Title says it all, trying to set up hotkeys is the most frustrating experience a game has yet to offer me.

I'm wielding a onehanded weapon, and then either shield or a spell.

So shield/sword combo goes together in a way that you cant separate the sword in the hotkeys. So you fiddle around trying to make the keyset work. Everytime it ends up in failure as the keys turn out to be same spell in both hands, or it has assigned one of the spells to the right hand instead of the weapon.

Got it to work somehow. Then got a new weapon and bought new spells. Now it's utterly EFFED up. WON'T work. This is the worst bad job I've come across yet in a game.

Secondly, the whole combat with melee weapons is badly done I think. All you can do is trade blows, nothing else. If you're melee and fight a dragon, yes you can only get up infront of it and whack away and see who dies first.

If it's sword/shield vs another sword/shield, there's no finesse at all. The Witcher 2 did all this right, if you block an attack opponent gets stunned and you can land a blow- If a dragon breathes fire you can roll away and dodge.

Nothing here, it's just a dumv clickfest.

Very disappointed, as these core mechanics are taking away from every single thing you do.

-3 points for this, Skyrim gets 7/10. Could have been 10/10.

Welcome to the forums!

Know exactly what you mean with the hot keys...being anything but "hot". Mumble, mumble, mumble.

You can assign weapons, spells or equipment to hot keys. After you use a spell, you will have lost either weapon or shield and have to hot key it back again. I use 1=main weapon, 2=soul svcking weapon, 3=bow, 4=shield, the 5 thru 8 for various spells for instance.

i have mine set up with hotkeys going like this.

1 main weapon
2 bow
2 shield
4-7 spells and potions
8 is my dagger for sneak attacks.

you can easily switch between spells and shield but you have to put shield as one of your hotkeys. my big beef is that you only get 8 hotkeys and half of them are just for you regular gear which leaves only 4 for spells and potions. i HATE favorites menu system. oblivion had some really nice hotkey mods that were far more user friendly. i cant wait for darn to start fixing this mess.

Hmm, I've been doing okay with sword&shield, bow, and a couple spells.

1. sword
2. bow
3. shield
4. alternate sword

6. heal


With sword & shield out - hit 2, switches to bow. Hit 1 or 3, back to sword & shield.
hit 6, shield is replaced with heal spell. Hit 3, get my shield back.
Switch between swords with 1 & 4.

:shrug:

Now, I know it's not nearly that easy if you're dual-wielding weapons or spells. But with sword & shield? Seems to work fine.




Hmm. Personally, I've gotten an awful lot of mileage out of the shield bash. Great for interrupting spellcasting, dragon breath, power attacks..... nice for putting that dragon/troll/bear off balance, etc. Heck I barely use power attacks with my sword - I want to save all my Stamina for shield bashes!

I found the hotkeys not too bad with sword + shield, but then I rolled a new duel-dagger assassin. The hotkeys are now totally infuriating.

My hotkeys

1: Enchanted Dwarven Dagger
2: Enchanted Elven Dagger
3: Bow
4: Healing

..so 3 works. And 4 works too - it'll pop into left on one click, then right as well if 4 is pushed again.

...but 1 & 2: If I push 1 the dagger equips to the right hand. So that's cool. But if I then push 2 that swaps into the right hand. So with these hotkeys I can't seem to have a one or two click duel wield from favourites, they are treated instead as if I'm trying to use a shield (which would of course default to left). But I have no shield for this character.

And then in the favourites menu the 1 & 2 assignments seem to disappear for these items. I'm not sure when, or how this disappears, but it happens constantly. Weirdly, it doesn't seem to be when I upgrade or enchant the item, but when

I'd like to have 2 favourites menus - left and right. Then I can setup for duel wielding easily. At the moment when I switch between bow and daggers I open the favourites menu and manually assign the left _ right each time.

The favourites also need some kind of manual sort feature imo.

if anyone has any tips please share

...I'm not on the 1.2 patch

...of course Skyrim is totally amazing, even with these annoyances and the frustrating quest glitches ('Cidhna Mine,' I'm looking at you).