The Oblivion Thread vol. II

[Spaced Cowboy]

Well I was wondering where the modifiers came from.

Would a good power leveling strat be staying one or two levels behind your actual level (without too much tracking). For instance only level up to 3 when you have the exp for 4 or 5. You would have a tendency to get more 5's this way.

[Solver]

You can't get anything else than a +1 for Luck. Or at least couldn't in Morrowind.

[Silver14]

Since no skills are tied to luck, you can only get a +1 for luck for each level. Although if you chose the 'Theif' sign and make luck one of your classes two main attributes you can start the game with a 65 luck.

[Dis]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
Bullseye! Bow to my leet Archery skills!

why would you ruin a baeatiful body such as that? How can you have sex with the dead corpse like that?

[DaviddesJ]

Sacred is another go-everywhere game that had level scaling. That game brought out some problems with the concept.

One is, if they get the scaling wrong, it's harder for the player to control the difficulty. E.g., if it's consistently just giving you enemies that are very easy for you to beat, you don't have the option to go someplace harder. Of course, this is something that can be controlled by the difficulty slider, if it exists.

Another issue is that there can be a sameness if the scaling is just exactly the same enemies at different "levels". E.g., in Sacred you might fight a level-6 goblin shaman, or a level-16 goblin shaman, or a level-26 goblin shaman, just depending on how strong you are. This makes the game feel more monotonous than if you get truly different types of enemies.

Another issue is that, if some elements are scaled and others are non-scaled, they can get out of whack. E.g., in Sacred you might fight your way through a bunch of high-level wandering monsters, and then the quest monsters at the end would be ridiculously weak. (This happens if you take a quest when you are low level, but don't get around to completing it until a much higher level.)

I think that scaling is fundamentally an ok concept, but it can be hard to get a lot of the details right.

[Solver]

Agreed, but Oblivion forunately has none of these problems. It has a difficulty slider, every creature stays its level, a skeleton is level 2 (I think) no matter what, and just about everything scales. You certainly won't get a dungeon with hard enemies and an easy boss.

[Quillan]

Busta, I've heard of an occasional bug where a skill will get stuck, for lack of a better term. I can't say about any of the others who've had it, but I had it happen once, with Mercantile. The still was stuck at bare minimum for the level I'd made a while back and would not move. I eventually spent money on training it up a rank and it started advancing correctly at that point. If your H2H is 32, it would cost you 310 gold to train one point in it. Save the game and give it a try, then see if it will increase correctly.

Solver, there are different level skeletons, but they have different names. What was the low one, decrepit skeleton? There are normal skeletons above that, skeleton guardians, skeleton heroes and skeleton champions are the highest level ones. The champions suck. They are spellcasters, and like to summon stuff to fight with them. However, usually the daedra types only have 2 variants, so you won't see any super scamps later on. In fact, I just saw my first Daedroth, at level 21. They are much beefier in appearance than they were in Morrowind.

[Solver]

Solver, there are different level skeletons, but they have different names. What was the low one, decrepit skeleton? There are normal skeletons above that, skeleton guardians, skeleton heroes and skeleton champions are the highest level ones. The champions suck. They are spellcasters, and like to summon stuff to fight with them. However, usually the daedra types only have 2 variants, so you won't see any super scamps later on. In fact, I just saw my first Daedroth, at level 21. They are much beefier in appearance than they were in Morrowind.

Yep, but they do have different names, weapons/abilities and sometimes looks, so I don't really count them as the same monster.

[Silver14]

Originally posted by Spaced Cowboy
Well I was wondering where the modifiers came from.

Would a good power leveling strat be staying one or two levels behind your actual level (without too much tracking). For instance only level up to 3 when you have the exp for 4 or 5. You would have a tendency to get more 5's this way.

No it wouldn't work. The moment you level up all skill increases account to the next level and not the previous, major and minor skills. So when you level up to 2 if you have a +4 STR, +3 INT, +2 WIS and so forh it doesn't matter if you decide not to level those stats won't change and everything you do will affect stats for leveling up to 3 until you have enough to level to 4 then all skills that level account for stats for level 4 and so forth.

The only way to get more 5's is to avoid getting 10 skill points in your primaries and beef up your lesser skills. I've found that watching skills for a couple levels just to get more 5's is rather tedius and boring. Its best just to play what you want how you want and let the stats come more naturally.

[BustaMike]

I think I know what broke my skill. There are certain points in the game where you can watch people fighting. I watched the 2 guys outside the arena for a 5 pt bonus. After that my skill broke.

I'll try the training thing. Hopefully that will fix it.

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by Silver14


No it wouldn't work. The moment you level up all skill increases account to the next level and not the previous, major and minor skills. So when you level up to 2 if you have a +4 STR, +3 INT, +2 WIS and so forh it doesn't matter if you decide not to level those stats won't change and everything you do will affect stats for leveling up to 3 until you have enough to level to 4 then all skills that level account for stats for level 4 and so forth.

The only way to get more 5's is to avoid getting 10 skill points in your primaries and beef up your lesser skills. I've found that watching skills for a couple levels just to get more 5's is rather tedius and boring. Its best just to play what you want how you want and let the stats come more naturally.

Indeed, that's a difference between Morrowind where the strat was possible and Oblivion. Once you officially level, you freeze your bonuses and restart (even if you don't level). You can actually "earn" several levels this way.

OTOH, training doesn't freeze - if you have a trainer that's hard to get to (well, with fast travel this shouldn't matter, but still) you can earn several levels, train for 5pts, rest for 1 level, train for 5pts, rest for 1 level, etc. ...

Also, you have the advantage that you keep lower level mobs this way A silly thing to do, but if you're truly powergaming I suppose a reasonable strat.

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by BustaMike
I think I know what broke my skill. There are certain points in the game where you can watch people fighting. I watched the 2 guys outside the arena for a 5 pt bonus. After that my skill broke.

I'll try the training thing. Hopefully that will fix it.

Hmm, really? I saw those two, I think, but I didn't watch them very long ... wonder if I'm too low/high to do it? Or maybe I just need more patience

OTOH, I did ...

Spoiler:

I did the quest with the halforc that's the grand champion at the arena, and he gave me some skill bonuses. Athletics, and ... something else, I forget what. I should check to see if my athletics goes up? I'm too high in Athletics to easily train it, though

[Quillan]

That may be what does it. I had just completed the missing daughter quest for Seed-Neeus over in Chorral. When you rescue Dar-ma and escort her back, Seed-Neeus gives you a bonus to Mercantile, as well as her disposition towards you being reset to 100. It was after that when Mercantile failed to earn advances.

[snoopy369]

/me suggests perhaps things like that should be spoilered (though not for my benefit, I read all spoiler things pretty much )

[Imran Siddiqui]

Well, I'm in another Oblivion Gate (this will be my 5th one). I'm trying to get all my recommendations from the Mage's Guilds to get into the Arcane University, but I can't avoid this Guilds . I just hope I hit Journeyman in Armorer soon, so I can repair magical stuff.. and thus I can use these sigal stones on my stuff .