Examples

The first perks of..

one handed
two handed
sneak
archery
Enchanting
Pickpocket
Heavy armour
light armour
Alchemy
block


Why? Well firstly these perks increase the skills effectiveness by 20% (out of 5, so to a hundred percent) However the skills for most of these do very little to change how effective the act is! So in a way these perks actually replace the skills!! The skill number is used only to tell you which perks you can pick up.. Is that even Elder scrolls? Half of the skills do this! Wouldn't it be better for the player to Not have these perks and instead improve the skill with the actual skill level? Some of these perks downright take all of the skill whilst one or two arent so bad (i am thinking sneak and speech, but they increase by a value less than 20)


Secondly the chain perks for

Destruction
illusion
conjuration
Lockpicking
alteration
Restoration
Arguably smithing

(by this i mean that there is separate novice/apprentice/journeyman/adept/master perks)

The magic skills for instance only loose 33% of their cost at level 100 and the perks half that. But that's just.. stupid! Firstly you NEED perks if you are going to use high level spells! (in destruction you actualy Need enchantments too due to the expert spells costing about 100 magicka and need to be used in quantity.. you are going to need a [censored]load of magicka to take down something your level in one go and chances are you're going to have about 300-400 at that kind of level if a pure magic user) But wouldnt it be easier if you didnt have to waste perks on these because magic Actually became a lot less costly and Lockpicks actualy became easier to pick with leveling?

What if i had 100 skill and no perks?
What if i had 50 skill but the first 3 perks, making me a better user of that skill than the hundred guy?
Will this novice lockpick perk help me at all in journeyman locks?
What if i had 100 illusion, no perks and wanted the perk that makes all my spells in other schools stealthy from the illusion perk tree?
What about when i get 60 one handed and 60 light armour in the same level- i will need to pick only one of these to actually improve! The other can wait for the next level up so long as i dont get my Enchanting to 60 then!



I like these posts..

Dude you are so right on, i have thought about this alot to myself as i level my character and dump perks into making my skill (that i killed so many things with to raise for the sake of being effective) actually useful when my high skill value on its own should be enough to make the skill useful. A warrior using heavy armor, block, and one handed weapons would be able to choose 15 extra perks if the initial 5 were dropped and added into the skill itself. Thats a lot of extra cool stuff you could get potentially.

Perks aren't redundant, some are very important. If your going to be using One Handed, you probably will want to put 5 points in the 1st perk.

They did this to avoid oblivion... A master of all, builds. Basically you have to choose what you truly are.

Exactly, the first perk to one handed is not redundant at all and neither is any other perk. One handed needs the 1st perk to be taken 5 times.

Cheers

N'wah! The fact is though that you would not NEED to waist 5 perks into something if it actualy got stronger with your skill

I agree. I had expected perks to act as with Fallout 3, where they provided substantial and different mechanics that complemented skills - not substituted the role of skills themselves by taking away their incremental increasing of the effectiveness of the relevant mechanics and adding them in as perks (which makes skills pointless, since as you noted their only role now acts as milestones to unlock certain perks, which is quite silly).

Yeah, I really dislike the new levelling system. Oblivion's was better.

The fact that most of these bland +X % perks are needed to make the skill worthwhile actually shows quite well where the problem lies that the OP mentioned, just that in this case it's not the perk which is redundant, but the skill itself, as it's basically no longer needed except to unlock the perk.

Tbh I think they need to do something similar with more perks (like modifying the heavy/light armor trees a bit so that it becomes inconvenient to use the armor without putting perks into it -- which would give casters a reason to wear robes or else sacrifice perk points they could have put into magic trees into an armor tree)

If it is a perception issue, it can be fixed by making perks to give pseudo bonus skill points.

So you can raise a skill to up to 30 without perks. Perks adding the rest of the points. Getting every perk except the top one, would get at most 75, and that perk adding +25 to achieve 100. I can't wrap my head around it right now but this should be possible by purely cosmetic means.

I would NOT go so far as to say that oblivions was better. Skyrim's is flawed, but Oblivions was TERRIBLE. If you actually chose the skills you intended to use as main skills, you would overlevel and get pwned by every bandit. It took me three mods to get it to the way I could actually feel comfortable playing. At least Skyrim doesn't take mods to make it PLAYABLE.

Yea, its kinda like skill level doesnt matter that much, if you dont add perks in XXX, your damage won't be increased by a whole chunk.
Especially damning for mages, where you need 5 perks just to make it VIABLE to use the spells. those 5 perks don't even make the spells stronger, it only allows you to use the spells, because 100% magicka cost is ridiculous. And even with the perk, the magicka cost is horrible not to mention the reduced magicka regen in battle.

And enchanting is the only way out :glare:

The fact that they're basically mandatory is one of the things he's griping about. Having restarted a couple of characters several times each, and doing the associated build planing, it's become pretty clear to me that the starting perk in several of the trees is there to soak up perk picks, since one could just as readily tie those increases directly to the skill levels rather than needing 5 ranks of the same perk to get it. I do realize that changing it to only need one rank would make it a bit too easy to get maximal potential out of one of said skills, as well as freeing up large numbers of perk picks, but at the same time it gets annoying having to keep picking that base perk just to get full benefits for my current skill level.

It's generally accepted that reaching 100 in a given skill represents the ultimate level of ability in that field, and that said skill represents a broad spectrum of talents; that being the case, perks should be the means by which one defines one's chosen specialty within that field. The Destruction, 2H, and 1H trees already have this to a degree, although there's a goodly bit of room for additional diversification. This is where not needing 5 ranks of the starting perk becomes important, since the overall limit on number of picks isn't likely to change; without that 'artificial' constraint, the opportunity arises to expand on the somewhat rudimentary specializations already present, which opens up a whole new array of more focused character types.

Agreed.