Skyrim: Blocking and you, or This is why you keep dying.
- Thread starter Montezuma's Lawyer
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right now I've got a mage at lvl 20 or so. Destruction and Conjuration, but i'm upping restore and alteration now so I can abuse those perk passives
I think i'll try a pure diplomacy/trading character at one point, maxing speech and pick pocket etc. Bob the Travelling Salesman.
I think i'll try a pure diplomacy/trading character at one point, maxing speech and pick pocket etc. Bob the Travelling Salesman.
Oh, I'll go Block when I make a Warrior, aye. 'Tis fun. But I'm not sure whether to go 2h or 1h+shield (or take both and end up having both a bit weaker). My assassin still has a lot of faces to stab and sinuses to decorate with arrows, so I still have some time to decide. :]
My strategy definitely does consider defense without any points in Block. Train 1H, Heavy Armor, Resto, Alteration, Smithing. Take perks for 30% Magic Resistance, huge armor, and huge healing. Cast +Armor spells. Proceed to soak ALL THE DAMAGE. Heal if < 50%. Win the game.
I'm an avid Morrowind player, and genuinely annoyed by the way blocking is done in said game. In Skyrim, however, the shield has become my new best friend (So has dual-wielding a fire spell and being a feline flamethrower of doom, but I digress) and something I ALWAYS have with me. Blocking is a useful, and sometimes necessary skill when playing games like this, and the perks that go with the skill make it all the more awesome.
just power level smiting and the rest of the game becomes so trivial that you don't need to block
I can't block shit when existence is torn asunder from my radiant aura of hilarious and fucked-up console commands. I don't need them, but they're sure as hell fun.
i go spell thief, with a sword and spell, argonian, and sometimes i dual. I drop enemies so quickly i don't take much damage, i have no need to block...Montezuma said:
Dual Wielding is a perfectly valid fighting style and I've found it to be pretty entertaining, even on higher difficulties.
However, it's something you really have to build up to. Dual wielding right off the bat is a bad idea and very ineffective as you gain no bonuses of any kind for it. So, in stat form your character is essentially a moron who barely knows how to use a weapon and has sacrificed their ability to defend themselves in favor of using two weapons they again don't know how to use. On top of that, whether you use shield or not, your one-handed skill won't level up any faster dual wielding either, so again, no point until your character knows how to use it properly.
However, it's something you really have to build up to. Dual wielding right off the bat is a bad idea and very ineffective as you gain no bonuses of any kind for it. So, in stat form your character is essentially a moron who barely knows how to use a weapon and has sacrificed their ability to defend themselves in favor of using two weapons they again don't know how to use. On top of that, whether you use shield or not, your one-handed skill won't level up any faster dual wielding either, so again, no point until your character knows how to use it properly.
Imperial Battle mage reporting in. I use myself a lot of destruction, restoration and occasionally conjuration magic which tends to knock most enemies for 6. But if i run out of magicka before everything in the room is dead... why I just run in with my trusty greatsword and smack their shit up. Sometimes i'll block with my sword, but mostly I don't have to as a couple of power attacks will put most people in the ground.
Montezuma said:
Block is a fine skill, and your comments would make sense if there were not plenty of reasonable character builds/concepts that by definition would not be using this skill. This includes dedicated mages (who typically dual cast), or battle mages who for whatever reason can't block with the one handed weapon they are equipped with while casting with the other hand. Two Handed weapon users are capable of blocking to some extent with their melee
weapon.
One of my concerns about the game is specifically that it's too warrior-centric which has been a problem with other Elder-scrolls games in the past, with it being very hard to get by without resorting to melee with some frequency.
While it's still doable, you do reach a point where everything is so loaded with hit points and does so much damage that it's very difficult to take down enemies using nothing but magic, so if you say leveled up into your 20s using nothing but magic, you wind up having some problems, especially if you've been sinking your points largely into mana and have been using robes and hoods for the mana regen. Even with the 25 and 50% damage boosts to spells your still not getting the kind of damage a melee character does with a good enchanted weapon, and on top of that your a lot more fragile due to you not having put a lot into hit point, and the simple fact that robes with the much needed mana-regen feature don't provide armor. You need mad skills in enchanting to seriously enchant armor that provides similar levels of mana regen. While there is a resto perk that can give up to 50% mana regen no matter what your using that requires a lot of points (and thus levels) in nothing but resto.
The issue isn't coming up with a build that can survive, I mean that's easy, the issue is in making the kinds of roles people want to play viable, and really I think that's an issue with Skyrim, even if it's been an issue with other games in the series as well.
Truthfully I've noticed a bit of a warrior-balance issue in MMOs for a while now, most notably in WoW. Typically it's because the guys waving swords around want to be able to inflict huge amounts of damage and be able to easily down opponents. Fair enough, but when your looking at games with more than one character type, and your giving these guys all the hit points, the armor, and the abillity to dish out massive piles of damage, it causes issues when you try and balance mages and such who are supposed to be "glass cannons" and wind up just being "Glass" when you get down to it.
Part of what feeds this is that games are easy to itemize, and create a steady progression of gear. In comparison with magic it's all abillity based damage, and even if you start working on things that enhance those abillities you run into problems in creating parity between the spells and what warriors and such will have in terms of equivilent gear. Originally this was a problem with MMOs (which I could go on about at length) but I think it's been seeping into single player games more and more often as well, where I notice dedicated casters becoming something of a dying breed, and being somewhat overshadowed
when they do appear.
All comments about fan-made mods for the PC aside, I think Bethesda might need to do some gameplay tweaks here. Reducing the hit points and damage infliction abillity of the monsters would be too complicated, I'd think what they mostly need to do is up the damage spells cast by the player do by a factor of two or three, perhaps by adding a much more dramatic damage increase to the spells as your skill in Destruction magic raises.
My more or less dedicated mage is level 22 right now, and has a Destruction magic skill of 60 (which comes from using it almost constantly, it does not raise quickly). Throwing a 60 damage fireball in many cases amounts to the target going "lol, wut? was that a breeze?" even after a direct hit. I mean I've literally slammed Cave Bears with that thing and had their health bar barely even move. In comparison a well geared fighter with a simila level of advancement can ginsu the bloody things. Add to it that my mage has like 150 hit points and can get one hit frequently, or die from two or three hits sometimes, and that represents something of a problem.
The game IS playable, I mean I keep winning and progressing, but sometimes I feel like a bloody idiot kiting monsters around, or sitting ther channeling healing to mitigate damage while I wait for my companion or a summon to kill the target.
Of course then again, they might want to re-think some of the monsters as well. At one point I was wandering around and a dragon swooped down on me, and I managed to get it to engage a high-end bear. Let's just say the Dragon didn't appear to be coming out on the winning end, even though I wound up killing them both (for obvious reasons). Honestly... I think the Dovakiin can just go and retire, from a few situations like this I think the general wildlife will put an end to the dragon threat in short order.
Don't use block at all. Went into the game thinking barbarian and stuck to that the full way, gain a little of a hunter style as I went though when I went up against dragons and well the elk I was hunting. Skill set up has been two handed battle axes, smith, bow and light armour as my four core skills of focus. Anything that becomes too much of a hassle for my character gets resolved now by my character's ace which simply is my werewolf form. General tactics follow as such, bow to thin down enemy ranks as I sneak about, axe to rip through the more manageable numbers and if a target is showing too much hassle for the axe due to his own defences or still too many numbers with him, turn beast and rip through them, devouring what ever I need to heal up. It a solid tactic, has kept me from dying any horrific deaths. With a game like Skyrim you really have to try to go wrong with what ever you chose.
The reason I avoided the skill, was simply put:
If you kill someone fast enough with a seemingly endless number of power-strikes and knock-backs (and paralyzing potions if required), ranged enemy's are usually not a threat and mages are - yes very powerful at range - but easy asmy mother pie to sneak up on.
So really, there's no need for a lot of health.
Unless of course you're tanking - in which case you just need more heavy Armour than.... nope no pun, sorry.
But you get the point.
If you kill someone fast enough with a seemingly endless number of power-strikes and knock-backs (and paralyzing potions if required), ranged enemy's are usually not a threat and mages are - yes very powerful at range - but easy as
So really, there's no need for a lot of health.
Unless of course you're tanking - in which case you just need more heavy Armour than.... nope no pun, sorry.
But you get the point.
Who needs to block when I have dual daggers and am an assassinMontezuma said:
Not so effective against dragons but thats fine, my spells solve that.