Is it going to be a big difference in survivability if I ignore pumping up my endurance until all my other abilities are maxed, as opposed to maxing it as soon as possible?

I'd kinda like to ignore it for some time with my archer-type character. I just really enjoy raising the endurance skills that much and would prefer to put it off. If it makes a big difference in survivability then I'll probably push myself through it.

Also, is there much of a difference between say an Orc with +5 endurance from his custom class, and the Warrior Birthsign vs. an Argonian without the +5 endurance and with some non-endurance enhancing Birthsign?

Well, there is certainly a big difference in the amount of health you will have.

Your starting health is exactly twice your endurance. Each time you level up, 10% of your endurance attribute is added to your health. It is not retroactive. That means that there is a big advantage to starting endurance high and pushing it up hard every level until maxed as soon as possible - if you want lots of health.

UESP wiki explains it fairly well here: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Endurance#Health_Gains


Now, that all said, my character is intentionally a glass cannon. At level 20, she has base endurance (30) and her health is a puny 117. This requires the cautious and high stakes play style we seek, but it certainly can work. In 500 hours, she has died exactly zero times.

This was exactly the kind of info I was looking for, thanks Acadian!

Would you mind saying what "type" of character you are playing as a glass cannon, and what you have the difficulty slider at?

I'm debating what would be more enjoyable for me, a glass cannon type of character on default difficulty, or a more solid build playing on 75% difficulty. Or glass at 75%

In Fallout 3 I intentionally made a character with low hit points and forced him to use low damage weapons, but had it set on normal difficulty. The character I had before that was set to high difficulty but had a maxed out build. The lower difficulty "weaker" character was more fun, because it seemed a little more realistic to die, or kill, with just a few shots, rather than be nearly unkillable and take forever to kill something.

I'm having a hard time gauging how Oblivion and Fallout 3 matchup in this way.

I can not say as to your experience with Oblivion..
The general facts are normal difficulty is set much higher than FO3's, more combat focused..
Slower attacks when sneaking ask Acadian if this is so with ranged attacks as he has greater / est knowledge with marksman.
Enemies level entirely to you so expect tough fights.
Monsters later are bullet sponges, even more so are quest foes, npc's allways have 100% health equipment at the start.
Enemies summon, burden, paralyze, silence, and power attack with frequent reguarity, and are prone to having good defenses.

All that said sliding down the setting even a small bit makes a big difference, and the game has far / loads more stratagies to take down foes than FO3 did.

Bear in mind, I know nothing of FO3.

Buffy is a Mystic Archer. She is a wood elf who dresses only for fashion, won't touch a melee weapon and has base endurance. She also is very very good with her enchanted bow, poisons, detect life, stealth, mind control spells, sophisticated combo spells, enchanting, etc. Hence - glass cannon.

As a stealthy long range killer with the ability to disappear (usually leaving a summoned distraction in her place) and control the minds of her foes, she almost never gets hit, but when she does it is a white knuckle experience.

I have capped her at level 20-23 by simply picking four major skills she will never touch. That ensures her foes don't gain hitpoints beyond that point. We play on default difficulty.

I hope that is of some interest to you. :foodndrink:

This sounds EXACTLY the kind of thing I'm aiming for. So... what major skills do you avoid?

Buffy's four 'never use' major skills are speechcraft (she uses charm), h2h (no melee), blunt (no melee), security (she uses alteration).
Now, just like she never increases endurance, she doesn't care about ever increasing strength either - so never using strength related skills is no problem for her. (She has never used a blade either).

Avoiding security entirely is a tiny challenge, especially at low levels and underwater, but one we enjoy.

She could have picked blade and heavy armor to avoid if she wanted as well.

Some people who cap how high their characters level opt for 30, when every single thing in the game is available. By stopping at 20, we happily sacrifice perfect amber/madness (prefer daedric bow anyway) and just about all top leveled quest items (the only quest reward item she wants is Azura's Star which you can get at level 2).

Edurance works MUCH different in Fallout 3 than in Oblivion. In FO3 your endurance just determines your base health and you get an extra 10 health every time you level up, no matter what. In Oblivion your STARTING endurance determines your base health and your CURRENT endurance determines how much your health increases when you level up. At 10 endurance (not possible in vanilla Oblivion) would cause you to gain 1 health point when you level up. 100 endurance causes you to gain 10 health points when you level up. So in Fallout 3, if your going to raise your endurance at all, it doesn't matter when. It will just change you base health. But after you leave the sewers for the first time in Oblivion there's no way to change your base health. So if you want a lot of health in Oblivion, you need to max out your endurance as soon as possible. You should master the art of efficient leveling if it means a lot to you. It kind of kills RPing to do this though so I usually don't bother. I just try to get my starting endurance to a place that's good for the character I'm player. My mages will have low endurance, my warriors will have it high and my rangers will be somewhere in between.

Fallout 3 at maximum difficulty means the enemies do twice as much damage and have twice as many hit points

Eventually I was doing minumum endurance at maximum difficulty

Oblivion at maximu difficulty means the enemies do six times the damage and you only do 1/6 the damage back

I don't know why they had to nerf the difficulty slider for fallout so much

Some of my magic specialists can handle MD

I only have one melee char who nearly holds his own albeit using the bound weapons and armor exploit

He's an Altmer, ironically enough, born under the sign of the lord

Physically hes weak but that will be compensated for in time, it's his ability to heal himself in battle that keeps him going

But I have to keep him towards metal on metal combat

One small fire ball he's cooked

I would never ignore Endurance, its too useful and important. I always put +5 into it at the beginning of the game when selecting my custom class choice.

Well, here's the real strategy to remember, and this logic is true for pretty much any attribute with derived stats (health, magicka, fatigue related stuff).

In essence, it doesn't matter whether you focus on the related attribute or not because you can always counter any weakness with other means such as potions, enchanted clothing/armor/accessories, and/or spells.

In addition, look at health and endurance closely and do the math, and you see that it really isn't that big of a deal in the larger picture. Let's say you start with only "average" endurance of 40 (that's probably a pretty "average" value, although many people might make sure to start at 50 or so). At 40, your starting health is 80 (note that endurance also impacts how much fatigue you have but you didn't ask about that so I'm ignoring it... it doesn't matter much for a ranged character, anyway). If you really try to max level your character and go up 50 levels, even if your endurance started at 100, you'll only be gaining 10 pts of health per level or 500 total by the time you hit level 51. Okay, that sounds like a lot of health, but you have to look at it in the context of the actual game. Also, you do not start with endurance at 100, so the first several levels do not gain 10 pts per level (I'm just using 10 to make the anolysis easy, but the actual value of endurance is even less than what I am saying here, at least for a ranged character).

As many people have noted, proper development and build will allow you to be well nigh invincible by level 20, even on max difficulty. Going up 20 levels would gain 200 health if endurance stated at 100 (max). So, within the actual game, is 200 health a big deal? For that matter, is 500 health even a big deal? Well, not for a ranged character, no , not really. Why not? Because the idea of a ranged character is "don't get hit." If you are not hit, you can have 1 health and still be fine (that's extreme, but I'm just making a point about what is important for certain characters versus others). On the other hand, if you were playing a melee fighter, obviously "don't get hit" is impossible, at least until you gain max chameleon or some similar effect.

Therefore, as far as the actual game is concerned and actually playing a ranged character, endurance (and high health) really doesn't matter. Such characters have a strategy of "don't get hit" anyway, so who cares about how much health they have or don't have?

However, let's say that you simply want to be a bit on the safe side. All right, enchanted clothing/armor/accessories with Fortify Health takes care of that. Grand soul gems enchant such items with +11 health each. You can easily gain +50 health or more with a few items. Sigil stones are far better, of course. Each Transcendent sigil stone (max power) gives +30 health, almost 3 times as much as a grand soul gem.

Obviously, potions offer temporary boosts, too, as do spells.

Thanks for all the advice. I've convinced myself to not just put off endurance until later, but actually purposely avoid raising it... ever I do want to go for a "glass-cannon" character, so keeping my endurance as low as possible sounds like a good way to achieve that end.

You are definitely choosing the path less traveled, but it is one that my character shares. At level 20, her endurance is 30 and her health is a puny 117. We do indeed play carefully and sometimes with white knuckles, but we also go anywhere we want and she has died exactly zero times. Glass cannon? You bet! Go for it, Chum! :goodjob:

(Caution: not recommended for beginners or the feint of heart.)

I am following your lead Master Acadian

I wish I had done this with my Fallout 3 character. I would have had much more fun in the long run.