Everyone seems to assume that the people doing this want to min/max, or want to be uber mages and uber thieves and uber fighters all at the same time. Did it ever occur to you that resetting perk points doesn't reset how you set your magic/health/stamina? If I play 50 levels as a warrior, then reset my perks and try to go mage, I will have the mana pool of a goat. I will be seriously gimped, or I will have to carry 50lbs of potions around with me all the time. Hell, for some of the top-tier spells, you might not even have enough magicka to do them at all! (I have no idea, I'm archer/1H+shield). Conversely, if you ran a mage for 50 levels, your health pool probably wouldn't be that great. In addition, your skills with weapons/magic (depending on where you started) would svck, while the monsters would be leveled up to where you are. Imagine trying to fight a level 50 dragon while you've got level 5 weapon skills. See how that could be difficult?

See? You can reset your perks, but there are still consequences. The lack of consequences seems to be a major theme that I'm seeing here, so I think that handles that one pretty completely. I don't think breaking immersion is a fair point, because what I do in my game doesn't influence what you do in your game. The only other argument I saw is that people would prefer that gamesas use that time making DLC, instead of making this. That's a fair point, but we don't know how their time and talent is distributed, so there's nothing even guaranteeing that implementing this would make us have to wait longer for DLC and patches.

Meh. I'm mildly in favor of this, but I don't even know that I would use it. I'm on PC, so I could always just go the console route if I felt my perks were so terribly misspent, but I haven't. I can see where it makes sense to be able to reset them, though. If I trained for years with light armor, and then trained for years with heavy armor, are you telling me that I somehow wouldn't learn the tricks of the trade of heavy armor? If anything, that breaks immersion, in my not-so-humble opinion.

I was polite when pointing out it doesn't belong, when it was made personal that" I'm out to ruin it for others and not allow their single player game to change " is when I wasn't so polite.

There is no reason Skyrim shouldn't have perk resets, every other game with a similar skill system allows respeccing.

I for one have no interest in losing all the hard work I've invested in a character by rerolling just because my playstyle interests have shifted or I took up a perk I ended up never really using to it's full potential.

you mean every other mindless hack and slash I don't recall most of the more RPG end games allowing respecs.

Regardless you don't and shouldn't get to be a jack of all trades master of everything character. You can a thief, warrior, or mage, variations of all of them and even a mixture. But you don't get to be everything.

You could in Morrowind. You could in Oblivion (stupid leveled bad guys notwithstanding). Even without perks, you can get everything to level 100 if you're really inclined, and that's enough to be beast mode with just about anything you can pick up.

I read through a bunch of this thread's responses and I got the feeling of what you all are saying, but here's my problem:

I saved my perk points for a bit and when I finally decided to look at the skill trees to choose from, I came to the conclusion that Smithing and Enchanting are definitely going to be my final choices; considering the fact that I'm looking to make my character with it's ultimate potential in his own line of skills (for me a heavy armor warrior with a sword and shield). I know many others play their first time for getting a hang of it or just say "this is just a game" and be over with it, but I like to play my games like this, so please no comments on this part.

So I started investing on Smithing, *SPOILER ALERT* my goal being the "ultimate" dragon armor (at the time I had no idea that daedric was ultimate). When I started investing I was like 40 at Smithing and it took me a while to get to 100 but I had more than enough points for it. Now the problem is, looking at the dragon gear perk on top of Smithing skill tree I immediately thought I should get BOTH the heavy armor and light armor perks for it. as I leveled through smithing skill, since I already had the points, I invested in both light and heavy armor. Now I have the full Smithing tree invested in and I just found out from wiki that you only need one branch to get to dragon gear, aside from the fact that daedric is superior anyways.
*END OF SPOILER*

Being a fan of elder scrolls and fallout series, when I got skyrim I decided to try to minimize my searching through the web for stuff like these and quests, since doing that would ruing my gaming experience and I wanted to live with the consequences for once. I thought maybe in such a magnificent game, they'd think of most everything about how the player will feel, think and perceive by seeing different aspects of the game, especially in something as important as the skill tree. now I'm sitting here with a whole bunch of perks wasted and quests broken (I can't even become the thane of falkreath due to bug) which has kinda made me not want to continue playing. I still think this is an awesome game and that bethesda deserves every penny they make off of skyrim, but still...

I'm all for accepting consequences of choices and all that, but this isn't a choice I made within the game intentions, this is just wrong. Now for someone like me, would you not recommend a skill point reseter? The thing that almost everyone tend to forget is that if there's something there you don't have to use it, if you wanna enjoy the game you can play however you want and make yourself not "cheat".

Right, but the overwhelming argument is that it punishes those who make an honest mistake in choosing a perk that doesn't represent itself fairly.

I don't want a "Full Respec" ability... I just want a way to change perks that don't work out for my character. Should I start a new character if I've invested three weeks in a character, and choose two perks I think would be useful for my character concept, but realize it doesn't work out? I'm stuck with a really nasty choice in such a situation:

1.) Continue with a permanently-gimped character

OR

2.) Start over, rendering the past three weeks of my life I've invested into the game completely worthless?

I wish there was a "Floating Respec" option: You can re-assign a perk once per level, but the re-assignments don't carry over between levels. It lets you correct mistakes in character leveling, without allowing you to completely re-design your character.

Here's a concrete example of what I'm talking about:
I currently have a character - a two-handed Berzerker. When I envisioned her and started investing points, I thought it might be cool to go for full two-handed offensive ability. It made sense at the time to put two points into Destruction so I had the option to bust out a super-charged Flamethrower when the task called for it. I was still under the impression that damage scaled with skill level, and that the Dual-casting perk made the spell much more powerful.

Instead, what I thought was going to be a supercharged flamethrower turned out to be a glorified tickler. My character is not a dedicated mage, and I've found that destruction's offensive power cannot compete with my Archery and Two-handed offensive capability. I want those two perks back. I'm not completely re-defining my character here: I just want to correct an early mistake.

you apparently dont understand how major and minor skills work

Major skills:
1. Define your character
2. Are more effective than minor skills.
3. Level up faster than minor skills
4. Contribute to leveling.


In Skyrim, skills you put perks into:
1. Are used more frequently than those you don't perk. Ergo, they define your character.
2. Have boosted functionality and potency from the perk investment. Ergo, they are more effective than non-perked skills.
3. Increase the rate at which they level as they outpace your lesser-used skills. Ergo, they level up faster than minor skills.
4. Contribute more to level-up on advancement than skills you leave behind. Ergo, they level you up more than minor skills. Minor skills leveled you up in Daggerfall and Morrowind too.

Do you want to hear more?


I wouldn't consider games like tabletop Dungeons & Dragons (Any Edition), and PC games like Two Worlds to be "Mindless Hack and Slash". Where are you finding these "RPG end games" you like so much?

That's why we're not whining about the inability to change skill level numbers. But "perks" are a front-loaded, abstract and arbitrary system. Aside from Smithing perks, they don't seem to be as much a "learned skill" as a "personal style," which is permanently mutable in Real Life.

The idea of choice based actions is trial & action. You do not just go in as a blind lamb and leave as all knowing, you go in multiple times, gather the know how to make the gears work & then you make the perfection occur.

Through you can also go see the Muppets instead of play Skyrim.

Yea except the perks are the easy part. You still had to get smithing to 100 which is what takes a considerable amount of time and effort. The perks are just that "perks". However the way the game is setup they can either give you a significant advantage or be a major liability since the game is balanced around you having them and if you invest poorly this comes back to bite you unless you are playing on low difficulties. I know when I started my character as a mage on master difficulty it wasn't until much later I realized how useless all the points I'd spend in destruction where. Thankfully now that I've spent over 90 hours on the character I have enough levels to diversify a bit but I can never get those perks back from destruction. They sit there completely wasted. The only way to really know if a perk is genuinely good or not is to invest into it and try it. In an RPG your character and it's story are the heart and soul of the game. Telling people "just remake your character and do the exact same content over again" is downright foolish.

TL;DR but yes, I would like Perk resets.

Perk resets no.
A new perk tree specificaly for "Fun" perks. Hell yes!

What?

If you're saying you shouldn't be able to correct mistakes after making them except by throwing everything you've worked on away... I'm sorry, but no. Just, no...

this is plain idiotic...and also the reason why the game isn't as attractive for me as it was before.

and seriously how many playthroughs do you intend to have? god knows how many hours it's gonna take me to finish this.

These disrespectful sorts of replies are why the pro-perk people think the anti-perk people might just be asshats. Anyway, like I said before, perk resets still mean that you have to level up the skills necessary to use those perks. If I have Destruction at 100 and One-Handed at 10, then I reset my perks, I've lost my Destruction perks and have nowhere to put them. I have to work to get my One-Handed up to the point where I can use those perks.

How is it overpowered that I have to put another 30-40hrs of gameplay (or however long it takes you) so that I can also get my One-Handed skill up to godly levels, knowing that Destruction is no longer there and can never get there again? How do you explain that the Dovahkiin can't learn how to shield bash because he went to the College of Winterhold before he joined the Companions? What, is he afraid of hurting his hands or something?

Let's be completely realistic here. A full respec option would be absurd. The fact that you could use smithing and enchanting perks to build equipment and then respec them into combat abilities makes the whole notion of a full respec ridiculous.

From reading this thread, it seems to me like most people only have 1 or 2 perks that they feel they have wasted. These mistakes mostly just annoy people. They don't actually make it so that you get stuck or anything like that. I think a feature (either through a side-quest or some clever plot device) that allows you to take one or two perks and re-invest them would solve 90% of the complaints without breaking the game. It would give you a bit of freedom to experiment without just making things silly. Of course smithing, alchemy and enchanting would have to be left out (or at least you couldn't remove perks from them).

For people who played as a full-blown mage and then decided that, after 20 hours, they would rather be a two-handed sword-weilding warrier; I really just think you have to create another character. I'm not trying to force my way of thinking onto anyone. I know that not everyone plays games for the same reasons but you also have to realize that not every game is created to provide the same experience. Not every game is meant to be something where you can just do anything you want. There are plenty of rpgs that allow you to create flawless gods but this is not necessarily one of them. I don't think you should be able to pull a complete 180 in the middle of the game.

You know since dragons continue to spawn, perhaps there can be a connection between getting so many souls to getting a respec?

50? 100? more?

Of the two camps voicing their view on the issue I think I fall into the 'sure let 'em have the option' group. A one-time reset quest or something would be ideal for console users, since this allows you to explore all the trees that interest you and dump the ones that don't match your play style after all.

To the hardcoe role-players I say this: there's nothing more fantasy-realistic (is that a thing?) than, for instance, being a Nord smith and sword user as a young lad and then laying your weapons down in old age for the arcane arts. I see no injustice in letting players reset their perks. People in the real world often change their ways or occupations, so why not in Skyrim too?

I've hit the point where I too have desired to shed my points in, say, Illusion for some in 2H weapons as I later discovered how fun it is to bash skulls in. So, I just go back to a save game file before the commitment was made and call the rest a 'vision' my character had. It works in the RP sense and in the more practical sense as well.

It's ironic that so many perk point fascists exist to play a game that is thematically about playing it however you want.

For me, I want to play one character and do it all. Then, get some DLC and do more. **SPOILER** Climbing the 7,000 steps for the tenth time doesn't provide me any additional fun or immersion value.

Go to title screen
Select New
Enjoy

This is the best response so far, imo. What I would like is a way to reassign the perks within the skill specializations that you've ALREADY made; your choice of skills to perk into is what defines your character, and typically people go into a new character with the idea of skill choices already in mind (for instance, I wanted to make an illusion/sneak/one-handed character). I've also re-rolled several times just because the perks didn't work how I intended, or I realize that they'd be better off spent elsewhere within the same tree, or maybe switched over to another skill tree that i'm already using.

Here's how it should work: once you decide to put your first point into a skill tree, that skill becomes a part of your specialization forever. So if you put points into 5 or six different skills, that's your specialization set up, and you can only reassign perks within those skills and between them. Perk resets are for fine-tuning a predetermined specialization set of skills, NOT for reworking an entire character's class archetype. If you at some point decide that illusion/sneak/one-handed isn't for you, and you'd rather make a heavy armor/two-handed/smithing warrior, THAT is when you'll need to create a new character. But give us some flexibility within our predetermined specialization; I for one know the general theme of my character from the start, but I don't know exactly how effectively or optimally each of the perks within that specialization archetype will work together.

As an example, let's say you started a character and focused on archery and sneak, and also put like 2 points into conjuration. Well, you're stuck with those skills - however, you could switch paths within archery between Quick Shot and Ranger, or you could adjust how many points you put into Stealth x/5. But conjuration is locked as part of your specialization, and you can either take points out of it completely, or wait till you're higher level to be able to specialize enough in it for the minions to be powerful. And obviously, there should be a limit to how many skills you can specialize in, maybe 6 (so it's possible to fully specialize in an archetype). That way, if you start out with archery, sneak, and conjuration, then for the next 3 levels you put one point each into destruction, alchemy, and enchant, that's it, you've filled out your specialization (as a Witchhunter) and must remain within those skills.

agree, except i ended up using a perk in pickpocket rather than sneak /fail

By eliminating classes and stats Beth implied that we would get a more open and free gaming experience, developing our characters in the game world rather than on character sheets. Thats great. I love that. But there has to be some level of permanency, some consequence to your in game actions. The game should not allow players to start out as mages and then change to rogues and then to fighters with no consequence at all. That would be ridiculous. Pick a play style and play it. If you waste a perk, thats your loss. Work around it. From an immersion point of view, in real life if you waste 5 years going to college to become a lawyer only to realize you wanna be a architect you cant 'reset your perks'.