If anything, I'm much more concerned by the whole 'silent casting' perk than I am by the perks you pointed out, OP.


Assuming there is still no Sneak Attack bonus for Magic Attacks (as they always go straight and are generally more useful than, say, archery.) then what would silent casting actually be useful for?

This is going to be a long 29 days.

I'm looking at the Smithing perk tree and i'm not sure what you're talking about. It looks amazing.

Can someone point me at a nice concise description of the known perks system. Link to a page or site of latest released information on it. Just wanting to read up about them.

What makes you think Smithing only deals with iron?

The Smithing perks are: Steel Smithing, Arcane Blacksmith, Dwarven Smithing, Elven Smithing, Orcish Smithing, Advanced Armors, Glass Smithing, Daedric Smithing, Ebony Smithing, and Dragon Smithing.

They do enhance your ability. When you start out you svck at everything. As you invest in perks you get better at stuff. The skill ranks themselves are less important now and serve primarily as a measure of your experience whereas the talent trees represent training. You don't get to be good at everything, for once. That's good.

Also, haven't you made this thread before, like a dozen times?

You can learn spells even if you don't meet the spell's skill level.

http://img849.imageshack.us/img849/1931/firestorm.jpg

In that screenshot from the demo, Todd's character has Destruction at level 93 and already knows a Master level Destruction spell.

It is a bad thing in my opinion. The reason I liked TES, was because it allowed me to go beyond being a master in everything, to the point of being a demi-god Wizard with 200+ in all stats; This wasn't game-breaking in Morrowind either, because it was extremely hard to get that powerful. I also enjoyed making a specific classes that played the game normally, so I wasn't strictly a power gamer either.

Most other games, make it their mission to make you a pawn in their world. As the TES series continues, it becomes ever more apparent that these games are becoming restrictive like the rest of them.

What ahglock was pointing in the topic of Smithing skill is that it is actually worthless, even if improved all the way up to 100 without the perks because smithing perks are actually essential rather than improvement, like in the case of other skills. If you don't take those perks and still achieve very high level in that skill you will be limited to low level materials ( worthless in later stages of the game ).

On other subject :
Can anyone confirm that the level in magic skills still decrease magicka usage like in Oblivion?

?

I don't understand this sentence: "What evidence do you have that, outside of perks, the entire leveling system isn't going to be reduced to something as scant as the ability to cast higher level spells, with no other benefits at all that are not costly perks?"

???

The entire leveling system for magic types has always been to boost to be able to cast higher level spells. Now there are also perks and potential dual-wield combos.
What perks to "unlock standard novice abilities" are you referring to?

I agree with this, and am one of those people. But I also love that there are limits to whatever kind of build you can make. It makes my character mean more/feel more unique.

how is the perk worded exactly? because 125% plus base is what your talking about, if thats how the combat system is accounted for now, are you sure its not 125% of base damage, so 25 becomes roughly 31, resulting in 11 points of damage?

IMHO all the perks are life changing for the players.

Some perks more so and some less, but when a perk let us cast a brand of magic with less magicka cost, IMHO, it would change the life for my mage character.

Or when a perk adds side effect to my ice spells and slow down the target, it really change my battle strategy, and so on...

I know some perks might seem less effective than others, but I really hope that when we look at the whole picture, they have balanced those perks for all the skills.

It's a 5 rank perk worded like "you attacks with one handed weapons do (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%, 125%) more damage" so he is right. rank one is 25% more damage, +6 damage for one perk point.

I'm pretty sure that outside of perks, the skill itself does barelly nothing. Meaning that the skill itself main effect is to unlock perks.

And it won't be a bad game because of it. Sure, it means you cannot do all the builds you want and have something functonnal, like you cannot max efficiency on 17 out of 18 perks and feel different from your last run where you maxed a different set of 17 skills out of 18.

But the truth is, it's not the ability to max everything that allows you to experience all the game in a single char. In fact, the game experience is defined more by what you cannot do when you play the game than by what you can do.

You mastered the two handed weapon skill and finished the fighter's guild questline. Then you decide you want on the same char to become a master mage. Well, your two handed weapon skill is still here and all the achievements you done you cannot redo them from that new perspective. So in a sence, you just grinded those magic skills for completion sake and they don't really allow you to experience the world through them without starting from scratch.

With the lack of spell making and the boring perks associated with casting, looks more and more like Bethesda want to kill the depth of magic.
And I really don't care how pretty they make it if it lacks depth.

You know, skills tend to work completely differently in nearly all TES game.

There were no perks at all in Morrowind, skills mostly raised casting chance and lowered cost, in Oblivion you got perks every 25 skill levels, opening up newer spells, and making them cheaper and more powerful.
Now it's about perks, the skill itself also might do something, but it's just close minded to think people would be "getting cheated from things that are granted" because why should those be granted?

This is exactly the point that some people are blind to... the perks as presented are designed to be a requirement for the skill to function reasonably, and imho that was a bad design choice that just acts to effectively disable the number of skills you will use.

In short, those material perks are what allows you to create with the materials. Without the right perk, you can't smith it at all. And the perks are arranged in a tree so that you must take the perks in a certain order. If you want to smith any Dragon Bone, you must take a large number of Smithing perks first. Not just the Dragon Bone perk.

Well, those perks have to be in a line somehow. Why would you waste a perk for making steel stuff when you could skip it and learn directly to make dragon bone stuff? There is an issue of "end game power creep" like in Diablo II where the most desireable builds were very often done putting most of your points into the level 30 skills, which as a result required you to play the game from level 1 to 30 without spending perk points at all into "inferior" skills. Thus the perk tree that requires you to learn each material in order to make the best stuff.

I get your point, but it's not as simple as that. Obviously you're not going to be able to get hold of Dragonbone armour materials straight away, so having that perk at the beginning of the game would be pointless. The game will be designed so there's a progression of armour materials, and if you buy each perk as you progress then your armour will stay good and powerful throughout the game as the world levels up around you. Remember you can "improve it by double." Chances are the progression of perks will lead to a more balanced difficulty curve.

It does mean that when you do reach Dragonbone, the lower perks will be less useful, but them's the breaks unfortunately. You can still make improved Steel plate armour if you like, which will probably be a good source of income. And in any case it's only 8 perks if you want to be able to make all types of heavy armour AND enchanted armour AND upgraded "scale or plate" armour - fewer if you want to concentrate on light armour.

Could you elaborate on the 'depth' aspect of spellmaking? Give some examples?



Although I can see the problem with smithing skill, what are other skills that could share the same fate you think?

Smithing as a numerical skill is not totally useless. Note the ability to craft, and the improve by twice. That improvement, what is it? Whetstones, used to get extra damage from weapons. Take the perk for that type, the improvement is doubled, but it is already confirmed that the base improvement is skill based.
As for the whole thread, I am sorry, but the OP has posted a few threads which have a tl;dr "I demand that mages be really powerful, because they are mages." Fine for the OP, some of us like to earn any little bit of limited power. Personally, and of course it's all opinion, I would rather a really hard earned sense of achievement than the easily gained ability to cast massively powerful spells.

I fully agree to 'achievement' approach, nothing spoils the game more like 'too easy' gains.
It is good they confirmed that the skill level will contribute to it's effectiveness, must have missed that bit of information. Do you, by any chance, also know if the magic skill level will also contribute by reducing magicka use or something similar ( like in oblivion ) ?

So making a bigger fireball spell is deep, but getting a perk that makes the fireball bigger is boring... :confused: