As mentioned, gold is easy to come by, and yes that seems about the ONLY good perk on that tree, but to get a whole tree of useless perks for it? Better to buy 200+ lockpicks and be done with it, and from what I hear the perks dont change the difficulty of opening locks much, its still the same method of trying to open them. So do you really want 1 unbreakable lockpick for all that?

Not necessarily me, but some might. What I'm trying to state is that just because one tree isn't useful to you and I, doesn't automatically make it "completely useless". Some people may need or want it.

InB4 roleplay, huh? Tough, my character idea absolutely demanded allure and persuasion, all there is to it, so in no way useless. As for the lockpicking, the problem isn't the tree and the perks, if there were less lockpicks (why do so many respectable traders sell them?), and the mini-game difficulty was seriously upped, you would have a useful skill. Oh and guards should take all your picks, except one of course, along with your stolen goods, imho.

The "experimenter" perks in the Alchemy tree are beyond useless. The fact that they're also relatively far up the tree makes their existence doubly confusing. By the time you've done enough alchemy to reach that perk level, you should have discovered large numbers of effects yourself.

The enhanced mage shield talents in the Alteration tree are kind of insultingly sad, too. What a privilege! If you leave yourself vulnerable to all kinds of harsh train-wreck deaths by wearing tissue paper, you can spend mana to get a temporary armor bonus if and when you remember to cast your protective spell. Meanwhile, any doofus with a handful of light armor perks (and/or a handful of smithing perks) can be at the armor cap 100% of the time and still cast spells at 100% power.

The novice-apprentice-adept-etc. climb up the Lockpicking tree is annoying; what would have been wrong with a flat, gradual series of improvements like, say, Pickpocket and Sneaking? The first perk in Sneaking gives you a 20% bonus to all sneaky situations... it doesn't limit it to when enemies are near, when enemies are far, when enemies are sitting down on Morndas, and so on.

as a previous poster noted you are powergamming, true if you want to play that way fine you paid for it you play it how you want to play it , but i can't even see the fun of powergamming in skyrim, i am sure it wasn't designed for playing that way

And indeed you are right they just useless if you are powergamming but most of us aren't they just enjoying the immersion and action roleplaying game called skyrim

my opinion on the most useless tree, depends on what sort of character you are playing , if i am playing my nord warrior then all my magic perk trees seem useless to me , ifi am playing my darkelf thief or my ranger /warrior then the heavy armor and 2 h weapon tree are pretty useless
and indeed the lockpicking tree is the least used of all

just my thoughts

I don't like dabbling in absolutes, but in this one I agree that it's pretty much useless no matter what.

You will get 100+ lockpicks long before you get anywhere near the unbreakable lockpick perk.

By the time you get that perk through normal play, I'm actually curious if there will be any locked master chests left to unlock.

How much gold have you seen in a chest in the first place?

I call... perhaps... 200 for dungeon clear chest? And in lower levels, it will probably be less

Better loot? It increases the chance to get better loot by 50%, which is awesome, until you begin to ask: do they add 50% or do they multiply it by 1,5? I heard somewhere the chance for magical loot in chests is 10%. 50% of that is a whopping 5%.

Unbreakable lockpick? I've broken... IDK... 50 lockpicks? And my lockpick never decreases, since I get lots of lockpick, seems that just about every corpse have at least one.

a lot of the tree's contain perks that should get removed and then -> given to you when you hit 25/50/75/100 skill in the tree as currently the 100 abilities are so "meh" that the only real difference between 99 and 100 is 1 skill point but 1 skill point and this awesome bonus we got in oblivion.

this

No, that is not true.
If you went up the heavy branch you will not be able to make scale armour, just bone.
If you went up the light branch you can make only scale.
To make both bone and scale armour you need both light and heavy perk trees.

The lockpicking "Novice --> Master locks easier" perks should really be "Automatically unlock Novice --> Master locks." They should get easier as you increase the skill, and this would give you an incentive to actually raise the skill to 100.

Yes.

Why? Because:



Thanks. Well said.

If you advance in lockpicking you get +50% to find special loot and more coins.
This is important if you want to earn money by robbing people.

And I guess for some people (me included) immersion is important. If you're a master thief and you're still breaking 20 lockpicks to open a master lock then you feel like a noob.
It's the same when you play a warrior: Do you feel like a strong warrior if you jump on a rock where your enemies can't reach you and then you shoot them?
And a master thief should pick master locks easily.

Have to disagree, takes one less perk, if you don't power level it takes some time to get to 100 and glass weapons are more than good enough, no need for [censored]in daedric.



Absolutely not true, paralyzing an opponent with a backwards power attack can save your hide as well as avoiding melee damage, if you don't one-hit everything.



Element enchant is good for resistances.



Don't know if poisons get better, but as far as I've seen up until now (4/5 Alchemist) I have to agree.



You must be trollin dude... Critical Hits, moving faster with a drawn bow, recovering more of you expensive arrows and paralyzing an opponent are [censored]in awesome! -> Playing a bosmer hunter as main char



Breton always was the best race...



Pure powergamers => GTFO!

I can open one with 15 lockpicks at 20 skill. :shrug:

It just takes practice, is all.

I feel sorry for all those who put perks into lockpicking. You have over 100 lockpicks and still need perks to open chests? I could open a master chest in the beginning around 20 skill with about 10 lockpicks. Bethesda needs to rebalance some of these useless perk trees.

Lockpicking is completely useless, i can pick a master lock with 3-10 lockpicks and i haven't put a single perk on lockpicking tree... Seriously did Bethesda think that people playing their game are some retards? If you have trouble picking locks in this game you propably have some issues, i can see maybe some 40+ year old man who doesn't play much or 10 year old might have some problems but who cares that's not the audience you should be targeting Bethesda.

No trees are completely useless but a lot of perks are. Thank god for the mod that made it possible to choose whatever perk you want without having to waste your points on the ones before to get to it.

Interesting. This is the exact reverse of what the boards sounded like when FALLOUT3 came out: "Why can't I just pick any lock? I should be able to at least try it! You telling me I can't even attempt it if I'm a single point away from the requirement? That's so stupid!"

SKYRIM has the right idea: I can attempt a master lock from level 1 - I will svck at it but there is that tiny little chance I'll succeed and if I do I get a big fat bonus to my skill improvement.

Finally: player skill VS avatar skill. Even Michael J. Fox could do it. Honestly, if you can't pick a lock in SKYRIM chances are you don't have the hand-eye coordination to point and click in REALMS OF ARCANIA (you know, back when "real" roleplaying games were played by "real" players" ) or, indeed, roll dice in a p&p game, so let us hear no more nonsense on this.

But hey, perhaps painting barns (only the broad side!) or driving a buggy (slowly in the driveway!) is more the thing.

Lockpicking and speech are pure convenience trees/perks.

So speech might still be cool just to save some time. Yes, there are loads of ways to easily farm money, but being able to sell everything to everyone, being able to sell more at once and being able to sell stolen goods to basically everyone is kind of nice.
For people like me, who just can't stop to steal and loot almost everything, it's cool I think.

For lockpicking however ...
Even without any perks it's still very easy to lockpick. Master might take a few tries, but it's still not really hard.
So this skill is actually 100% useless. Finding a bit more loot is a cool bonus, but still not anywhere near worth to spend multiple points here.

The light armor branch ... well ... for the endgame it's indeed a waste of perks to go that way. I realized that after seeing that there are no dragon weapons, but just armor. I don't like the look of most of the glass weapons and deadric is stronger of course.
Of course glass-armor etc. offer good protection before you reached 100, but I guess you could also play with what you find (including special armor types) until you reach that.

Why feel sorry for them? It isn't as if they only get to play the game once and those lockpicking perks are going to haunt them for the rest of their life.

I actually really like the idea of Speech, but it is far too difficult to raise efficiently, outside of selling and buying back stock from a shop repeatedly (gets very expensive) or that exploit in Riften (if you're going to do that you may as well whip out the console). It had a lot of potential really, but all the good perks are essentially centered around getting better prices in shops. This is okay, but as you go through the game the only beneficial perk to me would be the ability to sell stolen goods. I wish there were more Speech options that actually had a meaningful impact on the game outside of the only consequence of failing a persuade check is having to pay a bribe.

I'm really sick of people saying the lockpicking tree is useless. I know that the easier lockpicking perks are useless but lockpicking has two of the best perks in the game:

Finding more gold

Finding more enchanted items

I am really surprised no one said it...

Pickpocket. Either people find this useful, or it is SO useless people forgot it existed.

In every other TES/Fallout game this has been part of sneak instead of its own skill. WHY, WHY does it need its own skill? I honestly think that they wanted exactly 6 skills for each playtype(warrior, mage, thief), and they were one short on thief and they didn't want to do mercantile because that would make speech double useless.

Same here, but I think that it would be strange that one can learn how to run even before he knows how to walk.


Agreed!
I think that it would be much better if they merged Pickpocket with ether Sneak or Lockpicking (in that case, Lockpicking should be renamed to something like Security) and filled that place with Unarmored skill and give it some Athletics/Acrobatics-like perks.

I mean, I can see only three perks actually making sense from Pickpocket skill - Light Fingers (kinda obvious it makes sense) and Poisoned (this one fits the pickpocketing and actually looks like something which should demand a perk of it's own), Misdirection (I still have to take this perk to check how it works, but I think you should be able to pickpocket only sheathed weapons).
Other perks are simply silly.
Night Thief - Pickpocketing a sleeping NPC should be 25% easier by default since he is asleep.
Cutpurse/Keymaster - Gold and keys are easy to pickpocket enough already and again, pickpocketing something like that should be easier by default since it only makes sense.
Extra Pockets - This perk does not work out for this skill since items here take space based on weight, not based on volume.
Perfect Touch - Pffft... really?
Try to take pants of someone and tell me how well does it go.
I know that this is just a video game, but some tings are too much even for it, and this is one of them.
This perk could work out only in case the target is asleep (even then it would be a real stretch).

OT:
I personally find lot of perks silly and totally pointless.
When it comes to lockpicking, I personally think that Unbreakable is totally crappy perks since even without any perks, you can open master locks without too much trouble.
Now, I can't even imagine how easy would it be in case you get Master Locks and Locksmith perks.
On top of that, lockpicks are easy to come by and are really cheap, so even if you break lot of lockpicks, it's not that big of a deal.
I say that Unbreakable perks gets replaced with Disarm perk; a perk which will allow you to open doors, chests and such without activating the trap.
Also, I personally think that Golden Touch and Treasure Hunter perks get removed and replaced with something more useful since those two perks have nothing to do with picking locks and are kinda useless since you can already find enough special treasure and gold even without them.

When it comes to Speech, I personally think that Master Trader is simply idiotic perks.
What, you are so good trader that somehow all people you trade with have extra 1K Septims in their pocket?
I still have to check how Perfect Touch perk works, but it if works like I think it does (ie. you can pickpocket clothes and armor), then it's pretty damn stupid perk which should be removed and replaced with something else.
Those perks are equivalent to water-jumping from Oblivion. >_>
Master Trader should be removed and Investor should be turned into a two level perk and look like this:
Investor - 70/100 Speech - Can invest 750/1500 gold with a shopkeeper to increase his available gold permanently.

Threads like this actually encourage me to make a suggestion for overhauling skills in Skyrim since I notice that there are lot of people who actually see some crappy stuff which should be removed and get replaced.