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Levelling in Oblivion
poshniallo
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm not 100% sure if this should go in H&A, but since discussion on the subject will probably teach me stuff I don't know, I thought G&T would be better. And if the difficulty on this game is as weird as I'm hearing, a thread here might give people a chance to vent.
Basically, I just started playing Oblivion on the 360 (my PC is far too puny for it) and I keep hearing that the levelling isn't balanced.
I don't mean that enemies level with you - so far I like that, because I usually play JRPGs which are never really challenging, since you can always just grind.
I mean the idea that if you have such-and-such a character the game gets harder as you level because the character doesn't really 'work'.
The trouble is, I don't know what kind of characters don't 'work' well. Obviously someone with no combat skills whatsoever (some kind of alchemist/blacksmith who's a devil with the speech) would be in trouble, but apart from that, I can't find any info.
I've been playing with an elf, whose main skills are:
Marksmanship (or whatever Archery is called)
Blade
Light Armour
Athletics
Stealth
Illusion
Mysticism
and my 'sign' is The Steed.
I am in the first oblivion gate, after wandering around and doing some other stuff. I'm about level 10, and I'm getting my arse kicked. I shoot daedra from stealth and... well triple damage doesn't seem so cool when it's 3 times 1 damage.
Am I doing something wrong, have I just built my character stupidly, or do I just suck?
Basically, I just started playing Oblivion on the 360 (my PC is far too puny for it) and I keep hearing that the levelling isn't balanced.
I don't mean that enemies level with you - so far I like that, because I usually play JRPGs which are never really challenging, since you can always just grind.
I mean the idea that if you have such-and-such a character the game gets harder as you level because the character doesn't really 'work'.
The trouble is, I don't know what kind of characters don't 'work' well. Obviously someone with no combat skills whatsoever (some kind of alchemist/blacksmith who's a devil with the speech) would be in trouble, but apart from that, I can't find any info.
I've been playing with an elf, whose main skills are:
Marksmanship (or whatever Archery is called)
Blade
Light Armour
Athletics
Stealth
Illusion
Mysticism
and my 'sign' is The Steed.
I am in the first oblivion gate, after wandering around and doing some other stuff. I'm about level 10, and I'm getting my arse kicked. I shoot daedra from stealth and... well triple damage doesn't seem so cool when it's 3 times 1 damage.
Am I doing something wrong, have I just built my character stupidly, or do I just suck?
I figure I could take a bear.
poshniallo on
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The steed is pretty useless
However, that said, you also probably should not expect to be taking down Daedra at level 10.
Is there a way to counter this? Yes: grind away on the skills (blade, armour) that give you strength and endurance multipliers.
See, the problems with your build are:
1) the steed sign is useless in combat
2) you have 3 major skills that do not aid you in combat.
Oblivion is a combat heavy game and it punishes you if you level up through non-combat means.
As for getting stealth kills: you need a bitching bow and arrows on top of a high marksman skill to get those BOOMHEADSHOTS going. It's worth investing in...in the long run. I advise you to rise your skills by hunting down weaker enemies with the bow. Those daedra fuckers are pretty tough, but if you can sneak up to them and plant your blade in their back, you're gonna do a lot more damage. After that you gotta get out of stealth fast and dodge/block their attacks. If your blade skill is high enough you can disarm/throw them to the floor, which makes it easier to beat those guys.
Leveling up your blade and blacksmithing skills are basically the best ways to keep yourself up on strength and endurance - especially the endurance. Endurance should be one of the things you work up as fast as possible no matter what your class, all the way to 100. Each level up awards you a bonus of 10% of your endurance (on top of some other flat amount I believe). If you spend 30 levels not leveling your endurance much you're working yourself out of some major HP boost.
Alchemy also takes basically no time to grind. Just head down to the city of your choice, pick every plant there, buy everything all the stores have that can be made into potions/poisons, and just mass-potion-make. Then sell 'em all, also getting your bargaining skill(I forget its actual name) up and often profiting.
He's on the 360 though, mods don't help! (good suggestion though)
Hook it up with some linkage to this mod, Echo. I wanna read up on it.
Lemme dig out some of the fun uber-poisons you can create at full alchemy mastery...
You can make ones that'll do Damage Health + Damage Magicka + Ice Damage + Silence + Paralyze, for starters. And I've seen some stupidly big numbers from these things at high levels.
Re Alchemy, yes, it is ludicrous. I had a character with alchemy as one of his major skills (and incidentally, managed to level him into uselessness by making potions all the time before I knew how the levelling system worked). If you get the plants from through the demon gates, then you can make some nasty poisons. When I had potion supplies, I could drop enemies pretty quickly with a single poison arrow, but if I ran out then it took about 50 arrows to kill anyone. It was all rather silly.
Yeah, that's what I used for a leveling overhaul. Lots of other great stuff in it too. It's practically an expansion pack for the game.
Instead, I go to make a new "Kill-the-Ever-Living-Shit-out-of-Everything" spell and I don't have enough magica to cast it. With maxed out int. Ok. Fine. I'll tone it down a little. Little more. Ok; there. Now I have a spell I can cast: "Cause Minor Indigestion."
Fuck.
0431-6094-6446-7088
edit: Also, destruction spells use willpower, not int. Haven't maxed intelligence does nothing all that useful for casting fireball of death.
I'd heard some bad things about this last time I was talking to people about Oblivion mods. I have an outdated version of it at the moment. I heard it did stupid typical shit like make some wolves red tinted, and oh no they shoot fire! I mean, I don't think Oblivion needs that kind of shit.
Bust out the enhancement gear and the potions.
Also, there's a trick that's hard as fuck to use, but can destroy worlds: chained spells.
Put simply, there are two key aspects to Oblivion's weakness-to-<something> spells.
One, they will start up LAST in a spell. So putting weakness to fire in your fireball doesn't help.
Two, anything that kicks in while the spell is running stays enhanced the whole time, even if the weakness fades. So if you hit them with a 5 second weakness to fire, then hit them with a 30 second fireball, they will be extra burninated the whole 30 seconds.
And one other quirk; The weakness spells STACK(but only if they're separate spells, if memory serves). And weakness to magic makes other weakness spells that much more powerful.
You can see where this is going. You hit someone with two or three weakness-to-magic/element spells, then a plain old damagy spell, they're going the fuck DOWN.
There's various aspects to OOO, you can pick what aspects you want to run. I ran a lite version with only the leveling stuff, enhanced merchants and some extra dungeons.
And weren't there hellhounds in the vanilla game?
Cheers
I built a pretty sweet high elf atronach mage with +50 mana everything, with maxed out every school of magic. Too bad the schools were all primary skills. By the time I got the flexibility I wanted to create some really interesting, powerful spells, which was pretty exciting with my character's massive mana pool, the enemies were ridiculous.
It wasn't even the stats at that point. The game was just throwing mana absorbing/immune enemies at me left and right, thus nullifying my magic completely. My character was also maxed out in sword and armor and had strength and various other stats maxed, since I carefully leveled so every point I used was x5.
Even with all of that planning and time investment, my only option was using the difficulty slider to get further in this broken ass game.
Since the slider felt like cheating, I pretty much lost interest and stopped playing. Then the 360 red-ringed and I lost my saves.
I did a mage.
However no magic schools were primary skills, so I only leveled up when I wanted to.
I couldn't have mustered the patience to finish the game if I hadn't learned that trying to kill things in Oblivion (as in, the planes of Oblivion) is for suckers. Invisibility all the way. You can literally walk right through the entire damn place and pick up the sigil stone. Just remember that if you do _anything_ you'll have to re-cast invisibility. Of course, this strategy is totally worthless if you have to protect someone.
My new strategy for cleaning out dungeons for mad lewtz is to blast someone nearby with my custom Word of Command spell, return to invisibility and watch the excitement. I was cleaning out a nest of vampires once and these two at the beginning were taking forever to kill each other so I went on and cleaned out the entire nest and when I came back they were still fighting. A few shots from my staff of fire took care of that.
0431-6094-6446-7088
I'm not even a journeyman in anything.
EDIT: Gah. The steed sucks? Man, GAH. Any way to change my sign after the sewers?
Why bother with invisibility when you can have 100% chameleon gear. Run around backstabbing people without consequence. Of course, it does kind of break the game...
http://steamcommunity.com/id/BlindProphet
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sleep forever if you wish to be a dreamer
Having something like 100 alchemy on a level 3 character makes the game stupidly easy as you can make potions with a single ingredient and get absurd money. Also, you can make lots of damage health potions and poison your arrows with them, I could kill enemies before they reached me with my damage health potions!
Presumably you could do similiar with other skills, I know having a high conjuration means you can have clanfear that kick the crap out of stuff at low levels.
It's great and all when you understand HOW the system works and can abuse it by doing exactly the opposite of what seems natural. My beef is this: don't develop a character creation screen which seems to promote the spontaneous mixture of skills to make a unique character when, in fact, all characters are going to end up the exact same.
There is absolutely no point in vanilla Oblivion in picking Sneaking, Locksmithing, Athletics, Alchemy, etc, etc, as primary skills because in reality all characters are going to be able to do everything and comparably well. Picked the lockpicking ability? Ha ha! Fuck you! Here's an infinite lockpick five minutes into the game.
I guess it's unfathomable that any character be rewarded for trying to specialize with content that only particular character archetypes will see or unlock. God forbid your character can't accomplish every single last achievement in the game. In a game like Fallout I would come across obvious places in the game where I either couldn't stealth/lockpick or choose a dialog option or conversely kill something that my character would never be strong enough to. If my character wasn't able to do it, I just had to suck it up.
In Oblivion, I could have you roll me a character with 10 random skills and complete the entire game in any fashion just as well as any other character. What the hell is the point of even making a character at that point?
It takes fucking forever. It's also not fun. But at least after all that, you don't have to worry about levelling ever again. Then you can enjoy the game.
I think the best thing you can do is just say fuck it, I'll level when I want to. As you see enemies you like..just stay that level. Ignore levels and just learn your skills. You'll improve, the enemies won't. Then, when you actually do start to level, you'll find that you don't miss a beat in keeping up because your skills are still above where you'd be otherwise. I think my current character is around 18, I'm not leveling him to his max yet, but I can basically not use armor at all if I want. He's expert Marksman and Blade, and he's quick enough to survive most encounters with just a sword. Just don't corner him...
Also, get Shivering Isles. It doesn't get fucking stupid there, you won't run into a nest of trolls that are nearly impossible to kill. If you don't level in Cyrodil, then go to the Shivering Isles and go max level, you'll be fine. In my opinion they basically took their system and balanced it for the expansion.
Also, you can actually get away with weird uber builds if you learn the system, even with leveling. I created a warrior/mage hybrid who, despite a slow start, became incredibly powerful. Basically a Breton with the Mage sign with Heavy Armor, Block, Blade, Athletics, Dest, Rest, and Illusion, or something like that.
Best advice...just do a straight warrior play through to learn the system. Then you can get away with anything you please, but you'll honestly be playing as a work around to avoid the system.
http://www.irisgames.com/KCAS/KCAS%20Manual.html