Elder Scrolls V - Skyrim - Page 472

On December 13 2011 02:39 Sandster wrote:
I'm trying to not read anything about the game while playing, but I did hear that I'm supposed to complete a quest before I can go to an Orc stronghold.

Some random orc told me about a hold in the SW corner of the map and marked it on my map, so I travelled there at night and just walked right in and into the mine. I also punched their leader a few times for some gold. Am I missing something here?

On December 13 2011 01:37 Tula wrote:


In all fairness almost every gamer knows that if you "stack" abusive mechanics enough almost any game can be broken. The only way they can prevent that is to prevent all possible abuses, which means the rewards for all those mechanics suck.

Let me give you an example, say you want to play a Warrior, not a berserker just a plain run of the mill warrior, with heavy armor, shield and 1h weapon. Now logically that character will focus on smithing since he will need to craft his gear and improve it later.

From an RP standpoint smithing needs to be good enough that he can play the game without ever enchanting anything himself (or at least not above level 40 enchanting or so, which you can reach without farming) and without making much headway into alchemy. So smithing must be decent at the very least.


Next we have a completly different char who wants to go for a mageish style, so enchanting must be strong as well.

Then we have alchemy for the 3rd crafting skill. By itself all these 3 are not a problem, but if we stack them (and we do stack them ) we end up with skyrim :D

As i said before, i am flabbergasted that they did not cap the skills at some point ("you can't ever have more than 100 points in this, no matter how many modifiers your gear has") to prevent "crossbuffing" but i can easily see why the skills by themselves are as strong as they are. Frankly they need to be for the game to make any sense at all.

The only balance part i completly disagree with is the Destruction tree in comparison to the conjuration tree. I was shocked that a pure Destruction mage simply sucks. That makes no sense at all, but it shows what kind of characters they had in mind when they "made" the engine (mostly swordswinging or archery types).

Oh restoration is also very lackluster compared to what i hoped it would be. I hoped it would mean i could play a healing char who focuses on keeping their companion alive, good luck with that on master difficulty

On December 13 2011 03:26 Grend wrote:


Are you an orc?

On December 13 2011 03:38 Sandster wrote:


No, Imperial.

On December 13 2011 02:39 Sandster wrote:
I'm trying to not read anything about the game while playing, but I did hear that I'm supposed to complete a quest before I can go to an Orc stronghold.

Some random orc told me about a hold in the SW corner of the map and marked it on my map, so I travelled there at night and just walked right in and into the mine. I also punched their leader a few times for some gold. Am I missing something here?

On December 13 2011 04:55 On_Slaught wrote:


If you did the quest in Mark to clear the mine of Forsworn then it bypasses the quest to enter them (there may be other quests that bypass it but dunno).

Normally you have to go find them a piece of armor with +smithing (gloves I think) to get in. However if you clear that mine for that quest one of the miners says that he will tell the strongholds that you're ok and to let you in.

On December 13 2011 05:46 Offhand wrote:
You need to gain the approval of an Orc to become "bloodkin" or something so the Orcs allow you into strongholds. I cleared out a random mine and asked the Orc miner for that designation and I was allowed in. I don't know if there are other ways to do this because the two locations were on opposite sides of the map and there's multiple strongholds. Not all orcs can do this, the one at the mage's college didn't even have the option to ask.

On December 13 2011 05:05 Sandster wrote:


Ah that makes sense - thanks.

+smithing sounds really good though, too bad it sounds like I have to randomly explore dungeons to find them now.

On December 12 2011 21:50 aebriol wrote:
Uhm ... so I started a new game on master.
1) Go to riverwood and get friendly with the archer. Train / pick pocket / train / pick pocket and level up to 12-13 or so I think (50 archery).
2) Did a little killing in the nearby area (the mine, some bandits, nothing big).
3) Went to whiterun, to arcadia. Train alchemy / pick pocket / train alchemy / train pick pocket ... to lvl 22.
4) Into the inn, start a brawl with the singer, go into corner with a mix of light and heavy armor. Difficulty novice ...
.... sleep ...
.... work ....

Level ... uhm, well I'll update when I get home ... then I'll do speech, smithing, enchant, and tonight afk while sneaking near a giant ...

The game just seems ... quite a bit exploitable with it's leveling system. But on the other hand, if you try to play on master, and end up doing tradeskills too early, you kind of mess up your character because the opponents are too high a level for your gear.

So choice seems to be ... either hold off on tradeskills until lvl 25-30 or so ... or just level up whatever you want in the most efficient manner possible. On my second character, I ended up being way too weak for playing on harder difficulties, since I did smithing too early, and was playing around with pick pocket etc, and ended up lvl 18-19 with lvl 1 gear.

On December 13 2011 06:52 Sandster wrote:
The level-up system is clearly designed so that you don't pay attention to your skillups at all on your first playthrough (unlike Oblivion), and focusing on exploring and living in the world. Power gamers will always exist but you can complain about every single player game if that's the case (FF7, hi). Even stuff like BG2 had ridiculously broken classes for you to solo the entire game with fairly easily, but doing so on your first run through completely ruins your enjoyment of the game.

On December 13 2011 07:57 Calm wrote:
Awesome game. So far my favorite place has been + Show Spoiler +. So much like Morrowind, yet so different (with the giant mushrooms and stuff like that - a real departure from the more realistic worlds they've tried to create with Oblivion and Skyrim). Any other awesome places like this that people can recommend?

On December 13 2011 08:01 HolydaKing wrote:

How huge is ít anyway? With my 2nd char i'll have to visit it again but with my first char i did not clear it, that's for sure...

On December 13 2011 08:02 Carnagath wrote:


I'm level 55 and I haven't been there yet, maybe because I haven't touched the main quest after visiting the Greybeards. I believe the main quest takes you there, right? I hear it's cool though.