I haven't played much with dual wielding in Elder Scrolls...from what I remember they play it more on the "realistic" angle, where each hand has to be attacked with individually and deals normal damage based on that weapon, and only power attacks utilize both at once. Typically if I'm dual wielding in a game, I don't get much utility out of simply having the choice between two weapons at any given time, it feels a lot better if I'm getting benefit from both weapons with every attack. I want to be a dervish like in Monster Hunter!
I haven't played much with dual wielding in Elder Scrolls...from what I remember they play it more on the "realistic" angle, where each hand has to be attacked with individually and deals normal damage based on that weapon, and only power attacks utilize both at once.
You can do a normal attack with both weapons if you press both attack buttons at the same time, but like the power attack, you need to be standing still to do it.
I always forget about that Bound Bow book! I've known it was there, but now that I'm running a character where I actually intended on using that spell, it completely slipped my mind and I've been searching merchants (and preparing to head up to the College) to obtain it. Dangit!
In Skyrim, dual-wielding is kind of an odd beast; it has cool moments, but the inability to block or use bash attacks pretty much makes it a non-starter in my book. Even after I got the dual-wield block mod, I still don't like dual-wielding because the power attacks require standing still. Plus, I feel weird if I have two weapons and only one shows on my character, so I end up installing the mod that fixes that but it's a bit annoying and seems to cause me weird issues.
My personal favorite way to play is 1-hand and spell, of course with the dual-wield block mod. Blocking with a weapon is pretty effective, especially with my combat mods that make timed blocking a thing. Sometimes I go with Destruction magick in the off-hand, but with my current character I use Conjuration and Restoration primarily. This has proven especially fun with PerMa and Apocalypse Magick, because there are so many cool spells! Most of them involve casting on enemies and then creating effects such as healing me for whatever damage they take, or causing them to burst into spiders (that attack my enemies but don't follow me) when an enemy dies. Fucking rad.
PerMa + Apocalypse Spells is just stupidly good. Like they were made for each other.
Honestly, the only problem I have with PerMa is that I cannot for the life of me get a timed block off. Which is incredibly frustrating when playing as a paladin, since stamina is a really big limiter in the earlier game, and I can't stagger by using timed blocks because either the window is tiny, or I'm blocking at the wrong time, or something.
Apparently doing the Companions first dungeon quest at level 45ish spawns a shit tonne of Deathlords after grabbing the quest objective. Not fun when your warrior skills are crap.
that mission suuuuucks when you're not a brawler type
i went into that with a sneaky character and it was just balls because farkas galumphs through the level aggroing the fuck out of everything, then falls over
I think it's just a dragonbone bow with its damage and enchantments raised to ludicrous levels via exploits.
It's base game+DLC with no exploits. Dragonbone bow I named Wyvernbane.
First you get smithing, alchemy and enchanting to 100 with all relevant perks. Then you get Seeker of Shadows from a black book in Dragonborn that boosts alchemy 10% and you make enchanting potions. Switch to Seeker of Sorcery from the same book that boosts enchanting 10%, put on the Ahzidal set from Dragonborn which is the only gear that boosts enchanting (+10), drink a potion, and make an alchemy boost set. Repeat the whole process wearing the alchemy gear and crafting more until you max it out at +35% alchemy on each of 4 armor pieces. Then you can make the ultimate enchanting and smithing potions which max out at +40% and +158% respectively. Enchant an ultimate smithing set with +35% on 4 pieces, and an archery set with 57% on 4 pieces. Switch to Seeker of Might that boosts smithing 10%, wear smithing set, drink potion, smith the bow and armor, max out your archery and elemental perks and there you go.
Another not-too-exploity thing I could do is get the Necromage perk that makes all your magic effects a little more potent against undead, and then become a vampire, which flags you as undead and therefore makes all your enchantments another 25% more effective.
If I wanted to exploit I could wear both a falmer helmet and a circlet to boost alchemy further, and also the dunmer shoes in Dragonborn were incorrectly flagged to get chest enchantments so I could wear those to boost smithing further too. And then there's the resto loop glitch that never caps out and just wrecks the game. :P
If they are anything like Open Cities (or similar) in Oblivion, they are must have (unless they give bugs, block important NPCs or stuff).
I used to have 3 dual wield -related mods (I think) that made whole thing almost good. The mod showing your both weapons caused weird clitches every once in a while and there was some other problems.
But when the game engine is already causing lot of clipping and other stuff it wasn't so bad...
It may've changed, but Open Cities in Skyrim, while an awesome concept, is also guaranteed to break a lot of stuff (in many respects, it's just a mod that isn't compatible with everything else) because of how NPC and item placement works in cells versus the open environment.
The idea is one I can get behind fully. It's just a reflection of how Skyrim is running on a modified version of Oblivion's engine where practically every city is turned into its own, self-contained little world (and buildings within that).
I really wanted to use Open Cities, but it would break the great mods that expand architecture, city populations, and so forth.
How do people feel about expanded cities and towns, dawn of skyrim, and solitude reborn?
I was going to do a fairly vanilla run but thought it might be good to add a bit to the towns.
One I'd suggest looking at is JKs Cities - Lite and Superlite. It's a version of JKs mods pared down for performance, but it creates a much more subtle change that I've really liked. Right now only the main cities are done but the author looks pretty close to finishing the towns as well.
That first companions dungeon is fun if you do it at low level. The issue us that Farkus doesn't correctly scale to the dungeon but the mobs do. If you don't do it rather early he is a pure liability.
When I do it on higher level characters I use the console quite brutally so that I can enjoy the dungeon; targeting Farkus and disabling him and re-enabling him and moving him to me when I need him for specific scenes to trigger, then disabling him again.
3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
Yeah I don't see how that's an exploit. All of those mechanics are in the game and working exactly as intended. It's not using a bug or a loophole in the code as far as I can tell.
I think boosting alchemy with potions to make better alchemy potions is where it gets kind of questionable
Not that I care, but that does enter the realm of doing a thing the dev by all means probably shouldn't have allowed
I guess it's not really a bug, but it.doesn't feel intentional either
The necromage/vampire interaction is an exploit. Boosting crafting skills with other crafting skills isn't, it's just end-game level power-gaming. There's caps in place for how high the things can go.
Yeah I haven't done the necromage thing because it seems pretty unintended, also just not bothering with vampire stuff right now. The rest seems as intended to me because it caps out pretty quickly - the numbers are huge but I'm over level 80 with lots of skills at 100, so it's to be expected.
Ultimately it doesn't matter since everybody's going to have their own self-imposed limits, which is all good.
How do people feel about expanded cities and towns, dawn of skyrim, and solitude reborn?
I was going to do a fairly vanilla run but thought it might be good to add a bit to the towns.
I just got through a playthrough using ETAC and I would say that the usefulness of ETAC is inverse to the size of the city. ETAC is mostly an immersion mod and adding a couple of buildings to Whiterun or Solitude has almost no affect on Immersion, but adding a couple of buildings to Shor's Stone or Darkwater Crossing does wonders for immersion. I felt pretty meh on the changes to the cities who had their own cells, but I was happy with the changes to the small cities and large and small villages. If you are planning on doing a fairly vanilla run I might suggest combining ETAC with People of Skyrim. People of Skyrim adds a shit ton of stuff to look at all over Skyrim.
I still think it was a huge mistake to name major cities Whiterun, Winterhold, and Windhelm. All of them compounds, two of them W-H. And then to a lesser extent, Markarth and Morthal. I have over 200 hours into the game and still sometimes get them mixed up.
I still think it was a huge mistake to name major cities Whiterun, Winterhold, and Windhelm. All of them compounds, two of them W-H. And then to a lesser extent, Markarth and Morthal. I have over 200 hours into the game and still sometimes get them mixed up.
Markarth is easy. Just remember the phrase "Wow, I've played this game for 100 hours and have never gone to Markarth."
I still think it was a huge mistake to name major cities Whiterun, Winterhold, and Windhelm. All of them compounds, two of them W-H. And then to a lesser extent, Markarth and Morthal. I have over 200 hours into the game and still sometimes get them mixed up.
Markarth is easy. Just remember the phrase "Wow, I've played this game for 100 hours and have never gone to Markarth."
Alternately, "Fuck Markarth".
Morthal doesn't do anything to engender strong emotions one way or the other, that's how you differentiate.
I still think it was a huge mistake to name major cities Whiterun, Winterhold, and Windhelm. All of them compounds, two of them W-H. And then to a lesser extent, Markarth and Morthal. I have over 200 hours into the game and still sometimes get them mixed up.
Not much they could do about that, those locations were established in Arena back in 1994.
Markarth is actually the prettiest, most interesting city. I like the concept of a city of stairs and moss, ruins repurposed into a stronghold, even if it's a little bit of a pain to navigate. It's not big enough to be a real annoyance. Forsworn plot is a little weak but I just love the design of the place.
If I was going to name a favorite city though, I'm not sure. Definitely not Winterhold. I've seen too much of Whiterun, even though it's the perfect hometown/base it's kind of bland. Windhelm is too bleak but the murder mystery quest is cool. I might call it a tie between Solitude and Riften, I like the idea of the town run by a thieves' guild in decline and mob boss Maven's mead empire.
Riften sucks because of Maven, Windhelm sucks because of Ulfric and the Stormcloaks. Get rid of them and those cities are fine. Markarth just has a constant fog of misery and unpleasantness. Forsworn Conspiracy, Taste of Death, House of Horrors. Everything about the Silver-Bloods. So much awful shit has happened there that it has seeped into the stones and will never go away.
I also find it difficult to navigate around Markarth in general, so it's kind of frustrating for me from a gameplay perspective too. If it's not the blacksmith lady's shop then i'll probably take several wrong turns or the wrong stairway to get to a place.
Posts
You can do a normal attack with both weapons if you press both attack buttons at the same time, but like the power attack, you need to be standing still to do it.
Uh...where would that be?
it costs a ton of magic to cast, which can be a problem early on, but obviously the damage is gonna be ridonk at low levels
In Skyrim, dual-wielding is kind of an odd beast; it has cool moments, but the inability to block or use bash attacks pretty much makes it a non-starter in my book. Even after I got the dual-wield block mod, I still don't like dual-wielding because the power attacks require standing still. Plus, I feel weird if I have two weapons and only one shows on my character, so I end up installing the mod that fixes that but it's a bit annoying and seems to cause me weird issues.
My personal favorite way to play is 1-hand and spell, of course with the dual-wield block mod. Blocking with a weapon is pretty effective, especially with my combat mods that make timed blocking a thing. Sometimes I go with Destruction magick in the off-hand, but with my current character I use Conjuration and Restoration primarily. This has proven especially fun with PerMa and Apocalypse Magick, because there are so many cool spells! Most of them involve casting on enemies and then creating effects such as healing me for whatever damage they take, or causing them to burst into spiders (that attack my enemies but don't follow me) when an enemy dies. Fucking rad.
Honestly, the only problem I have with PerMa is that I cannot for the life of me get a timed block off. Which is incredibly frustrating when playing as a paladin, since stamina is a really big limiter in the earlier game, and I can't stagger by using timed blocks because either the window is tiny, or I'm blocking at the wrong time, or something.
WoW
Dear Satan.....
i went into that with a sneaky character and it was just balls because farkas galumphs through the level aggroing the fuck out of everything, then falls over
It's base game+DLC with no exploits. Dragonbone bow I named Wyvernbane.
First you get smithing, alchemy and enchanting to 100 with all relevant perks. Then you get Seeker of Shadows from a black book in Dragonborn that boosts alchemy 10% and you make enchanting potions. Switch to Seeker of Sorcery from the same book that boosts enchanting 10%, put on the Ahzidal set from Dragonborn which is the only gear that boosts enchanting (+10), drink a potion, and make an alchemy boost set. Repeat the whole process wearing the alchemy gear and crafting more until you max it out at +35% alchemy on each of 4 armor pieces. Then you can make the ultimate enchanting and smithing potions which max out at +40% and +158% respectively. Enchant an ultimate smithing set with +35% on 4 pieces, and an archery set with 57% on 4 pieces. Switch to Seeker of Might that boosts smithing 10%, wear smithing set, drink potion, smith the bow and armor, max out your archery and elemental perks and there you go.
Another not-too-exploity thing I could do is get the Necromage perk that makes all your magic effects a little more potent against undead, and then become a vampire, which flags you as undead and therefore makes all your enchantments another 25% more effective.
If I wanted to exploit I could wear both a falmer helmet and a circlet to boost alchemy further, and also the dunmer shoes in Dragonborn were incorrectly flagged to get chest enchantments so I could wear those to boost smithing further too. And then there's the resto loop glitch that never caps out and just wrecks the game. :P
I was going to do a fairly vanilla run but thought it might be good to add a bit to the towns.
I used to have 3 dual wield -related mods (I think) that made whole thing almost good. The mod showing your both weapons caused weird clitches every once in a while and there was some other problems.
But when the game engine is already causing lot of clipping and other stuff it wasn't so bad...
The idea is one I can get behind fully. It's just a reflection of how Skyrim is running on a modified version of Oblivion's engine where practically every city is turned into its own, self-contained little world (and buildings within that).
I really wanted to use Open Cities, but it would break the great mods that expand architecture, city populations, and so forth.
One I'd suggest looking at is JKs Cities - Lite and Superlite. It's a version of JKs mods pared down for performance, but it creates a much more subtle change that I've really liked. Right now only the main cities are done but the author looks pretty close to finishing the towns as well.
When I do it on higher level characters I use the console quite brutally so that I can enjoy the dungeon; targeting Farkus and disabling him and re-enabling him and moving him to me when I need him for specific scenes to trigger, then disabling him again.
Which part?
Not that I care, but that does enter the realm of doing a thing the dev by all means probably shouldn't have allowed
I guess it's not really a bug, but it.doesn't feel intentional either
The necromage/vampire interaction is an exploit. Boosting crafting skills with other crafting skills isn't, it's just end-game level power-gaming. There's caps in place for how high the things can go.
Ultimately it doesn't matter since everybody's going to have their own self-imposed limits, which is all good.
Yeah, they posted this video to their Facebook page yesterday:
I just got through a playthrough using ETAC and I would say that the usefulness of ETAC is inverse to the size of the city. ETAC is mostly an immersion mod and adding a couple of buildings to Whiterun or Solitude has almost no affect on Immersion, but adding a couple of buildings to Shor's Stone or Darkwater Crossing does wonders for immersion. I felt pretty meh on the changes to the cities who had their own cells, but I was happy with the changes to the small cities and large and small villages. If you are planning on doing a fairly vanilla run I might suggest combining ETAC with People of Skyrim. People of Skyrim adds a shit ton of stuff to look at all over Skyrim.
Now to spend the next months getting the installation perfect.
Markarth is easy. Just remember the phrase "Wow, I've played this game for 100 hours and have never gone to Markarth."
Alternately, "Fuck Markarth".
Morthal doesn't do anything to engender strong emotions one way or the other, that's how you differentiate.
Not much they could do about that, those locations were established in Arena back in 1994.
If I was going to name a favorite city though, I'm not sure. Definitely not Winterhold. I've seen too much of Whiterun, even though it's the perfect hometown/base it's kind of bland. Windhelm is too bleak but the murder mystery quest is cool. I might call it a tie between Solitude and Riften, I like the idea of the town run by a thieves' guild in decline and mob boss Maven's mead empire.
It's the people that make it a god-damn hellhole.
She is, at worst, inoffensive and benign unless you choose to seek her out
Everything else about Riften is tops