Feanoro

It all depends on what you want to do with your character pretty much. If you're the kind to be in the middle of the battle all the time hacking and slashing and pounding then you should get heavy armor and perks in it. Heavy armor has better defence than light armor until you get a very high smithing level and perks in the smithing skill. Basically it will help you in your style a lot until you become a high lvl. However, if you're the sneaky type character who likes to range or backstab people, you should go with light armor. Light armor will protect you better than nothing and will make much less noise when you sneak around compared to heavy armor, thus helping you sneak better. At the same time, the more you invest in light armor perks the better off your character will be because all the sneaky/thieving/assasin armors are light. Finally, if your main focus is magic in fights (something like summoning atronachs to hold off the enemy while you blast at them with destruction magic) then you'll find robes (non-armor but particularly non-armor with magic benefits) is what will help you most, particularly if you use defensive spells such as wards and oakflesh->ebonyflesh, etc. Of course, you can always create a combination of all of these but the most important thing is where you invest your perks in. If, for example you keep upgrading the light armor tree you'll then find that light armor will be way way better than heavy armor for you down the road. Similarly, if you keep investing in the heavy armor tree you'll find that all the light armor will encounter will barely protect you against anything at all. What's important to remember, though, is that you should make a choice at some point, otherwise if you spread out your perks among a ton of things you'll have trouble later on.

It's been said a lot (with proof) that Alduin is extremely arrogant. That's because no other dragon could kill him, not even the humans who first sent him forward in time. He does, however, know of the Dragonborn. Thus when he feels your presence nearby, he comes to investigate whether you're a threat or not. He arrives at Helgen, sees you with your head on the chopping block, he even shouts at you to get a reaction but manages only to make you unconscious. Seeing how much of a weakling you are Alduin basks in his self-confidence once more and proceeds to ravage the town while you manage to escape. Later on, in Kynesgrove, he proves his arrogance and that he doesn't consider you a threat by telling you something along the lines of "you can't even speak the dragon language and you call yourself dovahkiin". Only after you learn Dragonrend do you actually become a threat to him.

Lol it's funny how some people think Master is too easy and others think it's too hard:). I tend to go for the middle myself, I like a challenge but I don't like getting 1-hit by an Ancient Dragon:(. Anyway, I would recommend Sneaking around, even if you don't have a Bow. Sneak behind one of them, (won't be easy but in leveled dungeons it should be possible) and give them your best powershot from behind, then run away and hide. Come back again, and repeat till you are left with a manageable set of opponents. Also, at least at lower levels, neither you nor your opponents have any perks so I would imagine it's possible to avoid blows from 1 or 2 opponents if they have 2-handed weapons (because they're slow in swinging those things and usually it's the 2-handed wielders that hit you hardest at start imo). That's pretty much how I kill Draugr Deathlords at low levels, avoid their swing then hit them, avoid again, hit again, etc.

Quirkyblonde, I've been tempted to dive from high points into the water myself sometimes, but I never take the time to do it though...What do you think of Bard's Leap though? Never tried jumping from there but it seems like it's been specially made for something like this. Technically not a mountain top but still:)

Just wanted to point out that the most likely explanation why Paarthurnax has NOT intervened in any fights (as per the philosophy of the Way) is BECAUSE he knows he was created with a desire to dominate and rule. Paarthurnax knows that if he gets involved in wars/fights involving mortals and keeps doing it then his power hungry nature will have a chance to come out in time and lead him to bad things again. It's easy to end up on the wrong side like that, just imagine a group of mortals demanding that he help them kill another group of mortals by way of an ultimatum blades fashion style. Therefore the only way to be SURE he remains in control of his darker instincts is to deny them a fighting chance by adopting the Way of the Voice. Another thing that hasn't been mentioned is that, as is even written by Bethesda themselves in those loading screens, a battle between dragons is actually a verbal debate using their Thu'ums. Thus when Paarthurnax says he'll make the other dragons understand he means just that: he'll debate them with his Thu'um into submission until they adopt a peaceful lifestyle. But that's okay, because dragons are immortal and can take a bit of punishment without dying, unlike the alternative of letting them kill mortals by the dozens willy nilly. As for the Blades, I find it very strange that you get to be the Leader of the Thieves Guild, DB, Mages College but are never recognized officially as such by an "organization" of 2 people (or let's say 5 if you provide the other 3 yourself)? I really hope they make a DLC for them, as Delphine is the worst kind of "leader" for that group, it's better that they fade into history than they be resurrected under Delphine's shortsighted, hateful, warmongering ways. Now that being said I think I can see a small thread of Bethesda's logic in all this but it's still quite thin: before the Blades reached their maximum potential under the Empire they were dragonslayers. Correct me if I'm wrong but this suggests that they became the protectors of the Dragonborn BECAUSE he was the ultimate dragonslayer. In fact, it seems this dragonslayer bond was so powerful between the Dragonborn and them that they happily listened to him on all other matters, and under the Dragonborn Emperors they became the protectors of the Empire. Delphine and Esbern know this (it's from them that you hear bits of this in the game) and they want to remake the Blades from the bottom up the way it used to be in the old days. This means they are dragonslayers and you are the ultimate dragonslayer. They listen to you and protect you so that you can BE the ultimate dragonslayer and get rid of the dragons. When you stop fullfilling your end of the deal, they stop listening to you. This is what motivates the quest to kill Paarthurnax. This, also, is why you're dealing with a fundamentally different faction in this game: the Blades from Oblivion had all dragons killed/asleep and had a completely different role as protectors of the Empire. What we're dealing with in Skyrim is a faction whose only mission statement is to kill dragons. As such, let's not be surprised by the request to kill Paarthurnax, it's the same as being surprised by Astrid asking you to murder people in the Dark Brotherhood quests...murder is what the DB does, dragonslaying are what the Blades do. Delphine has told us this from the moment she met us and Esbern, even while a Blade in the old days, only cared about dragons and the end of days anyway. That being said (and maintaining the same parallel between DB and the Blades) if you can choose to Destroy the Dark Brotherhood, why can you not choose to Kill the Remaining Blades? From my point of view the moment I got Dragonbane I have no further use for them... Oh and let's not forget, Alduin's Wall (the only contribution of the Blades plot-wise) only serves to make you ask about meeting Paarthurnax. The latter is the ONLY source of wisdom and ancient knowledge in Skyrim. Now I admit on my first character, an Imperial-loving Breton (and after being mislead into thinking you would have MANY quests to do alongside the Blades after killing Paarthurnax), I made the wrong choice, not understanding very much about the game at that time. However, now, on my preconception breaking stealthy Nord, I will definitely keep my white dragon alive!

Just wanted to post and say thank you to Dominionz, he was soo right about the nvidia driver. I have an older card myself (9700M GT) and with the new 290.53 drivers i was constantly going under 10 fps in Skyrim. Today I uninstalled the thing and put 285.79 instead and I can play again!

Don't get me wrong, me likey Elisif, but doesn't it seem to you guys she just lets Falk and Tullius make all the decisions for her? Also, letting someone like Erikur poison the minds of the other Thanes with no repercussions is never a good move. Heck if she'd been a stronger woman perhaps the Moot would've supported her more! But anyway, ty for voting in the poll:)

Some of them are:) (thinks of Siddgeir). I'd argue, though, that most of them care about their people though, in one form or another. For example, here's what I think of them: Siddgeir -> milk-drinker Laila Law-Giver -> good intentioned person but naive enough to trust in Maven Balgruuf -> classical "good guy", though it has to be mentioned he clearly prefers the Empire over the Stormcloaks should it come to a choice while pretending to be completely neutral (but again, he does this for his people as well) Elisif the Fair -> too obedient and ready to give others the power. By the way, how could Bethesda not allow the Dragonborn to marry her, particularly if you side with the Empire? DAAAMn son, I'd conquer all of Tamriel for that girl :biggrin: Igmund -> Fair and politically savvy, but overconfident and naive when it comes to the Forsworn, Silver-Bloods and Dragons Idgrod Ravencrone -> Misunderstood and unappreciated, she understands the old ways and magic. She kind of reminds me of a very stern mother in relation to her people. Skald -> Slightly dimwitted and too bloodthirsty for my liking Korir -> His ignorance about magic and the College expresses itself in a hateful rant about them. Seems more preoccupied with getting prestige and respect from the other Jarls than making Winterhold a busy, happy city once again. Ulfric I already discussed, but I'll add that he's obviously a racist but it's unclear to what degree. (we know he hates the Thalmor and with good reason, he doesn't like Dark Elves but does this extend to all races? What about other humans like Bretons and Redguards?)

I don't know how often this has been asked before, but I feel the Jarls have the most developed personalities in game and it's worth talking about them for a bit. So please vote on your favorite Jarl in the poll and tell us why you chose him or her. I'll start things off, then. After a difficult choice between Balgruuf and Ulfric I went with Ulfric, because he wasn't what I expected. The Stormcloaks call him a hero and a true Nord, the Imperials call him a selfish, power-hungry rebel, but in my opinion he's just a man who's seen pain all around him and tries to stop it by doing the only thing he knows: fighting some more! You can just feel the hubris around him as he asks Galmar "Why do you fight?" the first time you meet him. Also, the voice acting for him is amazing, that deep booming voice is perfect for a character knowledgeable in the Thu'um.

As far as glass armor goes, the Thalmor DO wear it. There's a sidequest you get where you can choose to wipe out the Thalmor prison of Northwatch Keep (or whatever it's called) and you'll find at least a few people in glass armor there ( not to mention TONS of elven ). It's why that's one of my favorite dungeons in the game. Also if you're over level 40 I think you'll find that the Draugr Deathlords throw away their Ancient Nord gear and come at you with ebony waraxe + shield, greatsword, sword, battleaxe and ebony bow+arrows. At even higher level (I think 46+, that seems to be the level at which you get the best version of everything including all leveled items), you'll start getting drops in the rare armor categories. On my first character I used heavy armor and got dragonplate drops, on my current character that only uses light armor and has 17 heavy armor skill I got (without me being able to make them myself at the time) a dragonscale helmet, shield and boots and a daedric waraxe. I also got tons of ebony gear in all shapes and sizes including enchanted armor pieces/weapons (currently using an ebony bow of blizzards I found in some chest and that daedric waraxe that I enchanted myself with soul trap).

My first character was a Breton loyal to the Empire and proud to help it quash down the silly Nord rebellion. Always in the middle of the fight, surrounded by his fellow legionnaires, he hacked down every moving enemy in his deadly Daedric armor. My second character is a Nord in love with his home, people and traditions. He knows a weakened Empire might only speed up a confrontation with the Thalmor, whom he sees as the ultimate enemies, but he cannot stand by and let the Empire strip away the last shred of dignity his people have. Despite preconceptions against his kind, my PC prefers a stealthy approach to battle and light armor, although his natural strength and fighting abilities make him equally deadly in close combat. I'll probably go for a 3rd run in the future with a Khajiit, whom I think are amazing in Skyrim. For the moment I just love having Kharjo by my side:).

I think the greatest issue with Maven is that she's completely out of character with you. She's supposed to be cunning and manipulative but she treats the PC as an incompetent subordinate from start to end. Being continuously rude and threatening with someone is a very stupid move. Eventually they'll get tired of being treated like that and come for you, particularly if you never make good on your threats. I'm disappointed that Bethesda didn't take the time to change major players' behavior towards you after major questlines. If there's one thing that completely breaks immersion and fun for me it's not taking care of obvious plotholes like this. Particularly since all they had to do was get some people to replace some dialogue for characters such as Maven after certain quests are completed.

Would like to, but like I said, not an option at the moment. Meanwhile I'd like to squeeze every extra fps out of this thing so please help me out with any suggestions. I think using Skyboost and doing some experiments with shadows I've now gotten it semi-playable at the cost of a few minor graphical bugs (it averages at 17 fps now and doesn't drop into single digits as much). By the way, I keep going to the official tweaking guide nvidia's site and so far the most helpful thing for me has been increasing fShadowBiasScale to 1 which effectively reduces the number of shadows in the game (by increasing it you reduce the number of angles at which objects exposed to light get a shadow) without those weird blocky things that appear on all objects in the sunlight. Still trying to figure out how to control the amount of fog/smoke/etc. Messing with iMaxParticles doesn't help with that and just makes the game unstable.

On the bright side, this might be a good time to start upgrading that ebony blade :tongue:

Would you believe me if I told you the game looked like that for me as well till today? Well maybe not exactly like that but with washed up colors. Then I mucked about with it, messed it up too much and decided to completely reinstall. Before I reinstalled I also upgraded my drivers to the latest nvidia beta drivers then reinstalled the game. Now it looks like this: http://i1239.photobucket.com/albums/ff501/Feanoro/TESV2012-01-0713-33-42-60.jpg http://i1239.photobucket.com/albums/ff501/Feanoro/TESV2012-01-0713-29-14-76.jpg My textures are set on low btw cause I have fps problems and the pics above have been reduced in quality but anyway game looks way better with new drivers than it did before in terms of color and textures and stuff. So maybe the 290.53 drivers will help you out if you don't have them?

Guess Lydia had a better divorce lawyer :O

First and foremost ty for taking a look at this. I'd appreciate any helpful comments, particularly by people with similar hardware and experiences. I'm using an Asus g50V laptop which has a T9400 (I think) dual core cpu @ 2.53 Ghz and a GeForce 9700m GT @ 512 MB. I have 4 GB of RAM installed, my OS is Win 7 64 bit and I'm using the latest graphics drivers from nvidia (290.53 in beta version I think, I've used some previous ones before as well and had the same issue). Skyrim is patched up properly to 1.3 but I've also played on 1.1 and had the same low fps. Obviously my machine already has 3 or 4 years under it so I wasn't expecting any kind of high settings. In fact when the launcher configured the settings on the first run it disabled antialiasing, anisotropic filtering and FXAA. It originally set my textures on high, but I've since put them on low hoping to coax a few more fps out. Similary, shadows are on low decals on none and the view distance is set to low in all categories except actor, at which I put it at medium (but I had low fps even before I did this and noticed no decrease since). Now I've tried doing the basic stuff you read about on the net. First I've set all the options nvidia gave me to focus on performance instead of quality. After that I disabled the in-game vsync, and it does help remove some mouse lag but it doesn't increase my fps. For a while I believed the lag was mostly caused by smoke/fog and various things requiring particles so I tried to reduce iMaxParticles from the default 750 to various values (500, 250, 50, etc) and not only did the fps not increase, but the game started stuttering. At another point I tried playing with the shadow settings in skyrimprefs.ini by setting iShadowMapResolution to 1 and fShadowDistance, fInteriorShadowDistance to 0. I've also started from their default values of 512, 2000, 3000 respectively and tried to slowly decrease/increase them. Again, no noticeable fps gain and I only managed to make the game look ugly. Since I've tried all these things I've decided to completely reinstall Skyrim (used ccleaner as well for safety). The game looks great again but I'm still having low fps (13-17 in dungeons, and sometimes even lower outside). Do you guys have any idea what I could do to improve my fps? even an extra 5 fps would make a huge difference to my gameplay experience. I know your first impulse will be to say "get a better gpu/computer" but unfortunately that's not possible right now. At the same time I keep bumping into posts by random people on the net claiming to have my configuration (or an almost identical one) and running a constant 25+ fps in skyrim so hopefully there is a way to achieve this through software tweaking. Any help would be greatly appreciated guys! (in the meanwhile I'm going to try looking at TESVAL and Skyboost, maybe one of those could help me out-> if you have any idea if they would work for me please post that too) P.S.: Reinstalling Skyrim and loading my old save revived Skjor! YAY!

I see your point, it's not easy to create/voice act and implement dialogue like this to cover all these various situations. However, one would expect SOME situations to be covered, particularly those covered by major questlines. For example I don't care that much that Talen-Jei tells me I shouldn't come back to the Bee and Barb after what I did to Keerava, even though I did help him get her a ring afterwards, but I do get mad when, even after I've become Harbinger for the Companions, the guards still usually call me a noob in the Companions. Also what's the point of getting promoted by the Imperials or Stormcloaks when none of the soldiers salute properly:( (actually I have heard some Stormcloaks call me by my proper title, but the Imperials were a completely lost cause for me). I also have an issue with the randomizing factor for various quests such as upgrading the Guild subquests and DB Forever missions. What's the point of making so many different options if you're going to randomize the whole thing? What I mean is wouldn't it have been better to have to do each type of job from Delvin and Vex in each type of city rather than get assigned the same job in the same place 5 times? Same goes for DB forever, why not just go through the whole list of possible clients in order and only THEN restart the quest if you want to.

MMmm nice idea, although in Troy the top part of the sword looked somewhat more like an arrow, and of course the blade wasn't yellowish :)