Skyrim Skill usefulness

Inspired by comments in another thread about the usefulness of some skills, I thought I'd start a new one to share thoughts, strategies, and neat tricks about skills in general.

The skills in question were Lockpicking and Pickpocketing, which seem to be a bit lacking. Pickpocketing almost seems to have been split apart from Sneak to bump up the Thief skills to the required number. Neither are ones I use very much, except when I have to, and I have yet to take a perk in either one. I think the thing about these two in particular is that they have a very narrow focus. Everything else is either combat related or offers wider use (crafting/magic). I think Speech fits into this category as well, since they've done away with Disposition and the ability to use it whenever you want, but at least it absorbs some of Barter. There doesn't seem to be much reason to waste perks on these skills, and the inclusion of odd, but attractive, perks like Extra Pockets and Treasure Hunter suggests the designers were struggling with reasons to focus on them, too.

Maybe these skills get a bit more worthwhile if you really focus on them, or if you find the lockpicking minigame frustrating. Anyone finding them more useful than they appear?

Illusion's another one that looks a bit worse off to me, with spells that are extremely level dependent and generally only useful to a certain playstyle. Invisibility requires a lot of work to get, and most of the lesser spells seem to be a bit specific to a sneaking type in certain situations than anything else. Worth investing the time, or only useful for special occasions?

Any other comments about skills you love, hate, or otherwise want to talk about?

I believe you could play the game as many different characters. I wouldn't want to play Skyrim as a pickpocket or an illusionist. It'd be duller than dull. Of course, playing the game as an enchanter only or smith only would be dull also. What use is smithing, alchemy, and enchanting, if it's not tied to combat and exploration? That's the problem with pickpocketing and illusion, in my opinion. There really isn't enough usefullness in either skill in combat/dungeon exploration. Can you use invisibility? Yes, but sneaking is effective and free of magicka cost. Also, a good alchemist can make invisibilty potions and you can spam drinking them to be invisible forever. The ingredients aren't all that rare this time either.

Alchemy is the single most useful skill, at least for me. I use it to slow, poison, and drain my enemies. I weaken my enemies to the method I'm using to fight them. I use it to heal, fortify, and buff myself and my followers and I use it to carry off extra loot at the end of the day.

Enchanting is also good, for many of the same reasons as alchemy. Smithing is less useful, but still nice. I use enchanting and smithing to pay for my alchemy ingredients. I also use the stagecoach to travel to the various cities and harvest all the nearby ingredients.

Menigal said:

Illusion's another one that looks a bit worse off to me, with spells that are extremely level dependent and generally only useful to a certain playstyle. Invisibility requires a lot of work to get, and most of the lesser spells seem to be a bit specific to a sneaking type in certain situations than anything else. Worth investing the time, or only useful for special occasions?

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If you are a sneaky character they would be useful. In fact, if I do a thief character I will just do illusion magic.

But they are no worse in general than the two handed skill or any other skill. If you never use a two handed weapon then the skill is useless.

I'd say the Pick Pocket tree is much better than the Lock Picking tree, as the first PP choice is actually quite useful, +20% chance to PP, yes please, bonus to picking novice locks?! Why would I need a bonus to pick the easy locks...

Daniel.

Yeah, the lock ones are silly. They could go back to "you can't pick the lock unless you have X skill" or with the new system "perk X".

BillSeurer said:

If you are a sneaky character they would be useful. In fact, if I do a thief character I will just do illusion magic.

But they are no worse in general than the two handed skill or any other skill. If you never use a two handed weapon then the skill is useless.

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I plan on trying Illusion and other sneaksy skills out with my next character, so we'll see.

On a different note, I'm finding Enchanting to be a really useful, if dull, skill. It's gone from an interesting thing to play with, but not rely on, to a must-have super skill. I just wish you could do more quirky things with it.

My sneaky, dragonscale wearing, dagger wielding destruction expert level 35 Dark Elf *stops for breath* really only has his eye on 1 thing from lockpicking/pickpocketing trees and thats extra carry weight for I think 50 pickpocket required.

Its kinda like the 25% mana regen from a couple of points and 30 resto magic. Seems worth it for anyone.

Its pretty forgiving with messing up the thief stuff. I got into the theives guild by failing my pickpocket, power attacking the guy who wouldnt actually die then running backwards throwing dual cast fireballs killing about 10 guards before hiding in the sewers. The contact says "well, at least you didnt do anything stupid. I have a feeling about you! youre in!", or something. xD

I think that Pickpocketing, Lockpicking and Speech suck pretty much universally and aren´t really useful for any kind of character.

Lockpicking because one can open everything without a point in it and there´s nothing unique in containers with difficult locks anyway. Who the fuck needs a wax key?
Pickpocketing and Speech simply because of lack of in-game support - benefits are very minor.

Pickpocketing doesn´t net anything interesting and on a few occasions it´s pretty much required (I remember two), a potion boost is enough.
While Thieves Guild is the best guild in the game by far, its quest design is still half-assed thievery-wise. There are some missions which can be completed sneaky-style, pickpocketing keys and all, but there are no unique benefits for that since quest givers don´t care.

Similarly, it would be cool if high Speech skill with perks would open additional quest solutions in some major situations like Paarthurnax quest, Markarth conflict, that Companions´ "tipping point" or even Stormcloaks/Imperials, but since Bethesda obviously wanted to make the game first and foremost a good hiking simulator, such options aren´t present and that makes speech a waste of points. The only benefit it offers is a bit of convenience in regards to economy and even that may be questionable because those perks would likely be more beneficial spent elsewhere.


I haven´t played with magic extensively, but some of the schools seem very lacking to me.
Restoration seems like a waste to me beyond few low tier perks/spells. It´s too undead related, the best healing spell is the one everyone starts with and heal other spells are pretty much useless since followers can die only in specific conditions (mostly caused by a player).
Alteration seems only useful for players who for some reason refuse to wear armor and utilize enchanting, but the game really doesn´t have much support for that, especially when it comes to enchanting.
Damage of Destruction spells doesn´t scale. Nuff said. Enjoy the stagger tedium.
Lack of spellmaker sucks for all the magic, but it´s particularly obvious in regards to the above school.
Also, lack of utility spells.
Besides presentation, magic in Skyrim is in general a step down compared to Morrowind´s iteration, in my book.
Btw, I really like that Bethesda included special quests to obtain the master spells.


Other skills I think can benefit one playstyle or the other at least somewhat sufficiently.

I´d say that magic schools which allow to deal with combat "indirectly", Illusion and Conjuration, are the most useful ones.
They scale rather well, Illusion fits with the nightblade archetype for example, Conjurations is useful for pretty much any type of character.

When it comes to weapon abilities, personally I would prefer more "gamechanger" perks. As it is, perks that increase damage incrementaly (20%,40%) are pretty much a must, while there isn´t really all that many perks which change how one plays significantly.


Crafting is a dead horse case.
Smithing makes other types of loot progression quite redundant (too much emphasis on +armor and +damage instead of more varied effects), it is way too easy to level up (iron daggers and alike should cease to add skill gains at some treshold, vendors should not offer higher tier materials) and since there´s no weapon/armor degradation system grinding it is the only way to go.
Enchanting is better since it to some degree encourages exploration (though even that can be likely bypassed by vendor abuse), but it eventually breaks loot progression even more than Smithing. Toning down some of the enchants, but making them applicable to items already enchanted might help here.
Smithing and Enchanting together are lol, of course.
Alchemy, I think, is alright. Exploration + experimentation = a good recipe.

In general, I would prefer Smithing and Enchanting to be more strictly tied to exploration and more beneficial when applied to items found, not the crafted ones.
Also, the skill boosts weren´t well thought out I think. I would prefer these to scale down based on character´s skill - as in, blacksmith´s elixir would add 30 points to smithing at 20 skill points, but only 15 at 50 and zero at 80, etc.

I´m pretty sure I´m not entirely correct in all of the above and maybe I´m exaggerating a bit, so, uh, I reserve the right to do so .


As a side note, one definite improvement over previous TES games is that generally skill gains differ based on a difficulty of performed action. That was a huge flaw in Morrowind and Oblivion, so I´m glad Bethesda finally addressed it, even though it doesn´t always work optimally.

Also, I think the addition of shouts was a success. Most of them are at least situationally useful, allow for some synergies with character builds and as such work well as rewards for exploration and questing.

While I´m at at it, I don´t think loosing primary attributes was an unambiguously good move.
Attribute multipliers thing in previous TES games was stupid and Skyrim character development is definitely better/smoother thanks to loss of these, but I think a "best of both worlds" solution would be superior here.
As it is now, player can add +5 to health, stamina or mana upon each level up and I don´t see why something similar wouldn´t be possible for a strength-endurance-agility-personality-intelligence-willpower system.
It could work either with one or more batches of set amount of points which could be allocated in these and granular distribution would work too (say, 10 freely distributable attribute points per level up). Additionally, this could be scaled for higher values, like , for example, increasing an attribute would cost 1 attribute point up to 50, 2 points up to 75 and 3 points up to 100.
Among other things, such a system would supply all the incremental perks (20%/40%, novice/adept) which are pretty boring, if you ask me.
It would also allow for a more granular disposition system, as well as a global one, plus it could even open the game to become more fully fledged RPG-wise (attribute checks, for example).
Of course, this is totally moot, since the game wasn´t built with such system in mind, but, well, just wanted to mention that for me the new system certainly wasn´t an all around win .


At this point I would also like to add, that despite me often criticizing Skyrim one way or the other, overall I really enjoy(ed) playing it.

The game sometimes pokes fun at itself in this regard: There is a court magician who can't cast a spell and wants a staff to at least "look" magelike. There is a mage at the college, who is really a thief. There's a bandit that really only steals books to read, etc. My favorite "monster" is a vampire with an absolute shoe/boot fetish; all other loot is just lumped all together but each pair of shoes/boots has its own special slot on a shelf and his favorite pair are by his bed.

The only skill I think is utterly useless in this game is speech. First because you get plenty of cash anyway and second there is an item in the game that makes almost all persuasions successful.

crpgnut said:

My favorite "monster" is a vampire with an absolute shoe/boot fetish; all other loot is just lumped all together but each pair of shoes/boots has its own special slot on a shelf and his favorite pair are by his bed.

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I ran into that last night. I peeked into a closet and my first thought was "Is this the vampire that was Imelda Marcos?"

You guys are so wrong about illusion and sneak being the most boring skills. For me they are the most interesting and challenging. What's more fun than setting your enemies against each other why you watch the hilarious AI from the sidelines, and then sneak in with a backstab for the final kill without a scratch? And if you screw up you could be dead in an instant without using illusion spells to give you breathing room. I like that kind of challenge, though, it takes a lot longer to clear dungeons this way. Many of the sneak/illusion perks are useful too for this style of play. Boring to me is a straight ahead shooter, or brawler, or crafter.

Think of it this way. The guide says something alone the line - "every encounter is like a new puzzle to solve" with this style character. One approach is not always the right one, also if you throw in archery.

BillSeurer said:

I ran into that last night. I peeked into a closet and my first thought was "Is this the vampire that was Imelda Marcos?"

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I saw that too. Was their dialogue or books/notes to support the shoe fetish?

Thrasher said:

I saw that too. Was their dialogue or books/notes to support the shoe fetish?

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I don't think so. It was just set up via item placement.

So you've been playing the Illusiony type, eh? Is it just the painstaking setup of finding the perfect hiding spot and hoping all of the suddenly hostile baddies don't somehow all target you and ignore each other that it was in Oblivion, or does it work a bit better now? I don't mind working a bit harder for that sort of thing, but only if it's not more a case of luck than skill.

As for Destruction, I'm nearing level 30 and haven't really had problems with it not scaling yet, which I fully expected to happen. I don't even have to fall back on dual-cast staggering that often, and combined with shouts I can usually get whatever sort of edge I need in a fight. It does annoy me that you seem to need to boost your Destruction cost reduction so much to stay viable with higher level spells, though. We'll see how things go as I keep gaining levels.

I really hope we get some sort of spellmaker, via mod or DLC sometime soon.

Menigal said:

So you've been playing the Illusiony type, eh? Is it just the painstaking setup of finding the perfect hiding spot and hoping all of the suddenly hostile baddies don't somehow all target you and ignore each other that it was in Oblivion, or does it work a bit better now? I don't mind working a bit harder for that sort of thing, but only if it's not more a case of luck than skill.

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With high enough sneak skill and the muffle spell (illusion) you aren't detected in a suitably dark spot. With a backstab and double daggers (not maxed mind oyu) I can take out most enemies in one attack. It's much more satisfying than the clumsy melee combat. But the nice thing is that if you are detected, you have spells to pacify, fear, or turn invisible and try again. Reload not required. Also running away and retrying is almost always an option. But if you're into speedruns and overpowered builds, this style is not for you.