Leveling System Overhaul

[Btasty]

I know some people have posted about this and my idea isn't exactly the most innovative thing ever (not the most creative person in the world) but I wanted to get some opinions/ feedback on it. I like the perk trees (with the exception of some balance issues) and the skill set doesn't seem to have any major gaps in it. However as you level you are constantly forced to choose between applying perks to your combat or non-combat skills. While combat is essential to the game only focusing on it limits your role-playing experience with the game. However focusing on your non-combat skills leaves you unable to explore most of the content. If you want to full specialize in a more than a few skill sets you have to level up additional skills just to level up enough and get the necessary perk points for the skills you actually want to use. It kinda breaks the whole immersion/role-playing experience of the game. A mage shouldn't have to use melee weapons for the sole purpose of getting more perk points ect... From a role-playing sense it just doesn't make any sense. So I came up with two semi-similar ways to change the current leveling system that would leave most of the in-game structure intact. Both concepts revolve around the idea of combat/non-combat perks.

 

Combat Perks (Primary):

Conjuration

Destruction

Restoration

Archery

Block

Heavy Armor

One-Handed

Two-Handed

Light Armor

Sneak

 

Non-Combat Perks (Secondary):

Illusion

Enchanting

Alteration

Smithing

Alchemy

Lockpicking

Pickpocketing

Speech

 

Note: I am not really sure about Illusion and Alteration under Non-Combat Perks. I haven't really delved to far into my mage and thus haven't explored these skills at all. Also I think that Speech, Lockpicking and the Pickpocketing trees need to be reworked. Currently they provide no real benefits (that you can't survive without) even when compared to the other non-combat skills.

 

First Style: My first idea was to simply give a player two perk points each time they level up. However one point can only be spent on combat skills and the other on non-combat. This allows the the player to explore both sides of the game equally while not allowing them to abuse the system.

 

Second Style: This idea is more of an extension of of the first but would require a lot more balancing and tweaking of the game on the modder's side. Instead of having one level you would have two. One for combat skills and one for non-combat skills. If you leveled up you one-handed skill your combat level would increase but if you increased your speach skill your non-combat level would increase. Each level would yield a perk point only to be used in its respective area. This would also allow the game to more accurately gauge your combat strength and not create encounters that are far above or below your level. The only difficult thing would be judging how quickly each side would level as you have less skills contributing to each level and how much health, magic or stamina you should gain from each level.

[Arkune]

First style:

Giving the player two perk points per level up will obviously increase the available perk points from 70 to 80 up to 140 to 160. (Note: Judging from my level progress the maximum attainable level is somewhere in the 70ies).

Are there even as many perks? - Saying this will basically max. out any character.

Additionally this won't fix the problem that e.g. a mage will have to level his one handed skills in order to gain perk points from it as it won't change the way XP is acquired.

 

Second Style:

Splitting them in two will shift the focus a lot and will probably result in a noticeable loss of combat capabilities. It will also reduce the maximum attainable level and fiddle therefore with loot and monster spawn tables.

It also won't change the fact that a mage will still have to level his one handed skill in order to gain perk points, in fact it will put emphasis on leveling every available skill in the combat section because the player won't be able to allocate e.g. perk points learned by non combatant skills e.g. speech.

 

In conclusion:

In order to change the way the player plays the game you have to change the way the XP is earned.

For example: You currently have to level your one handed skill as a mage just because that’s the only way you will earn XP after you maxed out your magic skills.

 

I see only two solutions to solves this:

1. Abolish class freedom (Result e.g. no more sword wielding mages)

2. Give up the idea of becoming better by doing something more often

 

I don't like number 1 since this will remove player choices.

Number 2 will only remove some role playing elements most probably won't even care about and return to a more traditional approach to character improvement.

 

Let me clarify number 2 by an example:

Let the player gain XP points into an universal account (e.g. by killing an enemy, or by conducting an action as pick a lock or mix a potion(non combat)) and then let him choose into which skill he wants to allocate it. Only when the player allocate the XP into an skill his level increases.

This will keep the current level cap an amount of perk points untouched.

With this you could always use destruction magic and still gain all available combat perk points because you could use the XP you gained to level your one hand skill without even touching an one hand weapon (play style change!).

However this has obviously the disadvantage of not being very role playing like. Since I can use one skill to boost a different skill that I rarely even touch.

[Plutoman101]

Number 1 goes hand in hand quite well with an expanded perk list. Number 2 sounds good in theory, but will probably pose many more problems than it'd fix.

[saneroot]

Well, I think a nice and simple way to make the leveling more "balanced" and slower, would be to either:

 

1) Have only main skills give levelups, and secondary skills would only level themselves, not the player's level.

2) Have a similar system as Oblivion, with the player choosing a certain amount of skills that cause level ups for him/her, otherwise having normal Skyrim leveling system.

 

But that's just my view on the matter, maybe it wouldn't be as simple as that.

[ynohtnA420]

Well, I think a nice and simple way to make the leveling more "balanced" and slower, would be to either:

 

1) Have only main skills give levelups, and secondary skills would only level themselves, not the player's level.

****2) Have a similar system as Oblivion****, with the player choosing a certain amount of skills that cause level ups for him/her, otherwise having normal Skyrim leveling system.

 

But that's just my view on the matter, maybe it wouldn't be as simple as that.

 

 

If it would be possible to 're-do' the leveling system to be far more similar to Oblivion's leveling system it probably would solve most problems with how it balances your gaming experience.

Of course there should be slight alterations of it just to give it a better feel. I personally like having all the sub-skills like acrobatics, and agility. But disliked how long it took to level them by repeating tasks I.e* Running, jumping to be able to run faster and jump higher

 

But as Saneroot stated it would be far less simple than described and I'm just throwing that out as a suggestion.

[prod80]

First:
Remove Standing Stones exp bonus boosts... instead just replace that for skill bonusses (eg. Sneak is 10% more effective, Bows to 10% more dmg, etc)

Second:

Perk system - the vanilla is just bad bad bad - you cannot specialize into one specific weapon or tree, and actually feel the effect of it on your current equipped weapon or playstyle (caster, 1h, 2h, DW, Bow, Xbow, etc)

Third:

I dont like the leveling system that much, it is quite out of balance... I think the problem is not that much the system, I think the problem is that you level up too slow... this causes your character to become rather powerful while the enemies (that are scaled against your level) stay weak. The experience gain per perk level increase should be much higher so you level up faster while not getting much stronger... this way enemies scale up more natural and you dont steamroll the game after you get around level 15 or so, with 2 fingers in your nose, drinking a beer while watching TV and have your cat playing with your mouse on which you locked left mouse permanently down. Encounter zones should help to make the game much harder to have a more natural progression and not feel like "Shall I do the main questline of the Thieves guild now, or pick some side quests?" it should be "I'm not strong enough to finish the main quest yet - lets hit this other dungeon I saw on the road" ... It's so boring when youre so strong the game poses no challenge.

 

This third point I have already done in my game (first and second are handled by SkyRe..) and it works rather well. I frequently end up in a mess where I am simply weak and gotta run for my life... being chased around by some bandits or a high level dragon. It's actually fun - coming back later for payback =) The only downside is that you can really mess up and end up loading an older save... eg. I was going to kill this fake emperor dude, which was fine - but after exiting the door when he died, on the bridge facing those soldiers... they easily kicked my ass; I was no challenge to them. I had to reload a save... Im not strong enough to do that quest yet.

[Sabatasso]

There should be only one melee combat tree where the perks divided into the different weapon styles and one main weapon tree in the middle that included all weapons, shields (blocking) perks should be included in this tree as defense is as essential to melee combat as offense. Ideally and realistically swords should generally be more thrusting related while axes more slashing related, both generally result in bleeding while maces causes crushed bones and internal bleeding. These should either be accounted for without perks or ignored for the sake of simplicity. Weapon specific perks should only increase the wielding capability of the weapon such as better parrying and quicker attack speed.

 

There should be only one armor tree where the perks divided into light and heavy and there were distinct differences between the two. There should also be more severe movement restrictions for armor weight. The armor defense value should be more or less uniform and perks for the different armours should be related to maneuvering and less effective stealth related perks. Sneak perk tree should be removed and most of the perks added to the light armor branch of the armor skill while heavy armor perks should focus on reducing the movement penalty compared to light armor. This would ensure two distinctly different approaches depending on what type of armor you choose to use and add replay value to the game. Since there are no real dodge maneuver in the game there should be added some perks for light armor to avoid some damage (3/3 10-20-30 percent chance to evade incoming impact damage) Clothing should either count as armor and be suited for light armor perks or have its own skill where stealth perks also where available.

 

Smithing should not be skill/perk based but knowledge based, find the right book/recipe and you're set. Tempering could be removed or replaced with maintenance to cater for a weapon/armor durability system. By removing this skill and perks and remove tempering all together this would not count towards player level. It would also make the game less arcade-ish. Tempering could also be added as a temporary damage boost that counted as an enchantment and needed whetstones to replenish. Alternatively "Sharpness" could be a weapon enchantment gained from enchantment to increase material damage on scale with elemental damage and need soulstones to recharge.

 

*Enemy HP's should either be lowered to suit the new decreased damage potential or the uniform player weapon damage raised. There are multiple ways to handle this.

 

Any skill that potentially increase the damage to health potential of the character should count towards player level, so for example crowd control literally makes sure you receive less damage while you're still able to deal damage. This boils down to preferred style and situational advantages. Someone skilled with crowd control might not have the highest overall damage potential but fares better against overwhelming numbers than the single target burst damage specialized assassin. Alchemy directly increases A) your survivability or B) your damage potential through poison or C) Both (at the expense of something else) and should count towards player level. The incentive to focus on poison rather than sophisticated melee techniques would be required and if the game was created more in the style of Morrowind this would not have been a problem. Warriors guild should have had trainers for the more advanced melee perks while Thieves Guild should have trainers for the vilest poison perks and the two guilds should have excluded each other, meaning if you were a member of one then the other should be unavailable. Dark Brotherhood is a more secret organization and should not exclude anything because membership should be kept secret.

 

 

I could go on forever, but basically this little tirade in an old thread sums up to the fact that Skyrim is very lacking. Not saying that all my suggestions are perfect but the game is at such a sad state that it really doesn't deserve all the credit it gets out of the box. No offense...

Edited February 7, 2014 by Sabatasso

[madcow12]

number one sounds good. right now i've set it on my uncapper so i get two perks starting level 20, when multiple slots on all my most frequent skill perks start opening up, so i can check elemental block and block efficiency at the same time. i thnk if there was a more curve like this, where in early levels you get one point, but around 20~35 you get two to keep up with all the opening slots. after that drop it down to one agin or so