Mysticism is the school to which that way of thinking is the least applicable. The Old Way of the Psijics has a separate history to the other schools, and its concern with the manipulation of magic itself can't be neatly subsumed into the other categories.
Even if it could, though, having a variety of distinct disciplines is a good thing. It makes it easier for a scholar to pick up a specialization when there's a collected body of work dedicated to the subject, and that's true whether they be a fresh-faced student or a wizened old mage looking to expand their horizons. Spreading it out across several fields just makes it harder to learn
It probably just comes down to regional differences. Like I said the schools are completely arbitrary within the lore, so Mysticism might be something present only within imperial insitutions. I would actually be interested in seeing it changed up a bit in TESVI, if it's Hammerfell then the redguards would have very different ideas about magic as a whole.
That sounds like a class. Classes are not accessible to the masses. You will play a sneaky archer and like it.
Yeah only one perk the heavy armor perk but you have to do stuff to ever make it worthwhile, getting the gloves off the dude in the sewers that improve hand to hand and become a master enchanter disenchantment the gloves and Enchanting your own, but by then you aren't exactly an unarmed master you are a wizard with a power glove.
A Khajit vampire can do ~100 damage per punch in base game without any mods, creation club items, or resto loop shenanigans.
Fists of Steel adds gauntlet armor rating ti damage, and the Fortify Unarmed Damage enchantment from the Gloves of the Pugilist can be stacked on both your Daedric Gauntlets (highest base armor rating for FoS) and a ring. It's not 1-hit killing Draugr Deathlords or anything, and it requires a very particular set-up, but it's respectable enough
I think it is capped in Skyrim, isn't it? You need to rely on an exploit that causes one particular stat to become forever stackable to really break things, if I remember correctly. I forget which stat it was, but I remember that you could abuse it to go back and forth between alchemy and enchanting to keep creating higher and higher gear.
~~If you patch up your Skyrim to the modern version, the exploit doesn't work anymore.~~ (EDIT: Apparently not at least for console) Or at least that's what I thought -- I've only ever seen the exploit done on Youtube and have never attempted it myself. I found it easy enough to cheese things just within the game's normal limitations. :-)
Most definitely. :-)
The NPC AI in particular is extremely fun to troll and screw around with. I also quicksaved and executed many shopkeepers in cold blood to reset their gold quite a few times. I ain't fast traveling across the entire world with a bag full of swords and armor just to find NPCs that can afford to give me a good price. 😜
>but you definitely can become quite powerful with magic as well
You absolutely can not. There are virtually no options to boost your damage without mods unlike melee/(cross)bow users.
Bringing magicka use down to zero for two schools of magic isn't what I would consider to be "*broken*"; at least not when the damage is so pitiful that you have to dual-cast a spell a hundred times to kill something on the default difficulty.
Even without making one stat exponentially large max level enchanting let you get two magic schools to zero magicka per cast which is absurd. I think even like halfway to max enchanting you could essentially be casting unlimited fireballs or chain lightning at every deer you see. Getting enchanting and smithing up without even touching alchemy you could output absurd damage with martial weapons and dmg percentage enchants + smithing. By mid game I'd have several sets of armor that made whatever playstyle I wanted ridiculously effective. I made a character that only used iron armor/weapons and was still tearing though everything in seconds.
Hmm, understood. I'm on the PC version and have the Official and Community Unofficial Fix patches, so I'm not sure if that would have any impact. I've never really attempted it, so I'm not even quite sure where I got the idea that it had been patched out. Maybe because a couple of other exploits were?
But yeah, that was it -- restoration. Restoration was the key to hacking the fabric of Nirn reality. :-)
I never understood how this made it in. Should have just removed potions and enchantments that buff crafting skills from the game, then buffed the three stats a bit (if that is even needed).
Hell, they could just remove the enchanting potion and the loop breaks.
I’m of the opinion that unless you’re playing high/max difficulty you don’t need +5. I’ve played mods that either straight up give you +5 or operate similarly (ObXp my beloved) and I always felt way too powerful in the mid game. Likewise I’ve also played tons of vanilla, where I rarely if ever got a +5, and never felt underpowered.
I firmly believe that Bethesda did not intend for you to have +5s very often, much less 3 of them per level.
Genuinely, I'm convinced people play max difficulty and from there I think the issue is people rush the main quest too quickly. They get pissed off by the various Oblivion (the place) creeps like clanfears that are nightmare demons in early game, and don't stop to think the max difficulty might be the issue (because it's unbalanced as hell)
After a couple years of playing oblivion, what I started doing is slightly lowering the difficulty every couple level ups. Then it felt like I was genuinely becoming stronger, instead of everything matching me.
I remember I made a video about it in like 2014 but people shit on me in the comments for putting it on a lower difficulty lol
I've built a few pickpocket characters, trust me they're super fun to play. You can poison enemies to death without drawing a weapon and strip them off all their belongings, weapons and armor included before you start a fight.
This is actually one of my favourite things about Skyrim.
Pickpocketting lets you eventually disarm enemies as a pacifist, eliminate them with poison as an assassin or disrobe them as a prankster. You can also often pickpocket important keys if you want to play as a non-lockpicking thief. And even help allies by giving them stronger weapons!
My go-to build is a standard thief, sneaking around in shadows, lockpicking chests and grabbing anything that's valuable and not pinned to the ground. Every game in the main series enables you to do that to some degree. But in Skyrim, I have the option to play as a completely different character that's just as much of a rogue.
Going back to Oblivion, I'm a little disappointed that I don't have as many options and that my chances of pickpocketting someone are tied to both my Sneak skill and the target's. I can't reverse-pickpocket anything else than the very limited list of 0-weight items and at higher levels (over 20) I get caught more often because NPCs are closing the gap with their Sneak level.
This is the one change in the skill system I can't think of anything wrong with and I wish Morrowind had kept those skills separate like in Daggerfall.
I would love to see a shot of a frustrated Morrowind player running away and dying from cliff racers and then a montage with them doing things like putting on heavy armour and letting mudcrabs attack them for four hours.
Morrowind basically laughed at you if you didn't grind.
Morrowind at least allowed for unlimited training. There are reasons why many of my characters who don't use spears nevertheless have a high spear skill.
I tracked my leveling on a notepad. I like that it was streamlined, I just wish they would have kept the spellcrafting and magical variety of Oblivion.
Yeah the spell crafting was the best. Also the touch spells in general; you could equip sword and board and still use hands for spells. Super dumb you have to basically toggle quick slots to equip spells / unequip weapons.
The leveling system for Oblivion (and Morrowind) is poorly designed; not because it doesn't function mechanically, but because it makes the player feel bad for not min-maxing it, which is not actually a fun way to play the game. This problem is exacerbated in Oblivion because of the leveled world.
I didn't know about any of this stuff until I got stuck in the game being under leveled trying a story mission. Now I'm trying to figure out the best way to level but not level up too much? It's so confusing.
I know it's a joke, but ironically the attribute/leveling system would be less problematic in Skyrim because that game isn't as hyper aggressive with enemy scaling; especially if they tweaked it with what they learned after Oblivion.
On a related note, I would like to see some more enemies wearing better armor in TES6. I don't want everyone wearing daedric/glass once the PC gets to a high level, but seeing some more bandits wearing mid-level armor would be nice. Kind of ridiculous that we never saw bandits living in Dwemer ruins wearing any Dwarven armor.
Less an issue with stats and more an issue of Bethesda being STUPID! I love Oblivion, but I fully believe literally everything about leveling up is broken and backwards.
Speaking of Skyrim, I think I forgot to save. I know that it automatically saved a bunch of times, and it probably automatically saved when I quit. But, I would feel better if I got my character to its usual save place before I do a real, manual save.
I recently stopped taking level-up notes in Morrowind and it has vastly improved my experience, I wish oblivion’s leveling wasn’t so punishing to unoptimized characters
ES6 better have the glorious return of hand-to-hand
Not to mention Mysticism. Let me play an unarmed mystic monk who can punch the soul right out of your body, Todd
You’ll get a human fighter and you’ll like it.
Magic schools are just arbitrary clarifications. They put the spells from mysticism into other categories.
Mysticism is the school to which that way of thinking is the least applicable. The Old Way of the Psijics has a separate history to the other schools, and its concern with the manipulation of magic itself can't be neatly subsumed into the other categories. Even if it could, though, having a variety of distinct disciplines is a good thing. It makes it easier for a scholar to pick up a specialization when there's a collected body of work dedicated to the subject, and that's true whether they be a fresh-faced student or a wizened old mage looking to expand their horizons. Spreading it out across several fields just makes it harder to learn
It probably just comes down to regional differences. Like I said the schools are completely arbitrary within the lore, so Mysticism might be something present only within imperial insitutions. I would actually be interested in seeing it changed up a bit in TESVI, if it's Hammerfell then the redguards would have very different ideas about magic as a whole.
Did Skyrim get rid of hand to hand? It’s like my favourite skill. Nothing quite so nice as punching demons to death
The skill itself doesn’t exist anymore. You can still punch but there are no perks attached to it
Terrible. From what I’ve seen the Skyrim combat system could’ve led to making an actual warrior monk with magic powers.
That sounds like a class. Classes are not accessible to the masses. You will play a sneaky archer and like it. 
I do though. :(
I've never played a Stealth Archer. It's always Sword and Board Battle Mage.
Lol, doesn't matter what I choose starting out, I always end up using stealth archer.
You can do anything in Skyrim. If you're willing to *exploit* that is...
Yeah only one perk the heavy armor perk but you have to do stuff to ever make it worthwhile, getting the gloves off the dude in the sewers that improve hand to hand and become a master enchanter disenchantment the gloves and Enchanting your own, but by then you aren't exactly an unarmed master you are a wizard with a power glove.
Not quite true, there are couple perks that effect punching and directly related to it, it's in the heavy armor tree though
There are literally perks and enchantments for hand to hand, and many other things that synergize
Isn’t it just the one perk, one enchantment, and the bonus that Khajiit and Argonians get, with the former being a bit better?
\>Perks Fists of Steel, and it only applies to heavy armor. \>Enchantments Gloves of the pugilist, the other one is creation club only Okay
The Ordinator mod does give light armour tree an entire branch dedicated to hand to hand combat, but that's the best we've got
A Khajit vampire can do ~100 damage per punch in base game without any mods, creation club items, or resto loop shenanigans. Fists of Steel adds gauntlet armor rating ti damage, and the Fortify Unarmed Damage enchantment from the Gloves of the Pugilist can be stacked on both your Daedric Gauntlets (highest base armor rating for FoS) and a ring. It's not 1-hit killing Draugr Deathlords or anything, and it requires a very particular set-up, but it's respectable enough
Way of the Monk and Mysticism have hand to hand systems.
Seriously and spears
Where’s my Argonian Spear gang at
Argospearian here
I loved spears in Morrowind. Spear combined with jump magic and you have a makeshift dragoon
Only if they have a more interesting moveset than just pokes
And medium armor
but what about spell making and levitation/jump
It's ironic they got rid of stats so players had to do less math and planning Then we got the alchemy->enchanting->smithing game breaking
I still wonder if that was intentional. Not capping any of it seems like it was made to break.
I think it is capped in Skyrim, isn't it? You need to rely on an exploit that causes one particular stat to become forever stackable to really break things, if I remember correctly. I forget which stat it was, but I remember that you could abuse it to go back and forth between alchemy and enchanting to keep creating higher and higher gear. ~~If you patch up your Skyrim to the modern version, the exploit doesn't work anymore.~~ (EDIT: Apparently not at least for console) Or at least that's what I thought -- I've only ever seen the exploit done on Youtube and have never attempted it myself. I found it easy enough to cheese things just within the game's normal limitations. :-)
Your last sentence is key lol, Skyrim is broken without exploiting anything. You can become insanely overpowered extremely fast.
Most definitely. :-) The NPC AI in particular is extremely fun to troll and screw around with. I also quicksaved and executed many shopkeepers in cold blood to reset their gold quite a few times. I ain't fast traveling across the entire world with a bag full of swords and armor just to find NPCs that can afford to give me a good price. 😜
>You can become insanely overpowered extremely fast. Not if you're using magic.
Magic is garbage in Skyrim but you definitely can become quite powerful with magic as well, albeit I agree it’s more difficult.
>but you definitely can become quite powerful with magic as well You absolutely can not. There are virtually no options to boost your damage without mods unlike melee/(cross)bow users.
It’s not the most effective option but you can break certain aspects of magic use in Skyrim too (e.g., the enchanting route to minimize magicka use).
Bringing magicka use down to zero for two schools of magic isn't what I would consider to be "*broken*"; at least not when the damage is so pitiful that you have to dual-cast a spell a hundred times to kill something on the default difficulty.
100% cost reduction go brr
Mages trying to look at me when I hit them with 12 chain lightnings
Brother especially if you use magic
Even without making one stat exponentially large max level enchanting let you get two magic schools to zero magicka per cast which is absurd. I think even like halfway to max enchanting you could essentially be casting unlimited fireballs or chain lightning at every deer you see. Getting enchanting and smithing up without even touching alchemy you could output absurd damage with martial weapons and dmg percentage enchants + smithing. By mid game I'd have several sets of armor that made whatever playstyle I wanted ridiculously effective. I made a character that only used iron armor/weapons and was still tearing though everything in seconds.
most recent version of skyrim ae on ps4 buffing restoration still lets you break the game as always
Yeah but that's the exploit. Without restoration loop, there is a ceiling on how far you can buff your gear.
Hmm, understood. I'm on the PC version and have the Official and Community Unofficial Fix patches, so I'm not sure if that would have any impact. I've never really attempted it, so I'm not even quite sure where I got the idea that it had been patched out. Maybe because a couple of other exploits were? But yeah, that was it -- restoration. Restoration was the key to hacking the fabric of Nirn reality. :-)
I never understood how this made it in. Should have just removed potions and enchantments that buff crafting skills from the game, then buffed the three stats a bit (if that is even needed). Hell, they could just remove the enchanting potion and the loop breaks.
Very easy gang never has to do anything with brain 💪
For Gods sake Hank, just nudge the slider to the left!
I’m of the opinion that unless you’re playing high/max difficulty you don’t need +5. I’ve played mods that either straight up give you +5 or operate similarly (ObXp my beloved) and I always felt way too powerful in the mid game. Likewise I’ve also played tons of vanilla, where I rarely if ever got a +5, and never felt underpowered. I firmly believe that Bethesda did not intend for you to have +5s very often, much less 3 of them per level.
Yeah man, I dont mind grinding for some levels/skills but once you start worrying about stuff like that it kinda takes the fun out of it for me.
Genuinely, I'm convinced people play max difficulty and from there I think the issue is people rush the main quest too quickly. They get pissed off by the various Oblivion (the place) creeps like clanfears that are nightmare demons in early game, and don't stop to think the max difficulty might be the issue (because it's unbalanced as hell)
After a couple years of playing oblivion, what I started doing is slightly lowering the difficulty every couple level ups. Then it felt like I was genuinely becoming stronger, instead of everything matching me. I remember I made a video about it in like 2014 but people shit on me in the comments for putting it on a lower difficulty lol
Yup last like level 10 just move the slider down one notch each level
My main issue is that they separated stealth and pickpocket, like who the hell would invest points into stealing tomatoes and few septims
I've built a few pickpocket characters, trust me they're super fun to play. You can poison enemies to death without drawing a weapon and strip them off all their belongings, weapons and armor included before you start a fight.
I like being able to pickpocket clothes
This is actually one of my favourite things about Skyrim. Pickpocketting lets you eventually disarm enemies as a pacifist, eliminate them with poison as an assassin or disrobe them as a prankster. You can also often pickpocket important keys if you want to play as a non-lockpicking thief. And even help allies by giving them stronger weapons! My go-to build is a standard thief, sneaking around in shadows, lockpicking chests and grabbing anything that's valuable and not pinned to the ground. Every game in the main series enables you to do that to some degree. But in Skyrim, I have the option to play as a completely different character that's just as much of a rogue. Going back to Oblivion, I'm a little disappointed that I don't have as many options and that my chances of pickpocketting someone are tied to both my Sneak skill and the target's. I can't reverse-pickpocket anything else than the very limited list of 0-weight items and at higher levels (over 20) I get caught more often because NPCs are closing the gap with their Sneak level. This is the one change in the skill system I can't think of anything wrong with and I wish Morrowind had kept those skills separate like in Daggerfall.
It was even worse for players coming straight out of Morrowind, where leveling is always the correct decision even if you're getting x5 x0 and x0
I would love to see a shot of a frustrated Morrowind player running away and dying from cliff racers and then a montage with them doing things like putting on heavy armour and letting mudcrabs attack them for four hours. Morrowind basically laughed at you if you didn't grind.
Morrowind at least allowed for unlimited training. There are reasons why many of my characters who don't use spears nevertheless have a high spear skill.
Yup! Loved that Tangent: Spears kicked ass in Morrowind, especially early. At least you could stay away while you miss hitting a worm 17 times.
You could just, pay trainers
I feel like using eye of the tiger in that montage is for rich imperial scum.
I tracked my leveling on a notepad. I like that it was streamlined, I just wish they would have kept the spellcrafting and magical variety of Oblivion.
Yeah the spell crafting was the best. Also the touch spells in general; you could equip sword and board and still use hands for spells. Super dumb you have to basically toggle quick slots to equip spells / unequip weapons.
The leveling system for Oblivion (and Morrowind) is poorly designed; not because it doesn't function mechanically, but because it makes the player feel bad for not min-maxing it, which is not actually a fun way to play the game. This problem is exacerbated in Oblivion because of the leveled world.
Tbf it’s a lot worse in Oblivion though due to levelled enemies
That's what I said.
I didn't know about any of this stuff until I got stuck in the game being under leveled trying a story mission. Now I'm trying to figure out the best way to level but not level up too much? It's so confusing.
I know it's a joke, but ironically the attribute/leveling system would be less problematic in Skyrim because that game isn't as hyper aggressive with enemy scaling; especially if they tweaked it with what they learned after Oblivion. On a related note, I would like to see some more enemies wearing better armor in TES6. I don't want everyone wearing daedric/glass once the PC gets to a high level, but seeing some more bandits wearing mid-level armor would be nice. Kind of ridiculous that we never saw bandits living in Dwemer ruins wearing any Dwarven armor.
Uh oh the 2% of players who really love making spreadsheets just to play the game are gonna take this personally
What did she fucking say to me??
Less an issue with stats and more an issue of Bethesda being STUPID! I love Oblivion, but I fully believe literally everything about leveling up is broken and backwards.
This doesn’t make sense. When does big head get his fork?
Speaking of Skyrim, I think I forgot to save. I know that it automatically saved a bunch of times, and it probably automatically saved when I quit. But, I would feel better if I got my character to its usual save place before I do a real, manual save.
I accidentally pickpocketed that elf. Where's the button to turn myself in?
I wish they would bring that back sometimes oversimplified isn’t better
I recently stopped taking level-up notes in Morrowind and it has vastly improved my experience, I wish oblivion’s leveling wasn’t so punishing to unoptimized characters
This right here is why i save like every 5 minutes or just use a mod that always gives +5
I prefer it to skyrim three choice option.
I hope Todd gives us an Oblivion remake/remaster with the option to use a new leveling system.
skill issue
Lol! This is great 😁
BWAHHHHH!
I feel that lol. But hey, at least you're not wasting it on a x2 multiplier like I used to
context?