i started doing that quest that is apparently called 'brush of death' or something like that, and now i'm trapped. not bc of a bug, i cant kill the trolls.

i'm a rogue-like character, main weapons are a bow and a short sword (i'm only level 3) took me 5 turpentines just to kill the first troll, last one didnt help me at all against the second, and it killed me. i cant kill the trolls without the turpentine bc they regenerate faster than i can damage them! and ontop of that, they run alot faster than i do (i tried the suggestion of just running right past them all and back to lythe, didnt work) tried the suggestion of jumping ontop of rocks bc supposedly they cant climb (which btw they can, i got killed by a troll while standing on top of a rock 30 feet tall). and now i dont know what to do.

i cant possibly kill the trolls, and the only way i can get out is to do so. essentially, my character is also trapped forever inside the stupid painting.

i know i'm just going to have to abandon this game and start all over (again) but i was wondering if there was any possible hope of me getting out of this situation?

ironnic, a year after i decide to never play the game again i decide to give it another try out of boredom and guess what? same stupid [censored] that happened to me nonstop when i was playing the game on a regular basis. i really should have just thrown it in the garbage, most worthless game i've ever gotten, literally. the sims 3 is more fun, and that isnt even a good game either (sims 2 was alot better, i actually prefer playing that over the sims 3 lol)

All trolls are weak to fire, so if you have a fire spell and maybe as poison that should do the trick. Naturally, if you have a weapon with fire enchantment that′s another good idea.

So don′t give up. Maybe revert to an earlier save and get some heavy fire damage first and then start the quest from the beginning.

Good luck

Not the game's fault that you got your butt kicked; it's your fault that you jumped into an unknown scenario without hard saving first.

I can remember way back when games really WERE hard. And didn't let you save. You could waste an entire day on something like Sword of Fargoal, literally.

O yes this is true. I′ve learned it the hard way too back in the Nintendo 8-bit era. Hard as sh*t and no saves whatsoever anytime in the game :shakehead:
Lesson: always come prepared

from what i've learned of life, being prepared is impossible. you can never guess what will happen no matter what, it's not until you go for and see what happens for yourself that you can get an idea of what you need to do to prepare. from what i've seen in oblivion, that also holds true there.

what i need to do is just start over, but this time no more specializing. i'm going to play a generalist, i've always wanted to play a warrior-mage in DnD but never could since of course they dont exist as a main class and it's quite a disadvantage to do so (in DnD, wearing full-plate armor causes half your spells to do nothing!)

I'll play something like those battlemages, wear a briastplate, and carry a sword, and have a mixture of long-range and melee-ranged spells, and of course have poisons too. never bad to have a back-up.

brithsign will probably be the lady or the atronoch. as far as race goes, i'll probably be a breton or dunmer.

alas, i just looked it up and apparently there is no race with a intelligence bonus that also doesnt have a reduction in endurance (even though there are plenty races with high endurance but no penalty to intelligence). sigh.

or perhaps i could just play a warrior character and try the main quest again. but i dont like doing that stupid quest, something stupid always happens to me. then again, most all quests blow up in my face when i start making progress. i hit a game-stopping bug, i get the leveling problem (i [censored] hate that), or as with what happened now i end up trapped and unable to do the stupid quest to get out.

my original plan was to just wonder the wilderness with this character (i actually built him to be sorta of a ranger). killing bandits and goblins and animals, getting loot and money, and doing any daedric shrine quests i run into (in particular ones that i know will give me items that i need).

or i could just go with the generalist idea and design my character to deal with most any situation. this wouldnt be so hard if it wasnt for the fact that you have to do the stupid nigh-impossible mages guild quests to just get the ability to create your own enchantments, and half-way decent spells.

You could just lower the difficulty level.

The trolls in this quest can get extremely strong at higher levels due to level scaling.

So while it would have been very advisable to save before entering a new world, you could blame this in part on level scaling. Of course if there were no level scaling you could have gone in at at low level with the same problem.

If your can't kill the trolls with fire or other means and don't have a save, you can lower the difficulty as mentioned above by night owl, or you can use the console on a PC, by opening the console ("~" tilde key) click on a troll, enter "kill", and close the console with the "~" key.

Here is your solution...

Sneak around and find one, jump on one of those stand-alone BIG rocks that are around, and nail it with an arrow. If you place yourself right, the troll won't be able to reach you with it's strikes. It will just stand there and hit the rock in front of and below you. Hit it with arrows and destruction spells until dead. I usually coat my first arrow with Turpentine (the poison you get when you are trapped. You get 6 poisons and there are 5 trolls, so you can hit one troll twice with it.)

If you have enough arrows you can do it. The last one (by the body) you have to sneak around really high onto the 'unfinished' part of a cliff.

Use the speed and stealth of your character, to run up and grab the brush, and run back out.

You have a flare spell. Everybody does. This is what it's for. Trolls are weak to fire.

Turn the difficulty down if your character is getting pounded too fast. That slider adjusts your strength relative to your enemy, and it's there for a purpose; the game is not balanced at all levels.

save the game before starting quesst. yes, this one is harder because you can't retreat until those trolls are killed. or the quest item is obtain.

no i didnt save before hand, and i did try using the flare spell, it barely damaged him at all and ontop of that once my mana runs out i have to wait like 10 seconds before my mana recharges enough for me to cast it again. the only solution i could think of would be to sit there and cast flares over and over for hours until my skill level increased enough that the spell cost virtually no mana to me (and did the most damage possible). but that would take way too long.

obivously my best option is just to just lower the difficulty slider all the way, and hopefully that would make the trolls effortless to me. honestly, i've been contemplating trying to play the game with the slider set below normal, but i have never tried that bc it would feel like cheating...

i may just start a new character anyway, one that's more of a generalist. i think i'll make a battle-mage-like character....

May this be an unfortunate lesson in saveing often and keeping plenty of saved games no more than a couple hours apart.
Don't feel bad about lowering the difficulty,if you are haveing trouble thats what it's there for.
Not being able to get through a particular situation in any game isn't fun,it's just frustrating.
If lowering the difficulty means haveing fun than I all for it.Lower the difficulty to get you through this part then raise it back up,or start a new character.Just make sure you have fun playing the game :laugh:

actually it was only a few minutes since my last save, but in that time i had done the 'corruption' quest thing. trying that quest was literally the first thing i did after finishing that one (well technically i spend a few minutes finding the dungeon bc i read you could visit leland in there, he had nothing interesting to say btw).

Use fire spells.
Lower difficulty.

Always, always, always hard save before accepting any quest.

well i did decide to get him out of there (lowered difficulty all the way down, could kill the trolls with one or two hits from my sword, heck i managed to one-shot one with a sneak attack from my bow!)

after that i had him leave the city and now i'm just walking to bravil while doing all the caves and ruins i come across (my primary goal right now is finding more ingredients to make poisons, which is why i'm heaving down to bravil, there's alot of nightshades to the southwest of that city)

Gamer Orc is disapointed.