Soft cap is level 50, which you can get by only leveling in your specialized role. Think about it this way, what if Bethesda had released the game with a hard cap of 50 without changing anything else? Leveling up other skills would not grant you additional perks, or allow you to gain additional levels, just make those skills work better. People would have complained with things like "why not give us the option to keep leveling and getting more perks if we want to?". So they make the hard cap a soft cap for people who want the option to keep going. If this is not you, then stop at level 50. You can get all the best gear in the game, finish all the quests and the main story line without exceeding level 50. I don't know about a huge flaw. Yes most perk tree's have a starter perk that everyone is going to have to get if they want to use that style of play. I don't know if that's a bad thing. You give the boring baseline upgrade perk first, and then the fun and interesting perks come later after some initial investment. It's a perk sink for sure, but it's not required for every perk tree. For instance, you may want "Extra Pockets" in pickpocketing, but don't really care about your increased chance to pickpocket with the 5/5 initial "Light Fingers" perk, so you just put 1 point in light fingers, and 1 point in Night Thief, so you can get the perk you want. I havn't played a mage yet, and this is the one thing i worry about. I see all these ways to do 20-30k damage hits with melee weapons, and 7-8k damage hits with bows, and i worry when i don't see any way to scale magic damage up anywhere close to that high. I plan on doing a mage class next, so we will see. At least i get to look forward to casting all the high level destruction spells for free as many times as i want all day long with the right gear. There are multiple NPC's that will fence things for you, and all you have to do is wait for 48 hours and the NPC's will have more gold for you to continue selling your stuff if you don't want to go around and sell to multiple NPC's. It's a little annoying, but once you figure it out it isn't so bad. While burglary is fairly easy, pickpocketing isn't. Highest chance to steal something is capped at 90%. You know how annoying it is to have 100 skill level pickpocketing with perks and get caught stealing 10 gold from an NPC who is sleeping? Drives me insane. If anything they need to make pickpocketing easier, or at the very least drop the hard cap and let it go up to 100% chance. I don't think its so much that horses are too expensive, it's that as soon as you dismount them they run away and you have to rebuy them every time. You don't have this problem with the Dark Brotherhood quest reward horse though, so if you want a horse that doesn't cost you and doesn't run away, there is at least one in game. I have noticed that archers hit for a good chunk of damage, but I've also noticed it's pretty easy to dodge incoming arrows. Though my damage reduction is fairly low. You can easily get up to the cap of 85% damage reduction in light armor and no shield, which would make archers pretty easy mode. Just takes a bit of crafting and thought before running into battle. The game requiring you to think about your gear, and craft up something good before you go into battle isn't a bad thing. I don't really see the problem. A high level perk giving a good effect, arn't you complaining about none of the high level perks being any good in #8? I'm not sure what you mean by re-balancing, do you think armor and weapons are too good, or not good enough? With a little effort you can make the best gear in the game fairly early, like around level 25ish. Then around level 35ish you can upgrade it to get the highest possible stats on them in the game. Considering the game is supposed to end (soft cap) at level 50, it doesn't seem too ground breaking. I personally love some of the higher end perks. There are some you stated sucked in replies to others that i think are amazing. Like "Shadow Warrior", which if used properly allows you to pull off a mid fight sneak attack which will likely one shot whatever is kicking your ass. "Perfect Touch", while more of a role play perk, is a really cool ability. "Twin Souls" lets you have an extra conjured pet out. "Atronarch" turns 30% of all magic damage taken into magicka. "Extra Effect" in enchanting is probably one of the best max skill perks in the game. Now i will agree, that max skill perks like magicka reduction are kinda lame, but they are far from required. You can get 4x -25% casting cost enchants on gear for two schools of magic with the Extra Effect perk, which will make all spells from 2 schools free to cast as long as you want. I think it really depends on what skills you are leveling. If you focus just on conjuration you could have dual permanent Atronachs by level 20, which would be pretty amazing. But if you level tertiary skills like pickpocketing and lockpicking that don't help your combat capabilities, then yes you will get your high level summoned familiars late game when they arn't as good. You need to be careful what skills you level and when. I do agree that conjuration should be a possible primary damage school of magic, but it's not. It's just something you should know before going into it that your familiars are meat shields so you can kill enemies with your destruction spells without getting messed with. I would love to have more options, but there are a fairly large number already. You compared this to a game with over 700 perks, well lets look at other games. Diablo 2 was hugely successful, and you only have around 30 skills to invest in per character with the ability to invest 1 point per level. Same amount of perks per level as Skyrim, with more possible skills to invest in than D2 with a lower level cap. Seems way more robust than Diablo 2. Diablo 3 is going to have even fewer skills. So while you may personally feel 100+ unique perks is not enough, it is by no means a low ball number compared to other successful RPG's out there. I like how spell damage would scale with magicka, it makes sense honestly. An alternative would be to allow better enchants or crafted gear to increased magic damage. Then it would work like the armor/weapon crafted gear and scale similarly. There should be a way to craft magic staffs/swords/daggers that increase magic damage. Increased physical defense with health is going to be pointless unless you overhaul the current way armor mitigation works. With the right perks you can craft hide armor that hits the 85% physical damage mitigation cap in game without a shield. So more physical defense would just be a waist with the current setup. Increased physical damage with stamina would be broken if you don't overhaul the way the system currently works. There are ways to get 20-30k 1 handed sneak attacks, and 7k bow sneak attacks, and 5-6k normal 1h and 2h damage attacks. More physical damage without somehow balancing the way crafted items work is only going to make it even more ridiculous. You need to pick one way or the other. Either primary stats are going to effect damage/mitigation, or crafting and enchanting will. I say stick with the system already in place, and just add ways to increase magic damage with crafting. Why when you can easily make two entire schools of magic free to cast as much as you want? Just because you haven't figured this out yet doesn't mean the game needs to be fixed. More spells are always cool. There definately needs to be some way to scale magic damage better, but i don't know if tired levels of spells is the way to go. Just use the crafting system to boost current spells so it will work like armor/weapons do currently. Familiars definitely need to scale better with your level. Followers also need to scale with your level, currently they are capped to the stats when you first enter the zone as them. This is already in game, usually you just have to do a quick quest for them to unlock them. Again, just because you haven't figured out an aspect of the game yet doesn't mean it needs to be fixed. I think you should also make it so if you are married to your follower, that you get some sort of bonus.
