Perfecting Skyrim

Skyrim is a game you are supposed to win. It’s single player, after all.

If the player is vulnerable, they can use potions, the invulnerability shout, or on one of the many other escape tools to live. Or, they can die, go back to the last save, and try again. If one does not want to get into situations where they are vulnerable, they can optimize: craft, find better gear, cycle gold, and learn better shouts.

As such, when people talk about something in Skyrim being “overpowered”, they usually mean that it’s a path of least resistance, where the effort necessary to make something work is disproportionate to its strength. Effort is the most overpowered thing in Skyrim.

The ultimate “path of least resistance” build in Skyrim is indeed the stealth archer. Most people who play the game naturally without a specified build in mind will naturally drift towards it, due to its accessibility and ease.

One could argue that the archer itself needs to be nerfed; instead I propose that the other builds should be buffed and reworked to be as naturally fun to play as the stealth archer.

Most of the problems in Skyrim come from tradeoffs that the developers had to compromise on (e.g. content at the expense of context); the game itself is well-designed. That said, there are some fixes to the game that could be easily implemented by the developers; most of these could be made by modders as well:

World

Remove most bandit camps. Bandit fatigue is real.

Add more travelling merchants and organized bandit/marauder attacks.

Less hostile NPCs in general. To summarize, this is the world as it is:

And this is the world as it should be:

Keep the Reach (forsworn, dragons, falmer) and Riften (thieves) as the dangerous locations in the game, in line with the lore. Make the starting location of the game (Whiterun) the safest; new players who want to raise hell can just go south or north if they wish. Morthal/Dawnstar can be the designated safe areas of the game.

Add OP weapons that can be bought for 5-15k gold, like in Oblivion.

Reduce the number of cookie cutter collect and combat quests.

Make it so dragonrend is learned on conventional word walls rather than through the kel (cooler and more efficient way to say Elder Scroll). Keep the kel in the game, but make it so it is used to help find Alduin.

Give the companions, the war factions, and the thieves guild better end-game rewards.

Gameplay

Increase melee damage across the board.

Add headshots to projectiles.

Remove NPC camera kills, and make them happen less often.

Race reworks:

(Nords

• Remove battle cry from nord and give them a 5% damage resistance (added in p1)

• Remove calm from imperial. Buff the gold passive.

• Remove berserker rage from Orc. Add a passive that makes them do 5% more melee damage.

• Give bosmer the ability to calm animals using the traditional block + interact.

• Keep argonian ability, but nerf it.

• Keep breton ability, but nerf it.

• Keep redguard ability, but nerf it.

• Keep altmer ability, but nerf it.

Have NPCs use race abilities, potions, and poisons more often.

For shouts, I would buff most shouts and reduce their cooldown times.

Add more ingots/ore to mines.

The warrior

As of now, the warrior is too reliant on elemental fury, smithing, and enchanting to do damage. My suggestion to make the class better is to… Buff blocking. Yes. I’m serious.

The block perks are also all really broken, but nobody notices because sword/board is unpopular and the blocking skill is raised really slowly. I suggest adding two paths, one for shield blocking and one for no-shield blocking.

The base tree would be:

• 20: block damage buff

• 30: power bash

• 50: ability to parry attacks with a timed bash

• 100: timed bash disarms opponents temporarily

No-shield blocking tree would be:

• 30: timed (within 100ms) block fully negates arrows

• 70: block efficiency scales with damage of sword (capped)

Shield blocking tree would be:

• 30: arrows that hit shield do no damage

• 70: block efficiency scales with armor rating of shield (capped)

Magic/arrows should be partially blocked by both shields and sword blocks.

I would like to see swords and daggers weigh ~10% less and axes/maces/hammers do ~10% more damage. Would make the differences between weapons feel more important.

Sprinting power attacks are bugged. Imo those perks should just be replaced.

Crafting

Is the most strong thing in the game by far. Nerf and rework it.

I suggest not making crafting/enchanting/alchemy skills at all, and have blacksmiths sell the blueprints for armor/weapons at a certain level. Fix enchantments so they naturally scale, rather than having fixed 5/10/15 stuff. Remove anything that buffs enchanting/smithing/alchemy as well to remove loop exploits.

Thief

Is OP. I would make sneak less dependent on scaling and more dependent on environment so that it’s more unreliable and based on player skill, without making it useless in the early game. Also, nerf the ridiculous dagger backstab damage.

Stealth archer as a build is strong largely because of sneak, not archery, and gets outclassed by melee stealth beyond level 10 with dark brotherhood armor. As such, I don’t think the build itself needs any specific nerfs.

In terms of perks, I would remove eagle eye and replace it with the ability to block with a bow. That way, getting close to a high level 2-hander as an archer isn’t a death sentence. Power shot is both bugged and broken, and I suggest replacing it with a perk that buffs headshot damage.

Mage

Only broken late game and feels awful to play.

The core problem I see with them is that the fast cast animation in Skyrim makes it so that mages can burst really quickly, but run out of mana quickly and become useless. My suggestion to fix this is to have spells cost 10-30% more across the board and have mana regen 100-500% faster. Decreasing the cast time will make magic feel clunky.

In terms of specifics, removing the impact destruction perk is a very obvious thing to do. Illusion/alteration/conjuration/resotration magic is fine as is. The main why people hate the Skyrim mage is mostly because they specialize in destruction, which is the worst-designed part of the mage class.

Stats

• Block, light armor, heavy armor, conjuration, and destruction should level faster.

• Sneak, one handed, two handed, and archery should level slower.

• Integrate lockpicking and pickpocketing into sneak.