My stupid dual-wielding build...

[InDarkestNight]

I've been talking about this on a thread that started out as about Linux. I've started to think its not really appropriate for that, so I'm going to post about it here instead.

After I was forced to change to an SSD, I decided to take the opportunity and finally install Ubuntu. I've liked it more than not, but that's not relevant here. Seeing as I now have a clean slate, and it'll take me a while to figure out how to get my modding tools working on this OS, I decided to play a 100% vanilla. I tried to make myself as OP as possible, but I screwed up and chose the wrong enchants (put fire and shock on my dragonborn weapon, rather than frost and chaos damage on a stalhrim one). So I decided to finally take the opportunity to fix that.

To start, I went heavy armor, one-handed, and restoration. I chose restoration and the small number of skills to try and get it to 70 asap for the necromage exploit. I chose one-handed because it would give me the option of going sword and shield or dualwielding. I liked the idea of dualwielding here, because that means I would have double OP enchants on my weapons! I went with heavy because I would eventually be using Dukaan, which is a heavy armor helm. For my race, I chose orc because I thought that would make me even more OP being able to double the damage of my weapons.

Now, I've never done a dualwielding build before, because I never really liked it, so I had no idea what I was doing. Turns out, this build isn't as OP as I thought it would be. To make matters worse, I chose to play on expert to make the build more satisfying. I used to play on expert all the time, but I quit years ago due to me testing an endlessly long back catalogue of mods. I've clearly gone out of practice, because I kept getting owned by everything. I think that was due to my lack of a shield or any way to block; I was walking around with a healing spell in my left hand to try and powerlevel it. I ran into the problem where I couldn't handle anything anymore, because I simply couldn't out-dps anything. Also, most things could one-shot me, which wasn't fun. I ended up grinding restoration to get the necromage exploit working. I also had some unused perk points due to me not wanting to spend them on any perks that weren't stackable. This is probably the main reason I was so underpowered honestly. It was better once I got the exploit going; I could actually out-trade bears, and enemies in general were easier. I still got owned by sabrecats though, and as is usual on expert bandits are impossible between the levels of 10 and 20 because they can perform a kill move on you from full health!

However, overall, the necromage thing did far more harm than good. Because of it, I was super weak to fire, and even using the best fire enchant I could find wasn't really helping much. To make matters worse, during daytime my attributes weren't regenerating and they were nerfed by an abnormally huge amount too. Also, the berserker power wasn't helping much; it didn't protect me from magic, the bane of my existence, and I found I needed far more often than once a day too. Having suped up frost resistance also didn't help much against frost mages; I couldn't catch up to them, meaning they wiped the floor with me. That was fixed after I went out and got The Helm of Yngol. Either way, I was playing a character who had half attributes half of the time literally, a super high weakness to fire, and no way to block. I started lamenting I should've gone breton, because I needed the magic resist since I had no defense. I also thought about getting the lord stone and rushing the Book of Love quest. Don't know how much that would've helped.

So yeah, stupid first-time dualwielding build. I had a similar problem the one time I tried to play a two-hander that wore heavy armor. He kept getting slaughtered by archers since he had no shield or armor rating. Fortunately, that was a super short playthrough; I just did the civil war then got married. I was trying to hunt for achievements, and thought I had to play both sides of the civil war to get some of them. I never attempted that again. I had a similar problem with Fudgemuppet's paladin build, which has you wearing robes and using a warhammer. You wear armor in your other slots, but it still isn't nearly enough. Also, because of the warhammer's long-winded unsheathing animation, I couldn't help but get hit while I re-armed myself after healing. I actually got used to playing at halt health. As the game progressed, enemies just hit me harder and harder. Eventually, I tried to do Deepwood Redoubt, but I straight couldn't advance because the archers would one-shot me from full hp. I tried countless times to advance, but it was just impossible, I was far too frail. I abandoned that character because I saw no way he could progress.

I learned my lesson here; you can't be fragile if you're going two-handed. You need a full set of heavy armor, and I have played such builds successfully. No idea how to make dual-wielding work though. You can't block in any form; at least with two-handed weapons you can do a block bash to stop dragons from breathing fire on you. Clearly you need better defenses. You can't have vampirisim reducing your attributes and making you weak to fire. You need to play a breton, or maybe a Nord so that you don't get owned by frost mages, guess dunmer could be viable too. Since I've never done a dual-wield build before though, I would like to give it another try and make it work. Its just a playstyle I've never really explored. Then again, it feels alot like a spellsword build. It was powerful, don't get me wrong, but I quickly got bored with just walking up to people then standing in place spamming left-click while spraying them with a spell. I've never seen my enemies drop so fast. Still, it got old really fast, and dual-wielding seems to have the same damned problem.

Tirade over now. I botched a dual-wielding build really badly, and I tried to the necromage exploit which despite the stories clearly isn't worth it. Now I'm contemplating what I want to try next, while I wait for some money to come in so I can upgrade my computer and possibly improve skyrim's graphics.