Taking the Plunge...

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Must not have noticed. Then again, I hardly EVER go to the magic tab, as the only time I would need to would be for healing (the only spell I use), and shouts (and I only have one), both of which I have on my favorite list.

One quick question - are alchemy recipes static? It would seem like it would add to replayability if the effects of different plants, fungi, other ingredients were randomized to some extent each game. Like if components a, b, and c result in potion X in my game, will those same components produce the same potion in everyone's game?

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Out of curiosity, why would you need/want more than one house? I mean, with the ability to instantly travel to locations already visited, and then being able to immediately travel back to where you just left, why would you need to spend the money on houses?

I can understand doing the quests that would give you ability to purchase the house, just not why you'd actually spend the money on them. (It would seem like the biggest use for a cash dump once you get to higher levels would be training.)

 

Keeping stuff in different locations, free places to sleep, the lols, about sums it up for me.

 

Are you required to sleep? There's no mention of this in the manual...

Also, are undead - specifically draugr - immune to backstab? Because if they aren't, I'm clearly doing something wrong. I attempted this last night to try out my new dagger. I did NOT get the 15x damage bonus for being hidden.

 

They are not immune, I get my 30x multiplier on draugr all the time. What they are is reasonably hard to sneak up on if they are awake so they might spot you the split second before you strike.

As for many houses 8 pretty much summed it up. I have bought and furbished all the houses (except the Windhelm one as I am not far enough along in the quests to do it yet), spend 10-20k training each level and am still sitting on almost 300k. Money is not an issue, there are so many ways of making money and the only real limiting factor is how much you can be arsed to travel around to empty different merchants.

 

Another question - I have quite a lot of raw ore I've been lugging around for a while. I seem to find quite a lot of it in caves, and figure, what the heck, I have a pickaxe... I don't do a ton of smithing granted, but the stuff is kind of heavy, and it's totally useless until you smelt it. Granting that, it also seems that while the refined ore is somewhat more common, no merchant has it in great supply. So far, I've yet to find a blacksmith who has a smelter. Are there any out there?

 

Windhelm has one outside of War Maidens' and some of the popluated mines have a smelter outside.

I could dig out the guide and write up a few but I'm pretty tired from tidying it away in the first place

 

Pretty sure Whiterun has one to the right as soon as you come through the main gate.

 

Bother! I meant Whiterun... I blame my senility

 

Buy a house Aldeth, the Whiterun one is cheap. Store all your stuff there after every dungeon then you can just lug it out and use it when you have a sufficently large stock to make something useful or force a few levels.

 

I actually just purchased the Whiterun home last night. Is there any way to you, know, organize stuff? Like there's a chest in the upstairs, but it doesn't appear I can physically put stuff into it. I can drop in on the ground, and then move it around, but I'd like to be able to throw it in a chest and the just find what I'm looking for alphabetically. I also got the second amulet fragment last night.

The second amulet location was by the town I had to pass to meet the Greybeards. THAT was a pain in the ass. What the hell? There's only one way up that mountain? I ended up using the clairvoyance spell to get me there. Cripes. It took forever, and I got attacked by a saber tooth cat along the way that killed me.

I'm starting to think that perhaps my sneak thief concept was not a sound one for a first play through the game. While it is certainly convenient to one shot bandits and their ilk, anything remotely dangerous that closes to melee owns me. Not just saber toothed cats and bears, even a bandit with a two-handed weapon. My only option is to run. (Granted, I only have one point in one handed weapons - the base perk - so I am not skilled in melee.)

 

It's the same as trading with followers or putting things in other chests...

I don't know Xbox controls but there should be an indication on the bar on the lower part of the screen what "Give" is.

My problem with my first thief was melee too. Might want to spend a bit of time either finding a trainer (UESDP wiki should have a list) and/or attacking wolves with only melee for a while. Activate the warrior stone whilst raising it to help ease progression along.

 

I'll have to check next time I play - I can't believe I didn't notice it - just open the chest and there's a "give" option? I never noticed it with followers because I don't have any. As a stealth character, I find them mostly useless, as they blow my cover.

As for the melee stuff, there's upsides and downsides to both the way I see it. Having a specialized archer is great for taking things out from a distance with a one-shot kill. Dragons, I have to imagine, would be MUCH more difficult if you had to run up to them with a sword, axe, or whatever and start hacking away. In fact, I'd guess you'd have to carry a bow just to hurt them enough to get them to land.

But against the more typical enemies that you're fighting, a more melee-oriented fighter might be more effective. That will probably be my next character. I'll have to decide against one or two handed weapons. I imagine if I get good at blocking, one handed might be the way to go...

 

You can both remove and put things in all containers be it bodies or a chest in your house. The point of having a house is that things will never ever disapear from there. You can drop stuff wherever but someone might pilfer them if you haven't put them somewhere safe.

What you describe is one of the challenges of playing a stealth character. Up close you are toast but isn't there an element of excitement and tension in that? I enjoyed it a lot with my stealth and mage characters. I had to be careful and when the poo hit the fan I had to use my special abilities and potions or die.

 

Destruction + dual cast + impact = nothing gets up close. You can just chain stun anything to death. Last night, I pulled 2 giants and 2 mammoths, just for shits and giggles. They got owned. I'm only level 27.

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I'm also hoping that with some additional training I can mitigate the effects of this. For starters, it looks like Nazir of the Dark Brotherhood is a master level light armor training. I see me giving him a crap load of business. Same goes for Niruin in the Thieves Guild for archery. Even though I use a bow almost exclusively, because I have the thief stone, my archery skill level lags a good 20 points behind my sneaking skill, and since I use both regularly, I should get as good as I can in both.

I know that each level advancement in a certain skill requires more than the previous one, but I'm still getting level ups for sneaking like crazy. Heck, I'm already at 60, and I'm only level 15! I will eventually have to switch to the warrior's stone, but so long as I'm benefiting so much from the sneaking advancement, I see no present need.

OK, but that's way higher than me. Not only is that 12 more perks, but probably a freakin ton more in skills overall. Like I said, my sneaking is 60, but that's a good 20 points higher than everything else.

 

Here's where I tell you about a major exploit with trainers. Some call it a cheat. Others call it a damn cheat. And yet others might call it cheatery-cheat-cheat. But whatevs.

Any ally who is also a trainer can train you (essentially) for free. This works because you can access to an ally's inventory system. For example - Faendal in Riverwood is always one of my early trainers. He can train you in archery up to level 50. Once you do his little local quest, he will follow you. Ask him to do so. Speak to him again, ask him to train you in Archery. Do so as many times as your current level allows (up to five times). Then speak to him again, and ask him to carry something for you. This opens up his inventory, where you'll notice the exact amount of gold you just paid him is sitting right there. Simply take it back.

I am certain this will be corrected in a future patch – and frankly, I'm shocked it hasn't been already – but it's a neat trick for raising your skills early on without going broke.

There is a similar trick whereby you can get the thieves in the thieves guild to train you and then pickpocket your money back (provided your pickpocket skill is significantly high). I believe that within the guild, they will not attack you or call the authorities if you are caught - they just say "hey, cut it out, douchebag" (I'm paraphrasing). You are free to continue receiving training and trying to get your money back - preferably when they are asleep.

 

I'm sure that can be exploited like hell in the early part of the game. From everything you and others say, money ceases to be an issue after a while. Since you are limited to 5 training sessions per level, it would likewise appear that you'd do enough questing between leveling to acquire the necessary funds for more training.

I guess if you wanted to train a LOT of things, you can actually continuously level this way if money were no object. Say you had several hundred thousand gold. You could go to a dozen different trainers and get trained 5 levels in each. With that amount of skill improvement, chances are you'd level again and can go back to the first one.

A couple of other questions on game mechanics. Does armor reduce the chance of being hit, or the amount of damage you take upon being hit? Does gaining additional levels with a weapon (be in archery, one-handed, two-handed) increase your chance of hitting or damage dealt? Similarly for blocking. Can you effectively block anything? I mean, I suppose it makes sense that you could "block" a wolf trying to bite you. I'm not sure how effective that would be against a bear. And I can see it being totally ineffective against a giant, mammoth, or dragon.

Finally on some smithing. There's no way you can request, provided you have the materials, for a blacksmith to craft something for you? Like if I eventually want to get dragon armor, but I don't have a 100 in smithing, am I SOL?

 

You can only train five skill points per character level, total. Not five per skill per level. So in the course of getting to level 81 you may only train a grand total of 400 skill points, or about five skills from base 15/20/25 to 90, the max any trainer can take you to. If money is no object, it's better to concentrate on the very high range (75+) skills you can't train easily yourself, or if you're anti-something (such as not wanting to pickpocket anyone out of honor reasons) you could just train it to 90 as you go.

About perks: You'd expect that high-tier perks would be good, but surprisingly many of them lack any serious (power)gaming value. Take, for example, Paralyzing Strike from the one-handed tree. Sure, it sounds powerful but pulling off a backwards power attack is nigh impossible against anything but in-your-face aggressive melee mobs. (I've tried. And tried some more.) Similarly, while Master Trader surely gives quality of life improvements, money is definitely obsolete by the time you can actually pick it up, not to mention the many downright sucky to poorish pre-reqs along the way.

Armor reduces the damage you sustain from being hit (percent reduction) and a successfull block will reduce it even further, but not nullify it. Only physical damage is affected, thus poisons and diverse elemental attacks still remain a hazard.

Blacksmiths of Skyrim apparently forgot to put any perks in the Smithing tree and thus can't do jack all. This is a popular woe in the forums and quite possibly the most requested type of modification in the game. And yes, makes being a Smith yourself even more stupidly powerful vs. not doing it.

 

Oh, OK I get it. So if you start training ~level 20 say, and you only get your character level 50, you can only get a total of 150 levels added. This makes sense, as since each skill only has 100 levels, and you generally start with about 15 in each, getting all of them maxed would be ridiculously easy otherwise. Especially considering you can't train above 90 - you have to do the last 10 yourself - would mean that getting everything to 90 would otherwise be ridiculously easy.

That was the initial impression I had upon reading the descriptions as well. You'd think that getting to 100 on a particular tree would unlock a perk that would be a game-changing event. Other than something like smithing, which is the only means of getting dragon armor - it's generally not.

I'm glad you brought that up. I don't even know WTF a backwards power attack is. I didn't even know there was a backwards attack. There is no "backwards attack key" in the manual that talks about the control features. I know how to do a regular attack and a power attack, but I don't even know how one would attempt to perform a backwards power attack.

I thought there was a blocking perk that reduced elemental damage as well?

Bah! I figured as much. Again, for my character, not only would I have to do a ton of crafting to get there, but I'd spend a lot of valuable perks. Regardless of whether or not you through the heavy or light side of the tree, it takes 5 perks to get to Dragon Armor, 6 if you count the ability to upgrade magic items too, which I can't imagine anyone would skip.

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EDIT: One thing is for sure: This is the trial character. I've already learned so much on my first go-through - and keep in mind I'm no where near "done" with this character - that I can improve on many early-game decisions with later characters.

For example, one thing that's a bit problematic with this guy is that my two most important skills - archery and sneaking - benefit from different stones. So I cannot receive the benefit to both skills at the same time. I imagine that if you played a one-handed, shield using, heavy armor melee type, that you'd benefit all of your skills every time you went into battle, and that you'd have no shortage of places to assign your perks to either.

Just a quick look at the skills that the warrior stone benefits show a completely practical build that wouldn't require so many perks that you could never hope to complete:

One-Handed: There are 21 total perks on this tree, but assuming shield use, we can eliminate the 3 perks that are only for dual-wielding. Furthermore, there are 3 perks each that affect maces, axes, and swords. It would seem wise to pick a weapon type a stick with it, thus eliminating the need for 6 of those 9, so you can max out your one-handed capabilities with just 12 points spent.

Blocking: All of the perks here are worthwhile, or are prerequisites for other worthwhile perks, so all 13 would eventually be useful.

Heavy Armor: 12 total perks in this tree, although I think you can safely sacrifice the entire side of the tree that contains Fists of Steel, Cushioned, and Conditioning. Only the last one on that list would have long standing application, and probably isn't worth the previous two that have limited utility. 9 spent here.

That's just 34 perks, and all the skills benefit from the Warrior Stone. In fact, it's so few perks, that there would be enough left over to spend 7 in the blacksmith skills (ignoring the 3 light armor skills), and still have enough left over for a few in overdraw to make using bows to hurt dragons a bit easier.

I suppose I should make a point of seeking out the Stone - I've heard it referenced as the Lover Stone, though I have no idea where it is - that gives a benefit (albeit smaller) to all skills.

 

A somewhat similar exploit if you want the Whiterun house for free, is to wait till night-time and talk to the steward when he's in bed. Go through the house-buying dialogue options, and provided you are stood next to the closet (and quick enough) you can quickly put the 5k in the closet, get the key to the house, then just take the 5k back out the closet. Free house.