The Oblivion Thread vol. II

[yin26]

You sleep once, you level once. This is helpful to know for one thing because at each level you can pay up to 5 times to have a particular skill trained...and it's this training (albiet expensive and slow) that allows you to offset to some degree any weaknesses you see in yourself as you level up.

[bonscott]

RE: leveling

Right now I'm level 9. Blade is about 58, Heavy Armor is around 60. They've leveled a lot more lately because of all the fighting but so far I don't feel like I'm leveling too quickly.

Despite being a Redguard I'm trying to slowly level up my Intelligence a bit so I can cast more healing spells and that's working out pretty good but I'm not making it a priority so as to cripple my character.

[Solver]

Well, great stuff . Oblivion is indeed getting a lot of praise, and seems to deserve it, too. The only relative drawback is that it wants powerful machines, but oh well...

[Quillan]

Snoopy, it's not the Blade/Block/Armor skills I'm having problems holding back to keep from leveling too fast. It's the Alteration/Mysticism. As Ralph mentioned, leveling your combat skills doesn't hurt that much, because you've got the combat abilities to handle the tougher critters.

Destruction, as it turns out, is a rather slow-to-advance skill. I suppose it's because they expect you to use it a lot, just like Restoration. However, Alteration/Mysticism/Conjuration/Illusion go up FAST. I turned on the debug text and looked at the totals, and found that conjuration earns 6 advancement points PER CAST! When you need 60 points to make a level, all you have to do is cast Bound Dagger 10 times and presto! Illusion was 3 per cast. By comparison, I think restoration is a whopping 0.3 per casting, and it only counts if the spell really has an effect, so you either have to damage yourself for heals to count, or use Fortify Attribute spells as practice.

That has been my problem. I use so many Feather spell effects for hauling huge loot piles out of dungeons, and Detect Life spells for moving safely around in dungeons those tend to go up faster than I'd like.

Also, I used the bug with the skills "freezing" to immobilize my Blade skill for a while. I followed the main quest as far as Cloud Ruler Temple, then picked up the Blade armor/weapons from the armory, and walked outside to watch the two guys fighting. Once I got the improvement on those skills, suddenly I had lots of time before they'd ever improve again. Just for the record, that method of improving skills DOES count for leveling. I suddenly got 4 points and made a level from the 2 point increases in Blade and Block. It screwed up my Intelligence training as I hadn't worked up Alchemy and Conjuration for that level.

[snoopy369]

Hmm. Odd, because I can't seem to up alt/myst very quickly ... both are major skills for me, and alt barely hit 75 after I worked hard to up it; myst might be 50 now, at most. I guess I just use the skills less often than you do ... though I use Shield every battle several times, which seems a lot for me ...

Problem with blade/armor for me is that if they're major skills, then you get lower stat bonuses ... ie, I just got some pretty high stat bonuses for my last level because it'd been a long time between levels, and many minor skills were upped. If blade is your major skill, then strength is harder to get a +5 in, block/heavy armor same for endurance, because the easiest to up skill in that category isn't going up 10. You can use H2H or Blunt, of course, but that requires "practicing", which I prefer to do infrequently.

[Quillan]

In that, you are absolutely correct. I had to make a concerted effort to use Blunt almost exclusively for a while to train that up. In fact, I still don't usually get +5 strength modifiers on leveling up; I've enchanted most of my armor with strength or endurance fortification to make up for lacking natural attributes. I typically wear 16 points of strength bonus and 26 points of endurance bonus items.

[Spaced Cowboy]

Snoopy, my character has blade as a major, but blunt and hand-to-hand as a minor. I go to the guild and get 5 training on one or the other, and then use it instead of my blade on combat that I'm not worried about. On the downside, I'm only mid 40's on blade and I'm lv8.

Where I made my mistake was to take all three endurance traits (block, heavy armor, and armorer) as majors, where I should have taken something that I'd never level in (like lockpicking/security), since I have spells for those.

Since I sit around after a level up and cast armor and detect life spell until I get 5 levels in those, and the minors training in strength, I've been getting a lot of +5s, but not as many as I would think.

I should be easily able to max strength, intelligence, and willpower.

When you hit 100 in a category (say intelligence), do you still get the possible +5s or does that one grey out or something?

Does speed affect your blade or block skills?

[Harovan]

100 is the maximum on stats like strength or intelligence. I had on my steed assassin 100 on speed quick and could not advance it anymore. I'm not sure, but I think you can up it with magical items a bit over 100.

And speed does not affect blade (str) or block (con), but rather light armor, acrobatics and athletics (iirc).

[Silver14]

When I first started playing with block, I felt it was useless as it was too slow and didn't seem to come up when I needed it. The skill itself I think is somehow related to how quickly you can bring it up. When I made my Orc char I make Block one of the classes main attribute and raised it by letting enemies beat on me. He seemed to get the shield up quicker then my untrained characters but also I learned when to anticipate attacks from various creatures.

When you hit 100 in a stat it gets grayed out. You can increase the stat through magic spells and items however.

[snoopy369]

I don't think it affects you though. I have 100 int, and a spell that gives me +100 alchemy and +100 int. Increasing my int beyond that, as a test, didn't increase my potions at all ... didn't test it as net over regular (don't have alchemy boost w/o int), but certainly the additional 34 from a potion did absolutely nothing. Either INT doesn't affect potion strength or length, or going over 100 doesn't help (or at least over 200) ... and this worked in Morrowind, btw.

[Silver14]

I'd be interested if going over 100 on things like CON, STR, and AGI would effect your hit points and damage output for melee and bows.

Going over 100 on INT *should* increase your Magika points, does it?

[Imran Siddiqui]

if you have to run, you lost the battle anyway.

Not true... it's a good strategy for regrouping. It was very useful when fighting Umbra, for one .

I'm level 13... I'm a Knight class, so I have those skills as major (blade, block, blunt, speechcraft, and some other things). I've used a lot of destruction and restoration magic, but, unfortunetly, I've neglected intelligence rating and that kind of sucks after you've gotten into Arcane Academy and all these spells use up more magica than you've got as your maximum!

[Silver14]

Speaking of using up all your Magica. Lately I've been playing around with the Atronach sign. Personally I think it is the best sign for magic and non magic users alike for the 50% spell absorption rate.

I have found regenerating magica not to be a problem even if you don't use alchemy to create potions although that does help.

The main means of support are Welkynd stones which can be found in good number at every elven ruin. Temples will also restore your magica once a day and you can also find many power pools across the country side outside of elven ruins that will also max out your magica.

Once you leave the sewers straight ahead on the other side of the pond is an elven ruin with both a power pool outside and a good collection of Welkynd stones inside.

Solver, I know that you mentioned using a mage with the Atronach sign. How has that turned out?

The one sign I would never use is the Apprentice. 100% weakness to magic for 100 magic points is a hard price to pay, even for a Breton that has a 50% resistance to start with. For one you could chose the Mage sign for 50 points with no penalty, choosing The Apprentice for 50 more points and a 100% weakness seems absurd. Far better off with the Atronach and its additional protection for magic then The Apprentice.

[Harovan]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui

if you have to run, you lost the battle anyway.

Not true... it's a good strategy for regrouping. It was very useful when fighting Umbra, for one .

I didn't check it myself, but on the forums I read, that you don't need to run, but can easily kill her another way.

Spoiler:

There's an elevated ledge somewhere you can jump on from above. You're out of her reach, so she can't harm you with the Umbra sword, while you can snipe her to death.

My gripe with both approaches is, that they're just cheap AI exploits and somewhat ruin immersion.

[Traianvs]

I'm an imperial scout.
I'm not really raising my alchemy and armorer that much (those are 2 of my major skills), but blade and light armour are going nicely (around 60 at level 15). Also using (as minor skills)restoration for healing, and hand-to-hand a bit, but I'm not so strong for my level, so fights get rather tricky at times, especially with brutal and fast adversaries. I am a speeding monster too myself luckily so that evens things a bit. Finally speechcraft too, simply because I'm too cheap a bastard to bribe people in order to get what I want.

I haven't gone to Kvatch yet for the main quest because sidequests in the imperial city and chorrol, including the surrounding dungeons have kept me busy for a while. One thing that strikes me is - and I'm not sure if you people are experiencing the same thing - that finishing an opponent is always the hardest part. When they are near death I have to hit them at least 10-15 times full on the body (not blocked) to get them down. Secondly power attacks can be useful, but only when having a lot of health left. I mean, after a power attack with a blade for example my character is helpless for a short while, and my opponents usually take advantage of that and give me a good whacking while I can't even raise my shield to block! That way power attacks give a net negative result, so you're better of using regular attacks!


I enjoy playin the game, but to be honest I expected more immersion; roads for example are still devoid of travellers, merchants etc, except for imperial soldiers of course. Dungeons are also a bit dull apart from the fighting of course. Every dungeon is different (that's better than in Morrowind where every dungeon was a clone of one another), but there's never a story or special event, surprise or something similar in stock for an unsuspecting adventurer. Killing skeletons is cool, but I've done that a zillion times already you see

Also, the day/night cycle of the characters is great, but doesn't change much really. I have a gut feeling they could've worked that out better; more realistically I mean, less on routine and so on. For example someone opening his shop early in the morning with a hangover because he went to the feed bag the day before, complaining about his feeling. Or other people actually buying goods in shops so a merchants income can be good/bad so he has more money available to buy stuff etc..


PS: I caught vampirism, but I'm a good character... And the irony is I had just finished a quest with the objective of cleansing a vampire hide-out, and I'm supposed to get my reward from a bunch of people intending to exterminate vampires;... meanwhile I've become one myself

Now how on earth do I cure myself of this affliction
That still hasn't changed much from Morrowind: Lack of information... How am I supposed to find out the cure if I don't even know where to begin looking! I don't even know how to 'feed'. And what is assault really? It can't be theft (pick-pocketing) and it can't be attacking people, because if you attack a bystander you do kill him too right, no point whacking a guy and letting him run away/kill you instead