Quote:Original post by Kylotan
Sure, and the designers could have done something sensible such as scaled monster levels according to how well you fared against previous monsters. eg. They could keep a windowed average of how much health you lose during a fight, or how many hits you needed to land, compare that to a desired baseline chosen by the design team, and use that to adjust the next fight, scaled up and down according to the required encounter difficulty level.
This would have definitely been a better way to do it. There may also be simpler solutions that would still yield better results than they did, e.g taking into account the player's skills (regardless of whether they're majors or not) and weighting them according to their combat relevance. Even this would be better than just basing it on level, which is so far removed from 'combat ability' due to the levelling system that it's no indicator whatsoever.
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I don't know if this is just because I have The Four As in my primary skills (armorer, alchemy, acrobatics, athletics) which are largely useless in combat, but I really do get hammered most of the time. I'm level 20 or 21 or so, and things like Storm Atronachs or those hulking beige golem-ogrey things outside the gates are virtually unkillable for me. Ho hum.
Yep, that'd do it. Alchemy is controllable but levels very fast, acrobatics and athletics are slower levellers but you'll be using them constantly. Note that acrobatics increases not just when you jump, but whenever you take falling damage. Armorer you can probably get away with but I prefer to keep it as a minor for other reasons.
Another two to watch out for are light armour and sneak, and the obvious non-combat ones like speechcraft and mercantile.
Quote:I find it hard to believe that they didn't manage to play test all the prefabricated classes at 5-level intervals, arm them with the sort of stuff that they can find in the world at that level, and see how they fare. Yet that's how it feels - I'm playing a standard class, have done no power-levelling whatsoever, and am finding it very unplayable. I know I'm not great at computer games, but I'm not that bad.
My guess is that they probably did test it, but with the mindset that "if it's too hard I'll just tweak the difficulty slider". In other words, as long as you could play through on minimum difficulty, they felt they'd done a good enough job, rather than fixing the fundamental flaws in the character creation rules.
For the sake of enjoying the game though, I'd recommend either giving in and moving that slider, or else starting over with a different build. And adding some mods while you're at it.
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Seriously though, in what way does it 'work'? What do you think it's trying to achieve? By matching monster levels to your levels, it is essentially removing levels in the sense that they are typically known. Numerically you may as well have a system without levels at all, and just have the usefulness of different skills rebalance with time. If going up a level doesn't open any new doors, why even have them in the game? In abstract terms, what gameplay device does this combination of systems provide? All I can see are the things it's explicitly taken away.
When I first encountered a troll, it scared the shit out of me. It came charging at me out of nowhere at high speed, started walloping me before I could respond and it would knock about a third of my health off per hit. Now at 27th level I use them as punching bags, in much the same way I used mudcrabs at level 2.
In that way, the sense of progression is maintained. However, the challenge is also maintained, in that I now encounter a few things that are much harder than trolls, some of which I have to take at least *slightly* seriously.
Furthermore, I have free reign to explore, with no restrictions on how far I can wander before I accidentally stumble into an area that some designer arbitrarily decided was only for characters twenty levels higher than me and consequently getting killed. I have free reign to take on any quest and not have to worry if I'm 'high enough level' to complete it yet.
