LE Skills

[satsujinka]

Smithing in particular suffers from an inflexibility in what it allows for armor.

For example, let's say I want to have separate dragon armors for each type of dragon. By the time I get smithing up to level 100 (no clue what level that is if you grind, but generally I get it there in my late 20s,) regular dragons are nearly extinct and it would make no sense for me to want to make armor from them anyways, since I have access to Blood and Frost dragons.

 

So for smithing, what would be much better is instead of concentrating on particular armors, concentrate on materials. So the dragon smithing perk still does make improvements to dragon armors better, but it no longer controls making the armor in the first place. Perhaps, for balance, we could add the possibility of failure (when making or improving an item) and the perk simply gets rid of that chance to fail.

 

Another, issue I have with smithing is that I really prefer some of the lesser armors (like Iron and Steel.) True using some tricks I could get those armors up to the armor cap, but exploiting the game's flaws isn't something that should be necessary. Also, why is it that my character, a single person, randomly uses so many different styles depending on what material I'm working with? Wouldn't a smith mostly make the same style of armor/weapon no matter what material, after all, that style is the style the blacksmith learned? So another improvement to smithing: you start out with a basic design style for weapons, light and heavy armor (which you can use for any material you can find, but beware you're likely to fail for more complex materials until you get the perk.) You then have to find someone to teach you more complex styles.

 

A skill I would like to see returned is dodging. Though, people wearing heavy armor probably shouldn't be allowed do dodge, prior to getting the conditioning perk at least. Also it should probably be governed by a Stealth skill, since Light Armor has an Auto-Dodge perk already. In fact, I might go so far as to say that Light Armor should be restructured into an Athletics style skill that concentrates on increasing running/sprinting speed and duration. Not being a thief/assassin type, there might be another skill that could be absorbed into another and become Athletics. For example, Lockpicking and Pickpocket seem kind of redundant to me, couldn't they be combined into a single Theft skill? <- This is a real question for you sneak types, what do you think?

 

Another ability I'd like to see is the ability to change weapon handedness, e.g. wield a 2-hander in 1 hand. How this might work: You have a toggle button. If you have a 2-handed weapon you do a skill check and if it's higher than the weight of the weapon you get a 1-handed copy of the weapon at 2/3 the damage amount. However, you lose power attacking ability and every swing costs stamina. On the other hand, if you are wielding just a 1-handed weapon, there should be a skill check and if it passes the weapon is temporarily converted into a 2-handed weapon with 1.5x the original damage (the inventory should probably only display the original weapon in either case.) Arguably, this ability could be in either the 1 or 2-handed trees, but considering how similar the 2 trees are maybe it would make more sense to merge them into a single Melee skill? I really don't know what the best approach would be.

 

And how about throwable weapons? I would really like to be able to throw knives and eventually javelins at people. If we merge the 1 and 2-handed perks we make room for a Throwing skill (since archery doesn't really make sense as a location for this ability.)

 

Are there any abilities you'd like to see? Where do you think they belong? How should we make room for them?