The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Catch-All

manta173 wrote:

Is there a GWJ Guild for ESO? Or even a thread?

Yes and yes.

garion333 wrote:
manta173 wrote:

Is there a GWJ Guild for ESO? Or even a thread?

Yes and yes.

Thanks!!

IMAGE(https://memestatic.fjcdn.com/pictures/Empty+different+wolf_39126b_7983230.jpg)

jrralls wrote:

IMAGE(https://memestatic.fjcdn.com/pictures/Empty+different+wolf_39126b_7983230.jpg)

Let me fix that for ya:

IMAGE(https://bigmemes.funnyjunk.com/pictures/Empty+different+wolf_39126b_7983230.jpg)

Not out of character for the Game Pass Twitter account, but sadly not real.

Been playing this again on Switch. I really wish there was mod access, but such is life.

I'm level 30 with my sneaky archer mage character and I'm growing tired of mostly sucking down health and magicka potions when confronting Draugr Deathlords who are proliferating the dungeons now.

I don't want to have to turn the difficulty down, but Deathlords are a slog.

Soooooooo I'm thinking of starting a new character and focusing on heavy weapons and armor. I don't want to though. I've put a lot of hours into my current character. How feasible is it to switch things up at level 30? I could go around swatting at wolves and the like with weapons until I gain some levels and perks. Or I could start over.

Thoughts?

garion333 wrote:

Been playing this again on Switch. I really wish there was mod access, but such is life.

I'm level 30 with my sneaky archer mage character and I'm growing tired of mostly sucking down health and magicka potions when confronting Draugr Deathlords who are proliferating the dungeons now.

I don't want to have to turn the difficulty down, but Deathlords are a slog.

Soooooooo I'm thinking of starting a new character and focusing on heavy weapons and armor. I don't want to though. I've put a lot of hours into my current character. How feasible is it to switch things up at level 30? I could go around swatting at wolves and the like with weapons until I gain some levels and perks. Or I could start over.

Thoughts?

I had similar issues with any mage / ranged character around that level, and always ended up developing melee skills as a secondary set, to the point where they surpassed my original combat skills.

It's quite doable -- you take a drop in effectiveness for a few hours while you level up your melee & armour skills enough to put perks points in, but it's not as much of a time loss as starting again.

It helps if you've got decent smithing, alchemy or enchanting to make good gear for yourself, and of course if you need quick perk points, turning some 100 point skills legendary also helps. Sneak is so easy to max out, I often ended up cashing that one in.

Visit the Warrior stone, do Daedric quests for the unique item rewards or just recruit a tank NPC like Uthgerd the Unbroken and you're good to go!

Finally jumped into Skyrim. Am on PS4, not a PC gamer so don't know much about mods and so not playing with any atm. Should I be?

I've started with a Breton and played for a few hours up to lvl 4, don't really know which direction going to take him. For a game full of magic, seemed like a good idea to choose a race with a built in resistance to it. Popped a couple points into potion making for starters while figure out what to do.

I go pretty light on mods. For your first playthrough, I'd start vanilla, and if things start bugging you or you're just looking to spice things up after a few dozen hours, take a look at the mods on offer. From what I remember Sony didn't allow as many mods as Microsoft did, so you don't get things like the Unofficial Patch mod which I'd be more inclined to call essential.

If you've (somehow) managed to make it this far in life without playing Skyrim before, I'd say to stick pretty close to vanilla for a first playthrough. If you were on PC I could recommend a handful of stability and UI tweaks, but as far as my Google-Fu can determine they're not available on PS4, so pure vanilla should be fine.

Bubblefuzz wrote:

I've started with a Breton and played for a few hours up to lvl 4, don't really know which direction going to take him. For a game full of magic, seemed like a good idea to choose a race with a built in resistance to it. Popped a couple points into potion making for starters while figure out what to do.

Breton's a good choice for a first playthrough: your instincts are right that magic resistance is valuable, and there are only a couple ways to get it, so having some from the start of your playthrough is definitely a nice perk to have.

I wouldn't stress too much about your "build." While it's certainly possible to min-max, it's also hard to make a totally non-viable character unless you're really trying. And in the long run, all roads lead to stealth archer anyway. (-: Horse around with the different systems and playstyles, see what feels fun to you, and go from there. Remember that you can also bank skill points if you're not 100% sure what you want to spend them on right at the moment.

Thanks both, I'll stick to vanilla and just try and have fun with the character.

Yep I am so, so, so late to the Skyrim party, Elder Scrolls entirely in fact. I think life meant I was on a bit of a gaming hiatus when Skyrim was at it's peak and also have traditionally preferred the Fallout setting of which I've experienced a good deal over the years.

This is really promising so far though, could be a new deep dive for me, something I've not really found this year video game wise.

You either need to dive fully into magic and basically only ever use it, or you will want to take up some form of weapon-based combat to go with it and level it up a bit. Otherwise you'll find yourself under leveled in combat and getting your ass handed to you when forced into combat.

But, really, best to get crazy into magic and go to the College.

Sneaky archer...... I forget the name of the ghost bow spell... but that's a fun way to do it...

garion333 wrote:

You either need to dive fully into magic and basically only ever use it, or you will want to take up some form of weapon-based combat to go with it and level it up a bit. Otherwise you'll find yourself under leveled in combat and getting your ass handed to you when forced into combat.

But, really, best to get crazy into magic and go to the College.

I will say that Destruction magic doesn't scale very well, so if you try to go full wizard you might have trouble dealing damage later on.

Still plenty of fun to be had with magic, just make sure that you're also decent with a weapon in a pinch.

the College sounds intriguing...

I somehow usually end up playing sneaky archer or equivalent in games, attempt to try other options, but that's the default.

Magic with a bit of hack n slash on the side does sound good though, I'll try that and see how long it takes for the bow to win out.

Sneaky archer with magic bow was a lot of fun. I can second that recommendation.

Conjuration Battlemage is fun. Summon a skeleton, then summon a sword!

hbi2k wrote:
garion333 wrote:

You either need to dive fully into magic and basically only ever use it, or you will want to take up some form of weapon-based combat to go with it and level it up a bit. Otherwise you'll find yourself under leveled in combat and getting your ass handed to you when forced into combat.

But, really, best to get crazy into magic and go to the College.

I will say that Destruction magic doesn't scale very well, so if you try to go full wizard you might have trouble dealing damage later on.

Still plenty of fun to be had with magic, just make sure that you're also decent with a weapon in a pinch.

Yeah, I agree, you've gotta have magic regen out the wazoo. Literally commit to magic as the only possible choice.

I ran into issues with my magic-focused build when Draugr Deathlords showed up around level 20 (I think) but I wasted a lot of development on crafting, sneaking and archery. Can't do that with a magic mostly build, I simply wasn't able to use the higher end spells more than once or twice without switching to hack and slash, which means I quaffed potions left and right and then died.

beanman101283 wrote:

Conjuration Battlemage is fun. Summon a skeleton, then summon a sword!

For when you can't burn people to a crisp anymore switch to Conjuration!

Summons are a huge help against folks when you are on a magic track.

Ooh I'm off to the College

garion333 wrote:
beanman101283 wrote:

Conjuration Battlemage is fun. Summon a skeleton, then summon a sword!

For when you can't burn people to a crisp anymore switch to Conjuration!

Summons are a huge help against folks when you are on a magic track.

Indeed, Conjuration is the way to go. Don't necessarily neglect Destruction or Illusion, but Conjuration is a great boon. Soon, you'll be double conjuring Atronachs and Dread Zombies to kill your enemies while you loot the room.

*edit* That's assuming you don't want to go Dawnguard Vampire Necromancer.

If someone does want to go the sneaky archer route, don't sleep on Illusion magic. Turning enemies against each other, or calming wandering bears so you can escape, is an excellent way to augment your play, especially in the early/mid game.

Illusion usually pairs really well with stealth. Iirc there was a quick way to level both by sneaking and illusion at the same time. Throw in conjuration for even more spells you can cast/level up easily outside of combat.

Probably not among the most powerful combat builds, but I recall it was effective enough, and really easy to develop early on.

garion333 wrote:
beanman101283 wrote:

Conjuration Battlemage is fun. Summon a skeleton, then summon a sword!

For when you can't burn people to a crisp anymore switch to Conjuration!

Summons are a huge help against folks when you are on a magic track.

Conjuration Battlemage is my favorite build. Conjured weapons scale better as you level up than Destruction spells. And summoning monsters to fight for you is just cool.

I will say that the absolute coolest I ever felt in that game was around lvl 35 when I was tossing double casted explosive fireballs at an elder dragon attacking me on top of a mountain in a snow storm.

garion333 wrote:

Yeah, I agree, you've gotta have magic regen out the wazoo. Literally commit to magic as the only possible choice.

I ran into issues with my magic-focused build when Draugr Deathlords showed up around level 20 (I think) but I wasted a lot of development on crafting, sneaking and archery. Can't do that with a magic mostly build, I simply wasn't able to use the higher end spells more than once or twice without switching to hack and slash, which means I quaffed potions left and right and then died.

Past a certain point, it's not mana regen that's the problem, it's that Destruction spells do flat damage instead of scaling with your Destruction skill the way weapon damage does with your weapon skill, so at higher levels you fall behind the curve as enemy HP continues to go up while your damage stays static.

You can have equipment that reduces your casting cost to zero, and it doesn't matter because all that means is that you can spam crap damage all day long. It turns every enemy into an insane damage sponge that takes forever to kill, which isn't fun.

It doesn't help that the top-level Destruction spells have stupid-long casting times and require both hands, meaning you actually get better DPS out of lower-level spells.

hbi2k wrote:

You can have equipment that reduces your casting cost to zero, and it doesn't matter because all that means is that you can spam crap damage all day long. It turns every enemy into an insane damage sponge that takes forever to kill, which isn't fun.

Does that remain true even with mods?

In other news, many thanks for the Hivemind for recommending Wabbajack. Using that with the Living Skyrim 2 mod package has absolutely transformed the game. Never thought I'd be playing the game with literally several hundred mods loaded, but it's made it staggeringly pretty and a much more involved experience. Fantastic to see so many NPCs walking around, and such a rich set of options for exploring the world.

Of course, everything is wildly lethal, so I got one-shotted by a skeleton on an early mission that I cleared with ease in the vanilla version. It's going to take a while to get established, and I'm going to do my best (probably quixotic) to avoid becoming a sneaky archer. I'm following a treasure-hunter path with a Breton, which I think will give me a nice framework for stuff to do (since the main mission will utterly destroy me at the moment). She is going to use a summoned blade as her weapon (Shardblade? What? No, nothing to do with Way of Kings haha!) but otherwise use normal armour and resources. We'll see where that goes. It's definitely helped by a mod that that makes summoned weapons permanent (until dismissed) but at a cost of reserving part of the mana bar.

Another favourite way to play is my Khajiit monk, who refuses to hold normal weapons, wear armour, or carry burdens. He only uses summoned weapons (uses claws before he gets those spells), wears only robes, and carries only money, jewels, and alchemy supplies. It means that most stuff is left on the ground when he goes adventuring. I'm looking forward to trying him in this heavily modded version!

misplacedbravado wrote:
garion333 wrote:
beanman101283 wrote:

Conjuration Battlemage is fun. Summon a skeleton, then summon a sword!

For when you can't burn people to a crisp anymore switch to Conjuration!

Summons are a huge help against folks when you are on a magic track.

Conjuration Battlemage is my favorite build. Conjured weapons scale better as you level up than Destruction spells. And summoning monsters to fight for you is just cool.

Liking the sound of this, will investigate for sure.

Grenn wrote:

*edit* That's assuming you don't want to go Dawnguard Vampire Necromancer.

Oh hello...

Coldstream wrote:
hbi2k wrote:

You can have equipment that reduces your casting cost to zero, and it doesn't matter because all that means is that you can spam crap damage all day long. It turns every enemy into an insane damage sponge that takes forever to kill, which isn't fun.

Does that remain true even with mods?

There are certainly mods that can change that. The ones that I have the most experience with are full skill-tree overhaul mods that are fun, but very different from the vanilla experience. I'd also have no idea which (if any) are still well-supported, it's been a couple years since my last modded-up playthrough.