Legendary Skills

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Well, this effectively removes the character level limit in Skyrim. The only limit now is determined solely by how much time you're willing to devote to a given character. This is due to the new legendary mechanic introduced with the latest (and most likely final) patch. Here's a breif summary of how it works:

When you get a skill to level 100, you now have the option of making it legendary. This does two things: 1) It resets the level of the skill back to 15, and 2) it allows you to re-assign the perks you spent on that skill into other skills.

There is a related mechanic in the Dragonborn expansion that allowed you to re-allocate perks, but this is significantly different. You see, with this version, you can reallocate your perks, but you keep your experience and level, allowing you to level up the skill again, and earn all the experience points again. A skill made legendary doesn't function any differently from the skill prior to making it legendary - all it does is allow you to level it again, and thus increase your character level. (Oh, and once you get to 100 again, you can make it legendary again - there is no limit to the number of times you can reset a skill.)

It seems like if you really want to level your character that this mechanic can be used and abused with the crafting skills. (Specifically alchemy if I were to guess, having not tried it out yet.) What I'm thinking would be your best bet would be to perk up alchemy, smithing, enchanting as per usual. Then mass produce the best fortify enchanting potions and fortify smithing potions as you can. Make like 50 of each. A life-time supply for use. Then, make it legendary and assign those 8 perks you spent elsewhere. You'll still gather ingredients and hit the alchemy table to level the skill, but you won't perk it up this time. You just lather-rinse-repeat until you get bored of crafting.

Now granted, with 251 perks in the game, it will take you a LONG time if you wanted to earn all of them. (Which is now theoretically possible - but it will require you to reach level 252 to do it.) Remember that required experience to level does not increase linearly. Every level requires more experience points to be earned than the level prior to it. You could take a skill all the way from 15 to 100 and not earn a single level of experience, if your character level is already in excess of 100. That's why I say it's theoretically possible, but almost assuredly not practical to level to 252. You'll probably need to spend several dozen hours at the alchemy bench alone to do it.

Oh, and there's one more mechanic introduced with this patch - legendary difficulty mode. This I HAVE tried out, because it doesn't require you to make a skill legendary to activate it. Holy crap. It's absolutely ridiculous. While it's still possible to one-shot kill stuff with a backstab, that's about it. Even regular bandits take several whacks with an extremely high damage weapon to take down. And you'll be taking significant damage even if you've reached the armor cap. Dragons are formibidable again. For shiggles, I tried to do the ebony warrior quest on legendary difficulty. Now I know there are tons of ways to cheese this guy, but he kicked my ass on legendary. His damage output was so high that I needed to go through about 40 full healing potions to take him down.

Anyway, if you want a more detailed description, click here.

 

Instead of seeing Legendary skills as a (yet another) level grind to ultimate boredom, how about its redeeming qualities in keeping some game mechanics, such as loot, at least semi-interesting? I poked a few tries into that thought here.

Too bad my next serious foray into Skyrim is pretty much pending a new computer.. sluggish gameplay together with frequent freezes in various outdoor locations kinda kills the fun. But it'll definitely be a character variant to tackle the Legendary difficulty.