Very Few Viable Builds in Skyrim

[snugginz]

I'm back to playing this after many years (a decade?) off. And first thing I notice when playing with all the builds that I never got to before, is that none of them feel very viable.

First I played a Block oriented One Hand build with mace, a few points in Restoration for heals, and a few points in Conjuration for Fire Atronarch, and a point in Alteration for Oakskin armor. The Fire Atronarch and Lydia were both doing far more damage than me and all I became was a summons/heal bot. It took so many swings to take anything down with the mace even though by level 20 I had about 5 points in the tree. I figured my mistake was that I also had some Smithing to improve mine and Lydia's armor and weapons, and basically I was spread too thin.

So I started over with just Block, One Hand, and Restoration with non Alteration or Smithing, in order to be more focused, and the build was actually worse. Without the summons, the dps was so low it just felt almost useless. Although my armor and block ranked up fast and I could tank practically forever, it just wasn't a fun balanced build.

So I started over with a different idea, this time Destruction and Conjuration, and the build felt so weak it was silly. Even the first dragon felt completely immune to my fire/frost/or lightning attacks. I literally couldn't see anything happening to his health bar. So I grabbed a sword in my inventory and started hitting him, (with no points in one hand!) and was finally doing damage. Same for the mobs in the Balance of Power quest who were all but immune to my Destruction magic, and quickly one shot my Fire Atronarch. Sure I was only level 6, but this was a very beginning quest.

So I switched to the bow, went stealth for a few seconds (with no points in bow or stealth) and started one and two shotting everything. LOL!

So yeah, I guess *that's* why I remember always falling back to a stealth archer.

BTW, I also remember the ability to take over an enemy and get him to attack other enemies didn't work in late game as they all resisted it. It just wasn't viable in endgame.

I have to say I'm a bit disappointed with these latest playthroughs. I spent a LOT of time with not really viable builds only to find, "one build to rule them all..." there really isn't as much variety in Skyrim builds as it seems. Sure if you memorize all the OP weapons and min max your builds perfectly with good complimenting powers I'm sure a lot of them will work. But it seems there isn't as much ease of building whatever you want as the game leads you to believe.

Thoughts?

[Sairek Ceareste]

Skyrim isn't a very balanced game. Stealth archer will dominate everything because bows do great damage, are ranged with no cost (I mean, arrows I guess, but gold becomes irrelevant), scales incrementally in multiple ways (unlike magic which is static), and gets a massive sneak multiplier (which magic also doesn't get). Then of course there's both alchemy, enchanting and smithing which archery benefits both from for even more damage in multiple ways.

There's also the armor formula: Where anything below about 350 armor does absolutely nothing. You'll rarely find NPCs with more than 350 some armor even wearing full ebony plate with a shield.


All of that said, Skyrim isn't very difficult. So who cares if the build isn't meta? Take it as a challenge or use mods the balance things so they're at least viable options.
Two-handed weapons suck ass in this game. Even swords are incredibly slow despite being the fasted two-handed weapon type, and their damage is subpar. That still hasn't stopped me from making a character with a two-handed sword who absolutely cannot use magic (his magicka stat is a whopping negative twelve), starting with all my skills at 0, and doing a "zero to hero" run on legendary mode with mods. Oh, and all regenerations values were set to 0.01 base (so I can't just regenerate 20% of my health/magicka/stamina a second by stacking fortify enchants).

Yes, even the tiny level 1 mudcrabs ♥♥♥♥♥ slapped me for an astonishing 103 damage at the start when I had a whopping 10 HP, but now he's level 78 with a swole 653 HP and... well, they still hurt — a lot. But I hurt them back harder. they don't one shot me anymore. Still a very, very, VERY long way from slaying an actual proper dragon, but baby steps.
Goes without saying, I've learned very quickly the importance of side stepping in particular ways to avoid taking unnecessary hits from certain attacks.


Anyway, if you don't mind mods and need suggestions on things to help balance builds a bit better or at least mods that open up more interesting options besides "sword magic bow", I can toss you a few suggestions. I'd at least start with armor value mods since the formula is genuinely ridiculous and makes no logical sense in terms of game balance.

[John]

It's not a lack of viability, more like a lack of knowledge. Literally anything is viable and overpowered in this game and can make legendary difficulty a joke, no matter the restrictions you have given yourself, you just need to know where to get items, spells and powers and how to use them properly.

On lower difficulties the only thing you need is just level up weapon skills and you should do more than enough damage and enemies barely do anything to begin with on those difficulties. If you play on higher difficulties, knowledge of the game is needed.

If i can beat the game on Legendary difficulty without leveling up a single skill tree, including Karstaag without cheese strats, than you not able to play anything besides "one build to rule them all...", which i'm guessing is the stealth bore playstyle, than it's not a viability issue, but a skill issue.

[Kyle]

Difficulty makes a big difference. Even so, once you have 100 weapon skill and 5/5 of the damage perk, you can roll over anything in the game. Bonus points for potions/enchantments that fortify one-handed, two-handed, archery, destruction, etc.

Illusion is similar. You need both the higher level versions of fury/calm (like frenzy/pacify) and the illusion perks. If you can dual cast them, that also makes the levels affected go up. Same thing as damage, with all pertinent illusion perks and dual casting the high level spells, you can do whatever you want to the battlefield and then just turn invisible.

Every build is weak at first on legendary and will rely on followers/summons, but rest assured that every build is also viable on legendary. Lydia guards Breezehome now, all the time. Some builds require more help from enchanting and alchemy than others. Some like One-Handed can honestly faceroll everything with just the 5/5 damage perks and the Dual Wield perks. Nothing else in the tree is needed.

All magic trees can become 100% free to cast from enchantments on armor or clothes. With DLC alchemy ingredients it becomes very easy, but it is still possible in vanilla to achieve 99% on two trees from only 3 gear pieces with 100 alchemy and enchanting. The tricky part is getting there without feeling like you are doing boring grinding or being too gamey.

Destruction does scale fairly poorly with difficulty changes, and is the most reliant on potions or other magic trees to give you the ability to blast things to death before they can get to you on legendary. Very magicka heavy and you will need to consider your second free tree carefully based on what you need. I usually use Destruction/Restoration on warriors for both free weapon enchantments, ranged potential, magic shield potential, and burst healing to the moons. A mage might want Destruction and Illusion or Alteration. Paralyze is powerful if it's free.

TL;DR is that everything works on legendary, with varying amounts of investment. You will always rely on your follower/summons up to the point where you exponentially surpass them.

[snugginz]

Originally posted by Sairek Ceareste:

Skyrim isn't a very balanced game. Stealth archer will dominate everything because bows do great damage, are ranged with no cost (I mean, arrows I guess, but gold becomes irrelevant), scales incrementally in multiple ways (unlike magic which is static), and gets a massive sneak multiplier (which magic also doesn't get). Then of course there's both alchemy, enchanting and smithing which archery benefits both from for even more damage in multiple ways.

There's also the armor formula: Where anything below about 350 armor does absolutely nothing. You'll rarely find NPCs with more than 350 some armor even wearing full ebony plate with a shield.


All of that said, Skyrim isn't very difficult. So who cares if the build isn't meta? Take it as a challenge or use mods the balance things so they're at least viable options.
Two-handed weapons suck ass in this game. Even swords are incredibly slow despite being the fasted two-handed weapon type, and their damage is subpar. That still hasn't stopped me from making a character with a two-handed sword who absolutely cannot use magic (his magicka stat is a whopping negative twelve), starting with all my skills at 0, and doing a "zero to hero" run on legendary mode with mods. Oh, and all regenerations values were set to 0.01 base (so I can't just regenerate 20% of my health/magicka/stamina a second by stacking fortify enchants).

Yes, even the tiny level 1 mudcrabs ♥♥♥♥♥ slapped me for an astonishing 103 damage at the start when I had a whopping 10 HP, but now he's level 78 with a swole 653 HP and... well, they still hurt — a lot. But I hurt them back harder. they don't one shot me anymore. Still a very, very, VERY long way from slaying an actual proper dragon, but baby steps.
Goes without saying, I've learned very quickly the importance of side stepping in particular ways to avoid taking unnecessary hits from certain attacks.


Anyway, if you don't mind mods and need suggestions on things to help balance builds a bit better or at least mods that open up more interesting options besides "sword magic bow", I can toss you a few suggestions. I'd at least start with armor value mods since the formula is genuinely ridiculous and makes no logical sense in terms of game balance.

Yeah I am thinking of mods. Just a bit disappointed at how as you say unbalanced the game is vanilla. I don't wan't to play thousands of hours to know every min max and exploit. I just want to play different builds and have them all sort of work more or less.

[snugginz]

Originally posted by John:

It's not a lack of viability, more like a lack of knowledge. Literally anything is viable and overpowered in this game and can make legendary difficulty a joke, no matter the restrictions you have given yourself, you just need to know where to get items, spells and powers and how to use them properly.

On lower difficulties the only thing you need is just level up weapon skills and you should do more than enough damage and enemies barely do anything to begin with on those difficulties. If you play on higher difficulties, knowledge of the game is needed.

If i can beat the game on Legendary difficulty without leveling up a single skill tree, including Karstaag without cheese strats, than you not able to play anything besides "one build to rule them all...", which i'm guessing is the stealth bore playstyle, than it's not a viability issue, but a skill issue.

Yeah I disagree.
I don't think that needing 1000 hours to pull it off makes the builds 'viable' that just means you beat the game and know every exploit.

For example the Destruction magic build I described above. Did nothing. Worthless. I even got the Atronach stone for 50 more magica, and poured fire in the mobs face until magica was all gone and he still had 75% of his health. If you can work with that fine. But it doesn't mean the build is viable.

[snugginz]

Originally posted by Kyle:

Difficulty makes a big difference. Even so, once you have 100 weapon skill and 5/5 of the damage perk, you can roll over anything in the game. Bonus points for potions/enchantments that fortify one-handed, two-handed, archery, destruction, etc.

Illusion is similar. You need both the higher level versions of fury/calm (like frenzy/pacify) and the illusion perks. If you can dual cast them, that also makes the levels affected go up. Same thing as damage, with all pertinent illusion perks and dual casting the high level spells, you can do whatever you want to the battlefield and then just turn invisible.

Every build is weak at first on legendary and will rely on followers/summons, but rest assured that every build is also viable on legendary. Lydia guards Breezehome now, all the time. Some builds require more help from enchanting and alchemy than others. Some like One-Handed can honestly faceroll everything with just the 5/5 damage perks and the Dual Wield perks. Nothing else in the tree is needed.

All magic trees can become 100% free to cast from enchantments on armor or clothes. With DLC alchemy ingredients it becomes very easy, but it is still possible in vanilla to achieve 99% on two trees from only 3 gear pieces with 100 alchemy and enchanting. The tricky part is getting there without feeling like you are doing boring grinding or being too gamey.

Destruction does scale fairly poorly with difficulty changes, and is the most reliant on potions or other magic trees to give you the ability to blast things to death before they can get to you on legendary. Very magicka heavy and you will need to consider your second free tree carefully based on what you need. I usually use Destruction/Restoration on warriors for both free weapon enchantments, ranged potential, magic shield potential, and burst healing to the moons. A mage might want Destruction and Illusion or Alteration. Paralyze is powerful if it's free.

TL;DR is that everything works on legendary, with varying amounts of investment. You will always rely on your follower/summons up to the point where you exponentially surpass them.

I'm playing on medium low. Adept I think. And still fire does nothing to the mobs in that quest I mentioned, nor to dragons. Dragons are totally immune to frost and lightning as well. But at level 5 I can kill the dragon with a bow or mace, just not magic.

A part of the problem with the builds you're describing is that they require you to spread your points out pretty thin across a lot of trees, which *eventually* gets somewhere, but is seriously underpowered for a long time. I got to where I wouldn't put any points in Alchemy, Smithing, or Enchanting, because if I did then my weapon and armor stats for the level would be too low and I'd have to click 20 times to kill one mob (and he'd have to hit me 3 times to kill me!)

Seems like you really have to min max *something* early game and then diversify later when those are maxed? I really wanted my mace/shield guy to be powerful because that's how I roll played it. But I had to stop playing it because my click finger literally got sore with how many swings I had to take.

[worm_master]

I disagree, entirely, I built a stealth poison/mage, on Legendery, from level 1, and Legendery is the most unbalanced game mode ever, btw i only have 100 HP an 100 stamina....

I dropped down to Master, at around level 30, because my powerful toxins, had very little effect on the NPC's and i was spending large amounts of creds and long periods of "waiting".

I am a destruction mage, with full stealth an Alc, I use Paralysis rune, from alteration, and unbounded storms from destruction, and pickpocket to drop poison in, 1 of my toxins, paralyses the NPC for 17 secs, whilst inflicting, lingering poison damage to boot, more then enough time to fry em with magic.

Alchamy is ssooo UNDERRATED!

i have no points in any other skill.

[Rez Elwin]

Are you sure you're on Adept OP? I play optimized builds on purpose for RP reasons and I don't have issues on Adept I typically play on Expert and I rarely die, and fights don't usually take that long.

I will grant you I have over 2700 hours across all platforms so I do know what I'm doing, but even then I didn't have the issues you seem to be having when I played the original back on release in 2011.

If I were you, I would lower the difficulty, nobody cares if you like to play on Novice difficulty, whatever is fun for you is the best way to play.

[alexander_dougherty]

When you start, you have rubbish armour and weapons, and low skills, and need to spend time focusing on weapon and armour use, otherwise you are weak.... once you get some better gear and the skills up, and the builds the OP is complaining about become viable....

Even magic is viable, but you need to carry a ton of potions, and focus solely on the magic...
Mods make magic more viable in my opinion.

But nearly every build is viable, one you invest in the basic skills first.

[Emerance]

I would look at some gameplay and NPC stat mods to balance things out.

I use simply balanced off Nexus mods and adjusted the values until I got things to be where I like them.

An enemy above my level will kill me in about 2 or 3 unblocked hits and I kill them in about 5 or 6.

This has felt like a fair enough difficulty for me so that I don't feel overpowered or too weak.

[snugginz]

Originally posted by worm_master:

I disagree, entirely, I built a stealth poison/mage, on Legendery, from level 1, and Legendery is the most unbalanced game mode ever, btw i only have 100 HP an 100 stamina....

I dropped down to Master, at around level 30, because my powerful toxins, had very little effect on the NPC's and i was spending large amounts of creds and long periods of "waiting".

I am a destruction mage, with full stealth an Alc, I use Paralysis rune, from alteration, and unbounded storms from destruction, and pickpocket to drop poison in, 1 of my toxins, paralyses the NPC for 17 secs, whilst inflicting, lingering poison damage to boot, more then enough time to fry em with magic.

Alchamy is ssooo UNDERRATED!

i have no points in any other skill.

Yeah I didn't mention I don't generally use potions in games. I try to avoid them at least. So I suspect most of these responses are from people leaning HEAVILY on Alchemy, because yeah, it does seem pretty OP.

Still wondering exactly how you 'fry them' with magic, when my magic is literally doing nothing. My magic build was by far the worst, simply because of no real damage done. And then Magica is gone and they are all still alive so it's like 'run!' but since you have to kite all the time so they don't two shot you, you have no stamina left to run with when the Magica is gone.

Potions again I guess ;-)

[snugginz]

Originally posted by alexander_dougherty:

When you start, you have rubbish armour and weapons, and low skills, and need to spend time focusing on weapon and armour use, otherwise you are weak.... once you get some better gear and the skills up, and the builds the OP is complaining about become viable....

Even magic is viable, but you need to carry a ton of potions, and focus solely on the magic...
Mods make magic more viable in my opinion.

But nearly every build is viable, one you invest in the basic skills first.

So yeah... a ton of potions. That explains it :)

[snugginz]

Originally posted by Emerance:

I would look at some gameplay and NPC stat mods to balance things out.

I use simply balanced off Nexus mods and adjusted the values until I got things to be where I like them.

An enemy above my level will kill me in about 2 or 3 unblocked hits and I kill them in about 5 or 6.

This has felt like a fair enough difficulty for me so that I don't feel overpowered or too weak.

Hmm OK I'll check it out. Does it also ramp up Destruction damage to make it viable?

[Sairek Ceareste]

I'll start with the more simple mods that add/balance things for more options, and sit the complicated ones at the bottom.



For Armor Rating, I use this one. I don't know if it's the best one, but it has different variants for multiple perk overhauls and it does its job of unbutchering the butchered scaling on Armor Rating system. Choose whatever option will work best for you at the end of the day: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/95507


"Simply Balanced" lets you adjust every single thing in the game pretty much. This is a blanket adjustment mod and should work with everything else in this list that you may decide you like: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/15541


Precision makes melee attacks more accurate (though configurable) for both you and the AI. It also enables "hitstop" to gives melee blows a heavier-feeling impact: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/72347


Mysticism for more spells, and fun ones too. Gives more utility to magic: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/27839

Apocalypse is the same. Even more spells to give more utility to magic: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/1090


Mundus overhauls for standing stones: Makes them a bit more balanced and the useless ones are now much more viable: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/33411


Adds more High Level Enemy variants for late game: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/93648


Adds more enchantments to the game, though admittedly, while some are quite fun and interesting, "absorb enemies <attribute> within <Y> meters from you" has been brokenly overpowered and I avoid using such enchants: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/6285


"Respawn" changes how you die. In that, you don't. Instead you pass out and will wake up elsewhere.
I believe this is better than dying and then being forced to load a save, as that encourages save scumming and punishes infrequent saving. Also prevents being caught in a death loop if you (or the game) saves at an inappropriate time.
You can decide in the mod what punishments you receive if you die. Do you drop literally everything, lose exp progress, lose a percentage variable percentage of your gold, or do you just wake up at a temple with bruised pride: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/27546



"Experience" changes leveling from no longer giving you exp from increasing your skills, but from exploring, completing quests, reading books and (optionally) killing. This encourages you to actually play the game instead of sitting in town smithing 20 bajillion iron daggers and potions. You can adjust the EXP rates as you wish.

Base mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/17751
This one lets you configure things via MCM instead of needing to open a text document: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/65880

This one marks some quests as side quests that were erroniously marked as not quests at all so you get XP from them: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/57706


In combination, "Leveling Freedom" was made with "Experience" mod in mind. It allows you to decide your exp leveling requirements and curves. Additionally, you can make it so your skills are capped to your maximum level, so you can't max smithing at level 100 at level 1. You can set a base amount that you start off with, and how much a level up increases the skill cap: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/69589


"Skill Uncapper" lets your skills go above the vanilla 100 without fortifications. This may not interest you though (I like it however with Leveling Freedom)
However it also has the option to modify the exp rate of which skills are learned and easily allows you to adjust how many perk points are gained on level up, allows you to configure how much health/magic/stamina/carry capacity is earned when you select a specific attribute to increase on level up. Most importantly though (in my opinion), it fixes enchantment scaling to not go insanely brokenly bonkers when enchantment goes above 100, making the benefits for the enchanting skill more linear and natural instead of exponential - kind of like fixing the armor rating system: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/82558


"Natural Character Growth and Decay" allows your attributes to increase naturally over time without level ups, as those attributes get lower, effectively the more health you lose, the more max health you will gradually gain over time. But if you keep losing health too often, you can over stress your character and take penalties, and not working on something can cause stats to lower (decay and stress are optional): https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/76455





Here's the two complicated ones down below.




For perk adjustments, I use "Vorkiinator Black", which basically infuses some of the more popular perk mods into a single package. This gives you a *lot* of options. Stealth archer? How about stealth mage? Or putting cursed coins into peoples' pockets with pick pocketing, or crafting devastating automated dwemer cannons with smithing. Also, magic levels will give proper scaling just like weapons instead of just reducing magicka cost.

It also just gives great quality of life options to some weapon types, like two-handed weapons. Greatswords get many perks which can increase their speed, both with conditions are met, but also just a permanent +30% with perks which makes them feel so much more nice to use.

Also as a bonus, it fixes the broken attack speed scaling. Skyrim has a bug (surprising, I know) where if multiple attack speed buffs are on top of each other, instead of a "1.10" increase (10%) and a "1.20" increase (20%) totaling a correct value of "1.30" (30% total), it would instead add the buffs up to "2.30" total (130% attack speed). This fixes that.

That said, installing all of the requirements to get it to run properly does take a bit of work, but if I could learn from scratch, then so can you. There's a bit too many for me to list here and this post will already be long enough, so just follow the requirements it asks for: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/26702




While more of a roleplay mod, "Spell Research" allows for a more natural and granular way to obtain spells as you can research spells to discover the elements, write thesis' and examine magical artifacts and brew solutions to study arcane energies, eventually researching to discover spells - as opposed to just immediately buying a master-level spell tome and gobbling it up like it is a Pacman pellet and instantly learning the spell. It makes you have to work to earn those high-level spells.

Normal version: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/20983

Mysticism variant: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/48515
And this one helps improve the Mysticism version with a few fixes and tweaks to vanilla spells for balance: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/48515

Apocalypse variant: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/28816

The variants allow those modded spells to be allowed to be discovered and researched like the vanilla spells.

This mod helps optimize the mysticism and apocalypse versions together (alone, the mod has a chance to crash or have a script break): https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/69103


I would highly suggest adding a mod that removes spell tomes from vendors and loot locations personally if you decide to use Spell Research, but that's up to you. This one works for me but doesn't remove custom tomes from "DLC" mods so you can still access the unique tomes/spells from those mods. It only targets vanilla spawns and vendors: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/22139

[vee-kay]

With a few mods for Skyrim, you can kill any enemy, using:
* just a shield (get mod to add spellbreaker ward effect to any blocking, get mod to buff wards so they are stronger and can defend against melee and repel projectiles, get a mod that unleashes a straggering destructive arc wave when sprint bashing or power attacking)
* just destruction (trick is not to waste time & perks on Restoration. Instead turn a follower into a healer (change their combat style to healer and teach them advanced healing spells), and just use a vampiric drain spell to leech health and magicka/stamina from enemies, and a modded ward spell that can defend against melee and repel projectiles)
* just sneaking (a modded elemental cloak spell that turns player character invisible and paralyzes and damages nearby enemies and explodes on melee impact; pairs well with a blink teleport mod)
* just jumping (jumping air dash explosion - see Magical Jumping mod)
* just household items like brooms, shovels, pitchforks, clothes irons, blacksmith's hammers, lutes, flutes, etc. (see the Handyman mod; there are other similar mods that turn vanilla static items into usable weapons).