The conventional wisdom is that you should develop one melee attack skill and one ranged attack skill. But has anyone played around with a character who uses one-handed weapons as well as two-handed? Does that feel like a waste of time?

One of the things I liked about previous games was the organization of weapons according to type, so you'd have blade (or long blade, etc) and axe (or blunt, etc). For the most part, I had the option of carrying around a longsword and a claymore, and being effective at both.

Since I'm a svcker for +10 skill bonuses, I can't imagine playing a Nord and *not* using two-handers, at least a little bit, even if my character concept makes extensive use of one-handers. If I want a character who is a blademaster in Skyrim, though, I'd need to develop one-handed for swords and daggers, and two-handed for greatswords.

Since I like to (in theory) work on no more than 5 or 6 skills, having two melee weapon skills seems like it could get complicated. On the other hand, the way you sometimes have to wait for perks until you reach a high enough skill level in a perk tree might make this more feasible (I can't get the next rank in Barbarian for a few more skill levels, so may as well get Armsman, e.g.).

Anyone had any luck creating an all-rounder weapon master in Skyrim - and any tips for how to do so?

The majority of my created characters have been one handed/two handed/archers,basically an all around warrior. I like to switch it up from time to time to prevent boredom and stagnation. The highest I've taken my lastest hybrid is level 42 and he 's doing just fine.

Thanks, good to know! I'd probably use Archery too, so it's good to see that being thrown in the mix as well.

Ideally, I'd like to have a two-hander and 2 one-handers for dual wield (or possibly one-hander and shield), and switch weapons depending upon the situation.

Do you find yourself approaching a battle and thinking, "Hmm, this calls for a greatsword," or "Sword and dagger would work best here"?

I ask because I hope that each weapon type would be distinct enough to require the player to make strategic choices... but if one weapon style is just "the best", then I'll just be switching weapons for cosmetic reasons, which is less desirable. If that makes sense.

You can reach 100 in all skills and you have 81 perk to spare, so technically it's possible to be both one-handed and two-handed specialist.

True, I think he was asking whether it was wise to do so. I'm not sure there's any practical purpose to it. About the only reason I could think would be if you were, for example, using one-handed weapons and found a really great two-handed weapon as loot, it would let you switch to your new toy and wield it effectively. Outside that, I think it might be a heavy waste of a number of perks to go deep into both the one-handed and two-handed trees - but then if the character you wanna play is an all-around warrior, a soldier who can master any and all weapons, go for it. It certainly makes sense from that perspective; soldiers don't just learn one weapon, they learn a number of them. They usually tend to master only one, but they're qualfied and competent to handle all kinds of weapons.

waste of perks.
either one-handed or two-handed.
it makes more sense to mix up shield and dual wield than investing in 1H & 2H if you wish to add some diversity.

Since the perk trees are pretty much identical, and have a lot of perks, I can see that it would be a heavy perk investment.

I could mitigate that somewhat by choosing to perk out specific aspects of each weapon type... like if my 2-handed weapon is going to be a battleaxe, and my one-handers will be dual-wielded. Then pick one weapon type to go with the decapitation perk, and the other type for the sprinting perk...

Yeah, lot of perks, but if I'm not using a ton of perks for other things I think it could work. Here's what I'm thinking for a build:

Nord

One-handed
Two-handed
Archery
Light Armor
Block (only a few here - not a sword-and-board type)
Smithing (maybe no perk investment... just something to use occasionally. Still undecided.)

The idea is, this would be my character who goes through the Companions questline. And since there are .... aspects ... of that questline that, I have heard, base damage on One-handed skill and armor on Light Armor, I definitely want those two.

So, I see most of my perks being spent in combat skills anyway.