Skyrim, or, How I Ruined My LifeFollow

I joined the Dark Brotherhood, which is sadly changed from Oblivion. Spoiler They've hit a major decline and live in a cave now and only have five or six members. They no longer follow the Five Tenants and don't even get their jobs from the Night Mother anymore. Though, there are hints that that last bit is going to change. There is a word wall in their HQ though. I don't recall the word right now, but it calls nearby animals to aid you in battle. You also get a pretty decent set of light armor for joining. There are some alternate pieces sitting on a shelf too, so you basically get two sets of armor.

On the topic of WTF moments, I was out exploring around Riften and got attacked by a Troll, nothing too terrible, just need to be careful. In the middle of the fight some random NPC comes up to me and starts talking to me, getting me stuck in a conversation scene. The whole time the troll is beating on me. I died.

Edited, Nov 13th 2011 5:01pm by Turin

If you can find the sanctuary and know the password SpoilerSilence, my brother., you might be able to get in without joining. But you'd have pretty good fight on your hands when you get in. Someone sent one of them after me for whatever reason, and it was a good bit tougher of a fight than your average bandit. Oddly enough, having a contract out on me had no effect on my ability to join them. That wasn't the last time someone tried to have me killed. I haven't really wronged anyone so I'm not sure what's going on with that.

I picked it up today and started to play. So far just about an hour in, which was enough time to make my character and get through the "learning the game" beginning quest.

My friends from work are going to hate me though, since I'll be playing Skyrim instead of MW3 with them. They already rag on one guy who decided to get Skyrim instead. And while I have MW3, they'll see me online playing Skyrim instead.

How sad is it that I can't stop looking at the scenery in Skyrim and thinking of Northrend?

There's a quest in Dawnstar to cure the people of the nightmares they've been having (lolDarkrai). It's a fun quest, and at the end (Spoilerif you choose not to kill him) you can pick up a mage companion who also does pretty good melee damage. His accent's annoying, though.



Sadly, no. Part of the tradeoff for the revamped magic system was that you can't make your own spells any more.

Edited, Nov 13th 2011 10:49pm by IDrownFish

Mind you this is a first time play through completely organic build. But I pretty much roll through and gut stab fatality most stuff. Only been challenged a few times, Master vampire, Silver Hand Leader with the Giant Axe etc.

Lets see I'm a Werewolf for one but I don't use it much except for fun especially for ripping throats on Silver Hands since that seems properly thematic.

I have full dwarven armor on atm self crafted all improved to superior, all enchanted with buffs like 40% fire resist on my sheild, extra carry on boots, reduced cost restoration and faster magika regen on chest etc. My Skyforge sword is 10 Fire damage +more if on fire, I mostly use that but also have a fire enchanted bow. I have an alternate bow and sword I use to soul trap to keep my soul gems full. I tend to use the Fire Breath Shout in combat becuase it hits like a truck.

I'm level 17 currently and here are my perks:

Archery: Overdraw 2/5
One Handed: Armsman 3/5
Bladesman 1/3
Block: Sheildwall 2/5
Heavy Armor:Juggernaut 2/5
Well Fitted
Fist of Steel (a wasted point to get to conditioned)
Smithing: Steel Smithing
Dwarven Smithing
Enchanter: Enchanter 1/5
Restoration: Novice Restoration

And that's pretty much it. Does not seem too special but the 60% Sword damage I think from armsman is pretty crucial. I block when I can. I use power attacks and move away from big strikes. I dodge around a corner and pop out a restoration spell if against a big crowd and hurting. I create potions with alchemy out of spare mats and pop them when I need to resist different magic types or dragons.

I plan to work smithing and enchanting to make myself the best armor and swords I can get by hand. It pleases me to have on armor crafted by my own hand and fits my big Nord blacksmith brute roll play for this character. I pretty much plan on investing in the perk tree's above until they are filled out for this play through.

I'm playing with an xbox 360 controller on my PC and the controls are really well molded to a controller for combat and blocking etc.

*edited out some of the drunken... too much with the beer, football and Skyrim yesterday. >.>




Edited, Nov 14th 2011 9:05am by Shojindo

Well be ready to see SpoilerThe bear resists your shout (or whatever it said right before the bear ate my face) Worked some though.
Is there any rhyme or reason to "word" locations? Are there dupes? Two of my characters have the same words but got them in different locations. Well, excluding the first one.

Lost my first horse doing the mage college quest line. It was more than a slightly stupid way for it to get killed but whatever.

The coach is bugged for one of my characters. I select where I want to go and climb into the wagon but the guy just tells me to hurry up and such. Never actually seems to detect me. Means having to fast travel to the nearest known location and then run/ride on horseback the rest of the way to my destination. Sucks a lot!

This. This is me. This is what I do.

I do this with books.

Explain?

From what I've seen, I REALLY need to take up enchanting. A lot of the effects are downright amazing. But that means I need to find a bunch of good gear to destroy first >_<

So as expected, sneaking around and 1-shotting people is tons of fun, but I start running into trouble when I can't take people out one by one and end up against 3+ enemies. I also seem to have problems with both types of enemies - melee fighters I can't seem to keep distance on, but when I try to swap to sword + magic for them, I have to chug potions just to keep up. Meanwhile, with magic users, if I try to use archery on them unless I am really careful about staying at a corner and dodging their spells then popping out to shoot, I can get raped really quickly. I've also tried going at them in melee and just beating them down, but that often fails too. I try keeping up lesser ward in my off hand but 75% of the time it just gets broken by any of their spells. Perhaps I need to set up some resistance gear... I just start to wonder if 1) trying to do sneak, archery, destruction, and one-handed all as primary combat skills was too much and 2) should I have maybe not ignored blocking completely? At the very least I should probably go into smithing and work on some actually decent armor (though the bonuses from my current pieces (mostly DB and Thieves' Guild) are pretty hard to give up).

The other issue is that while having a companion is great for being a packmule and also to be a tank, their AI is not the best, they more often than not get in my way, and they're not tanky enough to where they won't die. For now I'm just running without and sometimes I miss having one but a lot of times I don't. I wonder if just summoning an atronarch would be any more useful, but I can't imagine their AI is any better and I don't think I can tell them to wait somewhere if I need to.

Yeah casters can be tough. I have Nord frost resist and a fire resist on my sheild but those ones that play Sith emperor are the worst. The shock damage hurts bad and also drains my meager mana that I try and reserve for resto to top off after fights.

I usually block or dodge the first salvo then sprint charge them down. At least they are squishy if I can close the distance.

Hmm, wonder if I'll start having this problem soon, as that's pretty much the exact build I've been using.