Strength-Intelligence or Endurance-Willpower?

[Aksolotli]

Battlemage with Heavy Armor. Also should i start leveling Luck from level 1?

[G.Metzel]

for optimization:

1. Luck always up to 100 +1 for 4 points
2. Endurance always up to 100 +5 for 5 points
3. Free Choice +3 for 3 points

With each level up, you gain 10% of your Endurance to your HP pool.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Endurance#Health_Gains

[Lucidess]

Well, do you need HP for a battlemage? Do you plan on taking damage? or being able to mitigate it with spells? I think there's a lot of flexibility there. Being a glass cannon battle mage sounds dangerous, but with the right shield element you can be protected from a lot of damage in certain situations (fire shield in oblivion).

[Just Chill]

It honestly doesn't matter.
Over the time you will get an allrounder.

Main skills now just are the ones you prefer to use to level faster (as they level faster).

But overall, it's just a matter of time and grind, until you are OP. ^^


I've previously wrote level up plans for the original, as it was more cheesy.
Taking care of the attribute multiplier required some planning...

Here it's basically impossible to skill your char wrongfully.

[Lucidess]

Originally posted by Just Chill:

It honestly doesn't matter.
Over the time you will get an allrounder.

Main skills now just are the ones you prefer to use to level faster (as they level faster).

But overall, it's just a matter of time and grind, until you are OP. ^^

There's a lot to consider actually, considering everything scales with you in the game, some creatures appear for awhile, and then disappear. you may need to change spells every few levels to adapt to certain enemies. Maybe there's a slightly more optimal route for early game. Why does this matter? well it's a video game, we're nerds and we find this stuff out because it's fun. This game has good replay value too. Keep in mind the difficulty slider kind of invalidates any notion that the game is easy or hard, or you are op or not. That is completely irrelevant. The journey matters so much more.

[Kasa]

WP >END> INT

WP now dictates MP AND stamina regen, you want to be able to keep casting spells all battle long right?

Ideally you want to cast smaller cheaper spells because they are more efficient and faster at killing things then the larger spells.

Also you HP bonus is now 10% of your END x Your level.

[Mad Matt Dog]

Originally posted by G.Metzel:

for optimization:

1. Luck always up to 100 +1 for 4 points
2. Endurance always up to 100 +5 for 5 points
3. Free Choice +3 for 3 points

With each level up, you gain 10% of your Endurance to your HP pool.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Endurance#Health_Gains

endurance is retroactive now so you dont need to max it first, only if you actually want more HP right now

[Aksolotli]

So i picked Altmer with Lord Sign.
So do i go for luck or not? I wanna level up high level.

[Lucidess]

Originally posted by Aksolotli:

So i picked Altmer with Lord Sign.
So do i go for luck or not? I wanna level up high level.

Depends. Are you setting the difficulty for a challenge? or are you just pushing everything over with no effort? Starting with a few levels of other attributes will help you earlier than Luck, and luck also has a cap. So some extra levels of early strength would be good for carrying capacity, for example. Or, if your agility is 30, maybe raise it to 40 to make sure you aren't stumbling around when being hit by rats. Maybe start leveling up Luck around level 5-10.

[Kasa]

Originally posted by Aksolotli:

So i picked Altmer with Lord Sign.
So do i go for luck or not? I wanna level up high level.

Luck is a dump stat, sure at level 100 it adds 20 points to all other skills but only as long as those skills are level 80 or under as the only skills that benefit from luck over 100 is agility and athletics.

Plus you don't get any mastery bonus from those skills boosted by luck.

Ps: Since you took the lord sign do the mage guild quest ASAP, you will be able to enchant magic resist items to try and boost your spell resistance to 100% to negate your elemental weakness.

[Mad Matt Dog]

Originally posted by Kasa:

Originally posted by Aksolotli:

So i picked Altmer with Lord Sign.
So do i go for luck or not? I wanna level up high level.

Luck is a dump stat, sure at level 100 it adds 20 points to all other skills but only as long as those skills are level 80 or under as the only skills that benefit from luck over 100 is agility and athletics.

Plus you don't get any mastery bonus from those skills boosted by luck.

Ps: Since you took the lord sign do the mage guild quest ASAP, you will be able to enchant magic resist items to try and boost your spell resistance to 100% to negate your elemental weakness.

you will spend most of your time with skills below level 100 so it's quite valuable, the journey to maxing out everything takes time, Luck will be powerful for most of any playthrough unless you spend all your time grinding skills before you go play. It's actually quite good in that regard, you don't need to spend as much time leveling skills aside from hitting the 25/50/75/100 milestones for ones you really want the perks for. You can just play normally and explore and get bonus stats from Luck.

It's faster to max out Luck than maxing out every skill. If I can get +20 in every spell casting skill, that's going to save me a HUGE amount of mana for most of my play time.

[Kasa]

Originally posted by Mad Matt Dog:

Originally posted by Kasa:

Luck is a dump stat, sure at level 100 it adds 20 points to all other skills but only as long as those skills are level 80 or under as the only skills that benefit from luck over 100 is agility and athletics.

Plus you don't get any mastery bonus from those skills boosted by luck.

Ps: Since you took the lord sign do the mage guild quest ASAP, you will be able to enchant magic resist items to try and boost your spell resistance to 100% to negate your elemental weakness.

you will spend most of your time with skills below level 100 so it's quite valuable, the journey to maxing out everything takes time, Luck will be powerful for most of any playthrough unless you spend all your time grinding skills before you go play. It's actually quite good in that regard, you don't need to spend as much time leveling skills aside from hitting the 25/50/75/100 milestones for ones you really want the perks for. You can just play normally and explore and get bonus stats from Luck.

It's faster to max out Luck than maxing out every skill. If I can get +20 in every spell casting skill, that's going to save me a HUGE amount of mana for most of my play time.

Except luck takes x4 more points to raise by 1 level then other abilities, so you are far better off raising those other skills in the first place especially since skills level very quickly in this game.

Don't forget it's +20 points AT LEVEL 100.

And it's only to SKILLS that get those points, that means you are wasting 200 points (40 level ups ) you could be putting into endurance, strength, WP, ect that far more useful then luck.

[Jen]

Luck affect skill, but probably not in a way you think. Luck can boost the affect of a hammer breaking when repairing or lock piking, but not trigger a skill effect. Useful sure. But once you hit a 100 in a skill it no longer apply any affect to that action. I would rather spend those point on something you want. Strength and will power if you want to deal damage and keep mana up. Want to take a few more hits before dying. put some point into endurance. Can't cast good spells without enough mana, so put some point into it. Will power and mana regeneration no longer is scaled to how much you mana you have. The mana will regenerate at the same speed no matter how much mana you have. It only depend of how much your willpower you have, but then again. Intelligence affect how much mana you have available for spells.

[8-bit Cavalry]

Luck is the "punch up" stat and the versatility stat. you're trading stat points for hidden skill bonuses THAT DON'T COUNT FOR SCALING. The higher a skill is the more it pushes your XP bar when you level it. so people saying "I'll just max my favorite 9 skills and then luck is worthless" are forgetting that leveling your 9 skills to 100 is a TON of XP and will ramp your level way harder then an equivalent character coasting on the luck bonus.

I did a quick test, and improving a skill from 67 to 68 was 40% more "level XP" then a improving a skill from 54 to 55. To reverse that math, it means if you invested 30 points into luck (ideally using birthsign and favored stat to avoid paying the level up premium) you will have 40% more effective total skill bonus at a specific level then someone who has not invested in Luck, until you start hitting your caps. The higher your luck or more focused your build is, the faster this will happen. It's not free though, the tradeoff for punching up on skills is lost attribute points.

So there is no universal answer here, for any character you need to ask yourself "will this class hit 100 on all my key attributes first? or 100 on all my key skills first?" if you think you're going to cap attributes first invest in luck, if you think you'll cap skills first, invest in your core attributes. And don't overinvest in luck.. the further you go, the more likely you are to lose its advantage before end game, 60-75 luck is pretty safe, going 90 luck is almost certainly going to bite you at the end.

Oh and always ask "am I going to spend 200 hours on this character and sweep the entire map and do every quest?" If you're going full ubisoft mode and clearing everything, you can safely ignore luck.

[psychotron666]

Intelligence endurance. Those are the only two somewhat useful attributes for combat.
Strength won't help you become stronger, at least in a combat sense. The only real purpose for strength is carry weight.

Luck is okay.. for a bit. At level 100 luck it increases all your skills by 20. However skills don't do anything beyond level 100, so luck becomes less useful as your main skills get closer to 100 and will eventually become useless for your build.

Starting with a higher luck and not touching it is better than increasing it every level. I wouldn't bother increasing luck last 60 or 70.

[Stop Nakba Denial]

As someone who maxed Willpower for the magicka regen, just don't. It's garbage. I have now placed Luck on a higher priority than Willpower. I maxed Intelligence > Luck (to 60) > Willpower > Speed > Endurance > Strength > Agility > Luck. But if I did it again, Willpower would be at the absolute end. I'd also do Agility above Strength if I was using swords vs maces/axes.