LE Skill/Levelling Overhaul Idea

[pickel5857]

It's taken months since the release of the game, but it finally seems to me like there have finally been enough good mods to fill in the gaps Bethesda left in making Skyrim.

The reason I love playing on PC is the ability to test these out and tailor the game to how I'd like to play it, or how I think it should have worked in the first place.

 

I really like the Community Uncapper as it expands the game immensely, giving you the ability to raise your skills to 300. For myself I toned this down to about 150. Since you can raise or lower the improvement rate on each skill, once a skill reaches level 100 I modify it's experience rate to go slower. The other great thing about this mod is the ability to have multiple perk points per level. Right now I have it set to 1 until level 15, 2 until 30, 3 until 50, 4 until 75 and 0 past 100. It gives you a lot more choices each time you level, so you can still progress your combat skills while putting a point in Speech or Alchemy, etc.

 

Improvements I'd like to see in a mod:

- Non-combat skills (Smithing, Speech, Alchemy, Enchanting, Lockpick) do not contribute towards overall level, but level much faster.

- Non-combat skills have a cap dependent on your highest combat skill (or second highest, or a scaled limit based on your level, whatever's most balanced)

- Combat skills may or may not level faster (perhaps harder to level ones like Blocking or Alteration) but contribute much more towards overall EXP.

- Auto-softcap, or basically "When skills reach level X their improvement rate is decreased by X percent" configurable option. I'd set to 100 out of 150

- (Possible) Default perk count of 2 per level with bonus perk every 5th. This is easily doable with the Uncapper right now.

 

Those fairly simple changes would drastically improve the game, as least for me. Levelling would be based entirely off of combat and there would no longer be the problem of levelling up through crafting skills while the rest of Skyrim has beastly combat skills. The auto-softcap and crafting-vs-combat skills problems are easily managed by careful playing but it'd be nice if the game helped keep things a bit more balanced.

 

Something I may try out with a new character is making a batch file to add all of the non-combat perks in the beginning of the game (first tier of multi-tier skills only). This way, I'll be spending very few points on NC skills but still need to level the skill itself to use the perk.