Skill trees are what differentiate one character from another. Basically the only means a player has outside of gear to personalize his/her character the way they desire. Why then are so many of these trees broken/imbalanced? Here is a few that need immediate attention. Feel free to add more, these are just the ones that were made immediately obvious after playing my first character.

Lockpicking:

What was your thought process behind making this a skill tree? Currently anyone with a 5 in lockpicking can pick a master lock with little/no effort. This entire tree is worthless. The only 2 mediocre perks in the entire tree are "Golden Touch" & "Treasure Hunter". Treasure hunter increases the chance the player will find "special treasure" (aka enchanted items) by 50%. So instead of having a 10% chance the player now has a whopping 15%. Waste of a perk. Golden touch is "ok". However, both of these perks are inferior to Haggling the first point in the speech tree. The player will net more gold over the course of the game from 1 point in Haggling than investing several points in a worthless tree to invest in 2 mediocre perks.

Pickpocket:

The only worthwhile perk in this entire tree is extra pockets which increases the players carry capacity by 100. Useful. However, the rest of the skill tree is again worthless. I have yet to encounter a single npc that has had notable loot that I could not acquire simply by killing.

Light Armor Vs Heavy Armor

I'm going to be blunt. Light armor in its current state is inferior to heavy armor. Here is why. Investing in the heavy armor tree gives you more armor/damage reduction (obviously), You take half damage from falling, ARMOR WEIGHS NOTHING (No sneak penalties!!!), Unarmed damage is increased provided you wear heavy gauntlets, 50% less stagger, 10% chance to reflect damage back to the enemy.

Now lets look at the benefits Light Armor provides over heavy armor. 50% stamina regen if in all light armor. Nice, however stamina has never been an issue. If your investing your attribute points wisely it never will be. In the rare, rare incident I run out of stamina I have 20+ stamina potions in my inventory that I have collected littered on the ground everywhere. 10% chance of avoiding a melee attack. Well, first of all its limited to melee. Secondly, its a 10% chance. Not reliable.

Conclusion: Heavy armor > Light Armor. How to fix? Well I thinking adding 10-15% movement speed increase to light armor would be a good start, as well as removing the weightless/no movement impairment perk in heavy armor.

Smithing:

Once again, favors heavy armor users. On once side you have light armors. On the other you have all heavy. Both of which lead up to dragon armor. HOWEVER, at the end of the heavy armor tree just before dragon armor, heavy armor users get access to daedric weapons/armor. The best items in the game. Light armor users on the other hand, have to invest in both sides if they want to create armor designed for their character & gain access to the best weapons in the game. How is this balanced?

Pickpocket is more for roleplay to get money without killing people.
Kinda like why do you need Speech if you can get a lot of money from selling loot you obtained from dungeons.

bethesda has always stunk at this part of the game. Modders will fix it, but imo the modders who have fixed morrowind and oblivion should be working for bethesda.

currently it feels like the only decent patches come from modders. Why is bethesda incapable of balancing their game and having a clear vision for how skills and abilities are supposed to work? I don't know, but I hope they enjoy their job even though there is a more qualified person for the job in the modding community.

Since the armor caps at a certain point (563, I think) and I think it's possible to hit the cap with both light and heavy armor (smithing/enchanting is required for either), your first point is moot.

Light armor also becomes weightless, at an earlier point than Heavy, even. So that's moot as well.

They're relatively equal.

What needs to happen:

1. The dragon smithing perk allows you to improve every single weapon in the game by double, this includes unique weapons.

2. The heavy armour perk that makes it weightless should be a 50% reduction in the weight of heavy armour.

3. Characters just starting out can't yet pick expert and master locks, because the mechanisms are too difficult. There is a perk for being able to pick expert locks, and one for picking master locks. I guess they'd be available around skill level 30 and 50.

Other useless perks:
- The entire Alteration tree. 30% magic resistance is too little and the 30% spell absorption is not that necessary.
- The entire Destruction tree except for damage-enhancing skills and Impact
- The entire Speech tree other than Haggling 1. Money's rarely an issue past mid game and there are lots of items that lower item prices.
- Any perk that increases chance for stealth success. With high enough sneak, these perks don't seem to make a difference (I tried putting on a bunch of +40% sneak items and they didn't make a difference).
- Any bound weapon perks. There are too many restrictions and too little gain to use bound weapons
- Cushioned. Fall damage is rarely an issue
- Wind walker. Stamina is rarely an issue at high levels
- Keymaster. Keys are the easiest things to steal

Disagree. If you want Daedric weps, up the heavy side of the tree.



Agreed.



Agreed.

Try doing it without savescumming and you'll probably run out of lockpicks first.

The problem with Lockpicking is that just by increasing the skill the lockpicks become easier to open and the Perks(Novice Locks, Apprentice Locks, Adept Locks, etc.) have a Lockpick skill level requirement. So let's say you have 75 Lockpick. Is it worth taking Expert Locks? No, because with 75 Lockpick Expert locks are not difficult anymore anyway. The whole main path of Lockpick is pointless.



If you have no qualms about killing random people for loot then yeah, it's kind of worthless. But not all of us are willing to do that.



Heavy Armor does not give noticeably more damage reduction because damage reduction caps out at 80%. With 100 Smithing and all Armor perks, you need 85 base armor value to reach it. Dragonscale armor gives you 82, so it's pretty darn close. This is all without enchantments and Fortify Smithing, so it's perfectly possible to have maximum damage reduction in a Light Armor.

So the only real difference between Heavy and Light in the end is the "special" perks. Heavy Armor gives you Fists of Steel(worthless), Cushioned(worthless), Tower of Strength(almost worthless) and Reflect Blows. Light Armor gives you Wind Walker(more power attacks and ability to cover much more ground quickly) and Deft Movement. If you want to compare only Tower of Strength and Deft Movement, the latter is better because the reason you wear armor is to reduce damage, not to have 10% chance to deal some minor extra damage to the enemy. In fact if you think of the 10% evasion rate as additional damage resistance, you could say that Heavy Armor has 80% max damage resistance while Light Armor has 90%. Also Light Armor gets the no weight perk 20 levels earlier and has less perks to get in general, saving you points.

Well, you still wouldn't be able to craft daedric weapons (which are supposed to be very rare). So maybe your character has the perks for greatswords, but never seems to find a daedric one. That's where daedric smithing (along with daedric armor of course) still has the edge. The complaint with light armour smithing right now is that you can never get nearly the best weapons. I think this would solve it without losing the whole idea behind the light/heavy perk tree.

30% of permanent, passive, item-independant magic damage reduction is too little?



Yeah, who cares about a perk that lets you cast spells for half magicka.

thats limiting the player, and it already hard to pick a master without burning thur 30 picks. The difficulty is already there, the only reason I don't invest in lock picking is that the perks are only allowing me to make picking the locks that I excell at, I want perks that effect all classes, not just one class otherwise I will spend my points in another area.

I think easiest way to solve it is to simply add in Dragon weapons, maybe a point weaker than Daedric ones(on Ebony level) to still give the Heavy path an edge as it requires more points to get to the end.

Lockpicking is too easy? Speak for yourself. Maybe this is just my terrible co-ordination coming through, but I can't pick an expert lock to save myself, let alone a master one.

Pickpocketing... You say you've never encountered an NPC with pickpocket-able loot that you couldn't have gotten by just killing the NPC instead? Well... yeah. So? I don't see the iussue there. Why should there be special magical loot you can only get from pickpocketing an NPC?

Fair point with the armours; light armour should definitely be faster and heavy armour should be heavier even with the perk, for one.

And re smithing: I'm not too far in the game yet, but are you saying that daedric doesn't spawn at all? You have to craft it? Because if not, then I'm really not seeing the problem. Upgrading glass/dragon weapons, especially combined with alchemy and/or enchanting, shouldn't put you at too much of a disadvantage. Besides, how would it make sense if you could learn how to make ebony weapons combined with daedra hearts, without first learning how to make plain ebony weapons?

Well yeah, the whole point of having different classes in an RPG is that some classes are just limited. Of course, if lockpicking is done like this the game needs to be balanced to fit it. So the game should never require you to open expert/master locks unless the quest is about breaking into/out of something (probably for the thieves guild). The way I see it is that dungeons shouldn't have many locks at all that have expert/master locks. Maybe 1-3 chests that contain some extra loot. Expert/master locks would be more common inside cities.

I do have to say that lockpicking is better than in oblivion. In oblivion every single lock was pretty easy, but in skyrim I'm having a difficult time too picking expert/master locks.

I mean classes of locks... I'm unsure if I made that known

Oh yeah, I also agree with that. Novice and apprentice locks in skyrim are dirt easy, yet every early perk in the lockpicking tree only helps with those locks. Would've been better if it was a flat bonus to lockpicking.

I don't know what some people expect. Every perk needs to be equally valuable and useful to all play types?

It's like some of you are upset every possible character build doesn't lead to an equally powerful character.

No, not at all. It's just that there should be as few obsolete perks/skills as possible in the game. Like with the heavy/light armour, heavy armour pretty much makes light armour obsolete by the weightless perk. The whole point of choosing between light and heavy armour is choosing defense vs. agility. But because of the weightless perk you move just as fast with heavy armour as you do with light armour. And because heavy armour still has better defense it makes light armour obsolete at that point.

Just like that, the early lockpicking perks are obsolete. People might be tempted to put a few perks of lockpicking on a combat build because they're having difficulty with the expert/master locks (because the rest are actually quite easy), but to even get perks that make you better at that you have to go through the entire lockpicking tree. Novice/apprentice lockpicking perks are just filler perks that no one will be happy about having.

All were asking is that every skill tree has its own unique utilities & incentives that will actually be useful to the player in game. Entire skill trees should not be worthless. Nor should there be skill trees that completely overwrite one another (Heavy armor/light armor). The unique abilities in the light armor tree are not nearly as beneficial as the ones in the heavy armor tree. Half fall damage in heavy armor tree?? Heavy armor weighs nothing & doesn't encumber the player?? Neither of those should be in the heavy armor tree.

The Lockpicking tree was probably designed just because Bethesda wanted to make sure the constellation was shaped like a key it would be far better if the Novice --> Master perks were all comprised within a 5-rank opening perk which made all locks 5/10/15/20/25% easier to pick.

Personally I think the real issue with Heavy vs Light armour is their synergy with magic, not Stamina. There should be a fairly hefty cap on magicka cost/regeneration and spell effectiveness when you're in Heavy Armour, because otherwise there's absolutely no point in wearing just robes. Likewise there's no point in wearing Light Armour as a mage, because Heavy Armour is no worse magic-wise and offers greater protection. In addition to the cost/regen/effectiveness reduction in armour (which would be greater in Heavy Armour than in Light), robes should come with innate BOOSTS to spell effectiveness and duration, boosted magicka regeneration (in combat) AND lowered magicka costs. These boosts/reductions should be substantial as well, to incentivise mages to wear robes for reasons other than role play.

As for Daedric weapons... well, I'm ok with Dragon armour being less strong than Daedric armour, but I think there should be more reason for it to require a higher Smithing skill than Daedric armour. That reason could be Dragon weapons, which could be the best weapons in the game, despite the armour being slightly inferior to Daedric (similar to how Orc armour > Dwarven armour, but Orc weapons < Dwarven weapons). Hell, the Dragon weapons and armour could even come with automatic +Frost/Fire resistance depending on the element of the dragon you killed (Dragon bones and scales could therefore be listed separately as Fire/Frost ones).

Pickpocket is not useless. Your argument is invalid - I happen to roleplay a person who doesn't kill everyone in sight. That's why the Thieves Guild has the no killing rule: thieves steal, not murder for loot. I actually like being able to snatch equipped weapons, even if they're not uber.

Heavy armor should never be weightless, though. The core difference between light and heavy armor is that the latter makes you less mobile. Without it, what's the point of having two types of armor in the first place?

I can pickpocket every single npc in the game with a 5 skill in pickpocket & no perks in pickpocket. In addition, if there is a weapon I want from someone I don't want to kill I can just engage in combat, use disarm shout, grab weapon, walk away. Again, pickpocket tree is useless.

1- I don't see harder locks open easy... At least not without using a lot of lockpicks, or being lucky. You can load the game everytime you fail, but I like it when a lock is easier by game design because I have mastered a skill and perks. It also fits on the role I decided for my character, as it's some kind of rogue. I don't plan on unlocking chests with my warrior, so possibly I won't even carry any lockpicks, and it will be sad if a main quest forces me to open a chest (in that case maybe I'll either ignore the main quest, or use a lockpicking potion/item, temporary)

2- About pickpocket, more of the same. When I play a "good" char, I don't take items from dressers, shelves or chests that are not mine, even if the item is worth 10000 gold. Why steal from someone, or even worse, kill him. If I play a thief I will surely steal all I can, but never kill. If I play an assassing that is not thief, I won't either kill or steal from them (except under contract), and if I decide to play some kind of psicopath (call it "bandit") then I will have no problem on killing them.

The same could be applied to Sneaking. I don't plan on using it with my warrior... I see no sense on being a brainless armored tank (possibly even without speech skill) trying to sneak on a cave.

In either cases, my skill trainings and use of them depend on what I decided for that char, not what interests me personally in a determined moment. This ends up having a more limited character for each "class", and also not so powered or full of advantages to "beat" the game.

To give you an example, in Fallout 3 there is a moment where you discover a guy (good, innocent) is carrying an item very important, but you can't convince him to sell it to you. I was playing a "good" char in that moment, so I couldn't either lie to him (even if the game allowed me to). I continued my way without the item... well, I must admit that I saved the game, shot him in the head and checked what was he carrying, but then I loaded back.

So basically, at least for now, I don't see any problems on the skills and perks... I anolize carefully only those from the skills I've chosen for my char, and try to invest the points on what I consider useful based on the class I want to play.

Lockpicking, how to open master locks:
- required around 10 per lock
- get 30 picks every time you visit Tonnila

Start at 45 to the left. 90% off locks are between 45 to the left and 45 to the right.

- Pres a/d
- move minimal to the center (around width of the pick)
- rinse and repeat till the pick moves

If the pick breaks when you just touch a/d move to center / right 45 and go backwards.
Lower locks allow bigger movements..

With Pickpocket I have pickpocketed equipped items from enemies so that they couldn't use weapons. :/
I also pickpocket a lot of rings and stuff to get money.
And I pickpocketed a lot of arrows at the start from guards so I didn't have to buy any.

I can also use it for RP reasons.

But I'd like to comment on Poisoned perk:
It's crap.
I've used the most potent poisons and I still barely take any health from enemies at all.
I thought this was meant for assassinating NPC's and enemies silently without the use of weapons.
This perk should make poisons reverse-pickpocketed three to five times more deadly.

And no, I refuse to accept that I should be forced to spend points in Alchemy for a Pickpocketing perk to be useful.