How do you feel about leveling?

[Eternal President Uncle Slam]

The longer I play the elderscrolls and especially skyrim the more I realize the leveling system is NOT GOOD. It damn near forces you to level skills you want nothing to do with in order to get to the endgame(level 80). It makes it really hard not to hit up a trainer every level. Its bad for roleplaying a character too. If you wanted to play a good aligned character then you still need to level pick pocketing and do devious things! Sure you can sidestep that by making skills legendary, but then you still need to power level one skill of your choice which is really bad for immersion.

Then we got the 3 crafting skills.......... You need 3 damn crafting skills at 100 with all relevant perks and multiple items/active effects to craft the best weapons and armor. Everytime I make a new character I have to go through the same process to achieve power! What a damn grind! I really think I would prefer elderscrolls 6 to have a fallout style xp system+crafting. Imagine being able to just chill and play Skyrim the way you want to without having to worry about leveling pointless skills. Imagine crafting not needing 3 skills maxed out!

Maybe its because I am a min/maxer and I can't settle for being low level and having bad gear, but I cannot wait to see what elder scrolls 6 brings for the leveling system. Hopefully they find a way to make it more like fallout leveling, but still maintain an Elder scrolls feel. Honestly elderscrolls has its earliest roots with xp based leveling in Arena so it isn't far fetched.

[alexander_dougherty]

Two crafting skills, smithing and Enchanting.

Yes I know you need alchemy to get the best results, but those results are generally overkill, you can easily coast through the game with just smithing and enchanting. Unless you play on the harder difficulty levels, which turns enemies in damage sponges and renders your crafting irrelevant, because a few extra points of damage per round is not going to make those mobs drop any faster.

[Ambugaton]

The leveling system works fine through mid levels but is just grindy after that, and for that work you're left with a game that (absent mods) is empty of enemies meant to be fought at those higher levels. By the time you get there everything in vanilla is dying in a few hits even on legendary difficulty unless you purposefully gimp yourself. IMO the root problem is they just didn't design the game for level 60+, arguably 40+

[Eternal President Uncle Slam]

I mean technically on lower difficulties you can ignore crafting all together, BUT I WANT BIG NUMBERS! I WANT SPELLS THAT COST NO MAGICKA! I WANT FORTIFY DESTRUCTION POTIONS THAT MAKES SPELLS ACTUALLY HIT HARD!!!

Thought about it some more. I want elderscrolls 6 to be xp based leveling, but keep skills in the game. They also got to find a way to fit attributes back in. They way they existed back before skyrim was really annoying to min/max, but if they can do it right I would want them back. Just doesn't feel the same without the iconic attributes.

[Omario]

Levelling in Skyrim was the sole reason why I went down the modding route.

On Vanilla, I came out of Bleak Falls Barrow near level 8 and knew this would be the usual janky Bethesda overpowered levelling situation.

Currently using ‘Simple Balance’. Glorious, proper levelling and skills adjustment.

[tulle040657]

I think your problem is you think you need to be level 80,

[Grumpy]

leveling in every game is boring past the first time (and in some games even while leveling the first time (FF14)), it all depends on how strong your motivation is to overlook the negative sides for leveling a new char

[mrpmg]

If you haven't already tried it, a skill uncapper mod might be a good fit for you: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/8889?tab=description

I use this mod and I set it so that after level 100 and then again after level ~120, the leveling rate slows down by a lot, finally zeroing out at ~150 (all this is configurable). It allows me to keep using those main skills well into late game without feeling like it's a waste, but still rewards struggling through with low-level skills against high-level enemies. After all, it makes sense that you learn the most from going out of your comfort zone, IMO. You can also configure a bunch of other things, like leveling rates and how much health/magicka/stamina you get per level.

[Win2000Fan]

I am not much at leveling but I did get my great grandfather's construction level from my dad and it is very cool.

[GIJoe597]

I also think you level too fast and are forced to level things you do not want to. Either for personal or RP reasons. This mod allows me to only level what/when I want. It is not for everyone, but there are several options;

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/15745?tab=description

[Anschluss]

Abolish XP

[258789553873]

The end-game isn't really level 80. Aside for the ebony warrior and legendary dargons, nothing new really spawns in past level 50 something. Bandits cap at level 24 for instance, and they make up like 80-90% of the enemies in the game. Bethesda actually put the ebony warrior in just to try and inspire the player base to make similarly tough end-game enemies, which nobody has ever done for some reason.

As for the leveling system, honestly, the series isn't known for its leveling systems, and Skyrim is by far the best. Oblivion had this really stupid and overly complicated system that actually made your character WEAKER as you leveled no matter what you did. Though in Oblivion, the problem was more caused by the fact that everything leveled with you (there were no static levels in Oblivion), and worse yet their stats improved faster than yours! I actually never completed any of the quest lines in oblivion, because the game would just become too difficult for me to progress. And even if it you could handle the difficulty, it just made things stupid because at the higher levels it would take FOREVER to kill stuff just because everything had so much hp. And unlike Skyrim, you couldn't make overpowered gear to compensate for this.

Yeah, Skyrim isn't balanced, and the crafting skills are all insanely overpowered, but honestly its still the best leveling system the series has ever had.

As for getting to level 80, its only really necessary if you're achievement hunting, because you have to get to freaking level 78 for a legendary dragon to spawn. Oh, and those things aren't much for end-game bosses, because they're 10 levels below you by the time they appear! The first and possibly only time I fought a legendary dragon, I don't think I even really noticed what I was fighting until it died and I got the achievement. Of course, being level 80 I had made insanely op gear for myself that let me one-shot just about everything in the game, so that may have had something to do with it. And no, I didn't legendary anything, I did seriously have that many skills, including all the crafting skills.

[MysticMalevolence]

I use the mod "Experience" which makes you get levels by exploring and completing quests, and limits how high your skill levels can get. The total level controls your skill levels rather than the other way around. It means faster early game levelling with it slowing down in the late game. The xp gains are configurable too and you can set it to give xp for kills as well.

I don't really feel the need to minmax though... I can't say I've gotten 100 enchanting more than once, I've never gotten 100 alchemy, and I only do smithing for the enchanted item upgrading...

[White Knight]

Originally posted by tulle040657:

I think your problem is you think you need to be level 80,

I had no idea we could get up to 80th level. I've never seen anything past the mid 60's. That does sound tedious.

[Ambugaton]

Originally posted by IXBlackWolfXI:

As for the leveling system, honestly, the series isn't known for its leveling systems, and Skyrim is by far the best. Oblivion had this really stupid and overly complicated system that actually made your character WEAKER as you leveled no matter what you did. Though in Oblivion, the problem was more caused by the fact that everything leveled with you (there were no static levels in Oblivion), and worse yet their stats improved faster than yours! I actually never completed any of the quest lines in oblivion, because the game would just become too difficult for me to progress. And even if it you could handle the difficulty, it just made things stupid because at the higher levels it would take FOREVER to kill stuff just because everything had so much hp. And unlike Skyrim, you couldn't make overpowered gear to compensate for this.

Yeah, Skyrim isn't balanced, and the crafting skills are all insanely overpowered, but honestly its still the best leveling system the series has ever had.

I didn't play Oblivion nearly as much as I played Morrowind or am playing SKyrim --the auto-leveling EVERYTHING killed it for me-- but one benefit of not having OP crafting skills was that it made artifact hunting interesting and worthwhile. In skyrim you get to a certain point and most of the artifacts you look at and and go "meh. I can do better." Doesn't help gameplay, immersion or lore.

[258789553873]

Yeah, I really wish someone made a mod nerfing the crafting skills. Or at least, buff everything in the game to be on par with what you can craft. Though honestly, it would be hard to do that without making the crafting skills pointless. Also, what else could you really do with smithing? In Oblivion it just determined how much hp hammers restored to your gear (in Oblivion your gear would wear out with use, so you had to use these consumables called 'hammers' to repair them). It wasn't until you maxed it out that you could use smithing to actually upgrade your gear, and even then it only improved their effectiveness by 25%. In Skyrim, at max rank you can improve items several times over. Its broken and stupid. I mean, Eorland is supposed to be the best smith in Skyrim, but even at the beginning of the game he's not any better than you. Though I guess added smithed gear to the loot tables would cause there to be far too many versions of items in the game. I know if you have a lot of armor mods installed you'll run into gear more often just because there's a larger list to pull items from.