45% 1h 45% 2h 45% arch 28% reduced cost in anything, 28% magic resistance. All percentage enchants should be applied once > Not being able to stack on eachother. Problem solved, not hard to implement. Edit: Tested this with my own gear and it would make 1h weapons deal about 150-200 damage and bows +-180, all with the best smithing improvement and 100 skill in 1h and archery. Thats a lot better then the current 420 dmg on both 1h weapons and bows.

Out of curiosity, what level were you? Once you get 40+ as a mage IN COMPARISON to everything else, you have a much much harder time, in other words : Underpowered. Wether enchanting is a must or not, i would say yes, others may disagree. But if I spam the strongest destruction spells on a single opponent for about 20 seconds straight they die. If I play my warrior I 1 shot master difficulty mobs, and even bosses with 1h swords, 1h axes, and bow. There should be some changes in magic, but not making the spells twice as strong or anything, I love playing as a pure destruction mage because its basically putting another difficulty level on top of Master, actually using tactics in a fight is what makes it fun. Not just randomly slashing your way through enemies.

Note: This isnt a flame post. 1) Pure magic is a player that focuses on training the different schools of magic and spending perks in that, wearing nothing but cloth gear, and their main damage source being destruction. Just training conjuration resulting in like level 10-15 with 2 flame atronachs and a bound weapon is not a pure mage, and indeed very strong on lower levels. 2) what difficulty are you playing on? I'm talking about Master only. And even on the lower settings the higher level you get, the less usefull destruction magic gets.

You haven't read the posts right, Magic is overpowered in low levels, and can be very underpowered in higher levels. I created a mage, and within 10 hours I reached level 40 with 100 conjure, 70ish destruction 70ish restoration, 100 enchanting, 100 speech, and some other random skills. I doubt you play mage on Master difficulty like I do, which is a significant change since it actually drains your mana bar completely for one mob, resulting in you needing to sprint away to regen mana. Gear that modifies spell damage, or healing, does not exist. Where'd you get this from? You arent motivated to level the 3 best, strongest skills in the game: Smithing, Alchemy, Enchanting? You clearly don't get how the game works then. My playstyle at the moment is all about 2x Flame Thrall, right hand : Incinerate/Fireblast, depending on single/multi target, and left hand Wall of frost. Melee enemys, even on master difficulty never reach you this way and you're able to dish out burst damage with fire spells and constant damage by keeping them on the wall of frost. Great kiting, even got me down a few dragons, kiting them around on the ground. Companion AI could be better, more in the way of them not always standing in front of you while you're trying to go through a door/small passageway though. The combat AI works perfectly fine if you ask me, you can simply strafe your character to the left/right, problem solved? Also, as a mage try specializing in one school. Myself I'm a pyromancer/firemage with 100 conjuration and dual Flame Thrall pets, allows me to cast the exploding firespells just directly on my Atronachs, killing my enemys and leaving the atronachs unharmed. I disagree with what you said on Illusion/Alteration magic, if you use these properly (which rarely anyone does because they can't be bothered taking the time to, including myself) these are probably the strongest forms of magic. Combining them would mean you could focus on Conjuration/Destruction and that illu/alt tree combined to create a mage that does incredible damage and cant be touched by anything. My highest 2h skill on any character is 50, I don't have any perks in it, but I tried it a couple of times and it seems extremely bad. I ran into a camp of Foresworns with bow/1h-shield and killed about 20 of them with my health bar going down 50% in total. I returned to the save i made before I went there and tried it with 2h and got pretty much one shotted, even though I'm armor and magic resistance capped. 2h is so slow and I think even with the hitting multiple targets on power swing (with the perk) just isnt worth it. The ability to block melee attacks doesnt make up for this at all. People with 100 Conjuration should be able to summon this

Somehow, smithing and enchanting should get some nerfs or atleast a form of diminishing returns when used on light/heavy armor, your first character and mine are similar, with smithing and enchanting I managed to get me 80% magic resistance and 1280 armor, even though the armor cap is 570 (80%) this is still a big deal because it allows you to play the game without having to wear a matching armor set to get the perk, heck I can even wear 3 pieces of plate and 2 pieces of cloth and still be armor capped. This makes chosing to use light/heavy armor just not really a choice, more like something you require to get through the game. Even worse is how you are able to upgrade your weapons in the same way as armor, this just makes the scaling of 1h/2h/archery so high/good that mage characters cant even come close. Aswell as bound weapons become s*** next to this (at 100 conjuration, all the bound weaponry perks, the bound 1h sword has about 40 damage, and 80-100 if you specialize in the one-handed tree. Same goes for the bow) compare that to the 420 bow, and 406 1h axe I got. As for archery, if you are going with the path of a pure archer you need either capped out blacksmith and enchanting to reach the damage cap on bows, or specialize in sneak and run around x3 dmg 1 shotting your opponents. To make archery strong enough to stand on its own they should do something like increasing the bow damage perk 5/5 to another 100% damage, but limiting the amount of damage to be added by improving the weapon as blacksmith, aswell as the 15% chance to paralyze perk to be increased to something like 20-25% so you can keep enemy's at bay. If you're playing a pure mage on Master difficulty Enchanting is just a must, you simply can not play the game without the %decrease in <magic school> and atleast a bit of increased regeneration. Myself I got a robe with 100% regen, 50 magicka, 15% reduced cost on every school. Head slot with 28% reduced cost on destruction, 70% increased magicka regen. Necklace: 28% reduced cost on Destruction and 28% reduced cost on restoration. Ring: 70 magicka & 70% magicka regeneration. Boots: 70 stamina, 42% frost resistance. Gloves: 70 magicka & 42 carrying capacity. And even with all that, on Master difficulty, on level 44 I still manage to get out of magicka when in a serious boss/multi enemy fight. Note that my gloves and boots are made of Ebony, If you're playing a mage going with heavy armor blacksmithing & 5 points in heavy armor, you should be able to get a base armor of 150-200 when fully upgraded. Giving you about 25% reduction against physical damage.

I'm having a similar problem ,been playing the game for 150 hours now and my compass has a massive bright blue solid box on it, i can still see the icons but its just terrible to look at. Everything that has a bar: Health, STamina, Magicka, Skills in the skill menu. When the amount of sta/health/magicka goes down the indication bar slides to the left like it should, but it comes out on out of the casing. same thing with skill bars, if I gain a little experience in a skill I got all these ugly green bars sticking out of the skill bar surrounding/casing overlaping the other skill names. When targetting anything, it appears normally, I see a red health bar, but the health bar never changes so its always just guessing when my target will be dead or on low health. Anyone know any fix to this?

First my main character that is level 71 right now and capped in pretty much everything but the magic schools, is wearing Dragonplate boots, chest, gloves, shield, and im 250 armor above the armor cap. If I wear a dragonplate helmet aswell my armor goes up to 1280 (because of the 25% armor perks) Since I'm always using a shield I could even run around in just dragonplate boots + gloves + shield and have my body naked and a nice visual-purpose-only head slot. Daedric armor is overrated. I think the best armor on a female = Dragonplate. Best armor on male character : Wolf Armor (no helmet) yes, you can easily get the armor cap with wolf armor, while not wearing the complete set. I've started a new game yesterday on which im going pure mage focusing on : Enchanting, Conjuration, Destruction, Restoration, and Alteration for the magic resistance (I'm a breton aswell, so alteration+racial+25% from the Lord stone will pretty much leave me unharmed by spells) I'm just wearing Clothing items now, and I'm playing on master difficulty. Fighting anything is quite the challenge, I have to kite and hide behind walls throw a couple spells and hide again, enemy archers do 80 to 100% of my health in one hit but since they are archers and im not a moron, I avoid most of their attacks. I'm thinking about grabbing some heavy armor though, just boots, gloves, maybe helmet (if I get my hands on the dragonpriest masks) that should provide me with about 30-40% damage reduction vs melee. So yes, if you're a pure mage with no light/heavy armor, relying just on your strong offense (in early game atleast) and your restoration spells and not armor, and you cant avoid getting attacked since you'd rather stay in one place casting then you should stop crying and play a heavy armor class or a different game.

Just came back from Dinner. So got some suggestions: - Improved lockpicking, makes a sound when you are near the right point. (to pick the locks easier) If you ask me, of the things you listed this is the only reasonable one, either like a sound, or something like the sneak detection eye, something that lets you know if you are in the right area. Because if you ask me, and I reached 100 lockpicking about 20 game hours ago, I break about 60-70% of my lockpicks finding the right place to put it in, not the process of picking it.

Here's some things I recently found out -If you are wearing a shield while sneaking and you raise it in front of you, it allows you to walk at normal movement speed, or even slightly faster. I'm not quite sure. -If you then press the sprint button (PC Alt) and got the matching 100 block + the perk allowing you to shield charge, you will shield charge in stealth mode running insanely fast while remaining undetected, and you are able to use the mouse to make a 360 turn as if you were a balerina. -If you are in the outside world and you crouch, pull your shield, right click to hold it up, then press sprint, let right click go, then let sprint go you will have an infinite sprint+autorun, even if your stamina bar depletes you will still continue the automatic forward + shield charge sprint. Oh, and here's a screenshot of a dungeon on master difficulty. Pretty much every single one of those mobs could one shot me with magic (I was wearing my damage gear, not magic resistance)

So a couple of quick n' easy things that could be put in a plugin the day the CS comes out could maybe be- Replacing all instances of +% enchant strength potions with something completely unrelated, maybe a short-duration magnitude bonus to power of all current active effects for example Reducing all damage and armor basic perks to something like 8-10% per rank (and maybe Stealth reduced to 4-5% per rank, Enchanter bonus reduced slightly to 15% per rank) Quick fix for the overly high magic resistance and armor values im seeing by reducing maximum damage mitigation for both to around 75% Reduce Bretonian magic resistance racial to 10% reduce Alteration "Magic Resistance" perk to +5% per rank adjust Dark Souls so you can put 2 points into it at +100 health at each Reduce Lord stone to +25pts Damage Resistance; +5% Magic Resistance ( from +50; +25%), Apprentice stone to +100% Magicka regeneration, +25% weakness to Magicka (from +100%; +100%) slightly increase minimum barter value, slightly lower maximum (i.e. better prices at lower end and it scales up a bit less) do something about Lockpicking i dont know what change Heavy armor Conditioning perk to "Heavy Armor weighs 50% less and doesn't slow you down when worn." slightly reduce the effect of Shield Charge reduce Elemental Protection to 30% im not as high level as some posters in this thread but im starting to see some of the problems being raised, on the day the CS comes out i want to fiddle with some of the numbers and get the mod out, mainly as a quick day 1 way of attempting to address some of the balance issues. I think I didn't mention it in my post. But magic resistance is duplicative from each source, but multiplicative from different sources. Example: -Max magic resistance from armor (including shield) 66% (ring, neck, shield all 22%) -Breton racial: 25% -Lord stone: 25% -Alteration: 30% -Shield Block: 50% fire, frost, lightning A dragon comes up and does a 400 health damage fire breath. This is what will happen: Shield block removes 50% from the fire damage resulting in 200 damage left, then the stacked resistance from armor will cut that 200 by 66% making it 68 damage, then 30% from alteration will make it roughly 47, then the lord stone's 25% reduction will make that 33, then the breton racial will remove another 25% resulting in you taking 25 damage from the dragonbreath. As far as I know the order of priority in magic damage reduction is : Flat damage reduction (like on the Spellbreaker artifact) > Elemental reduction > Magic % reduction. So since the Bretonian racial can't stack with anything, I think that should just be left alone. After all, nords get 50% frost reduction which is a lot better considering this game has a lot of frost damage. But I do agree on the Alteration nerf, 30% is overkill, even if it doesnt stack. Either make that 15-20% ish, or move it up in the tree so only expert/master alteration players can get it. However I do understand Bethesda's intentions with it being placed so low, so mages in their robes can get some resistances without sacrificing a whole perk tree of perk points for it. Also, whats wrong with lockpicking? Asides from the 1/10th chance I ever encounter a master lock on which I break like 20 Lockpicks I really like lockpicking, and once you get the hang of it (try fiddling with it, just like real life locks) its quite easy - for the people that dont know, you can turn the lock and release the lockpick button to turn the lock a bit further in order to find the proper way to pick it and having your lockpick last longer (Don't know if that made sense, its hard to explain). On a side-note, I don't think Bethesda intended players to reach the levels 70-80 when only on 30% of the main quest line (like me), because the minimum level to benefit from all the OPness mentioned here (armor and magic resistance caps) you need to have maxed out Enchanting, blacksmith, heavy armor, Block. After which only level 70ish players should have enough perks left to invest in something else like one-handed,archery, sneak. EDIT: The most important thing right now is that they fix Nightingale Blade's highest level version (player level 42 to obtain this version i beleive, or 30+ something like that, google it) can not be improved, making the 'what should be' best weapon in the game a piece of s*** :( Also, I've been looking forever to find a pair of boots with the Muffle enchant so I could disenchant and learn it, the thieves guild armor, nightingale, all that doesnt allow disenchanting since they are unique. Here's the pair I found from a bunch of Khajit merchants somewhere. Steel Plate Boots of Muffling > Item ID 00092a8e

Dragon armor is lighter so it makes less noise while sneaking. Shields are useless? level 100 block perk? Alt + Right click = knocking a group of 5 enemys 20 feet in the air, then they remain on the ground for about 3-5 seconds. Shield bash perk > Shield bash 1-2 shots most of my enemys on master difficulty. In my 130 hours of Skyrim gameplay I found like 4 of those 'Silly hearts' unless you mod, idk about that easy access. And another thing, you got 100 smithing and yet you are completely unaware of the fact that you can improve Iron/Steel armor up to the point where it reaches the defense cap (567 armor, 80%), so any gear you can smith yourself above steal is gear you make because you like the looks of it. ^ being said, the type of gear you wear doesnt matter when its heavy armor, with all the perks and 100 blacksmithing you can wear anything and you will be defense capped. My Dragonscale armor might have 1100-1200 armor VS my Wolf armor which has like 700, but it doesnt make a difference since armor stops being important after reaching the 567 cap.