I expected perks to make certain skill sets more significant and to greatly enhance the players ability, but ever more often I keep seeing snippets and hints that the actual leveling of skills may no longer have any value at all, other than, perhaps, allowing you to cast certain spells. If ALL of the advancements that used to come with leveling a skill now have to be chosen from the perk trees, then players will end up cheated out of many of the things that we have hitherto taken for granted.

Wha? The novice, apprentice, adept, expert, and master perks for destruction, and other spells don't determine if you can cast those spells. They simply let you cast them at half the mana price. All those perks do is enhance certain spells you already had/could do.

Edit: Double post

perks are to improve your character and abilites it probably won't make new abilities (maybe for certain skills). bethesda knows what they're doing.

While in many cases what you are concerned about is coming to pass in this case not so much. Don't get me wrong there are a lot of lame magic perks, but you will at least be functional without the perks.

It's called crafting more unique playthroughs. The word "concerned" has become such a cliche here anymore.

Thats complete ignorance, you have to have a certain skill level in a skill tree to get the perks and in most cases must have the previous perk in order to move to the next (Unless it forks)

As far as I know the only real gameplay changing perks are quick reflexes for Block, Slow mo for Archery, and Shield Charge.

so i cant slow down time as a mage? or get any gameplay changeing effects as one?

You can slow down time as a dragon born, once you learn the words. You get game play changing effects from different spells. There are 80+ spells now that are specific and have various animations.

Zoom for archery.
Move faster with drawn bow.
Overcharging magic.
Re-animate dead.
Place runes 5x further away.
Once per day autocast 250HP restoration when heath drops low.
Sprinting while sneaking performs silent forward roll.
Vanish -forces your attacker to focus their attacks on another when entering combat in sneak mode.


Those are some of the gameplay changers. I'm willing to bet as they actually release the perk trees, we will see more.

Anyone with an ounce of imagination and thought can craft a unique playthrough on there own. If the leveling methodology of Skyrim really does remove nearly all of the benefits that came with leveling in previous games and redesignate them as perks, then it becomes more a matter of purposely handicapping players than anything else. Not everyone wants to play as 99 different characters. Many people like to play as one or two characters over a very long span of time.

Saying that increasingly handicapping players simply offers more versatiltiy to playstyle borders on the inane. Follwing that train of thought, the devs could exponentially "increase" the number of "unique" playstyles by making it impossible for players to use more than one school of magic per character, or impossible for a character with more than level 25 in blade to learn any spells or vice versa, or by making it impossible to have a high stealth and a high armour level simultaneously. In theory you could have at least 18 VERY distinct character builds. . . except, of course, as the truly detail attentive will understand, that actually offers you FAR less unique build options than if you are able to have any one of the 18, but also to mix and match any number of those 18 as the player sees fit.

I hope to be wrong in this matter. Believe me I do. I had heard about the perks for 50% of magicka cost for each level of spells. Yet I recently have seen things about perks to unlock standard novice abilities. A perk for 20% off novice spells? Didn't that used to just come with the territory after a certain level? 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?

Those automatic skills you aquired at levels 25, 50, 75 and 100 were Perks. So it wouldn't be suprising to me to find those same cost reducing perks again on the perk trees. The difference now is that you get a Perk every level, not just when you hit a skill Milestone, and that you can choose whatever Perk you want ( assuming you meet the skill prereqs)

Overall I think it's going to be a good system. Better than Oblivion, worse than? I don't know, but we'll find out in 30 days!

Coyote~

Skyrim is a new game. You should not take anything for granted. That said, what did they really give us in Oblivion? All skill perks were hard coded and mostly useless. http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Skill_Perks

Read that and tell me you feel cheated with a straight face?

Perks allow for some actual interesting and useful enhancements and capabilities. I'd rather pick what I want than inherit some useless abilities that are hard coded.

From the perk trees i have seen you will be half right. About half the perks seem to be lame skill level replacement perks many of which are basically required to make the skill functional, the other half are actually cool. The problem is the skills that require X perk to be functional end up being grinding material for your primary skills and are worthless otherwise.

So what exactly will leveling magic schools do? They just unlocked higher level spells before. We still have that, plus perks now.

As I said in an earlier post I think the magic skills are at least functional without perks. A lot of the physical skills though have those perks that double or more that output. Take one handed lets say you do 25 points of damage per swing, the guy you are facing has enough defense to absorb 20 of that damage, you end up doing 5. If the game was based around that 5 you end up being fine, but the guy with the perks is doing like 125% more damage or 56 points of damage, after the 20 defense 36 points of damage. That kind of difference is just too large, without the perks the skill is bordering on worthless. And then there is blacksmithing where it actually is totally worthless without perks after like level 8.

How so?

Not entirely true. Though it is not listed in the list an earlier poster provided, we know that one of the key functions of advancing in the schools of magic, was that casting spells from the respective schools cost much less in magicka. This was an automatic feature, and a logical one, for as one's understanding of an avenue of magic expands and deepens, it stands to reason that you would waste less effort and energy in the casting of related spells.

There are LOTS of awesome and unique perks that could have been offered (and some are) from dual summoning to impact etc. WITHOUT turning formerly automatic advancements into costly perks. Making hitherto automatic improvements like decreased magicka cost perks seems almost like a mechanic developed soley for the purpose of eating up a person's limited perk choices.

svcks for you then. I'm glad they didn't make the character creation pointless by allowing one character to max out everything. If I wanted a game where every character was the same I'd just play an adventure/action game



:facepalm: That's what they did N'wah. You CAN mix and match the 18 as you see fit. Your character is made by how you decide to play rather than each character ending up exactly the same if you level them to max

I'm looking foward to new (perk) system

Once the game gets past iron a skill that can only build iron is pretty damn lame.

I'd like to believe that, but i've played their games :hehe:

Anyway, i've purposely kept the details of this game a mystery for me, so i can't comment on the perk trees. On paper it sounds somewhat similar to what Dragon Age 2 used, and that worked nicely enough.

Allowing is VERY different from mandating. Every character is not the same unless you make every character the same, so long as the maximum number of options is available to you.

Also, if you read my comment more carefully you would realize that you are arguing a hypothetical in the second statement. But to your point, you cannot mix and match all 18 as you see fit. There are severe limitations to the number of possible builds, because a vast number of the hybrid builds have been heavily restricted. You always had freedom to create different builds. There was never a mandate to max every skill, even when you could do so, and most people did NOT do so, even when that option and all related benefits were available.