Ideally I'd like to see an expanded skill list, but we'll most likely once again get 21 skills. 7 in each of the 3 specializations and 3 for each attribute except Luck.

Edit: At this point I'd like to make it clear that I'm NOT saying that they SHOULD keep 21 skills. In fact I would like them to create a longer skill list. What I am saying is that they WILL keep 21 skills. There's a big difference.
End of edit.

And if we are getting 21 skills I'd very much appreciate it if they repalced the Heavy Armor skill with a Polearm skill and the Light Armor skill with a Dagger skill. Polearm would then be a combat skill governed by Endurance (same as Spears in Morrowind) and Dagger would be a stealth skill governed by Speed (same as Light Blades in Morrowind). I know the governign attributes are wonky, but a lot of skills have wonky governing attributes and we can easily mod them to something more sensible.

There are a few reasons why I'm proposing this change. One is that I am against having armor skills. I've already written about it in other threads so at this point I'll just say that they create an artificial limitation without providing an interesting strategic choice. You pick one of the armor skills at character creation and after that it's a no brainer to stick with that kind of armor. I'd much prefer it if armor simply gave static protection. This would actually make the game more complex because in Oblivion if you had 100 in Light and Heavy Armor you got the same protection from both Glass and Daedric armor and they were both weightless. Without armor skills there would actually be a permanent difference between the one and the other, with Daedric being much stronger and Glass being much lighter.

On the other hand I do want more weapon skills and I want the various weapons to behave differently. Ideally weapons would have an armor penetration stat in adition to their damage stat to help achieve that (which would be much higher for maces than it would be for swords), but even without it Daggers and Polearms would make distinct weapon skills notably different from Blade and Blunt (or Sword and Hafted as I'd prefer to call them).

No, I would much rather have the armor skills. And I'd be stunned if they got rid of armor skills. I'd like to see the number of skills expanded to 24 or 27. 24 is easy, polearms into combat, unarmored in magic, and daggers into stealth

Yes, yes! A million times yes!
I wouldn't be stunned. There were no armor skills in Arena, no armor skills in Daggerfall, three armor skills in Morrowind and two in Oblivion. I've never made it over the hump to understand why they thought an armor skill would be a good idea, and I think passive skills need the boot. Even more than all of that though, I find polearms and daggers to be utterly attractive skills to include in the next elder scrolls. Spears need to be everywhere, and separating daggers from swords is completely sensible. Thrown daggers can even be included with the dagger skill, and you can poison those to make yourself a dangerous assassin.

I'd rather have more skills not diminish them.

1. I'm hoping so much for polearms.



2. Daggers -short/long blade skills? I'm a bit meh on the whole MW blade skill seperation. Even if in RL its probably a whole different thing, in the game world it should be a bit more simplified.

Were not seperating big maces from small hammers in the blunt skill, are we? Nope.
Why are throwable knives and bows not seperated into different skills?

3. Bringing back unarmored skill would be interesting.

Dagger and pole-arm skills are really interesting, but why keep to 21/7 system?

I suggest, replacing those armor skills with dodge and parry, and add the new weapon skills as well.

Those passive armor skills that are only advanced if you are bashed repeatedly are not a good choice for skills, and armors could be worn without a need for a skill, and they can add their bonuses and penalties because of their types and builds.

Dagger skill is a really welcome addition for my sneaky assassin, and if advancing in it can earn us some nifty perks then the better.

You see that this is a trade, not a diminishment.

I'm right there with you.

I'd even take things a rung further by having Greatsword for two handed swords, Sword for one handed sword, and Dagger for melee daggers and thrown knives/stars.

I actually did that in my skill list, separating the two handers from the one handers.

There was one crazy game with those together, I'm not supporting that combination.

I'd rather a million to have Dodge back.

I'd go for that.

I totally agree.

I am somewhat "indifferent" with the Armor Skill. If the dev were to keep the Armor Skills, at least make the skill distinguish than just "Light Armor" is just light weighted and "Heavy Armor" is Heavy. The "Skill Perks" like Oblivion isn't really ganna cut it. If not, better to just combine Heavy and Light to just "Armor Mastery" but also re-add in "Dodge/Unarmored" to have "legit" stealth base defense.

As for Daggers and Polearms, my Argonian really miss her dagger and my fox really miss her halberd. These two weapon skill really needed to be back and make weapon choice a bit more "diverse" again.

As I said at the start of my post, I would also like to see an expanded skill list. However, the most likely number of skills is 21 because then they can have both an equal number of skills in each specializatio nand an equal number of skills for each attribute and they seem to like that a lot based on an interview I read a long time ago.



In Oblivion the difference in size between bigger and smaller blunt weapons is smaller than the difference in size between a dagger and a claymore. They had maces and waraxes as onehanded blunts and battleaxes and warhammers as 2-handed blunts. Meanwhile on the Blade side they had daggers, shortswords, longswords, and claymores. The lightest blunt weapons would be roughly the same size as shortswords and daggers are lighter still.

You do raise a valid point when you say that in a game it should be simplified, but if we have two weapons that behave differently it's justified to have seperate skills for them. And we can easily have daggers that act differently than shortswords. For example the sneak attack critical hit multiplier for daggers could be higher which would make them a favored weapon for assassins.



Personally I'd rather have a Dodge skill.

Introducing two more weapons skills to end up using just one of them. Meh.
I'd rather have they fix the armour skill(s). Back to 3, or merging them into one.

Even then: Polearms and daggers. Ok. But why no axes, short blades, throwable weapons, dual wielding,....

Yes, more weapons would be nice, and I really hope for them, but I don't see them working in this system.
(For my idea of a good system, click the 'trinity skill system' link in my signature. It's a long read though, maybe confusing too.
It has 13 skills -good for simplicity- or 39 -good for us- depending on how you look at it.)

Well, I've never seen the light with any armor skills or the armorer skill. It's not that I think there's no skill in wearing armor, it's that I don't think they qualify against things like a master swordsman or a magician of mysticism. Armor is something you get used to wearing, but I don't think you could ever put it on an application to a job. Even at that in the two Elder Scrolls games with armor skills, you raised the skill by letting people kick your ass. Great, what a skill! I got my ass kicked today, I'm totally five points better at wearing leather!

It depends on how they handled it of course, but I'd like to say that I don't see an axe as being so different a skill use from maces or warhammers. They are balanced the same way and handled in the same manner, it's just that they do different things when they strike. If every weapon does damage in terms of slashing, piercing, and blunt, then you get a combination of the damage by weapon and you don't have to worry about the separation by visual characteristics.

I am glad you have made such a system. I'm too drunk tonight to give it serious enough thought, so I'll consider it tomorrow.

No Dragatus! Having equal numbers of skills in each means you'll have to come up with more personality skills! It is the death of empires, just like Afghanistan!

I agree that the armor skills were artificial.

Many other RPG's determine your ability to wear an armor and use it effectively from other governing stats. Like Strength, dexterity, stamina, etc, etc. TES could well use an armor system like that, without artificially wasting skills on armors. Besides that the type of armor you wear shouldn't be limited by an ability (=skill) to wear a type of armor, but by the basic tasks you set your character.

Or add it to acrobatics, I think they had a small role for it their once you were able to roll at 50 or having some sort of dodge, maybe expand upon that and make acrobatics even more useful, But to each his own.

PS Sorry if calling the chained mace a morningstar is wrong naming, I just kind of wrote this from memory and didn't bother looking it up.

i dont think you can be 'skilled' in not wearing armour

:D

I agree that the equal number of skills per attribute thing should be dumped, but I don't think Bethesda does. On several ocasions I proposed a system where using a skill gives you experience in both the skill and it's governing attribute and you get a +1 on the attribute whenever you gather enough exp. With such a system it would have no effect on game balance how many skills you have per attribute because the attribute gain wouldn't depend on the number of skills you have governing that attribute. If you cast 5 Destruction spells or 3 Destruction and 2 Restoration spells, you get the same amount of Willpower training.

However, the thing is that we're less than a year away from release. The game should be mostly finished by now and they should be in the polishing phase. It's probably too late for any major changes like the trinity system (the time for that kind of suggestion was 2-3 years ago), but we may still be able to get in some refinements of systems that existed in previous games.

@ Mumatil

If they lsitened to my suggestion we'd have 5 weapon skills (or 6 if you also count Hand-to-hand):
1. Sword
2. Hafted
3. Dagger
4. Polearm
5. Marksman

That's only one more than on your suggested list.

I made the suggestion for the first time in August 2009, so not too late. I doubt they ever read it though.

And levelling up attributes like skills would be a good thing. There's little excuse to stick with the current system.

Isn't easier to simply add those skills instead of replacing?

they may kepp 21 skills, if they replace t hings that could go as skills but 'remain' some other way: Athletics, Acrobatics and Armorer come to mind. The first two i guess everybody can understand, and armorer can be replaced by repairing things using tools and thats it, one does not need a skill sys for that.

Mercantile could be part of Speechcraft (which should stay IF the story and dialogs are creative enough, unlike O). So, right now we'd have four slots avialable. Unfortunately, in terms of weapons skills, to me the minimum should be: Long Blade, Short Blade, Blunt, Axe, Spear, Archery. That would make a total of 20 skills so far and would not compromise the 21 total. Let's say they add a Set/Disram Trap skill, or some sort of Dodge, that would = 21. That imo would already be better than what we have in O.

Not until they give us our damn axe skill back. I mean come on, the game is going to be in Skyrim, how could they not have an axe skill?

Well... I personally would die without spears. BUT shortblade... that is just as important as axe... guess I can live without it but I still think its really important.

I never thought the skill list needed to be symmetrical, like, does it matter that fighters have one more skill to choose from than wizards if the skills are of varying usefulness and ability to work together? But anyway, if we are needing to keep a balanced list, I wouldn't mind trading in the armors and making your armor choice based on attributes and tactics instead. It seems like most skills add new abilities as you increase them, but armor skills mostly take away the downsides of wearing armor and making it more like not wearing armor, so they're not all that exciting.

Why not just add Daggers and Polearms instead of taking away armor skills?

And wouldn't Daggers fall under the 'Blade' category.

I did this in my skillset design. Well, short blade and staff were what I called them, but I think they are essentially what you mean. I agree witht the sentiment that the armour skills are useless as you don't DO ANYTHING with them. Just live under the conditions you are given by them, most of which would be realistically out of your control in reality anyway.

No removal replacement... just add more for more customization even if they arent that good.

Voted yes

Although I'd of course want more skills, but I never did understand how you could be more skilled at wearing armor...