Legendary "Tier List"

[Godwoken Dovahkiin]

So, is there any established tier list for legendary difficulty? As in the best spells, perks and whatnot.

IMO High elf, breton and orc are on the top tier for race. As for "classes" i guess sneak, illusion and an impact mage. Anyone care to enlighren me? I'm talking about things that make you run through the game smoothly from start to "finish". Or an easier method of dealing with high level enemies from the beginning, as in giants, falmer, etc. Or classes that can be independant and not rely on your follower to tank for you (doing an archer run and its extremely boring and uninteractive)

[gnewna]

If you want to be able to easily deal with giants and other high level enemies in early game, and reduce the 'challenge' (I don't actually think Legendary is harder so much as more tedious and illogical) of Legendary by having an optimised/OP character, why play on Legendary difficulty? Particularly if you're not interested in the part where you figure this stuff out for yourself (which I understand is the usual reason people enjoy playing on Legendary but optimising their character so they can survive and so on, because they enjoy the figuring out how to optimise their character aspect).

Anyway, as I understand it, the most OP skills in Legendary mode are crafting, Illusion (probably combined with Sneak) and Conjuration. Conjuration because essentially literally ALL Legendary 'difficulty' (and the other points on that slider) does is nerf the player character.

That is, on Adept difficulty, you do 100% of your base damage and you take 100% of the enemy's base damage (I may be fudging the exact mechanics, it might not be about base damage, but the key point is the 100%).

On Legendary difficulty, you do I think it's 25% of your base damage, and you take 300% (in other words, you do a quarter as much damage as you would on Adept, and you take 3x as much from every hit.)

Enemies do not become tougher. You become weaker.

The reason that both followers and summoned Daedra (and AFAIK the same is true for raising corpses) are relatively OP in Legendary is because they are not nerfed the same way as you are. Every single NPC, creature, etc in the game, whether an enemy or not, is still exactly the same strength as they were on Adept. The only thing that's changed is you. So if in Adept you + Lydia or you + a Flame Atronach took, say, two hits each on an enemy to kill it, on Legendary, you will need to hit the same enemy eight times in order to do as much damage as you would in two hits on Adept. Meanwhile, Lydia's still doing the same damage with her two hits, but obviously she's not going to stop hitting after two hits, so on the third hit (when you've already done one or one and a half hits' worth of damage with your two or three hits, depending on speed etc) she will kill it. (The same is true of summoned creatures.)

Illusion, depending what spells you use, is OP either in basically the same way (because you can turn enemies against each other, although obviously there's the usual issues with vanilla Illusion spells not scaling very well as you increase in levels) or by adding to your survivability by helping you to sneak better, and combining with stealth bonuses for successful sneak attacks. This will be especially powerful as you get good at sneaking, and if you use alchemy to make strong poisons and/or smithing to improve your weapons, you will basically be OP very quickly.

As for crafting, well, if you hit the armour cap and have a sword of unbelievable damage and/or high-end potions/poisons and enchantments, you'll essentially un-nerf yourself.

[gnewna]

(It's possible some of my maths is slightly off, but it's close enough for illustrative purposes.)

[gnewna]

Oh, and if by 'impact mage' you mean anything involving Destruction spells? No, because those already don't scale brilliantly, on Legendary you'll essentially be using a pea shooter with fancy effects.