Dragons Should Scale More with Player Level Too

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One small little beef. Dragons don't really scale with difficulty. The only dragon you'll ever encounter in the game that won't be essentially the same as every other dragon you'll encounter is the first one you fight just outside of Whiterun. That one is the weakest kind of dragon, called simply "Dragon", and it has about half of the health that other dragons have in the game. It is also, as near as I can tell, the only time you'll encounter that regular type of dragon in the game. After that, most dragons are pretty darn similar.

After that, the next three dragon levels you encounter are blood (two types of breath weapons), frost (only frost breath attack), and elder (two types again), and all are pretty darn similar in the damage they do and their overall health. They all have between 1600 and 2100 health, and do between 150-225 points of damage with their melee attacks. You don't see a real bump in dragon toughness until you get to ancient dragons - they have over 3000 health and do 300 damage in the melee attacks. The thing is, I don't frequently see ancient dragons, and given that I'm level 56 currently, I'd think that if I were going to encounter them, I would by now. Almost all the dragons I fight are elder dragons.

The thing is that both their breath weapon and melee attack do about the same amount of damage. However, their melee attacks are much less dangerous as your armor rating will reduce the damage. A fully armor clad heavy fighter likely is at the 567 armor cap, and has 80% damage reduction to their melee attack. Even that big mean elder dragon can only do 60 points of damage to him, which chances are he can just shrug off. While there are also elemental resistances in the game, generally speaking you'll be harder pressed to get that all the way up 80%, making the breath attacks a lot harder to deal with.

Which leads me to my next beef with dragons in that they didn't really do enough to make them dangerous once you get them on the ground. In the air they are agile, difficult to hit, and when they do that strafing fly-by breath weapon attack, you basically just have to take it. Once you get them on the ground they are slow, lumbering, and so long as you stay away from the mouth if you have under 200 health so you don't get one-shot, are pretty damn easy to deal with. Sure, if you're playing a mage with 150 health, it almost doesn't matter whether they are flying or not - you don't want to close into melee range regardless. But because they seem to prefer their melee attack over their breath weapon at close range, they're not nearly as tough provided you're going in with a decent amount of armor and health.

Just last night, my archer-rogue got a dragon on the ground. He crash landed when he reached 50% health. I switched from my bow to my melee swords, and killed it with ONE dual sword power attack. (By one I mean one power attack series. The first blow didn't kill it - it took all three.)

All I'm saying is that unlike other places where the creatures are level dependent, Bethesda didn't do nearly enough with the dragons to up the difficulty for players level 30+.

It's different from say, spawns in dungeons, where if you're level 15, you'll get a pair of restless draugr, but if you're level 40, you'll get a pair of draugr overlords, both capable of using unrelenting force shouts. Fighting a pair of them is a challenge for even a very experienced warrior. Getting flung across the room and pelted with arrows will take away most of you health bar in a matter of seconds. And two upper-level melee undead shouldn't be tougher than a dragon fight - but they are.

 

Yet another common gripe with the game, addressed by correspondingly many mods keen on fixing this very issue.

Although there's only so much you can do with the bite/breath routine for an overgrown lizard seemingly rooted to the ground, no matter how you tweak the numbers. Considering how agile they are in the air, I'd expect much more intimidating close-range acrobatics to crush their opponents.

 

On the other hand dragons are extremely challenging for inexperienced players or lowbie characters. The first dragons I slew in Skyrim gave me epic fights then you learn how they work and when you have maxed your combat skills there really isn't anything in the game that is challenging. Except possibly as you stated several Draugr Overlords tossing you around with shouts.

 

Another thing that I find odd, is games like this favor specialization. Placing a LOT of your perks in whatever skills you like the most, and only dabbling in others. However, the leveling system does not really lend itself to that. If you want to advance much beyond level 50, you are forced to start using skills you may not have much interest in. The idea of a pure character class really isn't practical.

I'll use the pure warrior as an example, but the same can apply to a pure mage. (There really is no such thing as a pure thief, as there are no damage causing skills for the thief class, which as it turns out, is actually an advantage. A thief necessarily must either use weapons or spells to kill stuff, and thus will have a more diverse high level skill list.)

Say you're a pure warrior. You use either one or two handed weapons, heavy armor, maybe some archery. You also like the crafting skills so you go for them too, and you'll probably have some mid-range thief skills too, like lockpicking and speech that everyone will get something in. That will get you to about level 50-55. After that, you MUST diversify if you want your character to continue to improve. The problem of course is that the new skills you'll be using will be against some now very leveled monsters. It seems very difficult (not to mention some willful suspension of disbelief) for a warrior to start using mage skills just to level them, only to then put the perks into his warrior skills, as they are far more effective than the mage skills. Likewise it seems silly for a pure mage to all of the sudden starting using a weapon, but you're pretty stuck otherwise.

The work around for this is the Gimpus character I came up with. It makes the most sense if you really want to keep getting better to start working on a lot of skills all at once - from the beginning of the game - and level all of them gradually. This DOES make the game harder in the beginning, as leveling a whole bunch of skills early racks up the levels and the difficulty of enemies, but allows you to A) have a more diverse set of skills to chose from as the game progresses, and B) allows ultimately for a higher level advancement. The basic idea is use whatever skills you like the most and work on leveling them yourself, but train as much as possible skills that you want to use later in the game.

This game mechanic didn't have to be implemented this way. The most obvious means of fixing it is by taking the cap of 100 off of skills. Maybe not ALL skills, but allowing the player to be able to select a skill or two that you could take beyond 100, so you can still use your most effective means of engaging in combat, and still get something out of it.

It would have to be a limited list though. The crafting skills wouldn't work, for example, as people would just travel from blacksmith to blacksmith, endlessly leveling smithing because they have 1 million gold to spend. But it does appear that they have to change something especially with a planned expansion to be released this summer. You already have people who have developed characters, so if they are already essentially "done". So they are going to want to see some additional improvement as they play through the expansion.

And I really have to wonder who the players are out there who got a character to level 81. I'm a powergamer as much as anyone, but even I would not have the patience to get EVERYTHING up to level 100. It would just seem to be such a PITA, unless you really exploit the game as much as possible. Like leveling restoration. Other than equipping some type of healing spell and letting something repeatedly hit you as you heal the damage, I don't see how you'd do it. And that's a little too cheesy even for a powergamer like myself.

So I guess we need a better means of leveling opponents (especially dragons), and a means of getting to higher levels - even if a level cap still remains in place - without using skills you don't like. (In other words, I don't have a problem with having a level 80 - or whatever - cap. It's that I have to use mage skills to get my warrior to level 80, or warrior skills to get me mage to level 80. It makes no sense at all from a story or roleplaying perspective.)

 

I guess the explanation here is that you ARE at "maximum" level already at clvl 50 (give or take a few). None of the followers level past that, there are extremely few monsters even nearly that high in level, top quality leveled loot is in the 40-50 range and so forth. The character level scale only goes to 80+ so that you can, actually, play a F/M/T wannabe without any of your skills becoming godlike in the process.

I guess the question thus becomes: Why is the overall level even used for much of anything? Sure, it's a rather straightforward way of telling how advanced character we're talking about. But when using, say, your warrior abilities, it doesn't matter whether your magic or thievery skills sit at around 20 or 80, except maybe indirectly via buff spells and crafting. And most of the indirect effects are softened by the dynamic balance pitting you against tougher monsters anyway.

The only wrench in the clockworks with this train of thought is that your available hp, magicka and stamina points depend on your overall level so the F/M/T archetype ends up with most points to play with. But since such a character can actually claim to have a reasonable use for all three of them, isn't that kinda balanced as well?

 

That is largely true. You'll start seeing ebony items drop around level 40. daedric items are more rare, but can be found when you reach the high 40s, and dragon armor starts showing up around level 55. There's nothing past that. There's nothing a level 80 character can find that a level 55 character could not.

I guess my beef is that when a game imposes a level cap system, it is not unreasonable to expect people who get good at the game to want to approach the level cap. The Diablo series was famous for this. While it was unrealistic to expect to reach the level cap for most characters, you could reasonably expect to get to level 90 out of a possible 100. What I'm trying to do is make a character that could advance similarly in Skyrim. I know level 81 is unattainable unless I want to stop having fun playing the game and make it work for myself, so I'm shooting for something like level 70.

And there does seem to be one game mechanic that works in my favor in accomplishing this. With an ever-increasing amount of skill experience required to reach the next character level, it's a non-linear advancement in terms of number of skill levels compared to character level.

For example, my first fighter got to about level 50. For ease of math, lets say he reached 60% of the level cap. But he didn't come anywhere near earning 60% of all of the potential skill levels in the game. There's no way he even earned close to half the skill points that were available. The only skills he maxed were smithing and heavy armor. He had a high level in block, one handed, and archery. He didn't work on the other two crafting skills at all, so the 6 mage skills were essentially at base level (with the exception of a few skill books found along the way). He was moderately leveled in lockpicking and speech, just because some advancement in those skills is unavoidable, and that's it.

So he had 5 skills that were high level, 2 skills that were moderately leveled, and 11 skills that were virtually untouched save for skill books. So earning about 30% of the skill points possible, resulted in attaining 60% of the possible levels. Obviously, as you continue on, the gap between percent of skill points earned and maximum possible level narrows. (Although it never fully closes. Getting 100 in all skills results in a character that is exactly level 81.5 You actually get half way to the next experience level of 82 with all skills maxed. That means it's possible to reach the level cap of 81 without maxing all skills. You can probably get there with around 95% of all possible skill levels.)

But to get back to my goal of 70. That's approximately 85% of the maximum character level, but it definitely requires less than 85% of all possible skill levels. It won't still be the 30% gap that we saw earlier - it's probably something between 65% and 75% of all possible skill levels. So how do I get there? Well, just like my first character, I'll get 5 out of the 6 warrior skills to a very high level - everything except two handed. With the mage skills, I should be able to get 4 of them to high level, with alteration and restoration being the two that probably will be doomed to remain under level 40. With thief skills, pickpocket and alchemy will definitely be maxed, and since I'm doing the Thieves' Guild and Dark Brotherhood missions, I can reasonably expect both lockpicking and sneak to get fairly high, and with the added buying and selling of stuff, speech should work it's way up to a higher level too. So I'm looking at 11 maxed skills with another 3 that will be pretty developed. That may be enough to get to level 70.

Not really - at least not with the character I have planned out. The only reason you ever have to devote much to magicka is if you want to play a pure mage, and use spells from all schools of magic. Gimpus needs just enough magicka to be able to reasonably use the spells I need that I won't have 100% magicka reduction for. Obviously, as you level the skill, magicka cost drops, but you still have to account for what it will cost early in the game so you can actually use them in order to get them to a higher level. So you look at each school of magic and which spells you are going to want to use, and base your magicka goal on the maximum amount you'll need to cast them. So for Gimpus, we need:

Alteration - Transmute - starting magicka cost ~80. So base magicka is good enough for alteration.
Illusion - Muffle - starting magicka cost ~125. So we need 3 levels devoted to magicka to use this.
Restoration - even the top healing spell, Grand Healing - which I probably won't ever be able to purchase - only has a magicka cost of 120. All the other healing spells are under 100 and can be cost for base magicka.

So Gimpus currently has a magicka pool of 130, and I doubt it will ever go higher than that. With transmute I just need patience for magicka to regenerate. With Muffle the spell's duration is such that my magicka will completely replenish before the spell runs out. With the healing spells, I just have to hope my magicka will replenish before I need to use them again - but that's what potions are for.

 

True about magicka - you don't really ever need much past the base amount since you can use enchants to nullify the need for it for the schools you use the most. It's only Invisibility (334 base mana), Waterbreathing (222 base) and to some extent Paralyze (450 base) that qualify as universally useful, require quite a bit of mana to cast AND are of the magic schools that lack spells you'd expect to spam constantly.

You're kinda hinting at it already so why not spell it out: both the overall level and skill levels are polynomial growth functions, so it's only natural that your overall level will get a considerably larger boost from the first skill that reaches 100 compared to any subsequent ones. The functions are known so it's just a matter of doing the maths.

Upping any skill all the way from 15 to 100 gives 4930 character xp, which translates into character level 16 already, assuming no other skill is improved at all. The next 15 -> 100 skill adds yet another 4930 cxp, putting you in clvl 25, almost 26. It quickly tapers off from there on, every subsequent maxed skill adding less and less to your overall level.

I guess that's a good thing as you can skip quite a few skills altogether and still expect to reach at least level 70, instead of losing a lot by missing even one.

 

Add in the fact that all of those effects can be duplicated by potions. And in the case of Paralyze, you can get it as an enchantment on a weapon. (For my fighter types I almost always place soul trap and paralyze on my primary weapon. I only need to set each for 1 second, because the killing blow will activate the soul trap, and 1 second paralysis is more than adequate time to get another swing off, thereby paralyzing the target again.)

I probably haven't had the need to solve a polynomial equation since college. Thanks for bringing back the memories.

Which explains why for the first 20 or so levels, you're basically leveling limitlessly if you are stealing your gold back. The experience you're gaining for the higher skill level increases for pickpocket are powering you through.

That's my thinking. Plus there's the built-in margin for error on that last half level that serves no function whatsoever. While I do not feel at all inclined to do the math, I imagine you need quite a bit of cxp to go from level 81 to 81.5. Certainly at least one fully maxed skill. I'm thinking somewhere around 12, or at the very most 13 skills at level 90+ should get me to 70. Or, as is the plan with this character 11 skills at 90+ and another 4 or 5 at 60+. (It occurred to me that I will get something in light armor, because I'm wearing a mixture of heavy and light armor. While I seem to gain more skill increases to heavy armor when I get hit, I do get a light armor increase every once in a while, so it will be higher than base.)

I already know that I'll get pickpocket and the three crafting skills to 100. But some of those other skills probably will not get to 100. Having already played a pure fighter who used exclusively one-handed weapons, it ain't easy getting one handed to 100. I'm also disinclined to use training to power my way up to 90, simply because the last perk I intend to spend on that tree is available at skill level 80, which is not nearly as high a benchmark to reach.

OTOH, the only skills that would merit leveling via training after I'm done with destruction and conjuration (around level 45-50) would be one handed and block. There's no real point in doing heavy armor, as you'll reach the armor cap easily with no perks and an average level of skill. The three crafts will take care of themselves. So unless I want to do something like train lockpicking, there's not a heck of a lot else to work on. If I actually reach the goal of 70, I'll have a full 100 points of skill training available after finishing off the mage skills.