Skyrim: Introduction

In my previous post I attempted to give a quick rundown on some basics regarding Skyrim, but I always seem to underestimate how complicated these games are and how much explanation is actually required just to gloss over the basics.

Long story long I was determined on this retro playthrough to avoid using the most overpowered abilities in the game: Archery & Conjuration. Putting points into these disciplines was outright banned from the start in a self-imposed manner.

I was also determined to use Illusion because I was never able to get those spells to work due to the level requirements. This meant that I'd be dealing damage was with a sword, but I'd still be heavy into the wizard skills so I'd need to figure out how that would work. What I came up with is a strategy I'll probably continue to use going forward when Elder Scrolls VI comes out next year (soon™). It's actually a pretty satisfying playstyle with an interestingly mixed toolkit.

So what race should I pick?

Skyrim has a lot of races... too many races honestly. Hell, there are THREE different kinds of elf alone. Wood Elf (Bosmer thief), High Elf (Altmer mage), and Dark Elf (Dunmer mage/thief). Then there are four different human races (Nord, Breton, Imperial, Redguard), on top of a Khajiit cat race and the Argonian reptile race.

_{Wow never trust AI with basic math.}

Every race comes with a passive bonus and an active power. The active power can only be used "once a day" (72 minutes), but you can also sleep for 24 hours if you want to get it back instantly. Some of these racial abilities are really good and borderline overpowered, while others are completely and utterly worthless. This is the only decision you need to make at the beginning of the game so it can actually matter quite a bit if the player wants to employ any strategy to their methods (which is not required on Adept difficulty but the game is a lot more difficult without a strat).

Right off the bat we can see that both the cat and the lizard have completely worthless racial abilities. In my opinion they are also dumb looking & ugly AF, so it's not even worth picking them for an aesthetic role-playing situation. You don't need disease resistance because a basic potion cures disease. There's also water-breathing potions and spells (which also aren't needed because you hardly ever go in water). Night vision is pointless and doing more damage while unarmed only makes one or two quests a little less annoying. Silly silly races. They feel like a lazy afterthought.

Redguard / Nord / Imperial

Also pretty bad. But you could at least make a case for picking one of these races for RP reasons or because of their starting skills. Also new (and even seasoned) players often completely forget about the daily power and it can go unused for the entire game, so there is that. Poison resistance is trash because poison is rare and there are full immunity amulets in the game that offer 100% resist.

The Nord 50% frost resistance passive is okay because all necromancers (the most common enemy mage) in the game attack with frost, and while most dragons breath fire there are a few frost dragons out there as well.

Wood Elf and Dark Elf (pickable but not the best)

The Bosmer Wood Elf also has completely trash passives and daily power. Honestly the Command Animal ability should be permanent rather than lasting 60 seconds... as it can actually get you killed when the animal stops being under your control and turns on you along with whatever it was attacking. However the Bosmer is still worth picking due to starting skills which I will cover after these passive abilities.

The Dunmer Dark Elf has fire resistance, which is surely the best element to be resistant to, as it makes them a dragon killer, and this game is all about killing dragons, as you literally have the title of Dragonborn. Ancestor's Wrath is totally worthless and is basically just a flame cloak spell anyone can acquire later in the game.

S-Tier: Breton / Orc / Altmer

If you want a powerful character these are the only options, which is really annoying and feels extremely lazy on the development side considering this is the 5th iteration of the game. When I first started playing this game over a decade ago I always felt forced to pick the High Elf Altmer because +50 magicka at the start of the game is wildly overpowered (you only start with 100). On top of that the daily power basically gives you infinite magicka for 60 seconds... making the High Elf a really good race to pick no matter what you decide to do in the game.

The Orc is clearly amazing if you want a heavy-armor smash-and-grab melee warrior who cracks skulls open at close range. Their daily power makes you x4 more powerful in combat for 60 seconds... meaning every boss fight becomes a trivial beat-down. x2 more damage and x2 mitigation is wild. They don't have a passive ability but who cares when you have Berserker Rage? I've never picked a warrior (it's kind of a boring way to play) but I've always been tempted by the Orc.

I almost picked Altmer yet again for my spellsword, but decided it was time to try Breton. This was the best time to pick a class that gets 25% mitigation to all elemental damage (frost/fire/lightning), and the daily power basically turns you into the ultimate anti-mage because not only do you get 50% more mitigation but every spell it absorbs just gets added to your mana pool making you basically invincible to spell-casters for 60 seconds. As a spellsword at close range this seemed like a good pick, and it actually turned out to be even better than I expected.

Starting Proficiencies

Every race starts with different opening skills, which up until now I had always ignored because leveling an ability from 15 to 25 is pretty easy and the High Elf passive/active is absurdly overpowered on a relative scale, especially in the early game. However, I have since come to realize that these starting skills make a massive difference if the player is trying to keep their level low. And keeping your level low is the best way to "twink" out your avatar and make sure that you are stronger than the NPCs of a similar level that spawn around you.

We can immediately see from this grid that there are three "pure races" for lack of a better term. Not only do the Orc and Altmer have the best racial abilities, but the Orc is a pure warrior and the Altmer is a pure mage, making those obvious picks if you wanted to play pure mage or warrior.

While the Bosmer has lack-luster racial abilities, they happen to be the pure thief race, and starting out with 25 archery is a massive advantage because bows are hands down the best/safest way to deal damage.

The chart also shows that while the Redguard has garbage racials their starting stats are quite good if you want a character that uses a shield. It's the only class that starts with 25 points in one-handed, which also makes them the perfect candidate for dual-wielding... which is something I have never tried but appears to be quite good (x6 damage in the endgame).

The One-Handed skill directly increases the damage dealt with one-handed weapons. For each skill level, weapon damage increases by 0.5%. This increase is multiplicative with bonus damage from the Armsman perk for a total of triple weapon damage with 100 One-Handed and 5/5 Armsman. Weapon damage can be further increased by smithing and/or enchanting.

The Imperial also has very good stats for melee, with more of a focus on healing than other races. Argonians are worthless by every metric, and Khajiit are also not-optimal (both are sad thieves). The Dunmer is quite good if you want a pure destruction elemantalist, while the Nord is the only class with 25 points in 2-handed.

But my pick was BRETON...

And we can see by the opening skills this was pretty sub-optimal. I refuse to use conjuration but I start out with the highest level of conjuration at 25 points. I wield a sword and a shield but I start out at the base 15 points. This build also utilizes destruction & enchanting which start at 15. So off to a pretty not great start except for the ability to absolutely slay mages... which turns out to be pretty damn good when you join the mage's guild and are constantly going on quests to slay enemy mages to get better mage gear.

Alternate picks?

Taking a good hard look at this chart I see two other solid options for the spellsword/battlemage build. The obvious one is Altmer high elf... which I refused to pick on principal. But the not-so obvious one is Imperial, who starts out with 5/6 of the skills I need (heavy armor worthless)... and also the ability to AOE calm and find more gold isn't the worst thing ever. The Imperial is the only option that starts out with melee combat skills (one-handed & block), so I may try that in Elder Scrolls VI next year if this strategy is still an option in that iteration of the series.

So what does a spellsword look like?

There's actually a somewhat comical nerd debate on the Skyrim forums about the difference between a spellsword and a battlemage. The consensus seems to be that a battlemage is a mage first and a fighter second, while a spellsword is a fighter first and uses spells to enhance their melee prowess. However the counterintuitive bit is that many claim that a battlemage is slow, clunky, and uses heavy armor while a spellsword is more nimble and sneaky. Given these definitions my build is 100% spellsword, as cloth armor is used to sneak around and 100% of the character's damage can be done with the sword if Destruction is omitted from the build.

Spellsword Outline:

• One-Handed
• Block
• Sneak
• Illusion
• Restoration
• Alteration
• Destruction (not-so optional)
• Enchanting (optional)
• Blacksmithing (extremely optional)

Breakdown of the meta-class:

The main requirement for the spellsword is that they are doing a lot of melee damage up close and personal. Right off the bat this means you're guaranteed to be taking a lot of damage, making both Restoration and Alteration a requirement for defense.

Block

In theory equipping a shield is optional and you shouldn't wear one (go 2-handed, dual-wield, or spell in left-hand) if you don't like slowing down combat to block, but I enjoy the blocking mechanic as it feels like it adds skill to the game and a back-and-forth damage trading mechanic in your favor. A shield also makes archers do significantly less damage when they strike (or zero if you have that perk). On top of that it only takes 2 perk points into block for time to slow down when the enemy is doing a power-attack, which is surprisingly useful because you always know it's coming and can interrupt it every time with a quick shield-bash to avoid a lot of damage.

Illusion

Illusion is the spellsword's number one goto toolkit for rampaging the battlefield. In many cases the fight is over with a single spell or shadowstrike, or at least a divide and conquer strategy can be employed to make the fight significantly easier should shit hit the fan. Illusion is also the easiest tree to level by far due to the ability to spam cast spells out of combat. You can level up Illusion to max level 100 in something like 3 hours if you compulsively spam spells out of combat (not necessary or even recommended) whereas it might take 30 hours of gameplay to get One-Handed or Block to level 100.

Illusion Strong

Illusion magic is insanely powerful "mindfuck" magic. You get inside the enemy's head and change their perception of what's real. There are three types of crowd-control in the game, all Illusion:

• Calm - Trick the enemy into thinking you're a friend.
• Fear - Terrify the enemy into running away.
• Frenzy - Enrage the enemy into attacking anything near them.

These are all good spells (overpowered even) but highly situational.

Frenzy is certainly the best one because if you happen upon two or more unsuspecting victims you can legit just force them to fight each other and bust out some popcorn while you wait to see who wins. Then when the winner turns on you, you just hit them once or twice and they die due to already being gravely wounded from the previous battle.

Calm is also quite good because it forces your hapless foe to deaggro and stop attacking for 30 seconds, which is quite a long time in the heat of battle; often plenty of time to deal with another threat and take on fights 1v1 instead of attempting to battle multiple foes at once. It's also quite good at calming someone down who you don't want to kill or just fleeing the battle without having to fight at all.

Fear is a somewhat chaotic spell which forces the enemy to run in terror from you. This could mean that while you run after them they train you into even more baddies, which could be a big problem and result in immediate death. Why use fear instead of calm? Because fear doesn't break when you attack them, so they are completely incapacitated and won't fight back while under the affect, while calm will break immediately and frenzy doesn't prevent them from attacking you if you're the closest target.

Why are Illusion spells a pain in the ass?

Because your character is very easy to level up in the early game. If your character is leveling up and fury only works on "creatures & people up to level 6"... well then fury stops working entirely after you've reached something like level 8 and you're no longer encountering level 6 NPCs. This is extremely irritating as these spells either work perfectly or are 100% resisted by the target and they don't work at all. There is no in-between or wiggle-room here, so you have to make sure you've put enough "perk points" into illusion so that it always works and is up to date, which isn't a thing for any other school of magic in the game.

Another reason why I've always avoided Illusion is that it never works in key situations. You can't use it on dragons, undead, demons, or mechanical units. Bosses will often resist the spells and then you're shit out of luck because you just wasted all your mana on a strategy that had zero affect. Oops. But even with all these drawbacks I'd say it's worth it and fun to use; you just have to know what you're doing.

The silent killer

The best Illusion perk in the game is hands down Quiet Casting. It's difficult to suss this out without actually using the ability... on paper it seems very lack-luster. However all spells make noise (even invisibility) so if you cast a spell while sneaking pretty much everyone around you is going to be immediately alerted and come looking for you.

Quiet Casting allows you to prepare for battle and stack up all kinds of advantages before your hapless opponents even realize what's about to happen. It allows you to cast frenzy without them having any idea where it came from. It's a good perk to have even if you don't care about illusion spells, as you can use it to cast firebolts from the shadows and remain hidden much longer.

Quiet casting requires 4 perks into Illusion, but one of those perks adds +8 levels to your ability to manipulate animals (Animage) while the next one (Kindred Mage) adds +10 levels to your ability to manipulate humanoids. This allows even your basic/cheap crowd control abilities last into the midgame if you make sure to keep your character level low and twinked out.

Mana Regeneration complexity

Another reason why Quiet Casting is a must-have perk is that base magicka regen is 3% out of combat but only 1% in combat. This mechanic also has the affect of increasing overall regeneration just by increasing total Magicka. For example you start the game with 100 Magicka (3/s out of combat; 1/s in combat). Increasing your Magicka to 200 makes your out of combat regen 6/second and in combat 2/sec, effectively doubling it. This is not a design choice I agree with but it undeniably exists.

Normally it would be a problem in the early game that Quiet Casting requires level 50 Illusion, but again Illusion is very easy to level up by casting Muffle out of combat. Muffle is so good at leveling illusion that it seems like it almost must be a mistake, and it's also an ability that the spellsword is going to use constantly anyway because it's almost impossible to sneak up on the enemy to melee range without it, especially in the early game with a low sneak ability. You can also buy Muffle right at the start of the game from the court wizard at the starting town keep of Dragonsreach.

Muffle/Invisible combo

Once you reach level 65 Illusion (which again is trivially easy) you can buy the expert-level invisible spell, making you very hard to see. Having both muffle and invisible active makes you nearly undetectable while sneaking which allows the player to have all kinds of options that are unavailable to all other classes without Illusion, even accomplished thieves.

Alteration

The primary reason to devote resources into Alteration is to turn your squishy little mage into a heavily armored beast. Using stoneskin spells you can boost your armor rating temporarily from zero into the hundreds, rivaling even warriors with heavy armor. This is accomplished with the Mage Armor and Magic Resistance perks.

The reasons to wear defenseless cloth armor with this build are three-fold. First, by equipping cloth armor you avoid leveling light/he