Leveling system

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Personally, I kind of miss a class-based system. I think even Oblivion may have been saved (to an extent) by having a class system that let you choose 7 skills out of the 21 to focus on, but capped the other 14 at 50 points maximum. Having a 100% emergent class system is great in theory, but I do miss the class design aspect of character creation sometimes. Making the player choose is critical to an RPG, after all.

 

I like this idea. What are you capping your skills at (both SkillCaps and Formula)?

 

I put 255 into both, being an old-timer with fondness for 8-bit value caps. Besides, it just feels like a natural "keep on leveling practically forever" cap since there's no skill training past 90. Enchanting is capped at 199 since it really goes haywire after that.

At the moment I'm testing halved skill gain speed past the 100 skill mark to further aid in the "practically forever" part, but skills like Archery already takes forever to level from 99 to 100 in vanilla. On top of this, I put seriously steep and increasing exp penalties on all three tradeskills at 100, 125, 150, 175 and 200 marks, since I really don't like the idea of them putting my character on a fourth order polynomial growth in power. I also nerfed all three of them, heavily.

 

Keep us posted on your findings .

I'm playing with your recommended settings at the moment, and must say that I'm liking it quite a lot.
Together with Smart Training I have much more leeway to do what I want, when I went; instead of having to constantly worry whether I miss a training session, or overlevel!

 

Oh, I've totally missed that little gem of a mod! Thanks for pointing it out, olimikrig!

There's very few things worse in terms of game immersion than "I'd really like to tackle Dungeon <XYZ> at this moment, but I'm unsure if I manage to complete it before leveling twice.. so let's do something else in the meanwhile".

Although it DOES make it considerably easier to skip the really tough early leveling/training decisions until you have the economy part of the game sorted out. Oh well, just gives me yet another reason to put the gold production aspect of tradeskills through a nerf so hard that even Chuck Norris would need both hands to tackle it.

 

Apparently a lot of people have. It has very few downloads and endorsements.
Perosnally I think it's a lot better than all the other training mods that just increase the amount of times you can train per level (personally, I just cannot have a mod like that without exploiting it ).

Hah!

How are you nerfing the tradeskills (besides decreasing skill gain speed)?

 

Smithing: From "..improve twice as much" perks into "improve by 40%" only as per Blacksmithing Rebalanced.

Enchanting: Nerf to the Enchanter perks, going from 20% per level to 10%. Also, nerf the base value of Fortify Smithing and Alchemy from 8% to 6%, so that best possible self-made enchant at 199 skill is conveniently capped at 24%, a single percent BELOW best random loot.

Alchemy: I use SIPPS as my baseline, I really like the differentiation of ingredients and its HALVING of Fortify Smithing effects. However, I also modify its base gold values to one quarter and add a x4 modifier to the skill leveling formula to compensate. Additionally, I use SkyTweak to nerf skill scaling from 1.5 base into 1.2.

All three nerfs put together ensure that the best possible smithing upgrades stay well below the vanilla game's maximum all the way to skill 200+ in all three, ensuring very smooth increases in the character's power curve. I actually WANT to stay at low(ish) level for longer than it takes me to get to Whiterun, please.

Edit: The tradeskill nerfs are just a part of all the rebalancing efforts I'm planning on doing, on top of the skills vs leveling rebalance effort discussed in this thread. I'll write a longer guide about it later on.

 

I suppose I have my own ideals for leveling. I looked at a mod once that allowed you to level your character due to other things (completing quests, etc.) like in other games, and at first I was intrigued, because it sounded interesting . . . until I realized it meant all leveling, including skill leveling. That is, when you went up a level, then you'd put points into skills. Quite frankly, I LOVE the fact that skills level as you use them. This is so much more realistic than suddenly having "points" that you can put into skills. So, I decided not to use the mod.

But I do wish that skill leveling was separate from character leveling. To me, it seems like going on certain adventures and experiencing different things is what would make your character grow as, well, as a character. Facing down monsters makes you more of a hero, etc. Brewing 80 million potions well, really doesn't.

I don't really know if what I'm thinking is even remotely intelligent from a balance perspective; I'm only looking at it from a realism perspective. But what if there was a certain number of say "skill points per skill per level" but you'd still only gain those skill points if you used the skill. Similar to how you can only train five times per level, only it would be for use of skill, too. So, if you used a skill enough times to reach the cap per level, you'd stop leveling that skill, even if you used it.

Meanwhile, there would be other criteria for character level. Personally, I've always liked quests and exploration. Killing things, and for Skyrim, particularly killing dragons, makes a certain amount of sense. Succeeding at other various challenges might help, too. Anyway, once you reached the next character level, it would unlock the skills again for leveling. It would be similar to the "skill point" thing except that you'd still only be actually leveling skills through use and training. Plus, as now, you could choose NOT to level until doing some more combat training, only that training would no longer advance your character. One of the issues I ran into when trying to follow someone's advice to train combat skills five times every level is that I didn't have enough skills left over and I was constantly leveling up again. So basically, all I did for a few levels before I started figuring out what was going on was chopping wood and then training. With this system, you wouldn't have that problem because the skill leveling would be separate from character leveling. So, if for example, you accidentally got to the lockpicking skill level cap but hadn't done enough combat to be effective at the next level, you could train combat skills without worrying that those would put you essentially over into yet another level. Actually, the lockpicking probably wouldn't be enough to get you even close to the next level anyway, since there probably wouldn't be enough lockpicking quests giving character points.

Anyway, though, like I said, there's probably some really obvious thing that makes this idea not workable. Just something I've thought about.

 

Vorona, if I'm reading you right, you're also in the same boat with me: Leveling has to feel like you've EARNED it, and not like a simple test of endurance?

My 300+ hours with this game have taught me that there's not much inherently unbalanced in how loot is distributed and how you're supposed to get it, but for one significant miss: Tradeskills have such strong feedback effects into each other, both in terms of power and gold production, that all you really need for "maxing" your character is a few hundred merchant inventory resets. It feels like Bethesda actually put serious thought into an elaborate level-scaling system, both for loot and mobs you meet, but then forgot to nerf back the auto-win button a.k.a. tradeskills right before release.

I've heard many a success story of people just DECIDING, in advance, that they're not going to use at least some of the tradeskills to revive their gaming experience with Skyrim. While it admittedly works, it would leave an uneasy feeling of not playing to my best ability just for the sake of it. No, I'd rather keep the tradeskills, I actually LIKE that gameplay element quite a bit. It's just that their inherently overpowered nature needs to go.

And to be able to do that, the new tradeskills must meet these conditions:
- You must NEVER be able to gain a net gold profit with just store-bought materials, or at least the profit must remain insignificant and unrepeatable compared to quest/dungeon loot. You'll need to supply at least some of the components yourself. The removal of gold feedback loop, if you will.
- You must NOT be able to produce items that surpass current theoretical best random loot yourself, at least not until you're well past level 50 (see first point). Since Smithing applies to found items just as the ones you make yourself, this necessarily must mean the enchants put on them.

 

I wrote a whole post about money and then realized my issue is probably with a mod I'm using, and that I should probably disable it if it's bothering me that much (I have way too much money).

Anyway, on topic: You make good points. I don't know that I'd say I want to earn it so much as I want it to feel realistic, although the two are, of course, interrelated. My issue with having too much money is a good example: I feel like my character would be doing a lot of these quests for the implied reward, but since I already have so much money, it seems like less of an incentive. It also feels really unrealistic.

The crafting thing makes sense, too. I like that you CAN make money on craftables, but at the same time, I think it would be really cool if the main goal from crafting was to make items only you could use, that were unique in a certain sense, and therefore, unsellable (not sure if that's a word, but I can't think of another one right now). And I agree that you shouldn't be able to make the best of the best until you're at a very high level.

 

Thanks. Just finished my initial Tradeskills grind (well, smithing and enchanting at least), getting them to 100, so this is just in time to put a curb on them .

I'm looking forward to that!

Right now I am level 39 on my current character, and I am liking this quite a lot. It really smooths out the leveling curve, seeing as yo have to work for those levels. I also like that you have to think a lot more about where you place those perk points.