In Fallout 3 there was a large number of perks that only buffed you're stats, very few had a immediate effect on gameplay. This caused unbalanced characters if you planned ahead such as having a http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Damage_resistance#Permanently_increasing_Damage_Resistance which lowered the need to even have armor, in TES this would be disastrous with the focus on enchanting and looting for items we have had this far.
I want to see perks focus on styles of gameplay. For example; instead of granting a permanent boost to stealth give the player a new tactic to use like the ability to knock someone unconscious or remove a source of light, instead of increasing speechcraft they could make it so a specific race will relate to you more or that people of a certain wealth will like you more.

I think that's how the perks in Skyrim are working to begin with.

"If you plan ahead and min-max/powergame the system" isn't really what games are designed around.


Yeah, back in FO3 some small number of people claimed it was "easy" to max out all your skills - you "only" had to plan everything out ahead of time, not build any skill above 40 with leveling points, choose certain perks, and search the entire game for all the bobbleheads and skill books. (this was at the original lv20 cap)

Ok, sure - if you go to all that effort to get 100 in all your skills? Knock yourself out, it's your right to play the game that way. But 1) the designers don't care that you can go that far out of your way for something, and 2) there's no way you can call that "only" - it was a heck of alot of effort.


So, fine - someone will be able to figure out some min/max advantage they can gain if they plan out their gameplay and choose all the right things to do. So what? How does that effect your gameplay? How does that effect the normal gameplay of the game, for that matter?

No.

I can somewhat agree. But I think items and especially enchantments are hurt most by the removal of attributes, which provided the best enchantments in past games.

Really? I never enchanted for Gain Attribute. Seemed useless, especially when there were things like Shield, Fire Resist, and Feather around.

In Morrowind, at least, I never bothered with feather enchantments as you got more additional carrying weight for every enchantment with fortify strength than with feather, not to mention you do more melee damage, and I never used shield enchantments in Morrowind, though mostly due to the ugly and distracting effect for shield spells rather than their lack of usefulness, the only one of those I ever used in Morrowind was fire resistence.

Now, in Oblivion, things might be different, though in Oblivion I made fewer custom enchantments anyway due to the rather poor decision to limit enchanting services to those who gain access to the Arcane University, usually for Oblivion, if I wanted an item enchanted, I'd prefer to just use sigil stones, so I had to stick with whatever effects I got that I could use, and in Oblivion, I was quite willing to use shield enchantments, in fact, some form of shield, weather through enchantments or spells, was something I'd never go without if I chose to make an unarmored character.

But anyway, I don't see Skyrim's addition of perks reducing the usefulness of items, because perks in Skyrim aren't reallty like perks in Fallout. What Skyrim's perks do is allow you to further specialize within a given skill, like say, under one handed you might have a mace perk which makes you more effective with a mace, I see no reason why that should make any sort of equipment obsolete, perks are idependent from equipment and may improve your abilities to make use of your items.

Though in Fallout 3 I didn't really find myself being less inclined to use powerful items due to perks either, after all, I might be able to have a certain level of natural armor with perks, but by combining said natural armor with the defense from a good suit of combat armor made for an even higher defense, the only items which I felt could really be rendered useless by character abilities were ones which raised skills or attributes, such as power armor, since you couldn't go over the cap even with these items, so if you already maximized those skills or attributes, there would be no point in using them, of course, power armor was never really that good in Fallout 3 anyway.

Read my sig below.

I think you've got it backwards. Heroes walking around like Christmas trees just to optimise their monster-slaying abilities is harmed by the introduction of (in some cases) equivalent character abilities, which by definition are a quality of the hero and not the hero's trousers hat shoes ... magic items.

It's an improvement, I think.

yeah i think thats what they're doing.

Enchanting for attributes was mostly a waste. Attributes had no effect past 100 except for carry capacity (Str), max Magicka (Int) and Magicka regen up to a certain point (Will)