Prologue.

I have been playing this game since 2012 and have put in a sizable chunk of my life into this game. I have come back to the game a few times and each time I see the game a bit differently and play the game a different way then I did before. Where as in the beginning I would try to take advantage of a character's choice skill set, I have slowly began to role play more and more as I find that this is the most enjoyable way to play the for me. Though I do have an xbox 360 and plain vanilla Skyrim I try my best to role play as much as I can. At the same time its vanilla Skyrim and sometimes you cant help yourself.

I usually find myself playing in a bit of a hybrid style depending on my mood. But I like to experience the game as I am "living it" and like to play as realistically as possible, feeling the emersion of the characters I meet, the bonds I make, and the stories that unfold.

So to my question.

What are your thoughts on making a skill Legendary? I am having a difficult time with it as my character has 100 with alchemy and I am tempted to make it Legendary so I can use the perks for other skill trees. Alchemy is a favorite skill of mine for many reasons and I enjoy the relationships I have to the other alchemists in the world.

The problem is I am not sure it feels right. It almost feels like I am cheating if I make the skill Legendary. I believe I might have to make up a way to fit this into my role play so it all feels normal to the world I am "living in".

What do you all think?

Making a skill legendary has its perks... No pun intended... As it frees up perks to use elsewhere which can be beneficial depending on what point you're at in the game.


For me, it can be a catch 22 as you then have to go through getting a skill back up to 100 and enemies/dungeons/ruins have levelled with you thus making them tougher. I suppose in a sense it is a challenge, but it gives me a feeling of being "back at the bottom of the ladder" and can feel time consuming.

Absolutely idiotic feature. I still can't comprehend, why Beth implemented this.

If you need to free the perk points from skill A to be used in other skills, the Dragonborn DLC already brought a feature to do this. This "making a skill legendary" really killed the point of that feature.

Also, if one wants the level cap removed, there are better options than skill amnesia. You could, for example, allow the skills progress more or less indefinitely. If you're worried about becoming overpowered, the skill effectiveness could be capped without capping the actual skill.

Well, that's my opinion in short. Whether one should use it or not, that's not up to me.

I usually only make Illusion legendary. All the other skills take a good while to max out again but with Illusion, you can cast Harmony or Call to Arms in the middle of Whiterun to hit level 100 in a couple of minutes.

From a Role Play perspective, it's not a good mechanic. I mean selective amnesia of one of you best skills? I mean how much sense does that make? At least with a melee skill you could RP a person that was ill or broke a bone and is "clumsy" while strengthening their arm and gaining muscle memory again. But a craft? Sure Breaking an arm would lessen ones smithing...but not Alchemy or Enchanting.

I think it's a dumb mechanic... already in the DB DLC... I never use either one, doesn't make sense to me.

I see this as meta-gaming. I'm not above it, though

For people like myself who do a very long play through every time we start a character I legendary skills all the time. I keep alchemy and enchanting at 100 and just legendary everything else pretty much as soon as it hits 100. The exception maybe being smithing if I haven't made myself a nice set of gear yet. I get the role play aspect of locking your character at a certain level and into certain skills but I'm just not that type of player. I like to do it all, see it all, then shelve the game for a year and play something else. If I become a godlike being along the way so be it.

This sums up my thoughts pretty well. I'm pretty sure one of my mods disables this feature. I've never tried to use it.

I think it is one of the most idiotic things Bethesda has ever done. And that's saying a lot. It is not a roleplaying game mechanic. It does not belong in this game and it should never have been put in this game and I hope they never do it again.

Pointless, because I have an Uncapper mod.

Yeah, but ,but,but By going Ledge and dropping the skill back to 15 or so you can enjoy the grinding all over again.....plus it knocks the stuffing out of all your perked abilities making the game delightfully difficult to survuve all over again.....what's not to like

I've never reset a skill, but, you could level up endlessly combined with the resto-loop. That just ruins the game, IMO.

I get the pros, I get the cons of all the different perspectives. My take on it is that the ability to make a skill Legendary is an option. Since it's optional, BGS has given us the choice to use it or not. I prefer choices, especially the one/zero kind that toggle on or off a feature. This provides an incredible customization of game set up for the player that wants to experience the game in a unique way, but without it being mandatory for anyone. I've seen a multitude of arguments for/against toggles and don't want to bog down this thread with that issue.

OP the great things are you get to choose and you can try it, if you don't like it you can reload from a save just before you Legendarized a skill (you did make a save, didn't you?). Personally I would never legendary a skill I really enjoy and is a part of my role play. Since as others have put it, making a skill Legendary is a kind of meta-gaming practice I would make a skill I don't really care about legendary (like lock picking as an example).

Whatever you do as Sir Rick would say (paraphrased) "Enjoy your play, however you play".

You don't have to use it if you don't want to.

I'm above it. Or below it, or wherever. I don't do it. I agree that it's meta-gaming, and I think it's silly.

Believe me, I don't. See, instead of the bizarre Legendary skills mess, what they should have done is this: uncap skill levels. Voilà! Simple, effective...and it is a genuine roleplaying way to let characters and skills gain higher levels.

The counter point to this is that Bethesda gave us this lame option of making skills legendary instead of giving us the option to uncap skills, which would have been a much better option to have provided. PC users can use the uncapper, but not he console players. Would have been better to have the option to uncap skills than the option to make them legendary.

I don't disagree. I agree with having options. Having an uncap option, a legendary option, and more options would be a gamers dream, I just have never seen BGS provide that in an off-the-shelf game. Even their difficulty slider, although an option, could be implemented far better as seen by many of the difficulty type mods that are out there.

Exactly.

The Uncapper existed long before this "legendary" feature. Hell, there's even uncapper for Oblivion. The concept is old and very well known, why didn't Beth implement it? It doesn't even have to be as comprehensive as the uncapper, just take the basic idea: skllis raise indefinitely, only cap the effectiveness to maintain balance. Instead they gave us one of the most moronic features an RPG could get.

Hey thank you so much for so many replies!

I have come to the conclusion that I am too much of a role player and like my world to evolve as I live in it and play the game as I am living in it to make a skill Legendary. Its tempting I suppose but I feel like I would be cheating the game and making my character all powerful at the expense of enjoying the game. I just find that the real enjoyment of the game comes from playing the game as it was "real life" and "living" in the game.

Thanks again for posting your opinions. I enjoyed reading the different points of view.

Heck, I've got an uncapper for Daggerfall. I have no idea where I got it, or when I installed it, but Daggerfall works fine on my Windows 7 machine so I ain't touching it.

As for roleplaying - Consider yourself reaching for the 'next level', where it seems like you're starting as a novice again. Personally, I find alchemy to be the absolute easiest (and probably cheesiest) skill to make legendary. Especially if you put some of the perks back in as you go. I can go from 100 back up to 60 in a single crafting session if I do that. Without putting perks back I think I end up at 40'ish. The only really important perk for me is the double harvesting one (most powerful perk in the whole game). I've played staunch alchemists in TES since forever though, so it definitely fits my character.

The problem with having many alchemy perks is your potions become too expensive and hence a PITA to sell. But you skill up based on septims earned, not potions made...

Oh, and all of that is without any restoration looping or any other 'tricks'. Just straight up mixing ingredients for what comes out.

I separate elements of games like Skrim into two catefories.

Roleplaying

Game mechanics.

Roleplaying aspects take the form of items you equip, places you visit, actions you take, things you interact with, how you choose to get around etc.

Game mechanics take the form of things like perk points, fast travel, stats, rules, user interface, map etc.

I find it important to keep a mental separation between the two aspects, because, although it might be possible to shoehorn some mechanics into your rolelaying (i.e. pretending you are studying a real map when studying the overhead map, imagining you are gaining insight and comprehension of a combat ability when assigning a perk point) they are still more mechanical aspects or a videogame than a simulation of reality.

Therefore doing something like making a perk legendary goes firmly into the 'game mechanic' category for me. I'd not consider it wrong from a roleplaying perspective, because, as far as I am concerned perks themselves are not part of a roleplaying perspective, they are aspects of the game, designed to allow your character to grow stronger in an 'artificial' manner.

Hope that makes sense?

It makes sense, and I'd tend to agree with you about the division.

My personal approach, though, is to only make use of those game mechanics that are consistent with the actual character I'm playing. I have a hard time seeing how making a perk legendary fits into character development at all, so I don't use it.

I'm okay with it. I have used it a few times.

Unlike zero cost spells (which I view as an exploit) I am sure that "Making a skill Legendary" for someone that can/could kill a 'god' is not beyond the realms.....

The only skill I will make legendary in my game, which I have a couple of times, are the smithing skill since it's easy enough to get the smithing skill back up to 100.

How, first I always improve a dagger and I use it in the smelter to get more iron ingots. After that I improve all items e.g armor, weapon I can improve then I smelt every item that gives me the largest amount of ingots especially steel ingots.

Once I make it legendary I run *beserk* to clear bandit hideouts then take all loot back to a smith, I tend to go back to Whiterun or to Riften after I helped http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Balimund to save his forge.