Patch 1.9 - analysis

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At first I was really sceptical about the changes in patch 1.9, especially the thing about Legendary skills. What's the point of resetting skills only to be able to train them back up, leading into an infinitely long level grind of all things?

Upon further thought, it's a rather nice (partial) remedy on the rampant economy system imploding upon itself as soon as you've secured the means to train at every level... and buy half of Tamriel as a side effect. More specifically, hauling loot loses its purpose, crafting skills fall into serious disuse and gathering crafting materials yourself was never really encouraged either, as it was plain easier to just buy them.

By being able to reset your crafting skills, the incentive to haul literal metric tons of loot never really vanishes. Once you've reached 100 in all three crafting skills once, you're really set for the rest of the game in terms of gear, and should you anticipate career path changes down the road, just craft some spare sets for later use. As money is no longer an issue, loot - both found and storebought - rather becomes the means of literally leveling up your character. Sure, it might require a cartwheel's load of mats to grind a crafting skill from 15 to 100 in one go, but if your loot intake is better expressed in terms of truckloads, why not? On the other hand, resetting your primary dps skill just for the sake of leveling it up again.. Well, I guess that could be classified under "Challenges".

Legendary difficulty level, then? Well, Master difficulty really was an inadequate challenge once you started pushing the limits of the crafting system, together with some inevitable improvement on your (as in 'the real life you') gaming skills. In my humble opinion, opting out of crafting yourself to maintain some resemblance of play balance all the way to the lower difficulty settings is putting your self-discipline and game enjoyment on a collision course. Unless, of course, you're good at looking past the maths and go with your RP instincts. Kudos to you if you can, but at least I can't.