LE Fix skyrim's broken balancing!

[Link6746]

I notice that as a mage levels up, regardless of what schools of magic they excell in, if they don't put all their upgrades into health they are usually one-shotted by everything at level 25,

and additionally that by then every single spell in the destruction school is completely useless against opponents who have the usual health to max that the scaling of the game forces.

 

I honestly find that if you actually play a pure mage of any race and you don't put your first ten levels in as health increases (which runs contrary to the idea of a mage), you have to toggle god mode to just keep playing the game. I constantly worry that I forgot to do that before leaving town. Sometimes my suspicions are confirmed when something like a Skeever sneaks up behind my character and kills him instantly while he's at full health. Armor has to be very high to prevent this.

 

The solution I think is obvious. you remove the chosen stat bonuses altogether, replacing them with a system that directly raises them every level.

 

My listing for how I think this should work is this:

 

Magic schools+enchanting: Skill ranking added to Magicka. Spells of that school get a spell dependent bonus to the spell (if numerically quantifiable) that depends in strength on both skill rank and the spell itself... that doesn't just mean cost reduction.... it means they get an actual bonus to the effect of the spell if applicable.

 

melee weapons: half skill ranking added to both stamina and health

 

armor and blocking skills: skill ranking added to health

 

Alchemy: 1/3 of skill ranking added to magicka, and stamina

 

smithing and other mundane crafting: 1/3 of skill ranking to both stamina and health

 

 

This, hopefully, would make for more balanced characters- as it is a mage is able to be killed near instantly by most opponents (and not deal near enough damage to kill them, usually running out of magicka altogether before even half the damage is done even when said mage poured EVERYTHING into magicka. this even applies with most of the wards and protective spells in the game active!), and anyone who knows how the game works and plays a meleer will always choose health... which leads to a complete lack of challenge.

 

No attributes required.

 

Also, it'd be interesting to roll this into a system that automatically chooses perks based on in game behavior combined with skill increases that level. that would make for a very nGCD style game.

[KillerHappyFace]

+1

 

Game scaling, particularly for magic, is horribly broken. Aside from perks there is no way to improve your character except for equipment, and there is no equipment that increases magical potency.

 

We need for skill levels to have impact on the effectiveness of those skills. It would also be nice for there to be scaling enemies, so that by level 50 not every Draugr is a Scourge or Deathlord.

[AxleB]

I've felt that since oblivion, lvl'ed enemies were stupid, especially since you can lvl up purely from non combative skills. In morrowind it might have seemed boring to one shot everything past a certain point but there were still bosses, and honestly the best experience i've had to date was building an uber powered character without glitching or cheating in vanilla morrowind. The time and effort required, the feeling of power, becoming complacent and getting killed by the lich king in the mournhold sewers.

 

Those were good times, but making every fight challenging for the sake of keeping the game exciting isn't making anything more exciting, it's just another time sink padding the hours, or worse, a source of anxiety because you've been lvling your roleplaying skills the last 10 levels by interacting with npcs.

[maboru]

Actually, if you learn Enchanting and Smithing to a reasonably high degree you can manufacture light armor with some pretty beefy AC and magic buffs or robes, rings and amulets with armor buffs. I do agree that the Mage class has been left in the dust in this age of fighter focused RPGs where any fighter can learn magic spells effectively. I think you may also be able to simply not hit the level up button until you get your stats up to where you want them, although I've never tried it so I'm not sure.

[Lugh1000]

Actually, if you learn Enchanting and Smithing to a reasonably high degree you can manufacture light armor with some pretty beefy AC and magic buffs or robes, rings and amulets with armor buffs. I do agree that the Mage class has been left in the dust in this age of fighter focused RPGs where any fighter can learn magic spells effectively. I think you may also be able to simply not hit the level up button until you get your stats up to where you want them, although I've never tried it so I'm not sure.

 

You can't buff the actual damage that way.

[KillerHappyFace]

You can't buff the actual damage that way.

 

Yeah, that seems to be one of the reasons they didn't put in skill scaling this time around. Of course, you can still save up your levels as a free potion of full health, so it's a new kind of broken. I can't believe I prefer Fallout's "you got a level, now you *MUST* level up" system.

Edited November 19, 2011 by KillerHappyFace

[Shinamo]

Um, what?

 

My first play through was as a mage, destruction focused. Pretty much up until lvl 45 or so, my highest armor rating was 68. I never bothered with the shield spells, as I kind of found swapping to them to cast and then back to be a pain. My gear was mainly Apprentice Robes of Destruction, then later Archamge Robes with Morokai mask. It's only at 45 where blacksmithing and enchanting hit 100 that I made a full set of light dragon armor and enchanted to reduce my destruction spell cost to 0.

 

So considering all that, how are you having such a hard time? Did you boost the difficulty level up during play or something? Impact alone makes many battles easy, and for those annoying archers that can one shot me I just charge up two Ice Storms and pop back and forth to shoot them until they die. Now with the Light Armor it's only 2-H users that have a chance to kill me, and I messed up and put almost all my points into magicka. Finding out there was no cost reduction ceiling means all those 400 points could have been put to health instead, and made surviving easy.

 

Also, the one shotting from archers didn't even start to occur until around the lvl 35+ range. And again, this is with 110-120 health max through the whole time. Are you using Impact stagger spam to stay alive?

[Link6746]

Um, what?

 

My first play through was as a mage, destruction focused. Pretty much up until lvl 45 or so, my highest armor rating was 68. I never bothered with the shield spells, as I kind of found swapping to them to cast and then back to be a pain. My gear was mainly Apprentice Robes of Destruction, then later Archamge Robes with Morokai mask. It's only at 45 where blacksmithing and enchanting hit 100 that I made a full set of light dragon armor and enchanted to reduce my destruction spell cost to 0.

 

So considering all that, how are you having such a hard time? Did you boost the difficulty level up during play or something? Impact alone makes many battles easy, and for those annoying archers that can one shot me I just charge up two Ice Storms and pop back and forth to shoot them until they die. Now with the Light Armor it's only 2-H users that have a chance to kill me, and I messed up and put almost all my points into magicka. Finding out there was no cost reduction ceiling means all those 400 points could have been put to health instead, and made surviving easy.

 

Also, the one shotting from archers didn't even start to occur until around the lvl 35+ range. And again, this is with 110-120 health max through the whole time. Are you using Impact stagger spam to stay alive?

 

The mere fact these kinds of tactics are required is proving my point.

And actually the reason I am having such trouble is that there are so few light armor pieces that have any form of enchantment possible to make it easier to play the game without

reducing all spell costs to 0%, and that the armor spells (never heard of impact BTW) are so ineffective against anything physical other than iron daggers.

 

My typical setup is archmage robes (which should be WAY more powerful than they are given that you get them at the end of a long caster focused quest line and nowhere else)

with other that that primarily light armor pieces, especially morekei.

 

I am playing a mage, not a brawler. I hate having to use cheats and exploits just to not be killed instantly.

 

and my highest ever armor was around 30 or 40.

 

Because of a lack of decent long range mage spells that don't make you the #1 target of everyone in the general area, it's impossible to do the DnD mage thing and just stay behind your party while your enemies are forced to cut through them to get to you, oftentimes even ignoring you because there are things they consider bigger threats around.

 

Skyrim is more imbalanced than epic levels in DnD 3.0-3.5- if you have ever played through a server in NWN that uses epic levels you see exactly how bad that can get- People taking builds that make sense are penalyzed for not minmaxing, multiclassing as much as possible, and making sure that every last feat they take gives a direct mechanical bonus

higher than any other that level, even taking the prereqs that suck just to get an excessively overpowered feat. It's impossible to play rogues without HiPS, it's impossible to play mages who don't maximize both spells per day and have a f*#@ton of spells that cause death on a nat 1 to spam. It's impossible to play meleers without investing in palemaster, a caster prestige class, because everyone takes dev crit and can instantly kill you with any critical attack if you fail a fort save either by getting a nat 1 or by being unable to succeed at anything but a nat 20 simply because you didn't minmax in favor of instasuccess saves and high HP instead of making a character that actually makes mechanical and/or background sense.

 

In short, merely being able to say skyrim is worse than epic levels in DnD 3.0 and 3.5 in terms of balance shows just how badly they designed it in this regard. The only difference

here is that it is easier to minmax so long as you do a melee character, and impossible to minmax if you're a caster. Unlike DnD it doesn't require a masters degree in codebreaking, obscure mathmatics, mechanical reading, and possibly quantum physics (to understand structure of balance, as the way that builds are written and concieved is similar to how quantum theories appear at a face level). That's the difference.

 

And the lack of these things in skyrim along with it's limited paths of levelling is the only reason you don't see people making punpun and the omniscificer.