At level 21 I do 41 dmg with a Steel Greatsword.

I wonder about that. Not your definition of exploit, but whether this is one or not.

did they actually intend to make it so 0 magicka cost spells was easily obtainable, or is it a bug?

If yes, did they think through how this effected the entire resource buying at level up of magicka/health, or the perks to reduce magicka? Did they think about how this works with the easy ability to hot swap gear at any time so every school of magic is easily free, not just one or maybe 2 schools. No matter how I look at it they either are really dumb, or its an exploit from an unintended stacking issue. Given their track record for game mechanics it can go either way.

It is not always magelight. That is what they asked me to cast, but others needed to summon a flame atronoch or cast a fear spell and probably any apprentice level spells.

you cant really get 0 mana gear of the bat, and im not even sure you can get it at lvl 81 Hoki said he found gear that let him cast for 4% mana cost while he perked his destro tree so theres prolly no 100% mana reduction gear without enchanting. So you need to get 100 in enchanting and 5 perks to be able to craft gear with 0 mana cast on one school or use 3 more perks to get 2 schools for free. If you invest time and perks into enchanting why wouldnt you get at least 1-2 schools for free when there are 5 mage trees total.

Conjurance has thrals at master level and once perked with master level it dosnt cost much to summon them and they are pernament - so never any more resource managment here too.

agree with this guy . Like people who get smithing and enchanting to 100 very quickly and make a god like weapon then moan the game is too easy.

I was assuming using enchanting to get it to free, but getting the skill to 100 and spending 5 perks is kind of easy. And I don't think you should ever have an ability to completely bypass a resource mechanic. There is a reason resists cap at 85%, though apparently there is an exploit to get past that as well. And as I pointed out you can hotswap gear at any time, and its not like a few spare rings, gloves, circlets, robes will weigh you down that much, so it snot 1-2 schools at 0 cost it is every school at 0 cost just with a carry capacity problem of 10ish pounds.

I think it was the guy who is leading in developing for a game called "Age of Almur: Reckoning", who used to work on Morrowind and Oblivion... and he stated that he never finishes any games, and just stays in newbie zone fiddling with small details for hours.

It wouldn't surprise me if most of senior team leaders were completely clueless about working out a balanced yet diverse choices for game mechanics. All of TES games gave that strong vibe that none of the skills and mechanics had more thought than say, "wow would this be cool or what". While game mechanics looked cool on a glance, upon inspection they are all so easily exploitable (I mean within a week of release they are all exploited).

So if you got a set of Daedric armor in your inventory wouldn't you use it? Or would you just say "nah it is too good, i'll stick to my steel armor instead"? Just curious.

Maybe you need to look at the spell magic costs before saying there's no point.

One spell without the perk is over 1,000 magicka..

I kind of think they should look at some pen and paper games with solid designs and look to hiring some of their guys. A lot of these things have been worked out n the pen and paper side a long time ago. Take illusion for example with its fury/fear/calm effects how many pen and paper games would have put them in as is into their games where once perked they basically always worked and the magicka cost could either be nullified or reduced to a negligible amount. Now it being single player there is not a huge concern for showing up the rest of the people at the table, but at least a game vs world balance would show that some kind of limit should be put in. For example if they had kept attributes the willpower stat could be used to make a break free check every X seconds.

I use destruction/conjuration to do damage, restoration to heal myself, and alteration to protect myself. If I reduce the cost for two of those schools, I should have enough mana actually to cast the others in combat.

Also, the only reason folks aren't giving up much by going the cost reduction route, is that damage increasing enchants are for weapon users only. If we could enchant similar increases to our spell damage, the choices would be much more difficult and interesting.

Agree with this guy, but I also agree with the guy who said powerleveling/gaming kinda comes natural. It's one of those things you kinda have to choose for yourself, do you want to enjoy the game as it stands or do you want to find the easy way?

I'm only level 25 with about 30 hours in. While I know about the enchanting/smithing possibilities, I'm not taking advantage of them because other than to grind out high-end weapons and armor, I am not interested in those skills. I'm playing a character I like, using skills I enjoy, and am having fun. I do die a lot, but figuring out how to beat things without doing the min/max thing is actually interesting and challenging.

Besides, if I want it to be easy then why would I invest all that time into leveling skills/perks when I can just open up the console and tgm?

The real question is why you would level up magic based skills (like destruction), when leveling only reduces the amount of magicka you spend and even with 100 skill you run out of magicka fast due to slow regeneration in combat.

If you want to be a mage level up enchanting and invest in health and heavy armor

Wait what? all i had to cast to join the college was a firebolt(ball?). which costs elss than 100 magicka. What did you have to cast.

Exactly. This is not really a point where "don't break your game, it's your own fault" works. You can get 25% magicka reduction enchantments without any exploit whatsoever, just by maxing Enchanting as it was intended. And because your skill level doesn't change the magnitude, and you don't need any magicka to cast spells, an enchanter can be a master of any magic school he likes. :shrug:

And yet Bethesda decided to fix that.
Something tells me that Bethesda doesn't buy 'This is a SP game so it's OK to have imbalanced crap which can be exploited.' and actually wants to make the game good.

If you don't do enchanting then you'll just end up with the archmage robe. Talk about choices.

Spot on. And you also realise that alteration doesn't give you enough armor and you shoulda go with armor + more health and you either reroll out of frustration or delete the game for being misleading and stupid.

Its not the same spell everytime to get into the college. There's a pool of spells that it randomly draws from and presents to you when you talk to her. Save before hand and reload a few times, different spells come up.

MMO addicts are used to grinding away for 100s of hours to craft top gear, to say nothing of the need to grind away to level and to grind away to gain money required to grind away at both. They are also used to game devs constantly introducing new ways to svck their time away in the pursuit of 'something'. And so the wheel turns.

You don't want a 'game', you merely think you do. What you really crave is a hypno-device to engage you in a ritual of grinding, perpetual pursuit. Skyrim will allow you to become omnipotent, perhaps very quickly for some. They will consider it a downer.

Maybe start chain-smoking cigarettes instead.

I'm reminded of the old Fallout 3 threads, complaining that it was so easy to max out all the skills at 100. You "just" had to level almost to the lv20 cap, select a few specific perks, make sure not to put more than 40 points into any skill, and then find every Bobblehead and most of the skill books.

Yeah. "Just".

And here we have the same thing. "It's so easy" to either max out Enchanting, or level to 40 & then find several random/rare spawn enchanted items, or some combination of the two.

Sorry, but to me - that's going out of your way to powergame. No-one is going to just "stumble" upon that. Plus, there's all the game before you get your 100% casting reduction - you still need to have played through all that, so the fact that you'll eventually get free spells (and therefor won't need Magicka) doesn't really help you in the meantime.



Perhaps for some people, but not for everyone.

It took me 60+ hours to hit lv40. And I finally got my first 100 skill at level 48 - Smithing, which only made it to 100 because I did a "final push" on the last 20 points.... I deliberatly decided to semi-powerlevel those last few bits (and I still didn't use many vendor mats - instead I stopped doing other quests and did a round of the mines I'd found previously). Of course, since I did this in the mid-40's, it didn't level me up much and didn't really do much to the balance of the game.

Of course, now that I can actually make my Dragonscale armor, I've discovered that 1) it's ugly, and I'd rather wear Glass, and 2) my Enchanting isn't good enough to replace the enchantments I have on looted Elven and Glass gear, so I need to keep wearing those anyway. (best I can manage is 25% elemental resist, and I've got 50% fire and frost on my glass boots and elven shield.)

Gotta love people doing obvious exploits and them complaining how the game is broken. Bunch of [censored]s

Uh, yes they will.

"I'm a mage! It would be cool if I could cast for less magicka! Let's enchant some items!"

Voila.

They really should. It's amazing how well fleshed out lot of game rules are from decades of gaming history. No need for bethesda to fail at reinventing the wheel when there are plenty of good designs to learn from.

Also it should be noted that bringing in percentage modifier is always just asking for major exploit. With simple exception to things like critical strikes, they could've easily stuck to integers and never let anything go spiral out of control.



Gotta love morons who thinks making efficient choices based on game mechanics is somehow doing obvious exploit.

This is one of those rare games where players are making effort of intentionally playing dumb for challenge. Just think about that for a moment. You have to intentionally make huge errors for the meta game to function as it was intended to. When faced with obvious improvements for your character, you have to go out of your way and say "nah, improving my character in this RPG will break the meta game so I'll stick with gimping myself".

Just think about how ridiculous that [censored] is.