So what do we know about h2h..

1. We have a tweet saying roleplaying a monk is possible
2. H2h is in the game, but is not supported by a skill
3. H2H is lethal
4. Khajiit have a racial ability that makes their H2H attacks do more damage


So why is H2H going to rock?!

I Removal of attributes
In previous games damage of H2H was directly tied to your strength as well as your skill. This meant that if you wanted to be a master in it, you had to pump your strength to hulk levels. And martial arts is not about muscles.. You don't need to be huge to deliver the pain. In Skyrim you no longer have to pump your strength all the way to do damage with your hands.

II Not depending on perks
While a lot of people (me included) are hoping to see a few h2h related perks, being light on perks in addition to being light in your pack is not so bad.. Let me explain.. Let's say you choose two-handed weapons. To get the maximum out of them you need to spend over 10 perks (out of 50ish). 5 perks for added dmg, 3 perks for weapon specialization and a few stand alone perks..
With H2H your freedom is much greater.. When you start playing Skyrim you will probably spend the first 10 levels or even more enhancing your combat skills (one-handed, two-handed, archery, destruction) while letting your other skills wait a bit.. If you choose H2H instead you can invest in those skills right from the start.

III Gloves
Gloves in this game can be viewed as fist weapons in a way.. We already know Khajiit get stronger h2h attacks.. I will be both surprised and disappointed if Beth does not implement gloves that have a similar bonus.. Heavy hitter gloves, KO gloves.. Maybe even enchant gloves with a "on hit" mechanincs.. And you don't even need to unequip them if you want to hold a weapon or a spell..

IV Mods
And even if Beth does not implement such gloves, mods will. In Skyrim it will be easy to "increase / decrease / fine tune" H2H.. If you think its UP, you make a mod with gloves that enhance it.. If you over do it, you tweak the gloves.. With no skill you don't have to worry about balancing damage on lower and higher levels.. You just make gloves with different modifiers and make the better ones harder to obtain.. Sry consoles.

I suppose I see your point of being able to add more perks in other areas but at the same time that sort of takes away from the possibilities too. You could easily decide to not put anything into H2H regardless of whether they made perks for it or not. That is probably one of my bigger disappointments. I wanted to make a monk.

There are a lot of things they could have done with a H2H perk tree that would have been awesome.

Quivering Palm
Stuns
Grappling
Combination Punches
Haymakers
Pushback
Double fist punch (heh)
Hammer Punch


Anyway, there are a lot of things they could have done to make H2H really great. Unfortunately, it got nixed.

If anything these 2 reasons make H2H an inferior option to weapon combat.

The lack of skills, perks (and to a lesser extent attributes) for H2H will ensure H2H doesn't scale whatsoever. So whatever damage you do at level 1, you won't be able to increase it or not by a lot. Weapon damage increases by getting new weapons, increasing the skill and putting perks in it to cope with tougher opponents. Assuming H2H is not ridiculously overpowered at level 1, it'll take forever to kill something at level 40-50 just because you're playing with the damage output of a level 1 character.

You don't know that it won't scale with level. It could even have it's own algorithm based on fatigue, health, level and/or enemy level.

Basically what you're saying is since there's no perks and no skill or attributes tied to Hand to Hand everybody is going to be amazing at it with Khajiits being slightly more amazing because there is no need to train anything to be good at it.. ?

I don't quite get it.

It could yes, but assuming Pete implied it would be a feat to kill a dragon with H2H, I don't have good hopes that it'll go great damage.

H2H might be viable, but saying it'll rock because it doesn't have perks or skills tied to it, is not something I'd agree on.

Then read the rest of OP..

There is somewhere in the Creation kit a modifier for H2H dmg (we know this because Khajiit are better at it)
Even if Bethesda doesn't use it, I'm sure modders will to give you scaling dmg..

Normal dmg 10
Khajiit dmg 12
Apprentice gloves 1.5 modifier
Journeyman gloves 2.0 modifier
Expet gloves 2.5
Master 3.0

Get it now?

Oh, yeah. I didn't expect anyone to expect to kill dragons with just H2H.

Hell, I don't even expect anyone to kill dragon with just melee weapons.

Edit: And I disagree with the OP that says it will "rock" as well.

Saying H2H will only rock because you can mod it's damage leads to the fact that everything else that you can mod will rock as well and thus the entire topic becomes moot.

Well there is hope Bethesda will implement such gloves..

And yeah, for a bunch of us, TES games rock because they can be modded..

I don't mind the fact the game can be modded, in fact it's an awesome feature and I doubt anyone disagrees. But that wasn't the point I was trying to make. If you need to rely on mods to make something rock, it doesn't really rock, but the moddability of this game does.

And I'm telling you that atm it is still possible Bethesda will implement such a system and we will NOT NEED mods.

Possible. But unlikely in my mind. When they came out with the info that Khajiits get a H2H racial buff, this did lead me to believe they have a little more in store for it than they are letting on.

But "rocks?" I just have a more pessimistic view of what the reality of the H2H system will be come 11/11/11.

Someone needs to tweet Pete asking what makes H2H a viable option. Even if he just tweets "we have a few ideas implemented" it would better then nothing.

Thing is we do not know how H2H damage scales yet. Pete has said it's entirely possible to play a monk character so the damage must scale in some form to keep it being possible. Bethesda are trying to cut out what they think is useless or doesn't add much to the game, adding H2H but only making it useful for the first few levels would go against what they are trying to do.

It's likely we won't find out exactly how it works till we get the game though and go poking around the CK or test it over a play through.

I. Martial arts practiioners sure seem to spend a lot of time developing and training their muscles for an art that is not about muscles. No attributes combined with no skill means there is no way to improve the force of your hand-to-hand over time. A level 1 character punches just as hard as a level 70 character. I'm not feeling the rocking here.
II. If not having Hand-to-Hand perks helps make Hand-to-Hand rock, then not taking perks for one-handed, two-handed, archery, and destruction should help those skills rock too. Again, I'm not feeling the rocking.
III. I expect simple mechanics of weapons-for-offense and armor-for-defense.
IV. I suspect that if Bethesda does not enable III, then III will be unavailable in the Construction Set.

That looks like a weakness before you think about what they have done.

Having specific weapons and armor perks makes these mechanics more interesting than any previous Elder Scrolls game. Before this they had basically 4 perks to affect each skill and they were forced. For instance:

Desturction 25 - Can only cast Novice destruction spells.
Destruction 50 - Can only cast Journeyman spells.
Destruction 75 - Can only cast Expert spells.
Destruction 100 - Can cast all Destruction spell.

That is an extremely weak version of leveling destruction compared to what we have. Weapons are the same way. Before they were simple and generic, now they will be interesting and unique.

Sharpened steel, iron, elven, daedric, ebony, glass, and every other material; combined with armour... fists are [realistically] worthless.

What I'm hoping for is to have a base character damage that goes up as you level, have it tied to stamina or something, and weapons that either enhance that damage or add special bonuses, like the axe bleeding effect in the perk tree.

It would be nice if gloves or gauntlets added some to your base damage too.

I think this also makes sense for the Khajiit claws, maybe they just start with a higher base damage and get the special animation for flavor.

Odds are it's under the one-handed skill.

And can I get a link to this "Khajiit are better at hand to hand" thing? First I've heard of it.

While I can't find it right now, I can assure you it's in.

(I know, great assurance from random forum guy).

Here's a link to an article that quotes the specific twitter convo that confirms http://multi.systemlink.me/2011/09/skyrim-killing-dragons-with-your-bare.html

I'm still worried about this.. it just seems that with no skill related to it I get the feeling that you can't really progress with it.
Which really goes against the general rule of how character progression works in TES, "You do it and get better at it"... Well, not with Hand-2-Hand, then?
I hope there is some system in place to benefit the use of H2H other than possibly tavern brawls.

1. removal of attributes benefits all weapon styles. To bad you wont increase your "skill" using hand to hand to level, you will have to use other skiklls just to level.

2. Not dependant on perks. This is a WEAKNESS not strength. You say it takes perks to make 1 and 2 handed good, your wrong. The perks make 1 and 2 handed great, H2H having no perks is not "stronger" just even more gimped by comparison. H2H damage will be less then 1-handed damage at base, not equal to 1 handed damage with several +40% damage perk levels.

3. Gloves dont add anything, this is wishful thinking and not speculation. As for mods adding damage based on gloves? Even these mods were not that great in Oblivion, as its even easier to just make a mod that increases H2H damage without adding a dumb glove prerequisiste.

4. Mods. Mods have the potential to make any skill better, including hand to hand. HOWEVER! By not coding hand to hand to a skill (or classifying them as a weapon like in Oblivion) it is 100x harder to mod hand to hand! It took YEARS to add the ability to poison your hands in Oblivion, YEARS! and this was only possible after several generations of a script extendor. With no skill for Hand to Hand, it will be incredibly difficult to add perks for it and the like. By your comments you are not a modder yourself and do not understand how this works. We will basically have to tie hand to hand to an existing game skill (say sneak or something) and then script that every hand to hand punch has a % chance to add 1 skill point to sneak. From there we can add new perks into the sneak tree (sneak being used in this example) that add damage to hand to hand and the like. Unfortuneately even these perks will ALL have to be script based as opposed to simple console commands since its not tied to a skill. I could go on, but needless to say modding Hand to Hand will not be easy by any means.


I am also tired of hearing people quote Pete about being able to kill a dragon with your hands, and taking that to mean H2H will be powerful. If H2H even does 1 damage per punch, then OF COURSE you COULD kill a dragon with your hands, it would just take forever! He even stated he would like to see a video of that, hinting that to do so would be quite special and a massive undertaking. So not something to get excited about at all!


I for one love H2H, have made several and tweaked several hand to hand mods for others in both Oblivion and Morrowind. I WISH they did hand to hand correctly but they didnt. We need to face reality that they screwed up big time, and it will take ALLOT of work to fix. I am tired of posts of pure fanatasy thinking things are better than they really are. If they had simply tied hand to hand a skill, but still made it svck that would be fine. It would have been 100x easier to mod and fix, as well as if they had added hand to hand weapons like in Fallout for poisons, but they didnt (this took YEARS to mod, and still isnt great). Hand to hand will take allot of work to mod and make viable, dont expect anything other than a simple damage increase mod (easy to do, but will be like giving you perks for free) in the first few weeks. Expect at least a year or so for hand to hand to tie to a skill or perk trees.