TES V: Skyrim

[Grall]

Excellent advice. However, even though I try, I just can't remember to micro-manage my saves like that.

Fortunately for me, the game fixed itself after I woke the boss up by shooting an arrow through the doorway and into the back of his throne instead of going out into the main chamber and then aggroing everything.

...Although I do wonder why he attacks the other skeletons in that room. Seems weird they're not all on the same side. Perhaps a Bethesda oversight, I dunno. Not that it matters really, it's such an insignificant error in the big scheme of things.

I'm level 50 now btw, well on way to 51. Dragons are a fricken pain in the neck though, I'm encountering some REALLY tough ones, they burn me to cinders in a few seconds. Really annoying. I have to abuse the sneak "vanishing" perk and hope my follower manages to distract the dragon long enough for me to shoot a couple arrows at it, or else hide behind rocks or pillars to dodge the fire.

One dragon actually attacked me in the central courtyard of the mage college, I've never seen them attack a settlement like that before. Its fire hurt like a sonuvabitch, but fortunately there were plenty of stone columns to stand behind so I managed to kill it without TOO much trouble. The 2nd highest ranking mage NPCs helped too by shooting fireballs at the damn thing. They hurt far more than my arrows even though I wield legendary glass bow and am fully perked up.

Maybe I should stop using iron arrows on dragons, lol... Found 6 daedric arrows, they do 140% more damage than iron.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Fortunately for me, the game fixed itself after I woke the boss up by shooting an arrow through the doorway and into the back of his throne

Yes but did it reach the knee?

 

[KimB]

Excellent advice. However, even though I try, I just can't remember to micro-manage my saves like that.

Haha, it comes from many years of playing buggy and/or difficult RPG's. Storing at least two saves is pretty much a ritual for me now.

Skyrim is actually pretty nice as far as this goes, as it stores three separate autosaves and a quicksave separately. I remember the old days when there often wasn't any autosave at all, such as with the first two Fallout games (and with the original Fallout, I believe quicksave was added as a patch later).

Fortunately for me, the game fixed itself after I woke the boss up by shooting an arrow through the doorway and into the back of his throne instead of going out into the main chamber and then aggroing everything.

That's good!

I'm level 50 now btw, well on way to 51. Dragons are a fricken pain in the neck though, I'm encountering some REALLY tough ones, they burn me to cinders in a few seconds. Really annoying. I have to abuse the sneak "vanishing" perk and hope my follower manages to distract the dragon long enough for me to shoot a couple arrows at it, or else hide behind rocks or pillars to dodge the fire.

Haha, yes, if you don't have the right gear, the high-level dragons are quite tough. If you can get your enchanting and smithing up to 100, though, you can make some amazing weapons that take out anything in no time.

One dragon actually attacked me in the central courtyard of the mage college, I've never seen them attack a settlement like that before. Its fire hurt like a sonuvabitch, but fortunately there were plenty of stone columns to stand behind so I managed to kill it without TOO much trouble. The 2nd highest ranking mage NPCs helped too by shooting fireballs at the damn thing. They hurt far more than my arrows even though I wield legendary glass bow and am fully perked up.

I've fought a lot of dragons in that courtyard. Also a few in Whiterun, Riften, and Solitude.

Maybe I should stop using iron arrows on dragons, lol... Found 6 daedric arrows, they do 140% more damage than iron.

Haha, yes. Iron arrows aren't so good. But really the easiest way to take them out is dragonrend. Then you don't need any

 

[RobertR1]

Excellent advice. However, even though I try, I just can't remember to micro-manage my saves like that.

Fortunately for me, the game fixed itself after I woke the boss up by shooting an arrow through the doorway and into the back of his throne instead of going out into the main chamber and then aggroing everything.

...Although I do wonder why he attacks the other skeletons in that room. Seems weird they're not all on the same side. Perhaps a Bethesda oversight, I dunno. Not that it matters really, it's such an insignificant error in the big scheme of things.

I'm level 50 now btw, well on way to 51. Dragons are a fricken pain in the neck though, I'm encountering some REALLY tough ones, they burn me to cinders in a few seconds. Really annoying. I have to abuse the sneak "vanishing" perk and hope my follower manages to distract the dragon long enough for me to shoot a couple arrows at it, or else hide behind rocks or pillars to dodge the fire.

One dragon actually attacked me in the central courtyard of the mage college, I've never seen them attack a settlement like that before. Its fire hurt like a sonuvabitch, but fortunately there were plenty of stone columns to stand behind so I managed to kill it without TOO much trouble. The 2nd highest ranking mage NPCs helped too by shooting fireballs at the damn thing. They hurt far more than my arrows even though I wield legendary glass bow and am fully perked up.

Maybe I should stop using iron arrows on dragons, lol... Found 6 daedric arrows, they do 140% more damage than iron.

By level 51, you should be a walking death machine. Are you not smithing, improving your gears and weapons and enchanting?

You need to buff yourself up with the perks given. The game itself won't give you things that nice or powerful. Dragons should be your bitch by this point in the game even on Master.

 

[Jedi2016]

I'm level 36, and I'm already a walking death machine. The only dragons that give me any difficulty are the ones that don't land. Once they're on the ground, they're done for.. one solid power attack and they're below the takeoff threshold. I can one-shot most humanoids and draugr, and even the "difficult" ones only take three or four hits. And I'm not even maxxed out on enchants or smithing.

 

[KimB]

I'm level 36, and I'm already a walking death machine. The only dragons that give me any difficulty are the ones that don't land. Once they're on the ground, they're done for.. one solid power attack and they're below the takeoff threshold. I can one-shot most humanoids and draugr, and even the "difficult" ones only take three or four hits. And I'm not even maxxed out on enchants or smithing.

Hehe, well, I'm also not sure you've taken on any ancient dragons yet. Unless you have some pretty strong gear, those can be very tough. My first character had a hard time with them well into the 40's. As long as the toughest ones you've faced are blood dragons or ice dragons, that's completely understandable.

I don't think the ancient dragons get remotely easy until you get some crazy-powerful gear. Though I suppose with a mage they're always easy once you can stagger them with every attack.

 

[Grall]

By level 51, you should be a walking death machine.

I "should", perhaps, but I'm not.

Are you not smithing, improving your gears and weapons and enchanting?

I've got 100 smithing, fully perked for light armor. 100 sneak, almost fully perked, 96 or so archery, almost fully perked, pretty bad short blades skill level, a few perks there, pretty OK light armor, some perks, 65-ish enchanting but no perks yet. Also have 65-ish restoration with some perks; up to dual-casting and magicka regen. One badly invested perk is in lockpicking, wish I could remove that one.

I'm waiting to invest any more perks now until I get a handle on how many more I have left to gain. What's the max attainable level? I suppose it caps out once you've raised every skill to 100, but since you need more and more skillups for each level I can't work out how many levels I still have left.

Dragons should be your bitch by this point in the game even on Master.

Well apparantly not if one favors archery over spellcasting or melee. It takes a huge number of arrows to kill ancient dragons (even with ebony arrows), and their breath attacks hurt A LOT. Critting on them helps of course, but crit chance is only 30% max, so it can't be relied on.

If this is the "wrong" way to design a character then the game's flawed. I guess I could have put less focus on stamina and put more into health instead, I raised it to 300 so I'd be able to carry a decent amount of lewt; that would help my survivability I guess, but alas. I'm not going to stick any more points there from here on out though. Maybe some more into magicka, I dunno.

Maybe there's enormous untapped power to be had from enchanting my gear, I'm not sure. I had a ring of +20% archery damage but managed to sell it somewhere due to the uber crappy inventory system. If I chanted all the gear that can accept archery damage chants I might become a lot more effective, I dunno. Since I lost the ring I can't learn the chant from it and I haven't found ANY more archery bonus gear. Tons of turn undead stuff, frost damage, fire damage and so on... *sigh*

I'm wary to chant anything until I can sink some perks into the profession though, because it seems you can't re-chant an already chanted item, and I don't wanna keep making new dragonscale gear all the time. I don't have enough scales; the game drops tons of dragonbone but way too few scales. I only had just enough to craft a full set of dragonscale for myself and improve it to legendary.

My follower has to make do with my old glass armor set until I get more scales. When I do, I'll make him dragonbone gear.

Is anyone here using the Curse client for addon management? I use it for WoW (which I've stopped subscribing to for now), and it has a really nice Weightless Items addon. It makes all food, ingredients, potions and the pickaxe and woodaxe weights zero. Some quest items weigh less too I believe. Makes the game a lot more fun to play this way when I don't get totally bogged down by picking a single mountain flower all the god damn time.

 

[Sxotty]

I "should", perhaps, but I'm not.


Well apparantly not if one favors archery over spellcasting or melee. It takes a huge number of arrows to kill ancient dragons (even with ebony arrows), and their breath attacks hurt A LOT. Critting on them helps of course, but crit chance is only 30% max, so it can't be relied on.

If this is the "wrong" way to design a character then the game's flawed. I guess I could have put less focus on stamina and put more into health instead, I raised it to 300 so I'd be able to carry a decent amount of lewt; that would help my survivability I guess, but alas. I'm not going to stick any more points there from here on out though. Maybe some more into magicka, I dunno.

I put most of my level up into stamina and magicka and I actually use a bow mostly as well. Generally though it is still easy to kill dragons if you have shadow mare/mere or whatever that horse is called. That horse saves my bacon every time. I am level 50 as well, but die pretty easy b/c my armor skill is really low so if I run out of arrows and have to use a regular weapon I get owned

BTW enchant some gauntlets and boots and you can have your carry capacity near 600. I think mine is 570 now.

 

[Colourless]

You can make some really crazy stuff using the 'Fority Restoration+Forify Alchemy' exploit to make Fortify Enchanting potions and then Foritfy Alchemty and Fortify Smithing Gear.

Here is an example of how rediculous things are. Note that the damage is actually 89257 as sone at the bottom, not the truncated 892 shown at the top. Also note that I'm wearing something that is increasing my carrying capacity. The number is so large it wrapped onto a second line. Dagger is completly bugged though. The enchantments dont work. If your effective enchanting level is too high the calculations for the amount of charge needed per use screws up completely.

Also this is an example of armour.

I was literally laughing out loud when I made it. I knew things were bad with this, but increasing HP and Stamina by 15 million. It was just so rediculous that I laughed. And look at that value, its worth 1 BILLION gold.

This has quite obviously made the game completely trivial for me, but I was already level 50 when I made this stuff and I just wanted to screw around.

 

[Grall]

Generally though it is still easy to kill dragons if you have shadow mare/mere or whatever that horse is called.

Are you attacking from horseback, or what makes the horsy so great in combat?

Also, where can I find some (legal) horses? I only know of one that I can buy from the stables outside Whiterun...

Btw, how do followers keep up with you when you mount? Can they hop up behind you or something...?

 

[Malo]

You can buy a horse from any stables in the major cities.

There are 2 unique horses in the game, Frost and Shadowmere. Both are better than normal horses in combat, for dealing and taking damage. Shadowmere is by far the best in combat of the 2.

You can't fight from horseback, he's just referring to the fact that your horse often engages in combat with you. And follows don't really keep up with you on horseback as they're slower. They eventually catch up.

 

[RobertR1]

I "should", perhaps, but I'm not.


I've got 100 smithing, fully perked for light armor. 100 sneak, almost fully perked, 96 or so archery, almost fully perked, pretty bad short blades skill level, a few perks there, pretty OK light armor, some perks, 65-ish enchanting but no perks yet. Also have 65-ish restoration with some perks; up to dual-casting and magicka regen. One badly invested perk is in lockpicking, wish I could remove that one.

I'm waiting to invest any more perks now until I get a handle on how many more I have left to gain. What's the max attainable level? I suppose it caps out once you've raised every skill to 100, but since you need more and more skillups for each level I can't work out how many levels I still have left.


Well apparantly not if one favors archery over spellcasting or melee. It takes a huge number of arrows to kill ancient dragons (even with ebony arrows), and their breath attacks hurt A LOT. Critting on them helps of course, but crit chance is only 30% max, so it can't be relied on.

If this is the "wrong" way to design a character then the game's flawed. I guess I could have put less focus on stamina and put more into health instead, I raised it to 300 so I'd be able to carry a decent amount of lewt; that would help my survivability I guess, but alas. I'm not going to stick any more points there from here on out though. Maybe some more into magicka, I dunno.

Maybe there's enormous untapped power to be had from enchanting my gear, I'm not sure. I had a ring of +20% archery damage but managed to sell it somewhere due to the uber crappy inventory system. If I chanted all the gear that can accept archery damage chants I might become a lot more effective, I dunno. Since I lost the ring I can't learn the chant from it and I haven't found ANY more archery bonus gear. Tons of turn undead stuff, frost damage, fire damage and so on... *sigh*

I'm wary to chant anything until I can sink some perks into the profession though, because it seems you can't re-chant an already chanted item, and I don't wanna keep making new dragonscale gear all the time. I don't have enough scales; the game drops tons of dragonbone but way too few scales. I only had just enough to craft a full set of dragonscale for myself and improve it to legendary.

My follower has to make do with my old glass armor set until I get more scales. When I do, I'll make him dragonbone gear.

Is anyone here using the Curse client for addon management? I use it for WoW (which I've stopped subscribing to for now), and it has a really nice Weightless Items addon. It makes all food, ingredients, potions and the pickaxe and woodaxe weights zero. Some quest items weigh less too I believe. Makes the game a lot more fun to play this way when I don't get totally bogged down by picking a single mountain flower all the god damn time.

You need to smith gear and then improve it to get the max out it. An armor rating of 586 is the highest you can get. Any number after that means nothing.

One you smith and improve all your armor, you should be enchanting ALL your gears with the appropriate upgrades.

The items you find like "20% buff" here and there are pitiful compared to the power of high level enchanting.

Your perks in enchanting should go all the way top to 100 where you can put 2 enchantments on each items. At this point, you'll be plenty powerful.

I don't recommend what Colourless has done below where he's exploited the tricks to make super weapons. It'll make the whole game a one click affair. Unless that is what you want.

My recommendation would be to do the following:

Smithing to 100
Enchanting to 100
Make either the best Heavy (deadric) or light (dragon scale) armor at a forge
Drink a Blacksmith potion
Now improve the armor set while the potion is active
Then make sure your echnating skill perks are all the way to the top where you can enchant 2 items per piece of weapon and armor
Goto an enchanting table and figure what goes with that. Make sure you have enough soul gems with grand souls in them to get the max benefit!
Now if you have enchanting potion, drink it and quickly enchant all items

Now go and make an ancient dragon your bitch.

In the console type "player.setav carryweight 6000" without the quotes to get carrying capacity of 6000 (or any number you want). This will get rid of the annoying weight limits.

 

[Cyan]

I found a video of a place where you can become a vampire just after escaping Helgen. The name of the place is Haemar's Shame, and you just have to follow the road that leads to Ivarstead.

I don't know how I could miss it, but I didn't know there were vampires there. Broken Fang Cave is relatively close to Helgen, but I had to cross the Lake Ilinalta and the mountains between Riverwood and the plains of Whiterun to get there. This place is 2 minutes away from Helgen on foot.

After being a vampire from level 1 onwards -I am level 7 now-, I would certainly recommend it for the role playing aspect of it. Other than that it's pretty fun but there are disadvantages like feeding, something you have to be very careful about.

 

[Grall]

I contracted the early stage of vampirism at some point in the game, I'm not sure how because I hadn't foght any vampires for quite a while to my knowledge, and I'd checked my character status since then and had no diseases.

Drank a potion to cure it, since I didn't feel like turning into a bloodsucker myself.

Anyway, the game fairly sucks at things like ailments and temporary buffs and such. There's no on-screen indicator of any of these things, poisons for example become basically useless because you can't tell if your weapon's still poisoned or if it has run out. Same with magic shields like oakskin and such.
How much longer will it be up? IS it even up...?

 

[Bludd]

I thought poisons were apply for 1 dose.

 

[Grall]

Only 1 dose? Whattafuck... That's insane.

 

[KimB]

Anyway, the game fairly sucks at things like ailments and temporary buffs and such. There's no on-screen indicator of any of these things, poisons for example become basically useless because you can't tell if your weapon's still poisoned or if it has run out. Same with magic shields like oakskin and such.
How much longer will it be up? IS it even up...?

Indeed. Usually the way I find out that I'm diseased is I run by somebody in town and they say I look terrible.

As for poisons and other spell effects, you can usually tell if you look carefully at your weapons and/or armor. Often times the effect is subtle, but it's usually visible.

 

[Sxotty]

You can make some really crazy stuff using the 'Fority Restoration+Forify Alchemy' exploit to make Fortify Enchanting potions and then Foritfy Alchemty and Fortify Smithing Gear.

Here is an example of how rediculous things are. Note that the damage is actually 89257 as sone at the bottom, not the truncated 892 shown at the top. Also note that I'm wearing something that is increasing my carrying capacity. The number is so large it wrapped onto a second line. Dagger is completly bugged though. The enchantments dont work. If your effective enchanting level is too high the calculations for the amount of charge needed per use screws up completely.
I was literally laughing out loud when I made it. I knew things were bad with this, but increasing HP and Stamina by 15 million. It was just so rediculous that I laughed. And look at that value, its worth 1 BILLION gold.

This has quite obviously made the game completely trivial for me, but I was already level 50 when I made this stuff and I just wanted to screw around.

Is this patched already? I didn't try to make that specific thing, but I certainly found that the fortify alchemy -->enchanting-->smithing circle did not lead anywhere near that high. It was only a loop of x2 for the potions which allowed me something like destruction spells 29% less to cast or something like that.

 

[Colourless]

I did it with the latest patch. Found the easiest way of doing it is this:
1) Put on Gear with Fority Alchemy (4 * 25% items).
2) Make a Fortify Restoration Potion.
3) Take Fortify Alchemy gear off.
4) Drink the foritfy Restoration potion
5) Put on gear with Fority Alchemy back on.
6) Make a new higher power foritfy Restoration potion
7) Take Fortify Alchemy gear off.
8) Drink the higher power Foritfy Restoration potion (this will stack with the existing fort restoration potion if you drink it before the previous one runs out)
9) Wait a few seconds for the older Fortify Restoration potion to wear off (to make sure that when you equip your gear only the newer potions effect applies)
10) Goto 5 and repeat till your you think your alchmey is high enough
11) Create Fortify Enchanting potions

Then if you want create some crazy powerful Fortify Alchemy gear using the Fority Enchanting potions from step 11 above. Then do the same process again.

Fority Enchanting potions only last 30 seconds which is only enough for 1 item, 2 if your very quick. So if you are using Fority Enchanting potions, save before use and rush to make your items.

The problems here are obvious.
Fortify Restoration potions stack with themselves. REALLY STUPID
Enchantments on gear stack with Fortify Restoration. REALLY STUPID
Fortify Resoration applies to Fortify Alchemy (it doesn't stack with Fortify Enchanting though). REALLY STUPID.
There is the circular path where you can Fortify Enchanting using alchemy and Fortify Alchmey using enchanting.

 

[KimB]

I did it with the latest patch. Found the easiest way of doing it is this:
1) Put on Gear with Fority Alchemy (4 * 25% items).
2) Make a Fortify Restoration Potion.
3) Take Fortify Alchemy gear off.
4) Drink the foritfy Restoration potion
5) Put on gear with Fority Alchemy back on.
6) Make a new higher power foritfy Restoration potion
7) Take Fortify Alchemy gear off.
8) Drink the higher power Foritfy Restoration potion (this will stack with the existing fort restoration potion if you drink it before the previous one runs out)
9) Wait a few seconds for the older Fortify Restoration potion to wear off (to make sure that when you equip your gear only the newer potions effect applies)
10) Goto 5 and repeat till your you think your alchmey is high enough
11) Create Fortify Enchanting potions

Then if you want create some crazy powerful Fortify Alchemy gear using the Fority Enchanting potions from step 11 above. Then do the same process again.

Fority Enchanting potions only last 30 seconds which is only enough for 1 item, 2 if your very quick. So if you are using Fority Enchanting potions, save before use and rush to make your items.

The problems here are obvious.
Fortify Restoration potions stack with themselves. REALLY STUPID
Enchantments on gear stack with Fortify Restoration. REALLY STUPID
Fortify Resoration applies to Fortify Alchemy (it doesn't stack with Fortify Enchanting though). REALLY STUPID.
There is the circular path where you can Fortify Enchanting using alchemy and Fortify Alchmey using enchanting.

Yeah, they really screwed up on this. They should have done one of the following:
1. Provide a hard limit to the amount of bonus enchanting/smithing/alchemy that does anything.
2. Have a different function for calculating the actual benefit that has diminishing returns, tapering off to some finite value.