I am sworn to carry your burdens - Skyrimming for fun and profit

http://myfoodlooksfunny.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/funny-food-photos-bacon-skyrim-helmet.jpg

I was going to post to the new Skyrim thread but then I took an arrow to the knee.

now that we can talk openly w/o the worry of boring peeps, 2 things

1. if you want to really tank out Lydia, she will wear any dwarven armor that you give her, even though she wont wear any of the other heavy armor afaik

2. if i had it all to do over again, i would have been not stupid and realized that you can train 5 times per level advance, which means that by now at level 25 i could have dumped 125 EXTRA LEVELS into all of my who gives a shit dont use this skills.

Lydia's wearing the steel kit I gave her.

actually it seems you can train 5 times per level per skill afaict

I tested this by leveling conjuration and then looking at resto to see if the per-level counter was incremented there too and it wasn't

whoa that could be kind of gamebreaking actually, given that i have piles of gold and nothing to do with them pretty much all the time

lydia has refused to wear anything i give her that isnt dwarven for some reason - i figured this out because suddenly she had gold boots on at one point

not that that keeps here from leaping from ledges like an idiot and making me reload.

so what you are saying is Lydia is The Girl with the Golden Boots

does she want her pretty mind back

Lydia wore whatever i gave her that was highest rated, inc any heavy armour, and used whatever highest rated weapon was too. same with Roggi, who refuses to use a shield if i give him any 2h weapons to carry, despite being a supposed shield specialist. i am about the switch him out for a mage i just met, so i'll find out if that guy weighs himself down with plate armour and a glass warhammer too.

you can only buy 5 skills points per level across all levels. it doesn't take long for the cost to become exorbitant for anything skills you actually use.

across all skills, i mean

yeah I don't have nearly enough cash for all that training.

oh so this is broken on the PS3 then? or maybe I just can't read

I gotta say though that I love that you can level by selling stuff to vendors and creeping around, it's kind of hilarious

also by making daggers and bracers

man lydia is broken enough working right that it makes me really irritated that she seems to be super broken in my game. i know this because i gaver her some steel plate armor (rating 70 iirc) and it just sat there in her inventory, but when i gave her the dwarven stuff (rated 60) she put it on right away. and then jumped off a cliff to thank me.

i am not digging the leveling so much in stuff like smithing and whatever, mainly because i am normally so loaded down with loot that it isnt like i am going to haul a bunch of dwarven ingots around with me. also i gotta stop with the alchemy or find somewhere to sell potions for a good price.

i am on PS3 dan

nah dan i am playing on xbox so it might just be broken in my house

xpost oh wait hmmm maybe its broken on 360 then?

i think i have 40k gold, but i am not spending 10k of that to get 5 points better at Speech. i need to save it, just in case.

i am not digging the leveling so much in stuff like smithing and whatever, mainly because i am normally so loaded down with loot that it isnt like i am going to haul a bunch of dwarven ingots around with me. also i gotta stop with the alchemy or find somewhere to sell potions for a good price.

Why isn't Lydia carrying all your ingots and ore and dragon bones and mammoth tusks?

I think I'm beginning to understand alchemy. I still have no clue how to make a healing potion tho.

she is carrying my dragon bones/scales but i am constantly running out of storage in this game. my chest in my SECRET LOCATION IN CASE PEOPLE HAVENT DONE THE QUEST YET is full of shit that i will probably never take out. in fact ive just started dropping potions on the ground right after i make them because it is hard to give a shit about them.

also scrolls are pretty stupid and pointless in this game.

protip on alchemy: start by eating one of every ingredient you have, if you havent done that already

so we're edging towards "Dan can't read", awesome

or it's just buggy as FUCK, I mean I had to reload my game because I broke a bookcase by loading it with books after the game told me it had reached capacity

i am not digging the leveling so much in stuff like smithing and whatever, mainly because i am normally so loaded down with loot that it isnt like i am going to haul a bunch of dwarven ingots around with me.

Why don't you just stockpile all of this stuff at yr house in Whiterun and periodically go back to it for creation binges? There's a smelter behind smith woman's house and you can use all of her tools or the Skyforge, plus there's a tanning rack around there too, and you can put an alchemy table in yr house and I think the magic store lady has an enchanter and if she doesn't, the jarl's mage has one (AND an alchemy table too)

There's even a dude who will let you split firewood if you have an axe

off top of my head, blue flower, wheat, skeever hide are all common ingredients for a heal potion

alchemy is fun but totally unnecessary for the warriory build i have. otoh smithing and enchanting are essential. i have spent so much time compulsively mining :(

at one point i couldn't work out why i had so little room left to carry stuff and then i realized i was carrying 150pts of alchemy ingredients. so yeah, keep that shit in a barrel somewhere.

protip on alchemy: start by eating one of every ingredient you have, if you havent done that already

yeah, but don't do this in the middle of a battle. 'oh I will just pick and eat these mushrooms while fithing five mages, *gets poisoned*'

I'm kinda sad that both my bookshelves in Whiterun are broken, one I can't store any books on the bottom shelf, the other I can't remove the ones that are there.

fithing that's FIGHTING

i think part of it is that everything i can smith is just straight up useless to me, making a bunch of hide and studded armor when i can find way better shit by slapping around bad dudes = whats the point? enchanting on the other hand is awesome.

did we ever do the thing where we said how we were playing this btw? or was that back on ol ILX?

the point = FREE LEVELS

free levels plus with higher smithing skill can improve your gear more. i can get stuff to flawless atm, i guess there are still a couple grades better than that tho, somehow.

flawless with extra pink ribbons on

idk maybe i am being a little too old skool rpg in this, but theres like no reason my dude would be banging away on an anvil to make daggers and shit so i hate the idea that i should do that to game the system? reminds me of why the fable series keeps failing altho at least that doesnt seem serious about what its doing so when you have to kick a chicken a bunch of times to level or whatever it isnt grating in the same way.

(obv this is still better than the last elder scrolls experience where a prime way to level was jumping all the time forever)

I didn't even think about the gear improvement point

It is pointless - until you get better and can improve yr kit - but I still like it? I prefer the play-acting to idk whatever arbtitrary point-allocating systems you had in old skool rpgs.

Quality	       Skill Required	           Effect
      Without Perk	With Perk	Armor	Other
Fine	        14	14	        +2	+1
Superior	31	22	        +6	+3
Exquisite	65	40	        +10	+5
Flawless	100	57	        +13	+7
Epic            134	74	        +17	+8
Legendary	168	91	        +20	+10

xp I mean I'm the kind of player who obessively fills his bookshelves with books, tries to eat proper food, won't go to sleep in the daytime...

it's a little disconcerting that there is ZERO pressure from the game to actually do anything; I've basically been having a blast running around doing all sorts of irrelevant side and minor quests to the point where by the time I went back and finished the "go get the Horn of Jurgenflurgen" quest I was level 15

xp yeah, i like the idea that practicing at shit makes you better at that shit and getting better at shit makes you better overall. i think this is maybe the best character advancement system i have played

'skyrimming' still sounds to me like a reference to a mile-high club activity

but this may be the game that pushes me to finally move on from ps2 ownership

lol dan i haven't got jurg's horn yet and i am level 36. i am going the long way round.

this is the first time in a long time I've played a game that involved copious amounts of aiming where I haven't wanted to destroy the entire Earth out of frustration

xp: lol awesome, how many dragons have you killed? I have done in a whopping... 3.

2. if i had it all to do over again, i would have been not stupid and realized that you can train 5 times per level advance, which means that by now at level 25 i could have dumped 125 EXTRA LEVELS into all of my who gives a shit dont use this skills.

― KERWRONG!!! (PROVEN BY BOOZE SCIENCE), Thursday, 15 December 2011 16:15 (33 minutes ago) Permalink

this is sort of backwards -- if training your skills doesn't give you "xp" toward your next level, then you are shorting yourself on levels, since your skills have a max of 100 but there is no level cap.

theoretically you could train yourself out of a whole level

besides, raising your skills is fkn easy, and training is like thousands of money. totally not worth it imo

"buying" skills points does advance your level just like earning them would

but yeah, v expensive

i think ive killed like 15 dragons but i still refuse to unlock shouts other than a few because WHAT IF SOMETHING BETTER COMES ALONG

xpost but training your skills does give you xp towards your next level tho

basically if i had it to do over again id do the training to get out of the weird stuff like speech and whatever that is harder to really level regularly but is super useful

am i the only one using like every skill except a few? i started as a theify dude but i'm basically doing everything i can now. not using much destruction or alteration, no heavy armor or two handed, and not much pickpocketing either. but other than that, everything, all the time.

this has the weird effect of giving me a high level (30 something now?) but none of my individual skills are that high, except sneak which is in the 70s

xp there's a speech exploit but its super fiddly as they always are

killed maybe a dozen dragons i would guess? i guess they come on stronger later on.

i am absolutely in love with the ice form shout. i got 2 words for it back to back from that archaeology dig where you do the college field trip and then from a dragon peak right by it. it has been a total game changer a few times already

speech xp is applied on every transaction based on the expense of the item -- but xp for stacks of items (arrows, etc) is given as if it were 1x that thing. so, selling them all 1x a time...

yes i have done this.

I got given this for xmas by my bff and he's nagging me to play it even tho Ive hardly got thru Oblivon yet. Can I just mage it up and wander around doing spells/alchemy/side quests forever like I do in Obliv?

(lol such a girl way to play I kno)

Pretty much. There's no real imperative to do the main quest but you do get some great perks.

Cool, I must get started on it while the holidays are still on then.

(would have started sooner but I took an arrow to... etc)

Old student-slob-days gaming partner visited from America, so we broke into my girlfriend's house to play this on her son's ps3 while she was in the West Country. All got a bit messy when we set off her extraordinarily loud burglar alarm, but she was very understanding, indulgent even, and me & old friend wasted precious grown-up weekend passing controller back and forth.

After the weekend marathon, can now only fit in an hour here and there, but found a rhythm of wandering into a side-quest, eating mushrooms, hammering a few bandits/draugrs/vampires, then tinkering at the forge/alchemy lab.

Became a companion and a bard.

Started off a bit confused & dropping perks all over the place, but getting comfortable with one-hand, heavy armour, sometimes dual wield, sometimes shield.

I;ve been messing around with side quests waaaaaay to much. I'm on L17 and I've only just got the Dragonstone! However, I do have some kickass archmage robes and L55 on archery, so happy days.

My follower has disappeared (I don't think she died, she just . . . went) so I need to recruit. Is Lydia the best of the bunch, and where do I get her from?

You need to kill a dragon at Whiterun - activated after you get the dragonstone. Then the Jarl will appoint her to be your personal slave housecarl.

Aaaah, I think killing my first dragon is next on my to do list. I'll give it a go tonight and see what happens.

so THIS is where the skyrim thread is

guys: skyrim on mac! baller!

The idea of playing through to L17 before unlocking the dragons in a game about dragons is so great.

Now I will listen to Therapist Sweater/J3ff T.'s "Dragon" to celebrate.

this DL of skyrim i got already had a character started (but only right at the v beginning), so i played that guy up to level 6 or so, and i did the dragonstone quest super early, like @ 4/5 i think.

started a new character for the ~full experience~ and have skipped that dragonstone quest for now, just cuz i didn't want to go slog through a dungeon twice in a row. just joined the dark bros

kinda envious of peeps that havent started fighting dragons yet since the goddamn things seem to be everywhere now in my game. still tho, shouts are awesome (slow time u my boo). i am a little shocked by the lack of variety enemywise in this game though, pretty bored with killing draugrs and dwarven spiders over and over and over

ok so here is a question that is maybe really stupid, but: does skyrim automatically adjust the levels of your foes to whatever level you are? i've never seen any indication that the dudes i'm fighting are like LVL 60 TROLLs or anything, but it certainly ~feels~ like quest-specific foes are tailored to your current ability.

which, if true, is awesome game design, imo. i was always a little bummed in WoW that whole areas were unable to be explored because they were above yr paygrade. or that accidentally landing yourself in a new zone could mean instant death because even the lowliest creatures were totally elite. i never played AD&D or anything, but i always thought that the nice thing about DMs was that they could downgrade/tailor an adventure to be commensurate with the players' abilities. and in a sandbox game like skyrim, exploring and side-quests should be picked up or ignored by players for reasons other than "yeah i'm not ready for that right now."

(nb i'm basing this entirely on the fact that i got the dragonstone at level 4. and:

I;ve been messing around with side quests waaaaaay to much. I'm on L17 and I've only just got the Dragonstone! However, I do have some kickass archmage robes and L55 on archery, so happy days.

like, was your experience in the dungeon to get the stone just pitifully easy, or were the enemies scaled up to meet you? i didn't have much of a problem at the entry level (playing 'normal'), and i'd imagine that someone significantly higher on the food chain would breeze through the place)

some stuff def doesnt scale with you, for example my first fight with a giant was impossible but now they are relatively easy to kill, same with not having to run away from bears anymore. not sure about the quest stuff tho

well yeah that's why i was thinking 'quest-related' specifically.

i was able to kill the dragon for the dragonstone quest, and then soon after got aced because i thought i could step to a giant, being a dragonslayer and all

The second time I did the High Hrothgar quest I was farther along, and the enemies on the steps were much tougher than the first time when I only faced some wolves and the ice troll. There were a bunch of sabertooth tigers or whatever the second time, and some spiders.

how's the combat in this?

do you like first person melee?

that's a red line for a lot of people, but i'm getting into it. getting a rhythm down with the blocks, staggering, bashes and power attacks is pretty satisfying imo.

Killed my first dragon last night! Hurrah! wtf am I mean to with these dragon bones? I just left them there tbh, I need to offload some loot first.

re leveling up: It certainly feels like some baddies level up with me, and some aren't. Certainly saber-tooth bears or whatever don't panic me like they used to, but it still took me a couple of goes to kill the dragon.

The idea of playing through to L17 before unlocking the dragons in a game about dragons is so great.

I have to say, the perversity of this did attract me, but it was made easier by the game not really telling you which quests are the "main" quests and which are sidequests. Everything in the "misc" section I'm guessing is a sidequest, but everything else seems to be given equal importance in your journal, so I didn't even twig that maybe dragons were like, the big device around which the game revolves. Tho I suppose I could have worked it out by the whole dragon-attacks-city opening sequence. Oh well.

And I've been enjoying the game sans dragons, just bumbling around the map "adventuring", so I didn't feel much imperative to get on with the main story. I tend to do that with sandbox games tho; I'm very much a sidequest kinda guy.

i was happy just goofing around with sidequests until they all started involving traveling to the very edge of the Whiterun, past several locations i'd never been to before. now i kind of want to get back to the main quest to move things forward a bit. there's a war map in the castle of ulfric stormcloak that reveals most of the locations in whiterun if you examine all the little pieces, and i wish i never would have done so. it was more fun to lack knowledge about what was in the unexplored territory of the world map. now i look at it and see dozens of additional locations in whiterun alone and feel like it will take me the rest of my life to finish the game (in a bad way)

finished the main quest yesterday but will prob keep playing for awhile just so I can get some better armor (I have a full set of dwarves at the moment)

ah transmute spell, you are a grinder's dream

Alchemy for fun and profit: I enchanted some alchemy gear (hat, gauntlets, necklace & ring at +20%) and potions made from two cheap ingredients sell for 120 - 750. The problem has become offloading them, but every cycle through Solitude-Windhelm-Riften-Whiterun yields 5000 gold + enough ingredients to repeat. I'm looking into that Solitude mansion at a young level 33.

A special set of armour just for alchemy! Nice thinking. And one for enchanting too? And for smithing...

The Smithing gear is actually much more effective on a +% basis. There's no enchantments that improve enchanting, but potions can be made.

Downside of the level advancement from learning crafting skills means I'm facing level 35 Elder dragons with level 25 combat skills (but good kit).

wait you can own property in this??

yeah... what did you think lydia was all about?

(jkjkjk!)

Do quests for the jarl in each hold (or high monarch in Solitude) and you become thane and can buy houses, starting at 5k gold (unfinished) in Whiterun rising to 25k in Solitude. Double those figures for full furnishings.

You can also invest 500 gold in businesses to increase cash available for transactions, as a perk in the Speech tree.

The opposite of how I play Skyrim (I've yet to return to High Hrothgar): a speed run in 2 hours 47 minutes (the current record is 2 hours 13 minutes). Too many spoilers for me to watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mmg6H2qxFAw

speedrunning skyrim seems like totally missing the point

Yeah but 2 hours and 47 minutes later you have plenty of time to play it the right way.

So far the only person or creature he has killed is the dude with the book and the king Draughr in Bleak Falls. He is finished with Dragonstone quest and is only like 1/4 of the way through L1.

Read the collected written works of Skyrim offline on your Kindle, iPad, or other device.

in addition to other treasures (including all my creative writing notebooks from grade school and all my sports + trading cards) i found these in my parent's garage while cleaning out my boxes this week

http://i41.tinypic.com/55gzfm.jpg

sanpaku that is nuts. the writing in those books is so badddd

Eh, they're quick reads, and its a better option for absorbing some of the background (this is my first Elder Scrolls game) than sitting at the desk.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=bPHtAHxB3iI

arena!!! lulz

i kind of don't like enemy scaling, it can seem a little bit like it defeats the point. -- i mean then why even level at all.

ff8 had an interesting system but it was broken every which way.

whatever, i am going to start playing new vegas now

Killed the first Dragon last night at level 7. was hungry to get with that shouting that everyone is talking about... As a Melee character, you just have to stay away from the business end of the Dragon, but I'm not looking forward to the later much tougher Dragons..

Not sure whether to stick to 2-handed melee or go though a few dungeons building up the one handed just for a backup.

I swear I hear Colonel Tigh from Battlestar Galactica do one of the opening voices and now every new character is a game of "is it Tigh?"

One-handed is for wimps. Quit cowering behind a shield.

i would use two shields if i could

One-handed is for wimps. Quit cowering behind a shield.

Dual wield one-handed = 2x the chances to accidentally clap Lydia round the head.

One-handed is for wimps. Quit cowering behind a shield.

one-hand + magic

rawwwwrr!

I swear I hear Colonel Tigh from Battlestar Galactica do one of the opening voices

Yeah, he's that imperial captain dude.

Is anyone crazy enough to attempt a complete game? I guess it would all locations discovered, all areas cleared, all main quests completed?

"frakkin nords"