Skills

[Promiser]

So, I tend to start new characters with grand ambitions, and then quickly start a new one when things don't work out how I want them too. This is usually because I've got 5 or 6 skills I want to use and never enough points for the skill trees. I think the main problem is that I want to multiclass a lot and use as much as I can. To give you an idea my last failed build was the following.

 

Heavy Armor

Block

Destruction

Alteration

Restoration

Illusion

Smithing

Enchanting

 

The character was intended to be a 'chaos mage tank'. Block as much as I can, throw frenzy everywhere, heavy armor and alteration to pump damage resistance. Restoration to heal and deal with undead, and then destruction to spew fire everywhere. Smithign and enchanting was for money and gear. While this was loads of fun I ended up having a really rough go of things once I got to about level 20. My illusion spells weren't strong enough to frenzy people, my destruction spells were taking too long to kill, my enchantments were weak, I couldn't really craft great armor, my armor rating wasn't near what I wanted it to be, and ultimately I found myself running around in circles waiting for runes to trip and magicka to regen.

 

Is there a sort of 'rule of thumb' y'all have found while playing to decide how many different skills you want to use at once? Obviously trying to use them all levels you too fast and you end up getting trashed, but if you use too few I feel like you're going to get wrecked when you're in a situation you can't handle. (level 30 warrior with no ranged attacks doesn't doo well against dragons... Surprisingly enough). I feel like the added perk system is really cool, but ultimately it ends up limiting your character, because as you progress to higher levels, some skills end up being pretty worthless without their perks.

 

Or maybe I'm just not picking my perks right? I usually try to focus on one or two skill trees with my perks, but if I'm 4 or 5 levels away from the next perk I want, I'll dump it into the tree of one of my 'minor' skills. Any thoughts or comments about how you guys use your perks and how many skills you use?

[Moraevik]

Skyrim is a game that encourages the JOT approach to character-building because it forces you into all the main quest-lines, so you have to be a mage, a thief, an assassin, and a warrior. Or so the novice player might think. In fact, Skyrim doesn't adequately support a JOT character and players who spread their perk points out too liberally will quickly discover that at moderate to high levels they become weak and non-survivable. Indeed, if you carry it too far you'll be weak and non-survivable at even low levels of play. I'm talking about the vanilla game, of course. There are a lot of mods that affect the skill trees, the magic system, the stealth system, and the combat system. Once you start installing these, all bets are off.

 

I've played the following types of characters in over twenty play-throughs, although I'll admit that many of my play-throughs only lasted until about level 30-40, at which point the game becomes too easy without installing mods that make it harder. Unfortunately, most of these also introduce things that I don't like, so I don't use overhaul mods.

 

tank

pure thief

pure mage

heavy battlemage

light battlemage

stealth mage

stealth archer

 

What I've learned is that the game plays best, at least for me, if you super-specialize in only one or two skill trees. As an example, in playing a pure mage I'll generally go with "battle conjurer" -- that's someone who specializes in Destruction and Conjuration. Whatever I decide on a build, though, I'll always put a point into Destruction and Restoration, just to make it easier to use those novice-level destruction and healing spells. As a pure mage I'll likely build the Alteration skill tree so that I can cast the apprentice-level armor spell at half cost, as well.

 

I think your problem is that you're spreading your points around too generously in the magic skills. If you want to be a heavy battlemage, which seems what you were trying to describe, you don't need the Illusion or Alteration trees beyond putting just one point into each, and you really don't even need that. Eschew Block and use a two-handed weapon. I did that with my tank character and was pleasantly surprised that it was the most survivable, especially at low levels, of all my builds.

 

Don't go overboard on Smithing and Enchanting. Build these trees only as you need to in order to improve armor/weapons the game is dropping at your level, and to boost what you can find with basic, low-level enchantments. Both of these skills are notorious for causing rapid-leveling, even after the "stealth fix" to Smithing that the 1.5 patch introduced. The faster you advance without improving your actual survival skills, the weaker you become with respect to your enemies.

 

I'll put a point in Smithing very early in the game so I can forge and improve steel weapons and armor efficiently. I may well never go beyond that. You don't need Legendary Ebony gear to survive in this game. I generally go with a maximum of Elven weapons and leather armor and do just fine.

 

Similarly with Enchanting. Building the Enchanting tree early in the game is a total waste. Many of the enchantments you can do have their power levels set by your level in Enchanting and have little or nothing to do with the perks you buy. Get Enchantment up to about level 30-50 before you start building this tree. The best way to do this is to collect soul gems, fill them as soon as you can get a soul trap spell or weapon and then just enchant stuff. It doesn't have to be useful. You have to take care, though. This can cause very rapid leveling.

 

Don't try to be everything at once. That's the problem you encountered with your "chaos mage tank". Specialize in your approach to conflicts and keep within those narrow parameters. Play to your strengths and avoid situations that exploit your weaknesses. If you try to be too many things at the same time, your strengths are diluted and your weaknesses are amplified.

[AnkhAscendant]

( I answered 2-4 on Warrior because it said I had to answer every question, but I don't ever play warriors, so disregard one of those.)

 

I don't really make that many characters, but I will tell you what I have. My murdermage (my main character and "Official Dovahkiin", so called because it sounds better than "mage who assassinates people") is actually pretty specialized. He basically just uses Sneak and Destruction, with Illusion and Alteration as his 'minor' skills (and basically just so that he could have the silent casting perk and the damage resistances, respectively. I hardly ever use the actual spells). After I ran out of things to do with sneak and destruction, he went into archery, but not because I actually needed it, just because my other skills were maxed. Even though he uses a dagger for assassinating, one-handed is still only in the twenties, at level 46ish. Enchanting and smithing are maxed out, but not because I have any use for what they produce, just because I like to craft. They're kind of level-fillers, easy skills that let him level up and get perks I wanted, along with Lockpicking (a skill I use constantly, but as a non-thief I found the perks pretty pointless).

 

I said all of that because I was kind of surprised at your thoughts. I always kind of felt like I was being cheaterly to use the easy skills when I wasn't interested in their perks, and, with only two focused skills, I never felt like I was in a situation I couldn't handle. There was a lot of running backward and dodging blows while casting spells, but that always seemed to be enough.

 

Now this may be a kind of rare build where it actually works well to super-specialize - I don't wear armor, period, ever, and use only the rare dagger or bound bow as weapons, so that means that the Smithing, Light & Heavy Armor, Enchanting, and all Weapons are 'free' skills... I'm not interested in the perks, so I can level up those skills (on the rare occasion when I use them) and then use that progress to buy perks in skills I do use, whereas if you do wear armor or use a weapon then you're interested in two or three trees just for that (armor/weapon & smithing - enchanting too if you want magic in it) and you don't really have any of those 'free' skills.

 

If I were playing your 'chaos mage tank' I think I would have focused on the armor and destruction perk trees, especially since things get so much easier once you stagger your opponents constantly, and after feeling solid there go for illusion. I always need to feel like I'm safe with taking hits and being able to kill things before I get interesting though ^^; I would have had a huge skill in smithing and enchanting, but not have bought many perks, and just made do with the armor I could find and improve, I suppose... I never found much use for Restoration, since Destruction works just fine on undead and you don't need to be that high a level to heal yourself (so it's another one of my free skills, after getting the first and eventually second perk).

 

I'm far from an expert, though, of course, and I'm not trying to tell you how to play ^^; I don't know exactly how you did it and I don't know how well my way would have worked, honestly. this is just an interesting thought experiment. Chaos tank mage sounds like he coulda been BA at a higher level but he got stuck in some doldrums in the middle. Hm, new advice... Add Alchemy and carry 200 pounds of potions so you don't have to wait on your magicka.

 

I think to me, in summary, that super-specialized for mages, generalized for thieves (since they have range and sneakiness and a lot of non-combat stuff to pick up), and a balance for warriors would work best, in theory. I don't know about in practice, though.

[luzburg]

For my favourite class I'd have:

 

Sword

Block

Archery

Restoration

Enchanting

Smithing

 

I used this build for my dawnguard character. I got really high Archery and abused enchanting to get myself a pretty damn awesome fully upgraded dwarven crossbow. I highly doubt I'd be able to use that with SkyRe installed lol.

 

 

I'm trying a really scattered perks vampire-mage right now using SkyRe. It is very tough at around level 10 and I have to use all my vampiric abilities to even stand a chance of winning.

[gsmanners]

The "Thief" skills are the most generic skills: containing Lockpicking, Speech, Sneak, Light Armor, and Alchemy (which inherently have nothing to do with being a thief). So that's obviously the class with the best collection of skills. Granted, you won't always use them, but these skills have the most utility.

 

On the other hand, warrior skills are warrior-centric. I can't imagine a pure warrior or rogue using enchanting or any other mage skill.

 

My favorite builds always focus on 1 or 2 warrior skills, 1 or 2 mage skills, then all the rest go into a "thief" skill. Here's a good example:

 

Conjuration

One-handed

Illusion

Archery

Sneak

Alchemy

Speech

 

The above gives me a good start on a mage build. I can start off building bound sword skill, and slowly grind marksman, illusion, and stealth to the point where he can become a good sniper.

[Enatiomorph]

Most of my favorite builds aren't even available anymore in Skyrim.

[Promiser]

To give an idea on how I distributed points in my chaos tank, I usually stuck points in destruction first, then block. Whenever I couldn't buy a decent perk I'd drop a point in heavy armor, or illusion.

 

Illusion was mainly so I wasn't getting swarmed by dudes (This is very important in master difficulty!). I'd use frenzy rather than worrying about conjuration all the time. Restoration was mainly used for turning undead, because again, even in heavy armor, get swarmed was a bloody death note. In retrospect I'm not sure why I used alteration that much, other than for the armor spells, but no points were ever invested past novice. And again enchanting and smithing were used to upgrade, but points were never put into these, despite my deep desire to do so.

[Dovahkiin069]

Perks are one of the most hard choice in the game. You don't have a second choice and what you chose, it will be forever.

The skills I use is:

 

One-Handed

 

Heavy Armor

 

Block

 

Archery

 

smithing

 

Restoration

 

And a little of Destruction

 

As you can see, most of my skills are Warrior build, I prefer a directly combat.

 

Edit: But with certain mods, I can have a little more perks to build my Hybrid character and concentrate on destruction, conjuration and some thief skills.

Edited September 5, 2012 by Dovahkiin069