I recall in obivion .. i think it was the athletics skill but once you got so high you could dodge. where is that in skyrim? dodging is pretty important when your in a melee fight with 2+ enemy's, just another thing took out of the game.. WHY!

It was in the acrobatics skill, and I have no clue why they removed it.

I liked it in Oblivion and would have liked to see it back in Skyrim.

nice avatar ellert and yeah considering how it feels like warriors trackter beam to you it would have been perfect here

High up in the perk tree for Sneak is a silent dodge-like roll. It's very useful if you're an assasin type. Otherwise it's useless for melee.

Same place all the non-visual things went. If you can see it happening it happened, and removing anything that would contradict the visual evidence. I.e. if they clearly hit you but the screen says dodge, the feeling is that its immersion breaking.

Still not sure where I stand on the issue myself, too much of it and its definite action/adventure focus not RPG.

where did doge go? out of the window with a lot of other things...welcome to the gaming word 2011: streamlining

No what he's talking about from Oblivion was in fact an actual dodge. It was animated and everything. It was later added on to (or improved if you like) by the Deadly Reflex mod series. Adding things like back-flips and what not.

um.. never heard of straife??


i dodge mage shots and arrows all the time

Thank you, had it for quite a while now, first .gif I ever made



Oh nice, I actually hadn't noticed that yet, gonna test it out on my 2nd character that will be a thief.

If i meant strafing i would have said strafing. Try strafing a sword atk ..

There's a book in Skyrim, "Kill.. Before being killed." Or something similar, that advices the player to dodge (do a side-step) when an opponent is about to do a power attack, instead of using your shield to block it. All other strikes are best to block, according to the book. (because they are too fast for us to be able to side-step-dodge).


As for morrowind type dodge, isn't there a light armor perk that allows for 10% chance to dodge a hit, morrowind-style?

There's just so many things you can assign to 9 buttons.

Down on left stick + Y ...they F'ed up

But that doesn't work because the enemy AI is locked onto your character to perfection. One time an enemy with a warhammer was doing a power attack against my summon and I was at his side and attacked him halfway through his attack. He spun 90 degrees midswing and sent me right back to my last quicksave.

In that case a dodge move wouldn't help either. :/

I must be the ultimate Matrix person then. I can dodge arrows, magic attacks and sometimes even devastating power attacks of enemies with my feeble mage. At any rate, welcome to the world of Streamlining indeed!

It would help to mildly alleviate the problem. What made dodge useful in Oblivion wasn't that it moved you out of the path of their weapon, but that it put a considerable amount of distance between you and your opponent in a very short time frame. It's essentially the same as backing out of range of their attack, but in Skyrim that isn't quite as possible against someone with a 2h weapon when you're using 1h weapons due to normalized run speeds. I'd also like to see them fix the issue of them being perfectly locked on to you at all times, because that would fix the problem, as well.


As can I, aside from some of the power attacks like you said. It just seems like such a shame that the game has boxed rogue-like characters into a playstyle that's focused around instant kills and doesn't provide gameplay mechanics for those who want to be more of an "agile warrior" kind of thief. If an enemy begins a power attack when I'm already in his face attacking him, there's literally nothing I can do but sit and watch as he takes out a good 80% or more of my health because I don't have enough time to run out of range.

I don't see why it would be so difficult to just change the sneak roll to be available out of stealth and for all 4 directions rather than just forward. Make it so that when sprint is held down and jump is pressed, the player executes the dodge in the direction they're moving in.

I could easily see archery becoming way too powerful, even more than it already is, because of that. Instead of making melee-combat more tactical, it'd make all ranged stuff OP.

It's not too difficult to just get out of the way, you know? And if I can do it, almost anyone can. I'm traditionally rather bad at video games. Still enjoy them, though - especially this one.

you can dodge alot by just moving, but this is why athletics should have been left in. along with h2h and all the schools of magic so each arch had 7 skill not 6, then we could of had dodge and lots of cool other perks. ive hardly picked any perks as soon as leveling up as they are very bland, the games so great it jarring, its like they were like " woe not to much excitment weve got dragons u know, better tone rest down other wise people may piss there pants"

That's what I do, works fine once you know attack ranges. I've managed to get it down on every enemy except dragons and spell casters. Learn their attack patterns, taunt them into hitting, move out at the proper time then back in for attacks.

I think its much easier to pull of in third person though. I can't really pull it off in first.

Dodge wasn't in most TES games, and a lot of people thought it turned Oblivion into more of an action game than an RPG, so are glad it's not in Skyrim!

but there is no dice roll dodge apart from the 100'light armour perk. so its not likes its leaning either way, currently by having to skillfully dodge with time and moveing ie not have a dodge button or a dice dodge its very much action orintated.

The stealth sprint-roll perk is the closest you're going to get to any sort of activated dodge ability.

Some kind of dodge maneuver is definitely needed. As a 2-hand wielder it's essential that you can dodge those power attacks, and sometime I can by a simple side-step, but man does it have to be timed. I usually end up just wailing on the other dude with my greatsword while he's wailing on my with his battleaxe or whatever. Not a lot of finesse, which is really a shame. It gets even worse if there are 2 or more opponents. At the point all tactics just go out the window and it's slug-fest. Would be nice if there was a few more combat options than that.