Links to all skill perks can be found here
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Skills

Tod Howard had mentioned in this last interview how he really liked the idea of perks in games. Sounds like this may be seen in the next TES. I've seen many members post different feelings on the skill perks found in Oblivion. I wanted to see overall feelings about them and which ones were liked best.

I generally liked the perks. One of my favorites was Armorer, having a 125% bonus protection/damage made this skill wonderful for melee. Sneak, marksman and alchemy were others I liked. Some like Speech Craft and Security I liked in as much they affected their respective mini games.

The magic ones worked as far as not allowing a lower level character getting a hold of an uber spell early which I both liked and did not like, but since all casting magic had the same perk it felt generic to me. The melee attack skills also felt generic I would like to see more diversity according to different weapon styles, especially hand to hand. I felt the light and heavy armor skill perks essentially canceled out the differences in the two types and could have been done much more to accentuate the strengths of each respective armor type.

Some forum members have mentioned that they didn't like that suddenly at levels 25, 50, 75 and 100 you got a new powerful perk. i felt that a little, but don't know hot it could have been done differently for the various skills to make it "smoother?" Anyways that's my two cents lets here yours.

I dislike perks in Oblivion.

They svcked, I didn't like them at all.

The only one that was marginally okay was the marksman zoom.

All the others were artificially dumb and made non-perk-level skill ranks useless. In other words, skill ranks before and after the perk had no affect on the skill itself; only the perk was useful. Case in point: lockpicking, speechcraft, spell casting, etc.

Todd Howard needs to decide if TES is going to have Feats (like DnD) or Skills (where each rank is important to the skill's success). If he wants both, he'll have to actually start using his brain (or, as I suspect, because he has none, he will have to hire someone to do the thinking) to integrate the two.

EDIT: The other ugly monster in the room is the minigame, which divorced character skill from player skill. Learn the lock picking game, and you can open every lock with no ranks in the skill at all. As long as you can aim your mouse, you can hit a creature every time.

I really like the idea actually, but felt the implementation was jarring to the experience (As you mentioned: suddenly having access to a brand new skill).

I would like to see a quest being given at each interval instead (25,50,75,100) with which your character can visit a skill trainer to be taught a new ability now that you've advanced enough in the respective skill.

Makes sense, and doesn't seem jarring in that you just magically know how to do something brand new.


Agree with you on the lockpicking, but not on the ability to hit monsters. Always hitting is a good advancement, but needs more tweaking to come off believably. Better level-scaling, or none at all, would help a lot. But i'd also like to see Euphoria being used so that every 'hit' shows a creature or bandit block, parry, dodge, or see the attack glance off his armour, until the final attack which brings his HP to 0 is a killing blow that penetrates his defence.

At high levels you'll be skillful enough with a sword to be able penetrate the average bandit's defences with ease, killing them with a single blow. But taking on a guard at level 1, with a blade skill of 25... the guard would easily 'block' everything you throw at him for a long time. Much better than seeing the guard get hit 57 times before dying.

Even better that the Feat system and Perk system is in my opinion the Skill Tree system, like the one in Diablo 2.

While I've got no problem with the concept of perks (I'm not in love with them either, could go either way), I felt they were implemented terribly in Oblivion. Both how you got them, and what you got. Aside from the clunky format of handing you one every 25 skill levels, I disagree with giving everyone the same things. Your skills basically define who/what your character is, at least as much as your choices and roleplay efforts. What if I want to play someone who's just a genuinely good speaker, and exists on a moral high ground? Too bad, you get all the bribery speechcraft perks anyway.

I've always disliked the "you can never fail" aspects of Oblivion, which made me all the more annoyed by most of the perks taking that even further and removing all penalties, which just made characters blur together all the more. Mastering both armor types made them identical. Weapons gave you the same bunch of power attacks, magic perks were worthless, those two covered most, and the rest mainly just removed penalties or stacked bonuses on top of what the skill already did, as if getting better at it weren't the point of raising the skill in the first place.

I'd like to see a much larger number of perks, each much more specific in its function, and have the player decide which they get. Example of how this could work: you select 2 perks for your major skills and 1 for the minor. In-game, raising skills gives you "perk points." Say I raise a skill to 40, and have 40 points. I could then go to a trainer and "buy" a perk, i.e., be taught a specific ability. Instead of getting them all, you have to choose the ones that fit your character. You could also learn them from events and actions, such as how you get the Finger of the Mountain spell. Find a rare, ancient tome and learn a unique magical perk, or as a reward for performing a task for a daedric prince. They should be different between skills, including between weapon skills, not the same pile of power attacks. It would be a more intuitive way of getting them and also allow for greater customization, instead of spurning it.

Perks were a cute idea. Some people liked them, some hated them.

I personally found them cheesy but they didn't anger me, either.

I can't really vote because, looking back, I can't really remember what any of the perks did. Guess they didn't make much of an impression on me, then.

What did make an impression on me was the advantages/disadvantages in Daggerfall. That was a cool idea.

I don't get why Bethesda keeps replacing really cool stuff with loads of "meh."

P.S. a hint for Bethesda, seriously: you're only supposed to re-invent something when you get it wrong the first time. When you get something right, then completely do away with it and replace it with something else, you might get it right for a new group of fans. But the fans who liked the old game will always be disappointed.

When people get upset about how something was tweaked or replaced, and your response is always "we did it on purpose because each game stands on it's own, despite the fact the each game has the same exact name "Elderscrolls" with an ascending number afterward" there's only a few amount of times you can get away with it before it starts to look like a trend.

Remember: it costs 5 times more to attract a new customer than to keep a loyal one. Don't commit business suicide, Bethesda.

I hated them. The marksman zoom was alright. Alchemy wasn't too bad.

The ones I hated the MOST were the armors and armorer. Just makes me hate the entire armor system.

Horrible IMO.

Lets see here, as far as perks go...

Block:
I only like the expert and master perks, as they're actual skills. The no loss of fatigue and how durability is no longer lost is crap, and leads to too many block spam fights that end up pissing me off. At least in MW when a character blocks, the loss of fatigue can be dangerous, or the shield will be crushed to pieces.

Armorer:
Hated this! Absolute crap that magic items require journeyman rank.

Armor (in general):
Didn't like them. Light armor ended up becoming as good as heavy armor.

Weapons and Fists (in general):
Liked how combat skills gave combat abilities. This could be greatly expanded upon, with each class of weapon having their own and some same perks, some weapons types with a great chance of doing more/less of X, and so on.

Athletics:
Didn't like it. Morrowind handled Athletics better as any points into it helped, as opposed to the arbitrary 25, 50, 75 100

Casting Magic:
Absolutely worthless. Again, Morrowind handled this better with every point mattering, and spells had a chance of success, depending on how powerful the spell is.

Alchemy:
Again, Morrowind had it better. Potions may not have been created every time, but you could combine two things whose properties were yet to have been discovered. What I believe, at the very lease, should have been done is if two items are combined, with properties yet known, the the resulting potion will list its unknown property as "unknown."

Security:
Don't like the skill as is, could use some rework. The Thief series have a good lock pick system.

Sneak:
Eh, neutral

Acrobatics:
The perks were largely useless, save for jumping on water. That was fun. The jumping and attacking thing was crap if you ask me

Marksman:
They worked well.

Mercantile:
If this skill didn't take [censored] EVER to level up, it could have been interesting. But as of now, mercantile is largely a useless skill, save for RPers.

Speech Craft:
I don't like it how it is implanted as of now. Needs reworking. I did like how FO3 make the speech skill useful.

In short, some of the perks were good in theory, while a lot of other just flat out svcked, were useless, or took too much out of the game. Having it so perks were add-ons to the default skill makes them interesting, but sometimes the perk ended up BEING the skill (something to avoid imo), and how they are given needs reworking. I like the idea of something akin to Diablo 2 though.

I have yet to level up a char in Oblivion enough to get past the 'Journeyman' title, but what perks I got I didn't really care for. :shrug: Actually I think the entire class/leveling system in Oblivion svcked, which is odd since when OB was just a rumour, people said that MW had a bad class/leveling system and should be improved on in the next game... sorry, it got worse.


:dead:

Well, what made things worse is that when you level up in OB, so does everyone else. In Morrowind, enemies tend to be static, though stronger guys do appear. So, when someone in OB becomes level 20, and they didn't pay that much attention to their attributes and skills, they can end up being smashed, as killing something takes at least 5 minutes, and your character really isn't that strong (happened to a melee character I made, and ended up getting horrifically stuck in the painting).

In Morrowind, enemies at the very worst will take 5ish minutes to kill. However, you could also die relatively quicker too if you walk into a room with pretty strong guys when you really aren't.

I dunno, I'll agree that the never failing is unrealistic, but I like the direction that oblivion was taking with combat in general and making 'failing' less of a luck issue and more of a skill issue. I mean, it made NO sense in morrowind how you could miss something so close to you that your practically hugging it. So i like that in oblivion if you miss, its your fault, not luck's, but I wish there were a lot more skill involved. I mean, honestly, i can't count how disappointed I was the first time I hit someone when my cursor WASN'T actually aiming close enough to his body to realistically connect.

And I'm more of a "make everything available to everyone" kinda guy, so having to choose between perks and loosing others kinda urks me, but thats another issue. I personally don't like perks at all, I would like a graduated system, where the perks are always there, but they get better slowly, as your skill level rises. Otherwise growing in skills becomes arbitrary and all about "getting to the next perk" every 25 levels. For example, jumping on water for acrobatics (pretty useless anyways, but hey) is always possible, but the timing required at low levels is so ridiculously specific that you'd just plain have to get lucky to pull it off, where as at level 100 you can just kinda repeatedly press jump across the water willy-nilly to perform the feat.

It just seems kinda unrealistic that one second your incapable of something and the next your not... thats all...

The thing with that is that in Morrowind you weren't just missing; the enemy was also dodging, in accordance with its agility stat. There was simply no animation for either. When Oblivion got rid of missing, it also got rid of dodging. It makes no sense for a sword to pass through a solid object but it also makes no sense that in deadly combat, an enemy will make no effort at all to not get hit. Neither is really relevant to perks, though, or what I was getting at as far as lack of failure.

I like the idea of perks, but some of them should be redone or reconfigured. Like blade/blunt/hand to hand shouldn't all have the same perk and/or attack for each perk.

I disliked all the perks in oblivion and liked none. Perks can be OK if they are implemented better.

I like the concept of perks, but lots of Oblivions perks were quite silly. The perks for sneak were too combat orientated - for characters who depend on their sneak skill to avoid combat, the perks they received were rendered useless. Negating the weight of armour with mastery of the skill is very unrealistic. I find the fact that fatigue is regenerated by running equally unrealistic, so actually having it increase at a faster rate as your athletics skill increases is also silly - they got this the wrong way round, fatigue should decrease as you run but decrease at a lower rate the more skilled you are. I'm not saying they got it all wrong - things like alchemy and armourer were spot on. Shame they're two fairly useless skills...

As for combat and magic, I like the idea of learning new combat moves and powerful spells. However I don't like the way these were implemented. Novices should be able to attempt to cast master level spells, but should be very unlikely to succeed. There should also be the possibility of catastrophic effects when trying to cast spells that are too advanced for you. As for combat, I don't like the way you suddenly learnt a new move when reaching a certain level. I would prefer to see teachers who teach you new moves, but who may not agree to teach you if they don't think you're up to it. This could be implemented with spells as well, with teachers from whom you can learn powerful spells, but who refuse to teach you if you're level is too low.

I didn't like them at all.

That being said, I enjoyed the acrobatics perks because I believe they fit the fun idea of perks: something that's an addition, but doesn't take the focus away fro the skill itself. Complementary, if you will. It was fun to roll around and jump on water and whatnot, although the controls for rolling could have been much smoother.

Of course, I've talked about this one before, but I'll say it again: PERKS RUINED MAGIC FOR ME. Totally ruined it. Demolished and defaced it. NUKED THE HELL OUT OF IT. It felt like such a lazy addition, such a restricting afterthought, that it was disgusting. In addition, spellcasting from Daggerfall AND Morrowind was betrayed. Why can't I cast a spell and screw up? Why can't I try to paralyze somebody, even if half the time it doesn't work and wastes almost all of my magicka?

It removed all the experimentation, all of the MAGIC out of magic. I was a warrior that slung lightning. That's all I was.

The thing that really disappointed me about the skills in the game was how you could increase them beyond the next level of mastery with magic items but you wouldn't get the benefits. For instance you might find a ring which raised your marksman level by ten points, enough to go from journeyman to expert but you never get to use the perk for the next level of mastery. It is a waste of time looking for items to increase your skills since they did nothing to improve them.

I did not like the automatic-perk system of Oblivion. I did like the select-a-perk system of Fallout 3. I especially liked the perk-as-a-quest-reward system also used in FO3.

I did not like many of the actual perks in Oblivion as they were either useless, too difficult to attain when you need them, or simply filler to get 4 perks for the skill.

Yes! Have speechcraft dialog choices that change the outcome of quests. But I hated how in fallout you could just save and reload before a speech check and it rendered speech useless. Maybe making the speechcraft dialog choice available only if you have a certain level of speechcraft? :shrug:

I agree that fatigue shouldn't regenerate as you run, but one of the things I felt they got right was not penalizing you for running. The idea of carrying a bunch of fatigue potions or simply walking everywhere is stupid. I first played Morrowind on console and I always had the fatigue cheat on -- the game felt broken otherwise.

On topic, I felt that the perks were dumb for the most part. They were useless at best and immersion-breaking at worst. Really, suddenly because I reached an arbitrary figure on a scoresheet I'm able to wear boots while sneaking?

Oblivion's perk system is bad. It rendered the skill increases totally useless if they did not allow you to gain a new perk. I think that perks should add things to skills, but in Oblivion the perks only slowly remove pesky restrictions. That is silly. I think that beth can very well ignore perks for TES V. If they have to implement them, then perks should be something you can learn from NPCs or via quests if you fullfill some criteria. They should not be authomatic and they should add to the skill, make things easier or faster, but the game should be still playable without them.

Even though most of the skill perks are bad, the perks for speachcraft, lockpick and magic are by far the worst.



Totally agreed

I like the idea of perks for skills, but Oblivion has two major flaws with its implementation of them:

1. Magic - Need I say more? lol, but really. The idea that when you hit level 25 suddenly another 25 levels of magic are avaliable to your character felt very artificial to me. It felt more like 4 levels of magic with a slider between these levels. I much more prefered Morrowinds implementation. But if they added additional perks on top of the avaliable magic this would have been a lot better.

2. Theres only 5 teirs 0 - 24, 25 - 49, 50 - 74, 75 - 99, 100. So each skill has 5 perks, each of which feel very artificial, you hit one of these grades and you have the perk. I see two possible solutions to this, there may be more, but its all i can think off. The first solution is to add a huge number of more perks, make each less powerfull, or add to each other, and place them every 3 or 4 levels. The other solution is gradually introduce each perk, so maybe allow the player to use the perk from 10 levels before they gain it properly, and at the beginning give them a 90% chance of failing it, improving each level until at the perk level they will suceed 100% of the time. For example, with the sneak skill at level 25 you get a sudden jump to 6x damage, maybe at level 15 you get a 10% chance of doing 6x damage, and 90% chance of doing 4x damage.

These two problems spoil Oblivions implementations of perks for me. A perks system is a good idea, but only if implemented well. I would like to see one in the next TES, and im sure they will do so, but i hope they at least fix these two problems.

I liked the perks, the ones I liked were:

Blade/Blunt/Marksman
Block
Armorer
Light/Heavy Armor
Sneak
Athletics

2 perks that I thought were completely useless was for Speechcraft and the magic "perks" were stupid.