Skyrim

Jad.3 wrote:

Fuck Delphine, I finished the game!

I dont like her attitude either...
Congratulations! But... Isn't your life a little empty now?

Finally! It's my first time playing the game EVER! Not even watching someone; not even on someones house; not even with someone watching me - all on my own leisure!
I wished to buy it long time ago, but a poor sap like me is unable to - so I went to the dark corner and whispered words and - voila.
Tips and tricks? Like, how the game is actually a running simulator, bouncing on people will skip their dialogues, and a bucket on their heads will make you hide in plain sight?

1. Get a horse.
2. Kill ulfric.

noooo i was planning on joining him!
what is the story, anyway?

i mean, stormcloaks, empire, rebels...

Don't be too quick to join either side in the civil war. Instead talk to people in all the towns and form your own opinion.

General tip is to invest into one of thee crafting skills: Alchemy, Enchanting, or Smithing. But do not invest into more than one unless you're playing on high difficulty or else the game will become too easy.

In order to fight the higher level dragons you'll need some resistances from potions or enchantments (Resist Fire/Frost, Resist Magic). Also helps against mages. Higher level dragons start showing up for every 10 levels you have.

Destruction by itself is underwhelming becuase you'll be running out of Magicka a lot. Destruction mixed with Enchanting is overpowered because you can enchant your armor in such away that all spells from two schools of magic will have no cost. Then you can just spam lighting and fire as much as you want (frost spells are shit becuase this is Skyrim and everything has a resistance to frost). Also, Destruction has a perk that makes anyone hit by dual cast Destruction spells stagger. Combined with 100% Fortify Destruction you can then put any opponent into a stagger-lock as you keep staggering them with your free spells.

Dual Casting is crucial for Illusion spells, good for the high level Destruction+Enchanting combo, and a bit meh for others. It's extra meh for Conjuration and Alteration.

There's a Restoration perk that improves your Magicka regeneration, which is crucial for mages of all kinds.

Alteration has good perks (Magic Resitance, Atronach), but bad spells. Avoid Mage Armor perks, they're not worth it and they don't even have any effect on Dragon Skin (master level protection spell).

Necromancy is fun, but ultimately not as useful as Daedra summoning, because you need a corpse to work with (AKA you need a dead enemy before you can make a zombie that will kill your enemies). On the other hand a Daedra summoner can just drop a pair of Dremora Lords on top of the enemy and watch them go to town.

Bound weapons are nice at low level, but quickly fall behind weapons improved by Smithing.

Maximum protection from armor is 80% damage reduction, which you'll reach with 567 AR. You can get that high with Elven or Steel armor if you improve it enough. And fully improved Skyforge steel weapons will be nearly as strong as Daedric weapons. So if you're into Smithing any perks beyond Steel/Elven smithing are only for show.

Good way to improve Smithing is crafting jewelry. In a certain dungeon you can find a spellbook that teaches you an Alteration spell for transforming iron ore into silver ore and iron ore into gold ore.

Weapon specialiaztion perks are useless. Extra critical damage for swords uses the weapons base damage, before applying the effects of weapon skill, weapon damage perks, and Smithing and is therefore negligible. Bleeding damage from axes is nice, but by the time it actually adds up to anything significant you'll already kill the target. Finally, armor piercing for blunt weapons sounds cool, but the vast majority of enemies have no significant armor for you to pierce.

The way armor works is weird and a pet peeve of mine. Basically, each of the four major armor pieces (helm, body armor, gauntlets, boots) gives you 25 hidden AR that won't be displayed but still reduces damage. Any sort of AR multiplier only works on your displayed armor. And finally, how much an armor protects you does not scale linearly with AR. The lower your AR, the less a certain improvement actually helps you.

What all this boils down to is that at low levels it really doesn't matter very much what you wear as long as it's classified as armor and not clothing. I once calculated that a level 1 character in Daedric Armor would take only 16% less damage than a level 1 character in Fur armor. For the same reasons it's also a bad idea to invest into armor perks at low levels. However, at higher levels armor perks do make a big difference. A decent rule of thumb for armor perks is to not bother with them until your skill level reaches 55-60 and then spend the next 5 perk points on them.

Generally speaking the master races are Nords, Bretons, and Dunmer. Roughly in that order, though Nords fall behind Bretons if you're not using your racial daily power much. Honorable mention are Khajiits (if you want to play an unarmed fighter) and Imperials (if you use your daily racial power a lot - but Nords are still superior).

Finally, don't ask too many questions. Just experience the game for yourself.

*silver ore into gold ore.

Crafting? Eew! I'm a thief, I don't need to craft - do I?

Sneak w/ dual wielded daggers (Woe) is one-hitter, but twhen you go toe to toe with Deathlord you're a gonner. So Arcane Smitting and a little bit Enchanting?

@Dragqueentus: So you're saying no Mage armor perks, but that doesn't mean no Mage armor spells, right?

Cretino wrote:

Crafting? Eew! I'm a thief, I don't need to craft - do I?

You may be able to get away with not developing any crafting skills if you play on normal. But they are easily the most powerful skills in the game and by refusing to sue them you are effectively crippling yourself.

You may want to try Alchemy and mix up some nice poisons. There's a neat perk that allows you to secretly poison people with reverse-pickpocketing.

Do note that not all poisons are equally good. There is one ingredient that makes stronger poisons than most, I think it's Deathbell.

Although personally I'm not that much into Alchemy. All those potions and ingredients add up to way too much weight. In fact the only potions I ever keep are the healing ones. All the others I just sell.

Jad.3 wrote:

Sneak w/ dual wielded daggers (Woe) is one-hitter, but twhen you go toe to toe with Deathlord you're a gonner. So Arcane Smitting and a little bit Enchanting?

@Dragqueentus: So you're saying no Mage armor perks, but that doesn't mean no Mage armor spells, right?

You can use them, sure. Gold is plentiful, so spending some on spellbooks is fine. But ironically they have the biggest effect if you already have a lot of armor from other sources. This is because what matters is not how much damage your armor blocks, but how much damage comes through. Armor that reduces damage by 50% is actually only half better than armor that reduces damage by 25% and not twice as good like many people would instinctively assume. Why? Because with the first one you're taking 75% of the original damage and with the second one you're taking 50% of the original damage.

The conversion between AR and damage reduction is 0.12, so for every 100 AR you gain 12% damage reduction. This means that Oakflesh gives +4.8% damage reduction, Stoneflesh gives +7.2%, Ironflesh gives +9.6%, and Ebonyflesh gives +12%. The one really good mage armor spell is Dragonhide, which disregards armor and sets your damage reduction to the maximum 80% regardless of what it was before. And which does not benefit from Mage Armor perks in any way.

So I can wear whatever and cast the Dragonhide and poof! Max reduction? Nice!
That's 837 magicka for one hide, 1674 to dual cast. How many levels is that? Fortify Alteration 100% or bust!

I think you spoke "earlier" about Magic Resistance busting your own spells?

I don't remember anything about Magic Reduction busting your own spells.

Wrong associations then.

Hey, where I can sell every item? Even stolen? I have too many and too much on me!

They may call it treasure, but I call it junk

I mean, back in the early game I would fast travel to Whiterun and sell there, but now some items are not showing to the vendors (even loot!) What to do?

You need to find a fence. If only there was a group of people that specialized in stolen goods.

Jad.3 wrote:

You need to find a fence. If only there was a group of people that specialized in stolen goods.

Look for Brynolf in Riften. He has useful friends...

Items you stole are marked as such. You could stash them in a non-respawning cointainer. Use http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Skyrim to check locations with cointainers (barrels, chests...). Buy a house to stash the loot? http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Houses

Buying a house didn't fix it. I saved, quit the game, they are all stolen itens still =/

This game is so deep, there is so much to do! It's overwhelming sometimes - I thought VtM:B characters were annoying for giving me quests (every single of them) - but at least you get exp rewards. In Skyrim, you level up by working hard! No skipping leg day!!


(I raised stealth to 40, was having a bit of trouble even as a Khajiit, so I read this tip that if you backstab the greymanes, they won't retaliate and you will level up super fast!)

There's a fix, you need to slam your face into a wall very very hard.
I wanted to be subtle and was a bit disgruntled by Feral's description. But it seems even that was not enough!
You are a thief, you need to find a thief that buys stolen goods you dum-dum!

Seriously, wtf? Why are you backstabbing quest-relevant NPC's? Stealth is the fastest leveling skill, and there is little trouble in game for those who use it.

I don't know how to level up stealth! I mean, If I use arrows, that's ok, but then I run out of arrows.
Whenever I did stealth behind people, it didn't go up. Sometimes it did, but not in any particular pattern, so I prefered to backstab the non-hostile, extremely powerful Greymane until I got stealth up to 100 - I'm still having trouble with the game, contrary to your beliefs.

You're doing it wrong

Cretino wrote:

I don't know how to level up stealth! I mean, If I use arrows, that's ok, but then I run out of arrows.
Whenever I did stealth behind people, it didn't go up. Sometimes it did, but not in any particular pattern, so I prefered to backstab the non-hostile, extremely powerful Greymane until I got stealth up to 100 - I'm still having trouble with the game, contrary to your beliefs.

You just go around people unnoticed... Closed eye icon? Yhat alone will level up your stealth. Kiling hostile NPCs is a way too. It levels Archery/One-Handed too... Picpoceting people is a way too go.

In Skyrim, you level everything by using it.

Cretino wrote:

Buying a house didn't fix it. I saved, quit the game, they are all stolen itens still =/

This game is so deep, there is so much to do! It's overwhelming sometimes - I thought VtM:B characters were annoying for giving me quests (every single of them) - but at least you get exp rewards. In Skyrim, you level up by working hard! No skipping leg day!!


(I raised stealth to 40, was having a bit of trouble even as a Khajiit, so I read this tip that if you backstab the greymanes, they won't retaliate and you will level up super fast!)

Storing the stolen items was not meant to make them not-stolen. The idea was just to get rid of the weight until you find a fence. And Jad and Feral already gave you more than enough information to do that, so I'll just leave you with a bit of motivational music.

Cretino wrote:

noooo i was planning on joining him!
what is the story, anyway?

i mean, stormcloaks, empire, rebels...

I never got that far literally I got to about level 55 then went huh I should probably stop doing side quests and maybe go up that big ass mountain and speak with the beardy people. Then I left it for half a year and started again then repeated this process at least three times >.>

Ok, raised sneak to 100, pickpocket to 100, lockpick to 80~ (just enough to make more money and better treasures), the rest is history.

Too lazy to do the main quest - did the Thief Guild first o.O
Incidently did the Dagon blade as well, maybe I do have Nocturnal's luck!

I have a general question about Skyrim. Is haggling implemented as bad as in Oblivion or have they changed that so you can actually use it. Because haggle is the main reason I stopped playing Oblivion.

You'd have to tell me how was haggling handled there, I don't remember
Simply, prices are affected by your skill, that rises as you sell and buy stuff, can be enhanced by some perks. No looking for the best price vendor will still buy/sell for.

I have touched Morrowing, played Oblivion a bit, and engorge myself in Skyrim. Critics say the story isn't the best, or whatever, but the system is the best yet.