The Elder Scrolls XIV: Good? Bad? I'm the one with the Thu'um!

[Techwarrior]

Speaking of mods, does anyone know of a mid for levelled items that adjusts their stats when you level up?

[Rynjin]

Comes in at least three flavors.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Sure, but quite apart from getting to the Steed stone, I only get one stone slot, and if I spend it on the Steed that means I don't get to use the Lord or the Shadow or... whatever.

Katria says hi, and would you please leave her with some dignity? (Admittedly the crown falls under your 'specific item' clause.)

While I don't think that the UI for any of the TES games is all that great, I personally think that Morrowind's UI is the best UI in the three most recent TES games, especially when it comes to inventory/spell/character information.

Gotta disagree, because of two words: Quest Log.

[Triaxx]

Admittedly it's not like Morrowind needed another excuse to wander around lost.

[Balmas]

I've honestly never seen any reason to put points into anything but magic when you level up anyway. I don't even really play mages, but the health and stamina options just don't see necessary at all.

I disagree. In fact, if you're playing vanilla Skyrim, there's very little point to investing in anything but health. See, in most cases, your most effective attack is going to be the standard, non-stamina draining one. Even if you need to power attack or block, the cost of such actions is so low as to be regenerated in seconds. Magicka is similarly useless, because you're able to get free spellcasting for up to two schools of magic, with near weightless 75%% cost reduction in the form of circlets/rings/amulets for the other three. Unless you're regularly casting expert and master level spells from all five schools of magic, you're better off just increasing your survivability. After all, if you run out of magic, you have to wait a while to cast again; if you run out of health, you die and have to run through all the progress you've made since your last save.

There is some support to the Alteration spells in vanilla. One perk makes them last slightly longer. Stability at 70 gives +50% duration. And Mage Armor Doubles and eventually triples the protection if you're not wearing armor while using a flesh spell. But there's no penalty in vanilla for being in full Daedric armor and waving magic at everything. So there's no point at all in not just wearing armor, unless you're roleplaying.

I've never felt that the mage armor spells were really worth it. Even with the three perks invested to triple the armor received, and the expert-level Ebonyflesh, you're still talking about only half the armor you'd get from a properly smithed bit of armor.

Although, Ordinator once again makes this interesting by making it so that clothing gets stronger enchantments than armor with the right perks, so you can actually wander around as a mage in fancy clothing. Now if I can just find a mod for an umbrella, my dream of cosplaying as Taako can finally be realized.,

Sure, but quite apart from getting to the Steed stone, I only get one stone slot, and if I spend it on the Steed that means I don't get to use the Lord or the Shadow or... whatever.

Same response applies. I'll take an internal ability over one that I have to wear a specific item for any day, thanks. Especially since they stack anyway. Combined with the Agent of Mara power, even one or two levels of magic resistance perks go a long way to making me pretty much unstoppable.

If I had infinite money I wouldn't care about the cost of food and bills, so I'd spend those enchantment slots on something else too...

Not sure I understand this perspective. From my point of view, it's much simpler and effective to just wear the items instead of using the perks. Perk points are, after all, much scarcer than items or enchanting slots, and much more resistant to being swapped out after the fact.

I prefer Oblivion.

One playthrough of Oblivion was enough for me. After about a hundred hours, it all began to feel samey and stale. The Ayleid ruins all felt the same. The abandoned forts all felt the same. The oblivion realms were pulled from a pool of half a dozen plots, and so once I'd done more than ten I'd about seen them all. Having eight voice actors for the base game meant that everybody sounded the same, with people having arguments with themselves. It was a bland Middle-Earth knockoff where the difficulty abruptly jumped every five levels, and required you to either level perfectly or not level at all.

It just feels like the ugly stepchild of the modern franchise. It didn't have the polished, awe-inspiring world of Morrowind, or the smooth mechanics of Skyrim. It's stuck in an awkward lurch where both world and mechanics are meh.

Nor has Skyrim, Fallout 4 in 1080p is amazing, leaves Skyrim at 2560 * 1440 totally in the dust of it's wake, Fallout 4 almost looks photographic.

On the other hand, on GUI's I think Skyrim took a step backward on containers, 'r' for instert was okay but 'r' for take all when it's only a click away from insert one at a time? Who hasn't picked up all the contents of a container unintentionally? I've done it dozens of times, and I hate it.

SkyUI, man. Can't live without it.

Gotta disagree, because of two words: Quest Log.

Eh, they did a lot to fix that though when they added the index. That way, if you remembered roughly who gave the quest--mages guild, fighter's guild, Morag Tong--you could figure out what the game expected.

The problem came when the game actively gave you wrong directions.

[Anteros]

I disagree. In fact, if you're playing vanilla Skyrim, there's very little point to investing in anything but health. See, in most cases, your most effective attack is going to be the standard, non-stamina draining one. Even if you need to power attack or block, the cost of such actions is so low as to be regenerated in seconds. Magicka is similarly useless, because you're able to get free spellcasting for up to two schools of magic, with near weightless 75%% cost reduction in the form of circlets/rings/amulets for the other three. Unless you're regularly casting expert and master level spells from all five schools of magic, you're better off just increasing your survivability. After all, if you run out of magic, you have to wait a while to cast again; if you run out of health, you die and have to run through all the progress you've made since your last save.

I don't know about your playthroughs, but by the time I get to the point where I have all this reduction gear and these perks I've been long since unkillable anyway. Not to mention the fact that I don't particularly like using the spell cost reduction gear or perks in the first place. Pumping mana safely allows me to ignore them and still wear the gear I want.

Of course if you really want to go that route you should spend the entire game crouched with a bow under the influence of Atronach chugging enchanting/alchemy looped potions that boost the damage of arrows by some absurd amount. Or save the effort and just TGM.

Yes, technically you get a shorter Time to Kill with dual casting, but then you spend more time either waiting on your magicka to regenerate, or chugging potions. Or doing both because you run out of the potions, and then have to sit and wait. Personally I'd rather spend the mana on a full powered blast than 20% of one.

Hey, it's fine if you don't like to use it. Far be it from me to tell you how to play a single player game. I'm just saying that the perk can be situationally useful for some builds. That's really all you can ask for a single perk point available at a very low level.

[Triaxx]

I will note my dislike is personal bias towards destruction where it's at it's weakest.

Mage Armor and the -flesh spells are in a weird place. Early, the jump from 40 to 80 armor is tremendous. Later, not so much. Until you suddenly have a spell that straight up puts you at Armor Cap.

[Aeson]

Gotta disagree, because of two words: Quest Log.

They added one in Bloodmoon, and the only way in which it is worse than the one in Oblivion is the lack of the direction/location arrows on the compass/map, but I generally dislike that feature anyways.

Eh, they did a lot to fix that though when they added the index. That way, if you remembered roughly who gave the quest--mages guild, fighter's guild, Morag Tong--you could figure out what the game expected.

There's an explicit quest log alongside the topics index. Gives you a list of your active quests, and clicking one pulls up the journal entries related to that quest.

[Balmas]

I will note my dislike is personal bias towards destruction where it's at it's weakest.

Mage Armor and the -flesh spells are in a weird place. Early, the jump from 40 to 80 armor is tremendous. Later, not so much. Until you suddenly have a spell that straight up puts you at Armor Cap.

Aye, that's my main issue with the -Flesh spells, is that they're absolute trash until you get the master level spell. Even with three perks to upgrade the protection offered, you're talking stuff like an apprentice level spell, Stoneflesh, that provides barely more protection than an unupgraded suit of leather armor, while also being forbidden from wearing all those fun Dragon Priest masks that count as armor and negate the protection spells' perk bonus. Ebonyflesh is comparable to someone wearing Daedric armor, provided that person wearing Daedric armor also has no skill in Heavy Armor and has never seen an armor workbench in his life. Oh, and also they only last a minute, or a minute 30 seconds if you somehow manage to survive to Alteration 70 while wearing no armor.

Then you get to Master Level alteration spells, and find that you can hit armor cap with no perk investment, which makes those three previous perks pretty useless in retrospect. Except that the master level spell only lasts 45 seconds, even with the perks. And takes three seconds to cast, standing perfectly still. And is interrupted by anything that might stagger you, like spells, shouts, or power attacks. And costs over a thousand mana.

I dunno. Master level spells in general are just more garbage than expert level.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

I've never felt that the mage armor spells were really worth it. Even with the three perks invested to triple the armor received, and the expert-level Ebonyflesh, you're still talking about only half the armor you'd get from a properly smithed bit of armor.

Likewise here. My issue is that they don't last long enough. If I want to buff myself before a fight, the spell has expired before the fight is even half over.

Although, Ordinator once again makes this interesting by making it so that clothing gets stronger enchantments than armor with the right perks, so you can actually wander around as a mage in fancy clothing.

I really hope the next single player game does like ESO and does 'light' armor that is basically clothing at all but the highest levels and makes the leather medium. My big hangup with going around in robes is that armor increases your skill in armor and by extension your level, making you more powerful. Clothes don't do that.

One playthrough of Oblivion was enough for me. After about a hundred hours, it all began to feel samey and stale. The Ayleid ruins all felt the same. The abandoned forts all felt the same. The oblivion realms were pulled from a pool of half a dozen plots, and so once I'd done more than ten I'd about seen them all. Having eight voice actors for the base game meant that everybody sounded the same, with people having arguments with themselves. It was a bland Middle-Earth knockoff where the difficulty abruptly jumped every five levels, and required you to either level perfectly or not level at all.

Generally agree here too. The problem was made worse in that a lot of the dungeons didn't have much in the way of their own plot - no people to rescue, no artifacts worth the name, no books to read. The Oblivion Gates especially were just dungeons, they never felt like part of a larger world. And the leveling system took out the lower-level monsters as you leveled up, so eventually you'd stop seeing the Imps and Scamps and such and ONLY run into Minotaurs and Dreugh and Xivilai.

They added one in Bloodmoon, and the only way in which it is worse than the one in Oblivion is the lack of the direction/location arrows on the compass/map, but I generally dislike that feature anyways.

I'm well aware. It's terrible. And I disagree over it being nearly on par with Oblivion's; I never had the problems with Oblivion's that I did with Morrowind's.

[Triaxx]

As with so many things, mods have solved a lot of the issues I have with those spells. Sustained Spells, keeps the flesh spell going for me constantly, which means I'm always protected. Or I can use Ocato's Recital from Apocalypse to turn them on when a fight starts. The other bit, is the fact that increasing skill in Ordinator extends the length of the spells.

On the other hand, I've always found it odd to not see people piling the various flesh spells on top of whatever armor they've already got on. It's essentially a free extra chest plate worth of armor early, and gloves later on.

[Anteros]

On the other hand, I've always found it odd to not see people piling the various flesh spells on top of whatever armor they've already got on. It's essentially a free extra chest plate worth of armor early, and gloves later on.

This is what I always did. At least at first I did. The problem is that it's not really necessary in Skyrim since you almost never get hit anyway, and like everyone else, I just didn't find it worth the time investment.

[The_Jackal]

My biggest problem with the mage armor line is that there's no reason not to just wear light armor. None. While I'm generally in favor of offering players freedom to explore their concept, I do feel like Skyrim's magic system did a poor job of articulating trade offs in terms of the mechanics available.

[Rynjin]

I like that Ordinator gives a few perks in Destruction and Alteration that increase spell effectiveness in robes at least.

[DigoDragon]

True dat. I couldn't play Skyrim without SkyUI.

I haven't played Skyrim yet with SkyUI.

I disagree. In fact, if you're playing vanilla Skyrim, there's very little point to investing in anything but health. See, in most cases, your most effective attack is going to be the standard, non-stamina draining one. Even if you need to power attack or block, the cost of such actions is so low as to be regenerated in seconds. Magicka is similarly useless, because you're able to get free spellcasting for up to two schools of magic, with near weightless 75%% cost reduction in the form of circlets/rings/amulets for the other three. Unless you're regularly casting expert and master level spells from all five schools of magic, you're better off just increasing your survivability. After all, if you run out of magic, you have to wait a while to cast again; if you run out of health, you die and have to run through all the progress you've made since your last save.

Eh, I suppose so. I've always preferred bows and early on I've never regretted investing a couple levels in stamina for the zoom (and then sprinting away when I nail the bandit leader in the head and his minions come pouring out of the camp like a Surge commercial).

[Spore]

My biggest problem with the mage armor line is that there's no reason not to just wear light armor. None. While I'm generally in favor of offering players freedom to explore their concept, I do feel like Skyrim's magic system did a poor job of articulating trade offs in terms of the mechanics available.

Your idea of "none" is a bit polarizing. You get increased magicka regen and the best vanilla mage armor is a robe. Sure almost anyone learns enchanting. But that is partly because crafting skills are OP.

[Triaxx]

I've found robed wizards do just fine. Even in vanilla, either Illusion based crowd control, or just piling on Destruction damage so nothing get's close. Armor spells are more for keeping those random arrows from insta-killing you.

[Rynjin]

TBF to Bethesda as well, I think they EXPECTED when they made the game more people would use Wards as a pure mage, which closes the Armor gap a bit.

That's my estimate based on how NPC mages play anyway.

[The_Jackal]

Your idea of "none" is a bit polarizing. You get increased magicka regen and the best vanilla mage armor is a robe. Sure almost anyone learns enchanting. But that is partly because crafting skills are OP.

I suppose if you forego crafting, there's a reason to wear robes, but I think that's a poor excuse for an incomplete and poorly balanced game system.

[Balmas]

TBF to Bethesda as well, I think they EXPECTED when they made the game more people would use Wards as a pure mage, which closes the Armor gap a bit.

That's my estimate based on how NPC mages play anyway.

If Bethesda expected that, then they really shouldn't have made dual-casting so central to being effective.

[Triaxx]

Or Wards so pitifully ineffective.

The only thing is that crafting eventually reaches a point for armor, where there's no return. You hit the armor cap, and then any more effort is totally wasted. As a wizard, there's no need to waste that many resources, when I get a spell that gives me instant armor cap. And if I max enchanting, I can massively boost my magicka, and Magicka regen, and proceed to roll over the top of just about anything.

[The_Jackal]

Or Wards so pitifully ineffective.

The only thing is that crafting eventually reaches a point for armor, where there's no return. You hit the armor cap, and then any more effort is totally wasted. As a wizard, there's no need to waste that many resources, when I get a spell that gives me instant armor cap. And if I max enchanting, I can massively boost my magicka, and Magicka regen, and proceed to roll over the top of just about anything.

Also, wards only block spells. Arrows, which are quite common and just as deadly, if not more, fly right through.

The way the various systems in the game work, it feels as if different teams worked on different parts of the game, and didn't ever compare notes.

[Anteros]

I just don't think that Skyrim is attempting to accomplish what you guys want it to. It's not some sort of survival or realism simulator. They want you to feel powerful. They want you to feel unrestricted. They couldn't care less if the gameplay is balanced or builds are equal. That isn't their goal. They have to be aware how easy it is to completely destroy any semblance of difficulty in the game. At this point it has to be intentional.

It works too. Skyrim is wildly popular for good reason. People like to feel powerful. They like making whatever type of character they want to play and steamrolling over the world like a hero out of legend. A lot of the skills and perks you can take in this game are pure flavoring for what type of character you want to play rather than any kind of tactical decision. They don't want your mage to feel obligated to wear robes if you don't want to. The entire point is that every single build is viable and powerful. Sure, individual skills might be over or underpowered, but on the whole none of that matters.

[Temotei]

Wards also block dragon breath entirely, which is by far the best use for them. If you can't find cover, putting up a cheap ward isn't hard even for a simpleton character.

[The_Jackal]

I just don't think that Skyrim is attempting to accomplish what you guys want it to. It's not some sort of survival or realism simulator. They want you to feel powerful. They want you to feel unrestricted. They couldn't care less if the gameplay is balanced or builds are equal. That isn't their goal. They have to be aware how easy it is to completely destroy any semblance of difficulty in the game. At this point it has to be intentional.

I don't think it would take an enormous level of effort to look at their magic vs. crafting mechanics and get them into something approaching parity. And I find fault with the notion that 'because it's single player, balance doesn't matter'. If that's true, why put in a difficulty slider? Because as things work now, if you want to play a Legendary difficulty game as a magic user, you need to mod heavily. I'm not asking for intricately tuned balance fit for a multiplayer game, here. I just think that putting a designer on fixing the balance and scaling issues for, like, a week, would go a long way toward making the game better.

Also, if you look at Fallout IV, you can see that they are trying to make their games more balanced. Fallout 4, while by no means perfect, actually implements good common-sense game design principles like diminishing returns, better weapon balance, and fewer multiplicative scaling systems. So they are getting better.

As for why it's important for a single-player game, well, my reasoning goes like this: You shouldn't have to know the underlying game mechanics for them to be balanced and sensible. You shouldn't have to know that 567 armor is a magic number in Skyrim, or that magic resistance caps out at 85%. More should be better, and the rate of improvement should be simple, observable, and intuitive. WoW did this exceedingly well with their armor system. At any given level, adding more armor would result in a linear increase in your effective health. So, if, at level 60, 300 armor raised your effective health by 5%, then adding another 300 armor would also increase your effective health by another 5% (of the base, not the previous total). The result is a system that is, yes, quite arithmetically complex, but also highly intuitive. There's no magic number, more is just better. Fallout 4 also has a similar system, where at low levels of armor, relative to incoming damage, the armor behaves more like a threshold system, and as the ratio of armor to damage improves, it acts more like a ratio-based system of damage reduction. There's never an amount of armor that's pointless, or worse to have for the wearer.

When you contrast those kinds of well-designed systems with say, Skyrim's magic system, where deep investment into perks and itemization in Magic really do almost nothing for your damage output, or where the end-game paradigm of 'zero cost spells' make early acquisition of magic school basic perks a waste, it's pretty reasonable to point out the system's shortcomings, IMO.

It works too. Skyrim is wildly popular for good reason. People like to feel powerful. They like making whatever type of character they want to play and steamrolling over the world like a hero out of legend. A lot of the skills and perks you can take in this game are pure flavoring for what type of character you want to play rather than any kind of tactical decision. They don't want your mage to feel obligated to wear robes if you don't want to. The entire point is that every single build is viable and powerful. Sure, individual skills might be over or underpowered, but on the whole none of that matters.

Freedom, flexibilty, and power are in no way incompatible with good game balance and system design. I'd argue that they're actually mutually reinforcing. Good systems are easy for player to understand and feel powerful when using, without needing to sit down with a calculator to determine what's best. I'm not advocating for a 'all casters must wear robes' system. I'm advocating for a "don't make wearing robes a mistake", which is without question what it is now.

Wards also block dragon breath entirely, which is by far the best use for them. If you can't find cover, putting up a cheap ward isn't hard even for a simpleton character.

True, but not really an option for an archer, and not really necessary if you stack magic resistance and a couple of elemental resists.

[Triaxx]

Unfortunately for something to be 'balanced' no option can have any benefit whatsoever over any other option. So Robes and Light armor should thus provide absolutely equal protection to heavy armor, such that the selection is a purely cosmetic one.

If you want a balanced game, every enemy has one HP, all weapons do one HP and armor does nothing. Your game is now balanced, and so mind numbingly boring no one will ever want to play it.

There's no penalty to wearing robes, but there's no penalty to wearing armor. There's only benefit, which robes don't have. The fact that robes do come in several formats which are enchanted with abilities you cannot duplicate without exploiting the system isn't enough of a benefit to make them worth considering.

[Rynjin]

Unfortunately for something to be 'balanced' no option can have any benefit whatsoever over any other option. So Robes and Light armor should thus provide absolutely equal protection to heavy armor, such that the selection is a purely cosmetic one.

If you want a balanced game, every enemy has one HP, all weapons do one HP and armor does nothing. Your game is now balanced, and so mind numbingly boring no one will ever want to play it.

You very clearly do not understand what the concept of balance is. I get very, very tired of seeing this fallacy bandied about (on RPG forums especially).

"Balanced" and "homogenous" are not the same thing. They are different words, with different meanings, and when people conflate the two it irks me.

I sincerely do not understand how the idea that balance means "no option can have any benefit whatsoever over any other option" became so popular. You have all played games before. It does not require much critical thought to take note that, even if you can't articulate it, most games are balanced around tradeoffs and incomparable abilities. Numerics are not the only factor of a game.

For example, the ability to teleport 10 feet in a direction is not directly comparable to the ability to fire a target seeking projectile. They are two different abilities with two different uses, and characters that choose them will have different abilities, but can be balanced against each other when viewing the entire package to make sure neither character has inordinate impact on the game.

To go back to the example at hand, the different armor types do not need to have the exact same effect to be balanced. They simply need to provide incomparables unique to their style. If you get more armor in heavy armor, but the ability to dodge in light armor, and increased spell magnitude in no armor, you have created incomparables (and thus unique and potentially balanced build paths).

Likewise, things can be balanced based on tradeoffs. If, say, armor types had an increasing scale of stamina consumption and regeneration (and stamina were made a worthwhile ability with actual significant uses), light armor and robes might have less armor but would have a leg up in a different arena than heavy armor.

[LibraryOgre]

Unfortunately for something to be 'balanced' no option can have any benefit whatsoever over any other option. So Robes and Light armor should thus provide absolutely equal protection to heavy armor, such that the selection is a purely cosmetic one.

It's always about trade-offs.

One-handed weapons do less damage than two-handed weapons. But one-handed weapons are usually faster, and allow you to have a 2nd weapon, a shield, or a spell at the ready. That's a trade-off that results in balance.

Heavy armor protects you better, but more heavily impacts your stealth, magic skills, and speed. That's a balanced trade-off, in theory.

What is the advantage of magic over a bow? What is the advantage of a bow over magic? Balancing these things so there are fewer stupid options, and especially so stupid options aren't contradicted by the lore (i.e. It is a bad idea to be a Destruction-focused caster, because you won't do enough damage to keep up with a fully-perked warrior), is the key to creating an easily fun game, instead of a game with build-traps... things that should be effective, but simply are not.

[Aeson]

IAnd I find fault with the notion that 'because it's single player, balance doesn't matter'. If that's true, why put in a difficulty slider?

The difficulty slider is about adjusting the degree to which the player is challenged by the game (notionally, anyways; Bethesda difficulty sliders tend to be more about how much you want to feel like you're tickling a damage sponge to death while dodging knock-out punches), whereas balance between the various skills, abilities, spells, weapons, and armor is about equality of options presented to the player. These are not the same thing, they are not done for entirely the same reasons, and they are not equally important.

Also, while I do not entirely agree with the idea that equality of options is irrelevant to single player games, I also don't entirely disagree. As long as the game is fun more or less regardless of playstyle, game balance is largely irrelevant, whether in a single-player or multiplayer environment, and whether the environment is competitive or not. To a great extent, it is the imbalances between the playstyles which make them different - magic tends to be better at AoE or burst damage but worse at single-target or sustained damage than mundane, high mobility tends to come at a cost to durability, range tends to be safer but lower damage than melee, etc.* That one is sometimes better than another is fine. That one is always better than another can also be fine, so long as the weaker option isn't completely useless or only usable as a severe self-imposed handicap and the stronger option isn't so strong as to completely trivialize** the game. For better or worse, those are rather ill-defined lines.

*As general rules. Not necessarily true in any specific game or series of games.
**I will add that trivializing the game can be acceptable if whatever challenges posed by the game which the ability trivializes are not where the majority of the fun of the game is, and at least for me that is largely but not entirely true of combat difficulty in TES games, especially considering Bethesda's propensity to make things 'harder' by making them more tedious without really changing anything else. Other games do the 'tickle a damage sponge to death while dodging knock-out punches' thing far better than the TES games do, and if I wanted to do that I'd go play one of them instead of cranking the difficulty up in a TES game. For some people, the fun of a tycoon game is in getting to the point where money doesn't matter, for others the fun part of the game starts at the point where money doesn't matter, and for still others the fun part of the game is somewhere in between.

[Anteros]

There already are numerous benefits to wearing robes over heavy armor though. They're just being discounted. Weight is one and the sneak penalty is another. For mage specific things there are set bonuses that would require you to invest heavily into crafting to replicate with heavy armor.

Sure, there are skills that make light armor redundant if you invest in them. It makes no more sense to call robes under powered than it does to call armor under powered because there are ways to hit the armor cap while naked.

Almost all of my characters end up wearing robes until they have very high magic simply because the set bonuses are good, and replicating them on heavier armor with enchanting is a long and boring grind.

To Jackal: I vehemently disagree that Fallout 4 is anything resembling well designed, well balanced, or even a step in the right direction. It's worse than its predecessors in almost every way. This really isn't the thread to discuss it though.