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

Oh yeah, all the time. I put this down to playing with a n00bstick.

it is massively satisfying to fire arrows into the face of an advancing mob and watch it go down in three hits

also firebolt is a FANTASTIC FANTASTIC spell, my only complaint is sometimes I can't find the corpse afterward because it's been blasted so far across the room

just finished the companions quest line and ended it by giving up werewolfism. i found the whole plot a little uninvolving tbh, and they advance it offscreen i.e. important people die while you are off grinding another dungeon for someone... and then you have to go grind another one to avenge them etc.

i'm repeating complaints here, but too many of these places and groups and stories are unrelated and uninvolved with each other, or with the main crisis plot. you are free as a player, but it makes everything too modular. the 'compansions' exist as their own story to be experienced at your leisure. an ancient order of proud warriors, don't you think the imperials, the rebellion, the jarls, etc, would have some interest in what this group does? wouldn't the leadership have some opinion on what's happening in the world? and you BECOME the leader! but you don't really lead. there's no decisions to be made after that. it's not a position with any meaning. afaik it's no benefit to other, later storylines to be the leader of this group. this kind of stuff just bugs me.

is it me or are the quests kind of unimaginative? go here, kill this, get this. maybe i've been mainlining it too much the past couple days. if you're at all anal about completing things on your quest list you will go insane.

i've found the thieves guild and started stuff with them, hopefully those are a little different. it's really the micro-level pleasures that make this game great. just traveling through the wilderness and seeing what's out there is great. all the fiddly details of ingredients and crafting are just really involving.

"involve" is my word of the day i guess

from what I'm seeing of the mage quests, I am assuming the thieves guild is going to go about the same way

goole are you doing the main storyline or just side stuff like the mage/thief/companion guilds?

If it feels like you're just doing side story stuff it might be because you're just doing side story stuff.

i've done them up to the point where you go up the mountain but i haven't gone further than that.

Go farther.

heh ok!

i thought some of the thieve's guild stuff was engaged and there's a few brothers quests that were pretty different from the standard quest-thing and engaging

engaging twice + typo anyway whatever

also firebolt is a FANTASTIC FANTASTIC spell

is firebolt an actual spell, or is just using fire and shock at the same time, left and right hand?

i haven't even tried mixing up magic. i have the doublecast perk (or whatever it's called) so whenever i double up on magic it's usually two fireballs, or two shocks.

firebolt is an actual spell.

dang, i was hoping that there was a spell-combining aspect of the game that i could still explore!

That would be pretty sweet but at least you can use two spells at the same time.

oh god, if there was spell alchemy I REALLY would never play the main storyline (not that I'm playing it now, lol)

just imagine combining Muffle and any Destruction spell; you could make things explode into flame/ice/lightning by CREEPING PAST THEM

somehow the depth of this has gradually put me less interested in playing it. maybe over the holiday.

I want clairvoyance and sparks so I can feel like I'm walking the pattern in Amber.

there should just be a generic "summon artronarch" spell and the destruction spell you equip should determine its type

or you could dual wield "summon artronarch" and get an artronarch that throws smaller artronarchs at your foes

guys fyi i am going to spend this evening playing a spiderweb software game

http://www.spidweb.com/images/Exile1/exile_shot.gif

yeah

protip for PC skyrimmers: if you're an archer, increase the actor draw distance to see bad guys way off before they see you and maximize sniping efficacy.

I keep forgetting that I took the sniper mode perk

also, it's a little silly that the fight with the ghost dog and the ghost wight sitting on the throne with its back to me took like 10 tries for me to beat, but the end boss was easily defeatable by sniping at him from a ledge and the boss back at the school was easily defeatable because there was a long stretch of time where he just stood there with his back to me and let me hit him with a bunch of firebolts

Is this the fight in the leviathan dungeon while you're trying to get this crazy staff? I've just finished that one last night. What am I meant to do with all these stupid dragon bones again?

Also, where are you guys getting all your cash from? I've only got like 1.5k, not enough to buy a house. I keep dumping stuff in my room at college, but I can't stay at college forever (I assume).

You gotta sell some shit man, get out of college and go to whiterun, shopping capital of skyrim! or even windhelm. and, uh, ask the shopkeepers if they have anything for sale.

Is this the fight in the leviathan dungeon while you're trying to get this crazy staff? I've just finished that one last night.

Yeah, me too. I thought it was really, really odd that the two fights before that (the wight and the ghost dog, followed by the two wights that will steal your artronarch from you) were waaaaaaaaaaay harder than anything I encountered in the boss room; in fact, the only thing that hit me in the boss room were a few stray blasts from his storm artronarch. I just stood up on the ledge and rained arrows and firebolts on them while Lydia kept their attention.

I am pretty sure the fight after that in the college bugged out on me but I'm not really complaining, lol.

yeah that ghost wight on the throne was a fucking nightmare, took me multiple times as well

I basically spent 35 minutes banging my head against a wall until it occurred to me to try switching from fire to lightning; two attempts later BOOM DED (and it was only 2 attempts because Lydia jumped into my lightning and died; I think she needs some serious therapy/counseling and the writers missed a golden opportunity for extra hilarity by not noticing her multiple attempts to kill herself during playtesting and scripting her dialog around that)

I don't even remember that wight, he must have been butter under my greatsword of doom.

he periodically shouts your weapon out of your hand

yeah actually when i think about it i think most of my restarts were thanks to dead lydia. goddamn her and tight quarters tbh.

speaking of which, my dog vanished in a big old dungeon and i fear he may be ded ;_;

goddamn her and tight quarters tbh

I'm telling yr wife

haha yeah lets not add to the already existing marital troubles of "why does that annoying woman keep saying the same shit over and over again in that game?!" re:skyrim

Xmas eve skyrim update: got a dog. Barks a lot. Has questionable paw/ground interface. Defends me with gusto but otoh just another AI - artificial imbecile - that gets in the way in narrow corridors. Also got amazing new house in Markarth. Spent five minutes trying to get the dog to sit in front of the fire instead of the middle of the room.

Strange things were afoot in Skyrim over the christmas period. Was just wandering around Markarth minding my own business when I was suddenly surrounded by a whirl of glowing light and i was told that I'd absorbed a dragon's soul. A couple of days later - perhaps it had been there a while - I found a dead dragon in the marketplace. Unlike dragons I'd killed it hadn't burnt itself to a cinder, was just lying there all fat and scaly. Later on, on a trip to Riften I had to fight a dragon outside the city walls. I put the beast to the sword, then turned around to find Lydia and my dog beating the shit out of a horse.

so after the main quest is finished (whatever that is), I can still go around and do other stuff, right?

Yup

an impromptu extra day off due to car trouble turned into an embarrassingly long marathon stint yesterday. i ended up doing basically the whole thieves' guild questline. and hit 100 sneak!

a cool story imo but similar to the companions in that the final stretch involves a pretty creepy mystical element. idk, it's fantasy i guess...

*very minor spoiler*

i wish i could take back the Companions mission where you get the werewolf skill. i never, ever use it, and now i can never be fully rested again?

Can you not get cured?

http://www.gamefront.com/skyrim-how-to-cure-being-a-werewolf/

this game is good but man, i am tired of having to look up stuff on the internet re: completion of quests thx to bugs/haphazard notifications. case in point, the galdurs amulet thing where you get the three pieces and then uh.

also this dog needs to stfu

oh, you can just cure it? i don't know, several times i've had all status effects removed, and yet whenever i sleep it's like "YOU HAVE WEREWOLF BLOOD NOW, FUCK YOU!"

i'll try polyphonic's link when i get home (pretty much all game-related sites are blocked at work)

there is a way to get out of it but it's not scripted very well. i can just spoil it for you here if you don't want to wait

also i cant seem to really marathon this that much, i can basically run a dungeon, load up, dump the stuff in my chest at the mages guild, and then its really hard to roll out and do it all over again right away.

also i think i kind of dislike doing the onehanded + magic thing in this, mostly because the aiming of the magic seems so goddamn fiddly all the time. i pretty much just use shouts for hard fights and only use magic on weaker dudes when i am trying to level

Do conjure instead. It aims itself!

yeah i use reanimate and conjuration the most by far. kinda pissed that i havent figured out how to cast muffle yet, because that sounds pretty awesome.

i do a lot of flipping between weapons and spells and stuff mid-fight. my favorites menu is probably a little too long