A hardcore Skyrim player

[AngEviL]

Skyrim was very easy, so i mainly created my custom mod since nobody else did what i wanted, and i only used other mods for convenience so i don't get through the trouble of recreating them, and then i manually edited some of those mods only for my personal use. I use things like realistic lighting mod where i decreased the brightness even further in dungeons and nights, but this is not the kind of difficulty i talk about. I will explain now, here is what i did in my custom game:

 

- removed all the potions and enchantments in the game that increased the smithing, enchanting, and alchemy skill. There is not a single thing that gives a bonus to smithing, alchemy or smithing.'

 

- increased the prices at merchants by x10 and decreased the selling price to merchants to x0.2, so a total difference of x50 from vanilla. You will have to get by with what you loot mostly.

 

- player's armor gives around half of the vanilla armor rating (pay attention when i use the word player, it affects only the player, not NPCs). A

 

- removed the player's shield/weapon bash damage

 

- increased the bow accuracy of NPCs greatly

 

- increased the rate of attacks and bash and spellcasting and block by NPCs (which is done by various mods too), so basically they never stay doing nothing while you get free hits. They relentlessly attack you, and when you attack they try to block.

 

- removed from player or rebalanced heavily perks that i thought gave too much. For example regeneration gives a +20% healing bonus (from 50%). Conditioning was overpowered and it broke the heavy armor and light armor difference, and now it only gives a -20% decrease in weight for heavy armor. Assassin's blow gives now 4x damage, down from x15. There are many other perks which i rebalanced in a similar way and also many which i removed like bullseye or devastating blow or sweep or impact. There are simply no cheap or easy ways to deal damage or cripple enemies fast.

 

- decreased the player's bonus in damage/armor effectiveness/spell cost as you gain levels in skill. In short, advancing a skill gives less to the player.

 

- use custom difficulty, a bit higher than master, so monster deal a little over double more damage and player deals to them a little less than half.

 

- added a weak health regeneration while in combat to monsters including dragons (in vanilla there is none)

 

- decreased the backward speed, so it is harder to dodge NPC blows.

 

- the bonuses of stamina/health/magicka at levelup are halved to 5

 

- shrine and stones bonuses decreased greatly, for example Shrine of Arkay gives a +5 bonus to health, down from +25, or "The lord" giving 6% magic resistance only and no armor bonus (down from 25% resist and +50 armor)

 

- removed racial bonuses from all the races

 

- leveled almost enemies in the game to scale with the player's level, so all NPCs, including wolves, will give a good challenge

 

- weak monsters, like wolves, skeevers, or mudcrabs get huge bonuses. For example wolves get a base x5 health and x2 damage compared to vanilla.

 

- removed the skill advancement possibility to speech, pickpocket, lockpicking and sneak, in the sense that they do not give skills towards levelup.

 

- increased a little the experience needed to levelup. This combined with the deduction of those 4 skills, means that the maximum level a player can have is around 60.

 

- reworked all the skill trees. Other mods did this too, but i had to do my version to accommodate the player bonuses i thought were unbalanced in vanilla, and which i gave a few examples of, and there were things like nobody else did, like for example to tie the tempering of weapons and armor to the skill in the smithing tree. If you want to temper steel armor, you need the steel & leather armor smithing perk. if you want to temper dragon armor, you need the dragonscale and drangonplate smithing perk, which needs prerequisite perks too. Like i said, there are no easy ways to make the character powerful, and there are no "must-have" skills, all skills are equally powerful.

 

- greatly increased the temper of weapons and armor cost, up to x8 their vanilla cost.

 

- other miscellaneous things that i can't remember now, like potions healing over time.

 

 

Other than all of that, i did some other things. Everything started when i thought that the onehanded weapons and twohanded weapons needed to distinguish more from each other, and also why did the damage from iron to daedric is inconsistent among weapons ? Like for example a greatsword goes from 15 to 24, a x1.6 increase, while a dagger goes from 4 to 11, a x2.75 increase. I had to fix all that, to make everything balanced together i manually edited the attack speed, range, damage, stagger chance of each weapon, and after that, it was a neverending balancing of the game.

 

I was a little misleading in what i said until now, because there were some things that were underpowered which i improved, like wards and oakflesh type spells which i improved by giving bigger bonuses and/or decreasing spell cost. There are many other rebalances i did which i did not mention which cover all aspects of the game, but the main point of the post is how difficult your skyrim is.

Edited May 8, 2012 by AngEviL

[robanybody2000]

removed racial bonuses from all the races

 

removed the skill advancement possibility to speech, pickpocket, lockpicking and sneak, in the sense that they do not give skills towards levelup.

 

I agree with the rest (will certanly make a chalangeing game), except these 2. Now all of Tamriel races differs only by appearence and there is no posibility of playing thieve OR merchant.

[AngEviL]

removed racial bonuses from all the races

 

removed the skill advancement possibility to speech, pickpocket, lockpicking and sneak, in the sense that they do not give skills towards levelup.

 

I agree with the rest (will certanly make a chalangeing game), except these 2. Now all of Tamriel races differs only by appearence and there is no posibility of playing thieve OR merchant.

 

I agree with the first part, but this means I would have to give both negatives and positives to all races. For example if Breton has a 25% resistance to magic, which is very powerful considering the changes i made. then a Breton would have to have to receive x1.33 normal damage. Or a Nord 50% resistance to cold means they have to have a 100% weakness to fire, since 50% resistance means they receive 2 times less damage from cold, and a 100% weakness from fire means they receive double fire damage, so it balances itself out.

 

The point i made by removing bonuses is that i was unwilling to give player advantages, which eliminate part of the fighting strategy by giving an easy victory in various scenarios.

 

And regarding being a merchant, i agree somewhat that it can help at first to buy gear or alchemy ingredients, since the prices are so steep, but what about after you aquire the best gear and have everything you want ? I could give the speech tree worthwhile bonuses, like added health, stamina or magicka, but in general, how does advancing the speech skill make the character more powerful overall ? I felt that it is better to remove it, along with lockpicking and pickpocketing, and leave out only a few worthwhile skeleton perks, which i made by combining multiple perks together. But then i would have to go into a long discussion and explain all the changes and why i made each change.

 

As for being a thief, because the enemies have a bigger health compared to before and the reduction of stealth damage bonus, it is no longer a way you can play the game to achieve victory. You need to fight face on, and like in lockpicking/speech/pickpocket, i consolidated multiple perks from the sneak tree together and sneaking doesn't add to the level advancement. It already helps you enough by giving a free shot. It is a choice to use sneaking, but it doesn't give level advancement, but i am getting into explanations again, and i did not open the topic with the purpose of giving detailed changes of my custom mod.

Edited May 8, 2012 by AngEviL