I'm doing the whole thief/assassin thing and I find everything in lockpicking to be useless, the same can be said for most of pickpocketing and you really only need 3 perks from speech.

You have to dump too many poisons onto targets to kill them and it seems pointless to do anything but stab them when you're close enough for pickpocketing.

If anything it's a fun element, but it's not worth spending a point in it until you have more essential perks.

Do you have to use daggers to get the cut-throat / assisinate cut-scene / animation, or can you get it with swords too?

You can get a kill cut-scene with stealth sword kills but it's the one where you stab them in the back.

So I like immersion enough to wonder if sneak is too uber?

If I have 100 sneak and all attendant perks and sneak into a room with, say, 3 Falmer standing there and I sneak attack one within 5 feet of another - am I then seen for sure (100%) and have to fight or run?

Or can I simply recrouch/sneak and not be seen? (which while uber would probably make me feel broken)

I'm not criticizing play styles (play however you have fun) I'm just trying to know for my self.

Thanks!

J

With that level of sneak it depends on their facing direction and proximity. If they are literally standing around a few feet away and staring at each other, depending on the shadows and your positioning it would be possible to kill 1 and they will notice that he died and start looking around but they won't see you. Also using a sneak attack doesn't bring you out of stealth so you don't have to re-sneak after attacking. If the other falmer did notice you you can always use the shadow warrior perk or Shadow Agent power to vanish.

If they are 4-5 feet away from each other and are not looking in the others direction you can basically kill them both in 3 seconds without being seen.

Just thought I'd throw this in there, I did some testing with bladesman perk and dual daggers. It's NOT working for daggers with my client so I assume all those people claiming it did were either trolling or it was patched.

Get ALL sneak perks, the silent roll is so useful for fast movement when sneaking.

I like illusion and silent casting, I use it along with sneak and have found it very useful. You don't need to put any points into magicka also, you can just enchanting to fortify magicka or reduce illusion costs. I did put some points into magicka though, as I like conjuration, when I come out of the darkness to attack, its nice to have 2 dremora lords with me ha. Or due to silent casting, just stay hidden.

Alchemy is so useful to me, I can make 97% resist element potions, potions that increase archery/one hand damage by 130%, invisibility potions, poisons etc. Also its a great way to make money.

Illusion is very useful to assassins.

I haven't used bows with my character, so when I'm faced with a room full of enemies, I frenzy the hell out of that place. Then I mop up afterwards.

Also, I don't recommend taking perks in Light Armor. I haven't touched the tree, and I find I'm more than capable of handling dragons out in the open. Use alchemy to get your resistances up, and for any other enemies, Illusion can Calm them down if you get caught out of Stealth.

Illusion as a spell school scales poorly, the major problem is that without putting perks into the tree, you wont be able to use your spells due to level scaling at higher levels. While its great early on , till level 20 or so, unless you keep up the training or leveling it, you run into a dead area around 25-35. If i remember right even the expert level spells only impact level 20 npcs/monsters. illusion also wont work on deadra,undead or summons/dwarven mobs unless you get 100 in the skill and grab the last perk.

to be honest, outside of the silent casting, its probably better off to go with alteration as a school, since its perks are far superior,and its spells are much more useful imo.

I would drop illusion, you don't need it. Alchemy gives you an easy invisibility option as well.