Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Originally posted by Smasandian
I invested in Archery, Sneaking, Light Armour, and Smithing and a bit One Handed weapon to combat foes that are less susceptible to arrows (those pesky machines).

I had the same character as you did.

Smithing is important because you can get some pretty damn good light armour and you can create some powerful bows (I remember one of them being around 90 or higher). Enchanting I didn't find important at all. I never used it.

Thanks for the feedback.

Based on your post, I think I need to do something different.

Do you think I should scrap the guy I leveled pickpocketing up to 100 and reload the save before that? (So I can invest perks into the other areas you mentioned).

Originally posted by dadudemon
Okay, I need some advice.

I purchased this game a few days ago and I am at a level 13.

I need to know what to invest my perks into. I hear from one of my employees that I need to invest in enchant and blacksmithing. I like to use...everything. I like to use two-handed weapons, one-handed weapons, magika (destruction and illusion), archery, and so forth.

In fact, the only thing I do not care about much is alchemy.

Here are the perks:

Archery (16)

Block (13)

Heavy Armor (12)

One-Handed (21)

Two-Handed (19)

Smithing (10)

Alteration (14)

Conjuration (16)

Destruction (17)

Illusion (13)

Restoration (13)

Enchanting (15)

Alchemy (15)

Light Armor (10)

Lockpicking (11)

Pickpocket (12)

Sneak (13)

Speech (13)

I listed all the possible investments because you can only go up to level 70. That means you get 70 (wait, it says 81 on the wiki) perks to invest in. That means you can't get everything without console commands (and I have this thing where I will not cheat in a game unless I have beaten it at least once...so I want to do this right).

Based on that, what should I be investing in?

I have invested into pickpocketing because I power-leveled that all the way up to 100 (I found a dude in Riften that you can pick-pocket over and over in Riften and he can't do anything about it. It's awesome. Not cheating because it is a natural part of the game.) However, I kept a separate save just in case you guys give me better advice.

So what should I invest in? I don't want the answer, "Whatever you want." I want sound advice. This game is obviously not perfectly balanced to warrant a "whatever you want." Since I use all sorts of things, I don't really know what to invest in.

I am an assassin type character: I like to sneak and kill people from a distance. I always play sniper in any game I can because I like doing it. So I know I will want to invest in archery. But don't I need smithing and enchant to make my swords and bows better?

Restoration seems like a stupid investment because your health already replinishes and you can just buy health potions: seems like a stupid perk path.

Okay, I'll shutup, now.

Edit - Looks like dagger is something I will be using a lot. So I would need to level one-handed. Any suggestions? Should I duel weild daggers and invest in all thief and enchant stuff? (Leave out restoration, alchemy, and blocking, for intance.)

This is a minor point. You get 80 perks, not 81. You start off at Level 1, and get 1 perk when we level up.

Unless you are aiming for a mage-oriented character, there is no need to invest heavily in the magic-related skills, with the exception of Enchanting (8 perks at minimum). With 100 in Enchanting, you gain the ability to reduce the cost of any Spell to 0, and you can amp most stats considerably. Take for instance Archery: With 100 in Enchanting, I can increase my bow's damage by 160% if I enchant 4 pieces of gear to fortify Archery, each with a 40% increase. All three crafting skills (Smithing, Enchanting and Alchemy) are excellent and should not be avoided.

For the magic related skills, a couple of perks for Dual Casting in Destruction and Regeneration in Restoration will be all that you need. As you are going for a stealth-oriented character, I would recommend saving some perks for Illusion (3 is the required number I believe), as it has a perk that will silence any magic you cast (casting magic while sneaking will give away your position, and in some cases, you will be detected).

Sneak:
Stealth - The first perk in the skill. It has 5 ranks, much like the first perk in most other skills. However, for this particular skill, 1 perk is all that is needed, though no more than 2 extra points would help.
Backstab - One-handed Sneak attacks do 6x damage)
Deadly Aim - Bow sneak attacks do 3x damage
Assassin's Blade - Dagger sneak attacks do 15x damage. Eventually, you will get an armor set that will increase it to 30x. Sneak attacks with Daggers become fairly overpowered then.
Now, there is a perk that will grant you invisibility for a split second if you crouch. It can even be done mid-combat. You can find videos of this on YT. If you want to be a badass ninja, I suppose that is something you should aim for. You need at least 6 (if not more) perks, and 100 in Sneak for that perk.

Light Armor: 5 Perks for the Light Armor skill (First Perk - Agile Defender), and any additional perks should you deem them necessary, would help for protection.

Pickpocket: First perk has 5 ranks. Helps to invest in that one, unless you enchant gear to amp Pickpocketing, whichever you prefer.
You should try to get the perk that gives you an extra 100 points for Carry Weight. You need at least 3 perks for that, and you can get it when you have 50 in Pickpocket iirc. Extra Carry Weight is always useful.
There is another perk that will let you poison your enemies by letting you place poisons on them. Pretty awesome IMO.
Two more perks allow you to pickpocket weapons and equipped Armor respectively. Very awesome. However, you need at least 5-6 perks for them, and I'm pretty sure you need 100 in Pickpocket to steal equipped armor.

Lockpicking: No perks are required. Even Master Level locks are easy enough to pick if you have enough picks and/or are fairly good at picking locks. By the time you have played about 50+ hours, you should have a good number of lockpicks. The only lockpicking perk I would take is the one that makes your lockpicks unbreakable, but you need 100 in Lockpicking, and 7 perks, so ultimately, it is not worth it IMO.

Speech: 3 perks towards the first perk (it has 5 ranks as usual), and 1 for Allure (10% bonus when trading with opposite sex) are all you need. are necessary when you trade. Whenever you trade, make sure you:
i) Take the Blessing of Zenithar (+10% Haggling) or Dibella (+10 points for Speech skill)
ii) Give a Beggar one coin
iii) Equip items that amp your %Haggling such as Volsung (A Dragon Priest Mask) or Masque of Clavicus Vile, and/or a necklace that boosts %Haggling.
iv) Trade with a member of the opposite gender.
This will ensure that you are getting the best prices you can possibly get at that point in time.

Archery: As usual, first perk has 5 ranks. Get them whenever you can. After those perks, you only need two more. The first perk in question lets you zoom in when you press Block, while the second slows down time when zoomed in, i.e. those two perks will allow for more accurate shots. If you are willing, you can spend one more perk to slow down time even further.
I invested one perk for Power shot which allows me to stagger most enemies 50% of the time. Up to you whether you want to do so as well or not.

Smithing: You should aim for the Light Armors (left side), since you like Stealth. However, if you want to create Daedric Armor (which is the best Armor set in the game, though it is Heavy and needs a pretty rare ingredient for each piece), you will have to take perks from the Heavy Armor side (right). I just took all perks in the Smithing Skill, since I want to be able to make any type of gear I want.

Heavy Armor: If you go for Stealth, there is no need to invest in Heavy Armor. However, if you do want to sneak around with Heavy Armor, make sure you get the Conditioned Perk (you need 4 perks, and 70 in Heavy Armor), which negates the noise and movement penalty you have when you wear Heavy Armor. An equivalent perk exists for the Light Armor side which you can get 'sooner' i.e. your Light Armor skill has to be at 50 and you need 3 perks. Alternatively take the Steed Stone ability, and you can save your perks.

I have not taken any perks in Block since I do not need any perks in Block. It's up to you though.

One/Two-Handed: As you like Two-Handed and One-Handed, I'll address them together. As per usual, first perk has 5 ranks, which boost damage. Take them whenever you can.
If you like Dual-Wielding One-handed weapons, then you should take the Dual-Handed related perks, which increases the speed and damage of your Dual-Handed attacks quite considerably.
If you want to see your character decapitate enemies with a OH/TH weapon, then there's a perk for both, but there's only a 25% chance to see a decapitation. Otherwise, you need no other perks here.

Now, as most of your skills will not be at very high levels, you can only take certain perks right now. I've just told you which perks I believe you should aim for in the future. I get the impression that your play-style will be fairly similar to mine i.e. an all-round character.

EDIT: Man, I was so freaking bored when I typed this up.

You should definitely invest in magic though. Take your time and grind up your destruction to lvl 100. Combined with the dual casting and impact perk you will be devastating. I always ran as a spellsword, one handed weapon in one hand and destruction in the other.

I think they patched the glitch in, Riftin that allowed you to get your speech up to lvl 100 easily. You could try. You must take the time to get your smithing up to a hundred. It should only take an hour or two by making iron daggers over and over again.If you also take the time to get your blocking up to a hundred. You should have a good deal of perks from leveling up so much. Just take a shield and find a giant. Let him attack you by blocking. It should only take about a half hour to get your block capped.

Originally posted by Demonic Phoenix
This is a minor point. You get 80 perks, not 81. You start off at Level 1, and get 1 perk when we level up.

Unless you are aiming for a mage-oriented character, there is no need to invest heavily in the magic-related skills, with the exception of Enchanting (8 perks at minimum). With 100 in Enchanting, you gain the ability to reduce the cost of any Spell to 0, and you can amp most stats considerably. Take for instance Archery: With 100 in Enchanting, I can increase my bow's damage by 160% if I enchant 4 pieces of gear to fortify Archery, each with a 40% increase. All three crafting skills (Smithing, Enchanting and Alchemy) are excellent and should not be avoided.

For the magic related skills, a couple of perks for Dual Casting in Destruction and Regeneration in Restoration will be all that you need. As you are going for a stealth-oriented character, I would recommend saving some perks for Illusion (3 is the required number I believe), as it has a perk that will silence any magic you cast (casting magic while sneaking will give away your position, and in some cases, you will be detected).

Sneak:
Stealth - The first perk in the skill. It has 5 ranks, much like the first perk in most other skills. However, for this particular skill, 1 perk is all that is needed, though no more than 2 extra points would help.
Backstab - One-handed Sneak attacks do 6x damage)
Deadly Aim - Bow sneak attacks do 3x damage
Assassin's Blade - Dagger sneak attacks do 15x damage. Eventually, you will get an armor set that will increase it to 30x. Sneak attacks with Daggers become fairly overpowered then.
Now, there is a perk that will grant you invisibility for a split second if you crouch. It can even be done mid-combat. You can find videos of this on YT. If you want to be a badass ninja, I suppose that is something you should aim for. You need at least 6 (if not more) perks, and 100 in Sneak for that perk.

Light Armor: 5 Perks for the Light Armor skill (First Perk - Agile Defender), and any additional perks should you deem them necessary, would help for protection.

Pickpocket: First perk has 5 ranks. Helps to invest in that one, unless you enchant gear to amp Pickpocketing, whichever you prefer.
You should try to get the perk that gives you an extra 100 points for Carry Weight. You need at least 3 perks for that, and you can get it when you have 50 in Pickpocket iirc. Extra Carry Weight is always useful.
There is another perk that will let you poison your enemies by letting you place poisons on them. Pretty awesome IMO.
Two more perks allow you to pickpocket weapons and equipped Armor respectively. Very awesome. However, you need at least 5-6 perks for them, and I'm pretty sure you need 100 in Pickpocket to steal equipped armor.

Lockpicking: No perks are required. Even Master Level locks are easy enough to pick if you have enough picks and/or are fairly good at picking locks. By the time you have played about 50+ hours, you should have a good number of lockpicks. The only lockpicking perk I would take is the one that makes your lockpicks unbreakable, but you need 100 in Lockpicking, and 7 perks, so ultimately, it is not worth it IMO.

Speech: 3 perks towards the first perk (it has 5 ranks as usual), and 1 for Allure (10% bonus when trading with opposite sex) are all you need. are necessary when you trade. Whenever you trade, make sure you:
i) Take the Blessing of Zenithar (+10% Haggling) or Dibella (+10 points for Speech skill)
ii) Give a Beggar one coin
iii) Equip items that amp your %Haggling such as Volsung (A Dragon Priest Mask) or Masque of Clavicus Vile, and/or a necklace that boosts %Haggling.
iv) Trade with a member of the opposite gender.
This will ensure that you are getting the best prices you can possibly get at that point in time.

Archery: As usual, first perk has 5 ranks. Get them whenever you can. After those perks, you only need two more. The first perk in question lets you zoom in when you press Block, while the second slows down time when zoomed in, i.e. those two perks will allow for more accurate shots. If you are willing, you can spend one more perk to slow down time even further.
I invested one perk for Power shot which allows me to stagger most enemies 50% of the time. Up to you whether you want to do so as well or not.

Smithing: You should aim for the Light Armors (left side), since you like Stealth. However, if you want to create Daedric Armor (which is the best Armor set in the game, though it is Heavy and needs a pretty rare ingredient for each piece), you will have to take perks from the Heavy Armor side (right). I just took all perks in the Smithing Skill, since I want to be able to make any type of gear I want.

Heavy Armor: If you go for Stealth, there is no need to invest in Heavy Armor. However, if you do want to sneak around with Heavy Armor, make sure you get the Conditioned Perk (you need 4 perks, and 70 in Heavy Armor), which negates the noise and movement penalty you have when you wear Heavy Armor. An equivalent perk exists for the Light Armor side which you can get 'sooner' i.e. your Light Armor skill has to be at 50 and you need 3 perks. Alternatively take the Steed Stone ability, and you can save your perks.

I have not taken any perks in Block since I do not need any perks in Block. It's up to you though.

One/Two-Handed: As you like Two-Handed and One-Handed, I'll address them together. As per usual, first perk has 5 ranks, which boost damage. Take them whenever you can.
If you like Dual-Wielding One-handed weapons, then you should take the Dual-Handed related perks, which increases the speed and damage of your Dual-Handed attacks quite considerably.
If you want to see your character decapitate enemies with a OH/TH weapon, then there's a perk for both, but there's only a 25% chance to see a decapitation. Otherwise, you need no other perks here.

Now, as most of your skills will not be at very high levels, you can only take certain perks right now. I've just told you which perks I believe you should aim for in the future. I get the impression that your play-style will be fairly similar to mine i.e. an all-round character.

EDIT: Man, I was so freaking bored when I typed this up.

Dude...

You are so freaking awesome!

I am going to bookmark this and refer back to it as I play.

If you invest 50+ hours into a single save, it becomes paramount to get the most out of it the first time around. I don't want to regret a decision of investment about 40 hours down the road. That would be lame. I don't like to play games more than twice (and only twice if it is worth playing twice).

My second play will consist of console command cheating. Not God-mode crap but I will remove the caps, basically, for everything. I am the type that likes to max out all stats and perks.

One thing I do not like about Skyrim is the fact that leveling up is so heavily perk based. I want my base stats to level up, automatically, with leveling. (HP, Magic storage, speed, strength, and so forth). Then, on top of that, I do not mind having the ability to specialize in certain areas.

What would be cool is a system that capped the character at a certain limit, forcing a specialization. And then, after beating the main quest (it should be lengthy), the player can level up to a limit that allows ALL abilities/stats/perks to be maxed. This should be true of every RPG ever. Not MMORPG, but RPGs.

Originally posted by jinXed by JaNx
You should definitely invest in magic though. Take your time and grind up your destruction to lvl 100. Combined with the dual casting and impact perk you will be devastating. I always ran as a spellsword, one handed weapon in one hand and destruction in the other.

I think they patched the glitch in, Riftin that allowed you to get your speech up to lvl 100 easily. You could try. You must take the time to get your smithing up to a hundred. It should only take an hour or two by making iron daggers over and over again.If you also take the time to get your blocking up to a hundred. You should have a good deal of perks from leveling up so much. Just take a shield and find a giant. Let him attack you by blocking. It should only take about a half hour to get your block capped.

I definitely use spells quite a bit because they are "unlimited": your magika recharges. Also the Riftin speech glitch sounds like a winner. I'll take a look.

Thanks for the tips, dude!

The game pretty much is balanced around putting perk points into anything you want, for the most part.

I don't recommend putting points in multiple weapon types, but you can completely do a hybrid build and still be plenty powerful to progress through the game without any hassle.

For instance, my main character, who has about 150 hours into him and is level 54 has perks in many trees. Archery, heavy armor, destruction, restoration, one handed weapons, sneak, enchantment and blacksmithing, and some others thrown in there. At my level I literally one shot many dragons.

Don't worry too much about your perks. Unless you're a perfectionist and want to be the absolute most efficient character type imaginable (which is pointless in practice because even inefficiently built characters like mine can kill any creature in the game without hassle once you get high level weapons and armor) it won't make much difference.

Originally posted by cdtm
That's true of PC games in general. ^_^

Yeah, now I wish I had the PC version.

Bifmj1O3D24&feature=player_embedded

lmao, that's the greatest mod I've ever seen.

This one is also great:

YouTube video

I'm going to start getting the mods . 40 hours into the game and haven't rried any yet.

I've reached level 40 (halfway there to maxing, I believe).

Night before last, I got bored and decided to use the console cheats to add perks and items.

It totally destroys the fun in the game.

So, last night, I decided to start making potions with all of the collected ingredients. I made about 65,000 septims just from creating potions, alone. I went from level 16 in alchemy to level 49 in one sitting.

I read on the Skyrim wiki that you can continue to stack alchemy and potion making over and over.

I do not quite understand what it means. You first create a potion that boosts smithing skills. Then you create armors that boost alchemy. Then you make another boost "smithing" potion. Rinse and repeat. Can you really do this until you can create stupidly strong armors and potions?

Here is an example of the question:

http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/36692/fortify-alchemy-fortify-enchant-stacking

Look at that armor. it's leather light armor and it is worth over 5000 septims. Can you continue this loop?

There's always been exploitable bugs in the ES games. It's just now they're broadcasted on the internet more widely. In Daggerfall I had to find my own.

Uphill.

In the snow.

Both ways.

crackers

...anyway, I made a fortune off of some rest-induced reset code to the stores where I could steal an infinite number of horses and sell them to vendors.

I found some internet vids on what they were doing.

They do a fortify restoration potion, take potion, un-equip and re-equip a fortify alchemy armor set, then create another fortify restoration potion...repeat over and over.

For some reason, that causes your armors to increase in fortify alchemy over and over each time around and it is a geometric growth. Sound silly. Not cool.

Once you get your armor at stupid alchemy boost levels, then you make a fortify enchant or smithing potion. Then create or enchant armor with your super potion "on" (lasts 60 seconds) and you have yourself super-equipment. Seems to be stupid that Bethesda missed that.

Some places are saying it is capped at a 28-32% boost. Meaning, you can only boost about a "100" in smithing to 132, at most...making your armor or weapons limited to only 132% above base. That's still a significant boost to the power of the armor and weapons, but not enough to make it overpowered ( the way the Bethesda peeps intended the game to work, IMO).

But infinite horses? There is a value holder set for the numbers for those objects. Most likely a float or a double in "C" language. So there would be a limit to the amount of horses you could sell. Exceeded that value would cause your value to loop back over to 0 or go negative. So how did you sell infinite amount of horses?

Yeah, there's ways to stack Fortify potions with armor sets that add a bonus to alchemy/blacksmithing/etc, if you've got decent alchemy and enchanting scores. It's technically not cheating, but I see no real reason to do it, since regular blacksmithing and alchemy will make you a fair amount of money.

Also, you're level 40 and your alchemy is 49? 😂 I'm level 12 and my alchemy is 43. I just pick up every ingredient I see and then every time I hit a town I use up as much as I can crafting potions (when I'm done crafting and before I start selling them off it takes a good five seconds to scroll through my potions screen). My blacksmithing's only like 25 but materials for that are harder to come by (and I only started on that recently, I started alchemy immediately). Being as I eventually want glass armor/weapons, though, need to work on that 😄

Shit, my guy is level 54 and his alchemy is like 13. I barely touched alchemy.

The game is made so that you can play it any ****ing way you want so that happens. I don't deal with alchemy either, but I will sometime.

Warewolf or Vamp?

Pretty much.

I do think Smithing is an important skill to learn because I found that I could improve my armour significantly to a point where I rarely found armour laying around that even came close to compete with it.

Originally posted by Peach
Also, you're level 40 and your alchemy is 49? 😂 I'm level 12 and my alchemy is 43. I just pick up every ingredient I see and then every time I hit a town I use up as much as I can crafting potions (when I'm done crafting and before I start selling them off it takes a good five seconds to scroll through my potions screen). My blacksmithing's only like 25 but materials for that are harder to come by (and I only started on that recently, I started alchemy immediately). Being as I eventually want glass armor/weapons, though, need to work on that 😄

I have only done one alchemy session the entire game. 😄 Jumped from 16 or 17 to 49. I also have too much money and nothing to spend it on. What do I need money for once I have the best armor set and it is at legendary? Best weapon? Ha!

I guess I could craft a better armor set by amping my alchemy and enchanting up. That's pretty much the only thing left. I have gotten most of the perks that I want.

Here is an awesome potion maker scripter thingie:

http://rp.eliteskills.com/skyrim.html

Takes all the guess-work and wasted time out of making potions.

I never did alchemy on Morrowind or Oblivion. I could never figure out what all the different tools did. That stuff was heavy as well. It took up too much dead weight in my pack by far.

Didn't stop me from stealling every Grandmaster Mortar and Pestles I saw though.

Originally posted by dadudemon
But infinite horses? There is a value holder set for the numbers for those objects. Most likely a float or a double in "C" language. So there would be a limit to the amount of horses you could sell. Exceeded that value would cause your value to loop back over to 0 or go negative. So how did you sell infinite amount of horses?

This was in Daggerfall, not Skyrim. I don't remember the details. I just know I could make money off it easy, and it involved sneaking into the same store over and over to steal carts and horses.

You pansies need to level up Alchemy and Enchanting in WoW.