LE Perk Rebalancing

[DelnarErsike]

In my opinion, one of the most frustrating things about Skyrim is how imbalanced the perk system is: for example, it takes 21 perk points to max out the One-Handed tree, but only 13 perk points to max out Sneak, or it takes 15 points to max out Alchemy but only 10 to max out Smithing... and that's if you max out Smithing at all, in most cases, taking one branch is enough (6 points for Light Armor, 7 for Heavy Armor). And that's just the beginning, the Perks themselves need some rebalancing as well IMO, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

 

Point is, I've spent a bit of time creating a chart that would be the initial step in rebalancing the Perk system. In most cases, I've removed perks and spread their effects onto other existing perks (like taking the 4 extra levels of Alchemist that would total an addition +80% Potion/Poison Strength and spreading the +20% effects onto Purity, Snakeblood, Physician, and Experimenter, or taking the extra +60% from Enchanter and spreading it across Insightful Enchanter, Corpus Enchanter, and Extra Effect). In some cases, I've removed perks entirely or added new ones (Impact and Rune Master, for example, have been removed; instead, their effects are spread across the different levels of Augmented Flames, Augmented Frost, and Augmented Shock; Assassin's Blade and Deadly Aim in the Sneak tree are split into two levels).

In the end, I've largely achieved the following: skills that have no effect or a passive effect in combat have 10 perks (like Lockpicking, Pickpocketing, Armor skills, Alteration, and Enchanting), while skills that play a large role in combat have 15 perks (like Archery, Weapon skills, Destruction, Restoration, and Illusion), with only three exceptions: Block has 10 perks (since it pretty much needs to pair with One-Handed), Sneak has 15 perks (as I find avoiding combat to very much play a large role in it), and Illusion has 15 perks (see: Sneak). Also, according to my current system, if you purely invest into one skill tree, you'll have roughly the same effects as in vanilla at any given level of that particular skill (removed perks' effects that required a certain level of the skill they were in were distributed to perks within that skill with roughly the same level requirement) with only a few exceptions (for example, Unbreakable was removed from Lockpicking, but Locksmith received an additional effect of 2x Lockpick Health to compensate, even if I do think the amount of Lockpicks in Skyrim makes even that effect useless).

 

An interesting note: with the new system, because the max level in Skyrim is 81, which means you can receive a total of 80 perk points, you'll have exactly enough points to max out all magic trees in the game or max out all non-magic stealth trees (Archery + the "proper" stealth trees like Alchemy, Sneak, Pickpocket, etc.)

 

However, I'm in a bit of a predicament: without the CK, it's very hard to create a mod for a newbie such as myself. I've scavenged a couple tutorials, have already started experimenting with TESSnip, and have already analyzed a couple other mods that change up perks (such as cao's +77 perks, a couple "balanced magic" mods, and a No Perk Prerequisite mod), yet I still don't know where to start.

 

Any pointers or tutorials on how I should start would be great. However, if you have any constructive criticism to the changes I plan to make, feel free to voice your opinions.

Here's a link to the spreadsheet containing all my planned changes in my first stage: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?hl=en_US&hl=en_US&key=0AuHYz-aTOn9rdGg4ZnlaNGRtYTlUMVZVa3NaeHhYZGc&output=html

Edited December 25, 2011 by DelnarErsike