u/BeignetEtouffee

I got into nursing to improve my quality of life, but now I'm so miserable everyday one year in that I'm starting to think that it's all been counterproductive. I'm about ready to throw in the towel and apply to an EVS position that just opened up near me.

Anyone else?

I thought it might be fun to have a discussion about things Skyrim actually improved from Oblivion, rather than the other way around.

I'll start with a controversial one: Restoration. Hear me out. Restoration in Oblivion is arguably the best skill in the game. The ability to cast fortify skill makes training certain skills like security, speechcraft, and mercantile completely pointless, and greatly boosts your ability to cast higher level/costly summons, destruction spells, etc. You can even fortify restoration itself before casting other fortify spells. Or fortify intelligence and willpower to reach otherwise unattainable Magicka pools. It's truly a broken skill at level 100.

My problem with restoration is that it's not very good at all until level 75 (and to be honest, only level 100 does it become truly broken). It's incredibly tedious to train it because the devs presumably knew how broken it can be at higher levels and made it the slowest to level magic skill.

Honestly, Skyrim with its perk system (especially when paired with illusion and vampirism) makes restoration more useful throughout the game without being completely game breaking at higher levels. I like it a lot better, even though it's weaker.

Anyway, I'm sure this isn't a 100% original topic, but I think it would still be fun to hear what everyone thinks about the move from Oblivion to Skyrim and what Bethesda actually did right.

Don't get me wrong -- Endurance is arguably the best attribute in the game (a small minority would say Speed). However, in early-mid game you're not likely to need that much health to survive most enemy encounters, and by late game the appearance of items like Ring of the Iron Fist, Necklace of Swords and Escutcheon of Corrol for Reflect Damage and Mundane Ring for Resist Magic make your total health not all that important. Some of these items are so easily obtainable (you have a guaranteed drop of the Mundane Ring during the main quest) that I actively avoid using them on some characters/builds because doing so removes all challenge and effectively ends the run.

My point is, I've long argued that attributes are overrated and that Endurance is the only one that really matters, but now that I've spent a good deal of time in end game with multiple different characters I'm starting to feel that even Endurance can be ignored. It might be a fun challenge run actually to just never train it all and see if you can beat the entire game with 30 Endurance and maybe Alteration/Mysticism to buff you up before fights. It would certainly make level progression more fun not having to automatically put points into Endurance because it's "important" when you could instead put them into something like Speed or even Personality for flavor.

Anyway, I'm starting to ramble now. What do you all think? Is Endurance actually overrated or am I smoking too much skooma?

I'll always defend the Fighter's Guild as one of the best factions in not just Oblivion, but all of the Elder Scrolls games. I think that people don't give it a fair chance because it takes a while to really get going. But it's a great way to money because of the number of humanoid enemies, the missions are fun with lots of combat and unique characters, and there's some wild things that happen near the end of the questline.

I also think the Dark Brotherhood is overrated. It's probably my least favorite questline.

At high levels you're practically required to use custom spells to keep up with enemy level scaling. Yes, there are workarounds: triple damage poisons, expert and master level summons, fortify fatigue sigil stones, and fire/frost/shock enchantments come to mind immediately; but these workarounds have their own set of problems that makes you wish you didn't have to do all that in the first place. I don't want to spend hours picking ingredients or looting every barrel I come across for loaves of bread and wedges of cheese. I don't want to use summons to basically play the game on autopilot while I sit back and do nothing. I don't want to fill every enchantment slot with fortify fatigue and have to use fortify fatigue potions and spells to mitigate how weak physical damage is in this game at high levels. Why couldn't Bethesda have just made default spells actually decent?

Yes, custom spellmaking/enchanting is easy to unlock, but it becomes frustratingly easy to break the game with it. All you have to do is go a little overboard and the game becomes trivial. Maybe I'm just using the wrong spells/don't know where to find them. Or maybe I've simply played too much of this game and nothing is a challenge for me anymore.

It's depressing for me because 80% of the game is incredibly well balanced. You can absolutely play Oblivion without any jank using weapons skills and default spells alone, get through all of the main guilds questlines and main story, and do just fine until late game. It's once you're actually in late/end game that level scaling becomes absurd and you're forced to resort to these tricks to just keep up. I wish Bethesda had designed this part of the game better, but it feels like it was an afterthought because it's so poorly balanced.

/rant

One of the more common pieces of community wisdom I see floating around is that it's best to wait until level 25+ to obtain unique items. I'm not convinced this is true.

Let's use Rockshatter as an example. At level 25 Rockshatter does 20 pts shock damage and weakness to shock 35% for 20 seconds. This is pretty good. Let's compare that to Rockshatter at level 1, though. At level 1 Rockshatter does 5 pts of shock damage and weakness to shock 10% for 20 seconds. So the clear winner would appear to be Rockshatter at level 25.

However, this is not the full picture. At level 25, due to level scaling, enemy health pools are dramatically inflated compared to lower levels. A goblin at level 1 has 15 health, while at level 25 a goblin warlord has 750 health (maybe my math is wrong here lmao). This doesn't apply just to goblins, of course, but they're among the worst enemies when it comes to level scaling.

If you do the math here, Rockshatter at level 1 is DOZENS of times better than at level 25, relatively. This remains true until at least mid levels.

Another factor to consider that I don't see mentioned much is that enchanted weapons are hard to come by at low levels without enchanting your own. Custom enchanting is a beast in itself that blows away anything you can obtain as a quest reward, so I won't even get into that. The point is, I'd rather have a "weak" enchanted item early game that's stronger relatively, than a strong enchanted item in late game that I can either just enchant myself or is functionally weaker than the early game version because of enemy level scaling.

Is there something I'm missing here?

Balance in RPGs is notoriously hard to achieve, and I think that, on the whole, Bethesda did a fine job with Oblivion. Compared to its predecessors, especially Daggerfall, it's more difficult to create a completely broken character straight out the gate; and unlike in those games, where picking the "wrong" major skills meant struggling to land hits on enemies or successfully cast spells, in Oblivion you can still function with a poorly made character.

However, it's undeniable that some races in Oblivion are better than others (please don't cancel me 😭).

When the devs designed the different races in Oblivion it appears that they attempted to balance each race with advantages/disadvantages as any good RPG maker would. For example, male Altmer/High Elves start with a pitifully low 30 Strength attribute, but a quite good Intelligence and Willpower attribute. In the same vein male Redguard start with both 50 Strength and Endurance but have the worst possible starting Intelligence and Willpower attribute at 30 each.

On the surface this would seem to create a balanced selection of races. The problem, however, lies with racial bonuses.

Using male Altmer again as an example: male Altmer start with 30 Strength, as we've stated before, and 40 Endurance, which, if you know anything about this game, is not great. This is balanced by their strong starting Intelligence and Willpower attributes. This attribute spread alone would make them good spell casters compared to other races like Nords or Redguard. However, their strengths don't stop there. Altmer also get a whopping +100 bonus to Magicka, which is equivalent to two end game Fortify Magicka Sigil Stones as well as a +10 skill bonus to Destruction, which is one of the most powerful and slow-levelling skills in the game. Also, despite starting with 30 Speed, they are the fastest race in the game because of their height. All this at the measly cost of +25 weakness to magic.

What was Bethesda thinking? Altmer being so good doesn't even make sense within the logic of their own game because there's another way you can get +100 Magicka at character creation: by selecting the Apprentice birthsign. The Apprentice birthsign grants the player +100 Magicka at the harsh cost of +100 weakness to magic. This makes the Apprentice birthsign strategically interesting if you decide to pick it, because even magical enemies like imps become more of a threat with this birthsign. For some reason, the devs didn't extend this logic to Altmer, whose natural +25 weakness to magic is so small you often forget it's even there.

Continuing along this line, Breton can be thought of as Bethesda's defensive mage equivalent to Altmer. Breton, like Altmer, are weak physically but have strong Intelligence and Willpower attributes. Like Altmer, Breton get a Magicka bonus but it's "only" +50 Magicka, which if you're keeping track is equal to an end game Fortify Magicka Sigil Stone. Where Breton really get broken though is their +50% resistance to magic. This is arguably even more broken then Altmer starting with +100 Magicka, as it's equivalent to a Mundane Ring which is an end game drop and possibly the best item in the game. They also get +10 to Restoration, which is by far the slowest magic skill in the game and one of the strongest skills in general. They get all this at character creation.

Breton and Altmer being so powerful wouldn't be as big a deal if warrior races like Nords, Redguard, Imperials and Orcs also received equally broken racial bonuses. The problem is that physical damage is already weak in Oblivion, so these races really needed a stronger incentive for choosing them over the magical races. Orcs do, admittedly, receive a +25% resistance to magic, which makes them the best of this bunch, but it's still not much when compared to Bretons' +50% resistance to magic and +50 Magicka.

One solution would have been to give these races an even larger bonus to physical skills and more useful unique racial abilities. Instead of Berserk, what if Orcs did more damage the lower their health bar fell? This kind of thing could lead to fun, high stakes fights where the player is constantly trying to manage their health to maximize DPS while dodging enemy attacks to avoid dying. Maybe Redguard and Nords could start with +20 Blade and Blunt respectively instead of the +10 they presently receive, to really highlight their physical prowess early on when physical damage is still strong.

I don't know. Oblivion is broken in many ways, races being just one of those ways. What would you do to balance the races or do you think that it's actually fine the way it is?

All right folks, I'm back again to promote my better-than-efficient-leveling strat I like to call "efficient skilling." If you have no idea what I'm talking about, that's fine, I'll give you a quick run down:

The general gist behind efficient leveling is to achieve a +5 attribute bonus to your chosen attributes upon every level up. In the OG Oblivion this requires not only training your major skills but also your minor skills in order to achieve enough skill ups per level to translate to a +5 attribute bonus on level up. Somewhere along the line the majority of the player base decided that this kind of micromanaging was not only optimal, but essential to keep the game world from outpacing your player character due to level scaling. The sentiment that leveling up actually makes your character weaker is still rampant to this day.

However, I, and many others in this community believe that efficient leveling is actually anything but efficient. In my humble opinion efficient leveling is both boring and, ironically, makes your character weaker for the majority of the game. So I've decided to promote a different strategy that I like to call "efficient skilling."

The basic premise of efficient skilling is this: on character creation pick a build that suits your preferred play style. For mages: Bretons, Altmer and Dunmer are excellent choices for the Magicka bonuses/resistances/skill bonuses. For pure warriors (although I highly advise against playing this way in Oblivion because magic is powerful and fun and physical damage falls off mid-late game) Orcs, Nords and Redguard are all good choices for their respective bonuses to Blunt/Blade/Heavy Armor. All builds including mages benefit from the Warrior birthsign because of the +10 bonus to Endurance, which is one of the only attributes (together with Intelligence) that actually matters in Oblivion. There's a common trapping I see new players fall into at this point, which is thinking that they can somehow screw up their character beyond repair if they don't start off with a good build -- this is false. I'm happy to say that there's no way to permanently screw your build in Oblivion because, and here's the whole point of my thread, skills are SIGNIFICANTLY more powerful than attributes in this game.

I'm not a math wiz, but some of you are and know what I'm talking about. In Oblivion damage is a formula that considers various factors like Fatigue (the green bar that most new players ignore and then wonder why they're not doing any damage), Weapons skill level, enemy armor rating and lastly Strength or Agility in the case of bows. It's important to note that Strength and Agility have the smallest effect on the damage formula. This is why efficient leveling is a trap. A min/maxer who picks Blade as a minor and instead of a major will take a minimum of three levels to catch up to someone who selected Blade as a major skill; and that's assuming absolutely no level ups from the person who picked Blade as a major. It should also be noted at this point that choosing a skill as a major skill dramatically increases the rate at which it levels. So it takes even more REAL WORLD time to reach the same level of power as someone who just picked Blade as a major skill from the start. This is even more true if they built their character intelligently and picked a Nord/Dunmer/Redguard who all have a +10 bonus to Blade by default.

Now let's talk magic. I briefly discussed this on my last post but skills like destruction, conjuration and restoration trivialize the difficulty in Oblivion and make level scaling A GOOD THING to keep the game from becoming mindnumbingly easy.

Let's take a Breton with a magic specialization under the Warrior Birthsign. This character would start off with a whopping 40 Conjuration and Restoration. I tested this out and I was able to get to 75 Conjuration within an hour of leaving the sewers. From there it was as easy as creating a custom Fortify Conjuration +25 for 3 seconds (cost about 10 mana) and I was able to cast a Daedroth -- an end game summon that made mincemeat of every enemy -- for about half of my mana meter. All this at the beginning of the game without efficient leveling.

I'm sure there are plenty of other ways you could come up with to make a powerful character besides a Breton Necromancer, but my point is that efficient leveling is probably the worst way to make a powerful character. Skills matter way more than attributes, and some skills like Conjuration, Destruction and Restoration can absolutely carry you through most of the game with minimal effort and without intentionally breaking the game.

Let me preface this by stating that I am fully aware that the MCP/OpenMW fix a lot of the common glitches that exist in vanilla Morrowind. Even so, I like playing Elder Scrolls games on consoles. The graphics are worse, there's more glitches, but I still think they're excellent ports (excluding the PS3 version of Skyrim, which was an abomination).

Anyway, onto my question. On the original XBOX version of Morrowind when you're attempting to soul trap a summoned creature sometimes it'll crash the game. This isn't a huge deal -- you can still capture souls on wild creatures that aren't your own summons -- but it is very annoying.

Does anyone know of a fix for this particular glitch? Like I said: I enjoy the console experience; and if there's no fix then I guess I'll just have to live with that.

I really like the lighthouse in Seyda Neen. When it rains, especially at night, the vibes are immaculate. I like to spend time there contemplating and soaking it all in. You can find me there most days cozied up with a good book and a bottle of Sujamma (purchased from Arrille, of course).

All right y'all, so here's my leveling strat that I think is better than efficient leveling. And I'm going to call it efficient skilling. 

Start off as either an Altmer, Dunmer or Breton. Why these three specifically? Skill bonuses. Both Altmer and Dunmer start off with a whopping +10 to Destruction, which, as any experienced Oblivion player knows is a completely gamebreaking skill. Altmer is better for the +100 Magicka bonus, but Dunmer is a solid second choice. Breton, on the other hand, starts with a +10 Conjuration and +50 Magicka bonus. Conjuration, like Destruction, is a gamebreaking skill once you're summoning Master level summons, and let's be honest even expert level summons means you're playing the game on autopilot.

Forget attributes -- they don't matter. Focus entirely on leveling up either Destruction or Conjuration depending on which build you've decided to go for. You could probably grind to 100 Conjuration in under 1 hour if you wanted to, although, I haven't tested it. For Destruction you can use the lion pelt lady once it gets to above 70 to help speed things along. Again, attributes do not matter at all, even Endurance. All that matters is getting to 100 Destruction or Conjuration. 

And that's it. If you follow this simple strategy you should have those skills maxed out before level 10. You can also do this with Alchemy as a Bosmer if you want to be a short king and you for some reason enjoy farming ingredients all day.

Is this boring? I mean, I think so. But it's better than the nightmare that is efficient leveling. Or you could always just play the game normally, but who wants to do that?

Race: Nord

Birthsign: Mage

Specialization: Combat

Favored Attributes: Strength & Endurance

Major Skills: Alteration, Armorer, Blade, Conjuration, Destruction, Heavy Armor, Marksman

The basic combat strategy is to wail on enemies with a claymore while maximizing DPS with damage over time destruction magic, poisons and conjuration. I chose marksman as a major because of the apprentice level perk that stops fatigue from draining while aiming an arrow, and I'd like to open combat situations with a poisoned arrow when possible. I'm a bit concerned about running out of magicka between shield, summons and destruction magic so I'm still undecided on my birthsign. Another thing to consider is healing -- should I farm restore health ingredients or use restoration? Restoration is less tedious but it would exacerbate the magicka problem; and unless I'm mistaken, there's no reliable source of restore health ingredients until Fly Amanita at level 50 alchemy, which would make healing a huge pain ITA for the first few levels.

I REALLY like the idea of this character, but there seems to be some glaring issues.

Obviously I'm a big fan of the Imperial Sewers. Once you learn where all of the enemies and containers are you can breeze through the entire intro in less than 30 minutes.

HOWEVER, on replay it can be a slog. Sometimes I want to just create a new character/build and not have to listen to the same dialogue/fight the same enemies for the 30th time. Skyrim suffers from this same issue, except even worse because the cart sequence at the beginning is unskippable and feels like it takes 5 minutes all by itself.

Morrowind handled the intro in a unique way by kind of avoiding it entirely. In Morrowind you start off by selecting your build and then you're free to either stay in Seyda Neen (the starting town) until you're comfortable or immediately head off in any other direction. This makes Morrowind very replayable.

What's your favorite Elder Scrolls intro and how do you think Oblivion's could have been improved?

Basically modern day David and Goliath except David is an average dude with a sling and Goliath is a bear. In the interest of keeping things fair, the guy has had 1 week to train with the sling.

R1: Fight starts at 100 meters. Both guy and bear have no prep time.

R2: Guy get a medieval suit of armor and instead of just rocks he gets heavy metal balls he can sling.

R3: Bear gets armor.

Sure, when you look at it from a purely min/maxed perspective, Luck is worthless. It provides a minimal bonus to your skills early on (an invisible +4 to all skills for every 10 levels of Luck) but this becomes worthless once you've reached level 100 in your skills.

However, something I think people neglect to account for is how expensive (if you're using trainers) or time consuming (if you're grinding) getting your skills to 100 can actually be. Another point that should be considered is that skills actually become significantly more powerful the higher they are (level 5-15 hardly matters, where as level 90 to 100 makes a HUGE impact in spell cost for Restoration just as an example). This means that Luck becomes significantly more powerful when your skills are HIGH, but not maxed out yet -- which is most of mid-late game. Also, you might get your favorite skill at level 100 if you really focus on that, but what about your other skills that are hovering in the 60-80 range? This is where Luck truly shines, I think.

That said, Luck is still pretty bad. Maybe it's worth it to pick the Thief birthsign and Luck as a preferred attribute just to start off at 65 Luck, and then maybe just continue to pick Luck every time you level up until it's at 80. 80 Luck should get you +12 to all of your skills, which is nice when they get to that 80-90 range.

Have any of y'all had success with a Luck heavy build or have you come to regret it because Luck is actually terrible and the popular opinion is in fact right that it's not worth it?

Everyone knows how good Bretons and Orcs are, but are there any races that you think are greatly underappreciated or ones that you keep coming back to for whatever reason?

For me, I really like going for an Altmer Apprentice. I've always thought that enemy magic is weak in this game in comparison to player magic -- the enemies that give me that hardest time aren't even magic ones, but those that can stun/stagger lock you like Ogres and Clanfears. So by going for an Altmer apprentice enemy magic becomes an actual consideration and I'll put effort into dodging and applying elemental resistances. Plus, with how Magicka regen works (a percentage of your total Magicka), Altmer Apprentice has arguably the highest DPS possible.

Another one I like to play is an Imperial Pilgrim. I've had great fun trying out the default classes. I think the flaws of those classes add flavor. As an Imperial Pilgrim you'll start off with 40 mercantile, which means you'll only need 10 more levels to acquire the +50 Magicka enchanted Cuirass in the Imperial City. There's also the +50 Magicka ring you can buy in Bravil. When combined you'll have ~200 Magicka pretty early on, which is only really possible by having a high mercantile level to be able to afford both of those items. Imperials also have a decent bonus to heavy armor, so it's fun to play a hybrid armor character where you wear a combination of light armor and heavy armor and use your 5 training levels on Heavy Armor for early Endurance gains. You have less encumbrance too.

Anyway, are there any cool combinations that y'all have explored besides the obviously good and popular ones?

There's a subset of this community that seems to think that the best way to combat the level scaling problem is by efficient leveling. I won't get into the plethora of reasons why this is actually wrong (hot take, I know), but my question to the people who recommend this to new players is do you actually enjoy playing the game this way?

Personally, I'd rather forget about attributes entirely and just play the game naturally on the default difficulty. In my opinion all new players really need to know to "fix" the level scaling problem is to use the enchantments you get from closing Oblivion gates, maybe pick one or two magic fields you'd like to help boost your damage output (destruction, alchemy and conjuration all serve this function beautifully) and then let loose.

Edit: Just as an example because I can already anticipate the naysayers saying that this isn't simple to do: my current character is an Orc Battlemage with the Lord birthsign. My major skills are Alchemy (crazy, right), Alteration, Athletics (another absolutely insane one), Blunt, Heavy Armor, Destruction and Conjuration. I'm currently level 19 and have had ZERO issues on the default difficulty at any point in this playthrough. No efficient leveling.

I was recently reading The Fellowship of the Ring, specifically chapter 2 where Gandalf recounts to Frodo the hunt for Gollum, and being a huge fan of the movies but not having read very much of the books I was shocked/disturbed at what I read.

Here's an excerpt:

"The wood was full of the rumour of him, dreadful tales even among beasts and birds. The Woodsmen said that there was some new terror abroad, a ghost that drank blood. It climbed trees to find nests; it crept into holes to find the young; it slipped through windows to find cradles."

I mean, first off, wtf. And second, this is clearly a much more monstrous/vile character than the movie depiction of Gollum, who is closer to a wild animal than a truly vile creature.

Do you agree that Peter Jackson toned down the character for movie audiences, and if he did, then do you think it was the right choice?