>Boots up new character. >Set on playing spell/spell effects only. >Lock in on illusion & conjuration. >Muffle in left hand & Bound Bow in right. And like that, it happened again.
Unironically the best way to play an Archer. The Bound Bow has the stats of a Daedric Bow with a weight of zero, which makes it draw faster, giving it the highest DPS of any Bow, and also EXTREMELY broken in the early game. And the conjuration investment also gives you access to summoning extra meatshields to protect your squishy archer behind.
You forgot the most critical thing. It feels good, kill cams are nice, exploring slowly is nice and it incentivizes lateral thinking and problem solving which tingles the smart monkey brain parts
There's definitely an element of feeling like it rewards player skill more than other playstyles. Knowing which enemy to take out, when to take them out, and where to take them out from that your attack goes mostly unnoticed, as well as actually hitting a shot on a distant moving target. While you can break the game just as much with the other playstyles, it's either through pure numbers or through free and unblockable stuns. There's nowhere near as much element of feeling like you have to actually be good.
@@octavianpopescu4776 This is definitely part of it. For stealth characters, the kill cams reward your good gameplay with shots of your character being skilled at the thing you built them to do. For other characters, they tend to interrupt the flow of combat and hinder your ability to do things that make those characters feel competent.
I love being stealth because you can see exchanges between enemies who would see and hear you otherwise from the other end of the dungeon. You can see how the natural wildlife act while they are not aware of your presence.
Magic got downgraded IMMENSELY in Skyrim. The lack of min-maxing customization we lost is why it became unsatisfying for me. I usually role a mage character in games.
Yep. It's really sad. In Morrowind magic was very fun to use. (It also was able to break the game easily, but it's magic so I think it's fine.) There were a lot of ways to interact with the mechanics in interesting ways to improve your abilities, and gathering spells to make custom spells with was fun. In Oblivion the capability got nerfed a lot, but it was still good enough to be fun. In Skyrim you're better off just ignoring it. There's almost no utility to benefit from and the damage spells are weaker than any alternative more easily accessible. IIRC Todd liked playing a Barbarian style character, and it seemed had a grudge against how much utility mages had, but just make enchanted items and spell scrolls more accessible instead of removing anything interesting from it.
It'snot that bad. I am playing thru for the first time since the game came out but without any melee (been there done that with oblivion back in the day.) It actually becomes OP as hell, if you know how to properly use alchemy you can break the game as a mage. It just takes a bit of patience to get the items and perks to get in to that point. But in retrospect its a whole new game compared to spamming attack button and stealth archery in all my previous runs.
Well, the mage gameplay in MW was as awesome as it was unhinged - a true freedom you can hardly find anywhere else. Oblivion was a bit nerfed, yes, but you still had a lot of freedom, enough to have to be careful not to make anything gamebreaking. Skyrim - well being a mage is more challenging, true, but once you get gear enchanted to spam spells like a machine gun for no cost, it becomes quite the fun. Especially those elemental blasts added later. And paralyze rune, that one is BRUTAL😂 but I have to get rid of any follower, since they die too quickly. After that... Boom boom BOOM time🤘
I have SO MUCH fun playing Necromancers. It's the best, most fun magic strat. If you REALLY want to have fun, do Azura's quest, and when you get to the guy's skeleton, ressurect him. Maximum fun.
Another issue is that magic doesn't scale damage in skyrim. A level 1 mage can cast a 40 point fireball. A level 50 mage can cast at best about 130 damage fireball. A level 1 archer can hit around 15 damage with unupgraded tools. My last character at level 28 archer hit for 128 damage before arrows, enchantment, poison, and stealth bonuses. I added fiery soul trap and chaos damage to my bow. I hadn't even maxed out my smithing, enchantment, destruction bonues, or alchemy yet. I checked the math at one point and if I poisoned my bow, drank an archery potion, landed all 3 chaos effects, and wore archery boosting equipment, I would hit for over 700 damage. So if I hit a steath hit, I'd slam them for over 3,000 damage. I basically fought peasants with a bolt action 50cal.
It basically forces the player to actively not level melee, ranged, or armor skills and to not prestige/legendary skills for more points in order to remain viable. Some spells entirely stop working at high enough levels without modding (looking at you, Illusion).
That's because magic's main strength isn't "raw damage" in Skyrim, it's Summon Dremora Lord spam+Destruction Impact stunlock as support. Combined with Quiet Casting perk from Illusion and some investment in sneak and you can't die just from the fact that you won't even be targeted by enemies that are perpetually distracted by your summons and losing attrition. Yes, the spell school named "destruction" isn't actually for doing damage, it's stupid like that, blame Todd or whoever for the way it is.
@@josephpercy1558 so my options are to stunlock an enemy to death, and hope none of his buddies kill me or instant kill him from 30 yards away? Why would I ever choose magic? Todd hated Morrowind's magic so much he drug skyrim's magic out back and shot it.
I'd also add that one reason it feels so good to play a stealth archer in Skyrim is the map design. It's hardly always a flat plain, and instead gives you several vantage spots from which you can approach an enemy. Whether it's a hill, a tower, a rooftop etc... the game encourages you to look for higher ground in order to have an advantage, and oftentimes it rewards you with such advantage.
Then there is the reverse! You spot a group of enemies, they haven't noticed you yet. You have the low ground so if you approach the archers and mages of the group are gonna be taking lots of pot shots at you while you fight the melee fighters. So you pull out a bow, and shoot one of them first... Dead. The enemy group is alerted but they don't know where you are. You shoot the other ranged enemy.... Dead Now they know where you are. They start running towards you.... You have a bow in hand already, might as well shoot them before they reach you. Because their AI lacks any sort of "group tactics", or concept of cover, they all B line straight towards you on the same path usually one at a time. Dead. Dead. Dead before anyone got within melee range. Oops you just Archered them all.
Plus there is a reason long range weapons are very strong. Killing something before it even touches you or even knows you're there is how you survive long term. Period. Imo the early magic and sword/board isn't as strong as it should be to offset the strength of the sneak bow.
@about99ninjas56 it also feels nice because it gives you the chance to actually feel like your arrows are lethal. The enemies aren't damage sponges if you hit them just right, or your bow and arrows are strong enough.
The worst thing about trying to snipe enemies from high ledges is the game's inability to shoot an arrow downward at any sort of sharp angle without shooting it into the dirt at your feet. If you shuffle closer to the edge, you fall off. If you stand up, every man and his dog knows you're there. If the crosshair is sitting firmly over the bandit leader's face, why do I keep shooting myself in the foot just because I'm crouched? It's maddening and always makes me curse Todd Howard and all of his descendants.
An important reason that archery is something everyone is drawn to is that dragons are almost impossible to kill otherwise. In the early parts of the game your spells are short range, so until you unlock Dragonrend or higher level magic the bow is your only option for fighting the most common reoccurring boss in the game. You can't even unlock shouts until you kill a dragon, and you need a ranged weapon for that. Fire and Storm Atranochs are pretty good options as well, of course. I find they're even better at taking down dragons than bows or shouts are. But you need to have high enough Conjuration to make the spell books spawn, purchase and learn them specifically, and then think to use a fire elemental against a fire breathing dragon before you'll ever get the chance to use them against a dragon. And before that happens, you'll probably have already picked up a bow.
You say that like I didn’t immediately go and master magic after reaching Whiterun and becoming a werewolf. I was like, “Oh, Companions sounds cool” when reading the instruction manual or whatever, then went, “Oh, Circle? Cool. I’m becoming a werewolf.” Then become Archmage of the College Of Winterhold. Then did everything else lmao
Fire and storm atronarchs are terrible, they have too few magicka and their AI focuses on ranged combat through spell attacks. Only frost atronarchs (unusually tanky for its level), dremora lord (summonable AGGRESSIVE humanoid melee NPCs with two handed weapon staggers), dawnguard (decently tanky skeletons), and Creation Club summons are actually decent.
@@stranger7131 Focusing on range is the point - they actually have attacks that can hit dragons, and they regularly use them. Fire Atranochs in particular are immune to fire breath attacks like most dragons use, so they'll survive long enough to bring the dragon down. As for magicka, the fact that they come with their own pool is a good thing. They don't eat into yours after the initial summoning, and they regenerate magicka on their own, so they can keep casting spells. In the early game you can run out of magicka after a few firebolts, but for less mana you can get more firebilts from a Fire Atronoch. It doesn't scale to late game, but this isn't about late game. This is about early game, before you've mastered Destruction magic or have the Dragonrend shout. This is about alternatives to using the bow to ground a dragon.
@@normal6483 If you want to fight dragons then just time destruction impact staggers to cancel their breath attacks, very easy to hit against the hover breath attack (which is probably the only really dangerous breath attack because who cares about the wildly inaccurate strafe version), and also easily done with the lightning bolt just because it's a hitscan attack. Also their accuracy (especially against flying dragons) is terrible if ranged attacks is your point of using them, and no, their magicka pool is so small that they'd immediately run out of them pretty quickly and while NPCs do regenerate magicka a lot faster in-combat than the player do, it's still pretty slow. Still, they ARE disposable ally NPCs that can distract the dragon, you are that much correct, but again, frost atronarchs or those other summons I mentioned likewise occupy the same role. And hey, you can only have two summons outside of ritual stone abuse, and spending it on something low impact as low damage output ranged ones is rather poor use of it.
@stranger7131 You need 50 Destruction to unlock Impact, meaning you'll already be halfway to maxing it out, and thus have already started fighting dragons with bows. You are at the point I talked about earlier, where you are strong enough in magic that it's no longer early game. Also, while Frost Atranochs are great against a lot of enemies, this is about dragons, who fly. Why would you bring up bad aim when the alternative is being completely unable to attack at all. Their aim is better than a controller users, because they can hit a flying dragon while most controller users need to wait for the dragon to hover before they can fire. So aim-wise they still have great aim, anyways. But even if they didn't... the alternative is still a summin that does nothing.
One thing I noticed when doing the restoration potion loop exploit is that you can get to a point where you can one shot everyone with a flick of your finger and are functionally immortal. The relevance is that when you encounter a dragon, the literal main gimmick of this iteration of the series, you are almost useless until the dragon decides to perch long enough and near enough for you to get a hit in. So despite being technically more powerful than literal gods, you still need to invest into archery.
You know what also encourages players to go stealth archer? The main selling point of Skyrim. The bloody dragons. Unless you speed run getting Dragonrend, what is a melee build going to do against the flying buggers? But if you’re already sneaking, of some of that slow time and zoom, then all of a sudden you’re going more damage and a bigger amount of damage than any mage that has to flail around with a sparks spell that’s not in range and more likely to miss. The game’s marketable enemy is forcing you to take up a bow.
I'm not an effective archer in active combat. Until I get Dragonrend, I just wait for the dragons to land and wail on them with my favorite warhammer. My archery is put to better use during dungeon crawls and I'm not always able to one-shot an enemy so my warhammer stays my secondary weapon for active combat situations.
Dude, the player can get become etheral shout pretty early on for a reason. You are suposed to fade the moment the dragons shout at you until they come down. Works like a charm
Also a fun playstyle! I had a lot of fun with the melee character I made for this video, and I've enjoyed melee and melee/magic hybrid builds in the past. :)
I'm close to that: light armor, one-handed, restoration, illusion, sneak. I call my style stealth knifer. And it's not just in Skyrim, but I like to play this way in every game that I can. I was a stealth knifer in Elden Ring too. I was sneaking around taking enemies out one by one, whenever it was possible.
Spellsword is definitely my preferred build. Nothing like a spell in one hand and an enchanted axe in the other. Plus it means I can actually inflict weakness to magic poisons
I almost always played stealth archer like everyone because I'm no fool, but I also had a lot of fun as a spellsword/battlemage once (I went with battlemage; the latter were traditionally more heavily armored). The "enemies attacking you as you blast them with flames" isn't as much of a problem when you can spray them as they charge at you, and then hack them down with one or two hits when they reach you, having been already weakened by the flames.
It's a shame they made the game in a such a way that stealth archer was generally more (in most people's opinion apparently) and OP, because logically, it seems like, in a world where you can be a Jedi (ie magically-enhanced warrior, ie Spellsword/Battlemage), it seems like that would obviously be the ultimate. This is why I was always annoyed by the D&D attempts at balance and thought settings like Ars Magica were so cool. Obviously normal people and those with the ability to bend reality to their will aren't "balanced". Mages are walking artillery, so why should they be "balanced" anymore than cavemen are balanced with modern infantry? By why does having powers have to make you a weak, skinny bookworm? You can come up with justifications if that's the kind of setting you want, sure, but...why should you? Why can't they also hit the gym every now and then, and even use magic to make them faster and stronger?
Same thing happens with me. I've played a Stealth Archer about 2 or 3 times, and I always find it incredibly slow, and boring. I typically end up defaulting to Spellsword, or Two-Handed Warrior.
It's not just the most optimum play style, it's the most compelling too. Both magic and melee consist on pointing at the enemy and pressing a button ad infinitum while managing your health/magicka/stamina. When you're a sneaky archer, you need to sneak without being caught, position yourself, account for the arrow drop, correct in case the target is moving... It's way more compelling.
I dunno I always find it boring to use stealth archer. It's not hard. Just wait for em to stop and fire a few arrows until you get it right. The ai is so dumb that they won't notice if you do it fast enough.
What? Not two-handed mace? Nerveshatter is the "Win Button" of two-handed weapons, and all you need to get it are a piece of Amber and a piece of Chaos ore. It's stupid OP. ='[.]'=
Great video! Also I think that the stealth archer build grants the most compensatory mechanical upgrade, like slowing down time and zooming in your targets. We don't really see a mechanical change like that in other builds, who usually just reduces damage taken and increases damage dealt if you use a certain weapon/armor/element (I'm just being very rough here, but it is what it feels like) Maybe this was not a thing in Oblivion, because there were more meaningful mechanical changes that had more weight in each skill tree, like being able to paralyze an enemy when using fists or knocking down enemies with your arrows
I don't have the skill trees in front of me right now to go through them all, but block has a few mechanical perks. There's a time slow, disarming chance, and a sprinting shield bash. Most perks are just "X% more damage," though
@@Takarias oh? Might be a good reason for me to explore the blocking skill, didn't know that. I'm playing as a mage this time but it sometimes feels unrewarding indeed, I believe it might be mostly because of this "X% more damage" thing or "now you can do damage to THAT enemy too!", even though I believe the Illusion school is a little bit different from that logic
@@tic5418 I'm considering making a new character that leans on Illusion as much as I can. There's a few interesting perks in there that feel like there should be something to them.
@@Takarias Block's problem is how big of a pain it is to level to get to the interesting perks. Until you reach the point you can survive teasing a giant for skill ups, you level too slow to get to any of the fun ones. I remember having a pain finding the high level trainer for block too, but I may have just been a dolt.
There's also the habit in early to post-mid game of enemies just onehit kill you the moment they get in range - so that's a push factor you didn't mention. I once made an army vet char. Expert difficulty, Alternate Start in Solitude, join the legion right away, no side quests till victory (this guy doesn't go awol), only use Legion issued armor and weapon, plus the once liberated from the stormcloaks, survival mode on [this makes getting to the battlefield an actual challenge instead of just being tedious busywork]. If you want to try it, this is actually a pretty engaging way to play the civil war questline. Drawbacks, you're broke the hole time, for you can't carry enough loot, to sell and pay for the necessary food, potions and shelter. So you'll be hunting for food very quickly instead. See where I'm going? Also whenever you'll arrive at the battlefield you'll be frozen half to death, probably starving and in desperate need of sleep. Well that's no condition to get pummeled on by a bunch of longblade wielding stormcloaks... Then you'll remember that hunting bow, crouch behind your comrades and become a stealth archer. Too make at least some money, I also had this char turn all the animal skins into leather armor, upgrade them and later even enchant them for additional value. The cheap soul gems lie about everywhere, and one is filled everytime you hit a deer. So my army vet character ended up being - an "arcane blacksmith merchant stealth archer", with basically no points in melee, but maxed out haggling. Ditched the armor alltogether once my tour of duty was complete. Still it's an engaging setup for a character and you'll feel as desperate as real life civil war, drafted at level 1, soldier should - unless you safescum or use the console ^^
I think another issue with melee versus archery is that weapon poison only lasts for one hit which is much easier to understand with a bow than a sword. And you can’t apply poisons at all with magic. My mage characters take out a bow to apply weakness to magic poisons to dragons so that my destruction magic can actually deal enough damage for its cost
It would make sense if the poison was weaker on swords, but each hit 'stacks' in a way, able to poison multiple targets, while on an arrow, it's strongest to a single target as they get the full effect. A much better balance. Not sure about Mage, though.
@@Daltonisntabot Magic should probably benefit more from, or have more options for, potions. There's no good lore-friendly way to make poisons work for magic pures. They should also have access to spells and enchantments that can do similar things to poisons.
@@Cethinn I agree, just not too sure how you'd do that, unless it's done kind of Ward or something that activates in hit, like a Rune on the clothes or something. Maybe if you defeat someone, a poison Rune is placed where they're at. Definitely more utility though for Mages in Elder Scrolls 6.
Poison technically only lasts for one hit in archery, too, because the (vanilla) game pop-up indicates "Do you wish to poison your bow?" No, it should be poisoning your arrows, and doing it in multiples.
I had an idea for throwable poisons with AOE effects. Would be able to give utility to any character - explosives, smokescreens, lingering poison gas...
One underrated effect of the stealth archer is that it just feels good to defeat a foe with 1 or 2 blows. Most other methods (e.g. melee/magic) require spamming attacks over and over which makes them feel less good (i.e. more "noodle-like").
I think stealth dagger is even better for that tbh, with good investment in all the crafting skills and all other realavant perks I was able to do some 12 000 damage in a single sneak attack wiht no exploits or loops whatsoever, that's enough to oneshot both Alduin and Miraak.
@omppu3487 stealth melee is great, but it requires a high stealth skill, or you will get spotted as you approach. Stealth archers bypass that limitation by shooting from range and thus before detection, so it is "unlocked" from the get go.
@@nicolasoliveira4903 I personally wouldn't classify a fully intentionally designed game mechanic an exploit, just bad balancing. Now if you make a loop out of fortify effects that's a different story, but I didn't.
Easy changes you could make to Skyrim's magic that would make the mage style more appealing, to rival stealth archer: - you get the long range, fireball spell to start, instead of short range flames - ward is a starting spell for Bretons and High Elves - casting ward only depletes magicka when it blocks damage, or is very very cheap to cast and costs more when blocking damage - if you start casting ward at the same time as the damage hits, you take zero of that damage, like a parry move. - there is a stealth bonus for magic attacks (I always mod it in before playing) - the mage armour spells have health not duration - recasting them all the time is tedious, so cast them whenever and they last until you take too much damage - illusion needs spells that can be used in combat, eg: cast blindness on an enemy, and avoid them as they swing wildly
There are a lot of great ideas here but I propose some alternatives: Ward needs to be completely reworked. A magic shield is a great idea but having it take up a hand slot is not. Dual-casting is integral to effective magic use, especially for Destruction at high levels. Having to give that up to deploy a shield isn't a good solution. It's not a good solution for physical shields either, honestly. Rather than having time or health mage armor should just be permanent until dispelled and reduce your maximum magicka by its cost as long as it's active. Casting it again while active should dispel it and return your maximum magicka along with 25% of the cost to your current magicka, with a perk to increase that to 50%. Then add touch, distance, and AoE spells to dispel others' mage armor without returning any to current magicka, and maybe a perk to absorb some of it for yourself when you succeed. Aside from that I agree wholeheartedly with everything, except that players should get to choose whether they want Flames or a long-range fire spell.
This is funny because Illusion has Combat Spells, just see the Frenzy Spells. Sneak in, Throw Voice to group enemies, cast AoE Frenzy and watch them kill themselves. Combine this with Conjuration to resurrect an Enemy to cause more Havoc, and the Illusion Perk that makes you spell casting (and Shouts because they're "magic") silent and you have a very competent playstyle.
@@Heyhowsitgoin999 i don't think frenzy qualifies as a combat spell. I see it as a preemptive strike to allow the opposing force the opportunity to reduce themselves for my benefit. Then the combat begins
I've been saying it for ages. Stealth archery is a combination of two playstyles with both very low cost to entry and opportunity cost and that synergize well together and can also fit into any build or be a build in and of themselves both individually and together. First sneak. The cost to entry is incredibly low as the sneak button is always available and it's only cost is movement speed. The goal of stealth is to get to a point without getting seen (duh) and that makes it so that it's always the right option no matter what you want to do. Want to go by unnoticed? well if you don't sneak that won't happen. Want to engage an ennemy in melee? well you could charge in and get hit by ranged attacks, or you could sneak in and either you get spotted and you are in the same situation, or you don't and you end up in your favored spot able to engage the ennemy directly, maybe a more favorable ennemy than the one you'd have had to engage otherwise (and as a bonus you might get a sneak attack). Want to engage ennemies at range? Well you don't have to sneak but sneaking makes it more likely for you to reach a favorable range for yourself and a vantage point that's hard to reach, and again if you get spotted you will still be in a better position than if you just walked in so it's better to do than not. Those are assuming you don't take risks, the point is that even at zero risk you still get benefit from stealth, if you take risks you can get larger benefit but that's an option you don't have to. We're not comparing dangerous sneaking venture with no sneak. We're comparing sneaking to go to the same place as you would without sneaking, the low movement speed is only a cost to your patience as if you look at it from the ennemy's perspective you effectively teleported closer to your objective if you only count the distance traveled undetected, it's similar to using a shout like whirlwind sprint to get to an advantageous position. So yeah in a moment to moment gameplay there is no reason not to sneak as long as you are undected (especially since resuming to normal speed is pretty much instant). The "moment to moment" gameplay matters as if you're trying to optimize a character, gaining levels can be detrimental so you might opt to avoid some actions, but if we're talking path of least resistance then your build will be decided by moment to moment effective gameplay, not long term optimization. Now onto archery. The cost to entry is a bit higher as you need a bow and arrows but those are extremely easy to come by, you'll find a bow in the tutorial, and arrows are littered everywhere as you have access to your ennemy equipment on death (you can't loot their spell for exemple so magic is much harder to come by). It's also useful to note that arrow have a gold value but no weight, which means you should *always* be looting arrows even if you don't have or plan to use a bow. So yeah, most likely you'll have a bow and some arrow lying around. And similar to stealth the opportunity cost is very low. If you are a mage the bow allows you to keep dealing damage without using your main ressource of magicka, and without taking additionnal risks. It also goes through wards which are otherwise annoying. It also got more range and/or accuracy than most of your spells making it a prefered engagement tool especially since you can hold off on draining your main ressource until it's needed, so both at the start or the end of a fight the bow is a good tool to have. If you are melee a bow is still the prefered engagement method vs another melee ennemy as you will get free additionnal damage before they reach you, and can easily switch to melee when that's the case, it also allow you to attract ennemies to fight you in a more advantageous position. And it also allows you to reach otherwise unreachable ennemies, and in a game where the main boss ennemies are FLYING this is an obvious advantage. If you use alchemy it's the best way to inject poisons. Bows are also really good at cheesing overleveled ennemies (althoug magic wins here as the ressource is renewable meaning if you found a safe spot you can sit there forever, but a bow works fine enough in most cases). They also don't have to deal with random elemental resistances making their damage pretty consistent compared to magic. And even as a main weapon bows just deal good damage. If you level bows you'll find you deal similar dps throwing arrow in melee as you'd have done with a melee weapon, it's a bit awkward and definitely not the prefered way to do things but the point is that you're not sacrificing your damage by using a bow, it meshes well with any playstyle but it's a playstyle by itself. Oof that was a long list... AND IT'S NOT OVER BABY! That was what those weapon give to any playstyle without needing real investment or commitment. But the thing is those compound with each other. Bows range is usually high enough that sneaking while shooting arrows lets you kill ennemies before being detected, and it also make them the method of engagement of choice when sneaking. Remember that point about being a melee build that would rather engage in stealth first, and would rather whittle an ennemy with arrows before they reach you? Well if you do both you're whittling them down with arrow while they search for you and if they ever detect you AND reach you you can still fight in melee, it still didn't cost you anything. Stealth also mean sneak attack which on top of the bonus damage does mean less arrow spent on ennemies (which is usually negligible but you might have high quality arrows you want to preserve) and a easier time to hit your target since it moves less, so again, goes hand in hand well. But even at non combat utility bows go well with stealth. Bows can let you activate traps from afar or distract ennemies to a specific position which are doable but much harder with magic. Also if you are using magic to complement your stealth (with things like invisibility and silence) odds are you won't have magic to spare to cast spells while the bow and arrow is free. It is ridiculous how many advantages having a bow in your inventory gets you. Even if you are roleplaying a character you'd have to find a justification why they aren't pulling out a bow when it's obviously the right thing to do in that situation (and they are visibly proficient enough at it to use it). You have to actively try to not use a bow or never sneak. No matter your playstyle, from the most frontal warrior to the whimpiest mage the bow always has a place in your arsenal and so does the stealth button.
If you have Conjure Bow, the cost for Archery gets even lower - infinite arrows, and you use the most powerful bow in vanilla Skyrim and second best arrow (I think, it's been a while since I played Skyrim).
@@ivanpetrov5255 I mean, conjuring a bow does take more investment than getting into archery in general, but yeah it's worth noting that it's actually a good payoff for a conjuration build and synergizes well with summoning something to distract ennemies so we can add that onto the pile of minor reason why you'd naturally end up using a bow while pursuing something else
I love your enthusiasm for this game, but that all sounds... terribly dull. We've all completed the game numerous times, what's with this desire to number crunch and complete it in the most efficient way? Pure mage is and will always be the most fun. Unarmored, no melee weapons, just good old fashioned wizardry. High risk, sure. But high reward. Way more intense and varied battles. Stealth archer is so bland. One-shotting enemies, grinding for the best perk combinations every time, little jeopardy, minimizing risk as if your life depends on completing the game with no deaths, getting the exact same kills every time... it's like playing through a spreadsheet. I get the impression that many people who play like this will also spam Iron Daggers to level Smithing, and use the Alchemy exploit, etc. Isn't this a ROLEPLAYING game? What's with everyone's obsession with playing it the "meta" way? Completely misses the point of these games in my opinion. There's no right or wrong way to play these games, that's the beauty of them. But roleplaying a character with vulnerabilities and figuring out how to navigate your limitations, without reverting to stealth kills, exploits and cheesing, is a lot of fun. If you're doing the stealth archer meta (yawn), you can't roleplay as... - a scrawny, malnourished necromancer who relies on conjuration and raising the dead to fight for him - a skilled alchemist who travels Skyrim with a band of warriors protecting him so that he can find rare ingredients and make potions/poisons to strengthen them in battle. He will draw his sword if absolutely necessary but relies on his mercenaries using his concoctions - a Nord from Kynsegrove who rejects the Imperial pantheon and only worships the true Nord gods. A devotee of Kyne, he only hunts when it is necessary to feed his family and prefers to spend his time meditating atop mountains, relying almost entirely on Kyne's gift - the Thu'um - in battle - an exiled Alik'r warrior duel-wielding scimitars, who believes stealth is the dishonourable domain of a coward - a vigilant of Stendarr whose dominant arm was crippled in her youth and consequently struggles to wield weapons or aim bows. She cares not for bandits or dragons because her life's mission is to find and kill any daedric abominations she can find. She has mastered Illusion and Alteration to keep herself alive and uses sun damage spells from Restoration to deal damage - a pacifist who refuses to harm any living creature... until the full moon takes him... - a Dwemer researcher who is terrified of automatons so surrounds himself with a band of paid followers when delving into ruins. He is heavily armoured and carries only a sturdy shield to block attacks, knowing that carrying weaponry will only burden him and be of no use in combat with his lack of skill - a hand-to-hand martial artist Khajiit with speed, agility, raw strength, and claws which nobody wants to mess with - an aspiring Orc mage who left his stronghold to join the College, but not having a genetic predisposition to magicka, he relies on staves and scrolls in battle. He searches the province for legendary staves, even those of daedric origin... - an alcoholic mercenary who relies on liquid courage to find the bravery to delve into dark dungeons. As such, his aim with a bow is unreliable, but brute force with a two-handed weapon comes naturally to him - a druid who dedicates his life to protecting and preserving nature, and travels with bears and sabre cats using animal allegiance shouts (even spriggans if you use mods) - a cripple who lost all feeling in his legs during the Great War, but continues to fight until his dying days exclusively on horseback. Skilled with a bow or a sword These are just a handful of examples which don't use stealth archery, or destruction for that matter. Are they the most efficient way to play the game? Obviously not. Do some of them limit which quests you can do? Absolutely, but this is an RPG, and we've all completed the all the questlines numerous times over at this point, right? Will they result in a lot of deaths? Some of them, yes. Will they eventually run their course? Probably, but there is always another roleplaying idea to come up with. "Death means death" playthroughs are a way to keep things fresh and stakes high. You might find some of these suggestions boring, but I assure you you will stumble across some you like. This is an open world sandbox RPG, and the possibilities are endless. Sweating through the game with only the optimum strategies because their perks deal more damage and you can cheese enemies is robbing yourself of hundreds of ways to experience these great games. Just my take. Play however you like, as long as you enjoy it!
sneaking in morrowind even at high levels calls for casting invisibility. the difficulty is enough to drill the habit of quicksaving before all theft sessions into me.
@@AwareWolfOnWheels in a way. save scumming is to me more akin to playing rotk x where when defeating an officer's unit you can save state and run the fight until the rng has the officer become your prisoner instead of running away. several times in morrowind i've had the stealth indicator show hidden and still been reported.
I have a Skyrim playthrough right now where I was determined to play a mage - because I played a stealth archer when the game came out - and I think it's only entertaining because I am playing on the Anniversary Edition, which includes a bunch of broken spells and access to better gear than exists in the base game. my main takeaway from this run is that losing attributes - and to a lesser degree, skills - has been hugely detrimental to the magic system as a whole. like, if I was using magic in an earlier Elder Scrolls game, I would rely on Intelligence and Willpower to provide a baseline of power to every spell in the game. if I got Destruction up to 100, that meant I also tended to put a lot of points into Int and Will in the process. so, when I tapped into other schools of magic, I was still a powerful mage; it's just that the low skill meant I had a chance to fail to cast the spell. that was extremely elegant. with these separate perk trees, being a master of Destruction provides absolutely no benefit AT ALL to Restoration or Conjuration. I still have to level those trees to even have a chance at casting higher tier spells, but, I'm essentially treated no differently than a level 2 nooblord putting their first points into the Resto tree. that's still true even if I've become Archmage and taken down Alduin. add that unsatisfying mess to the fact that Skyrim has only a mere fraction of spell effects that we used to have, and Magic is an afterthought in Skyrim, at best. like, Detect Key or Detect Enchantment from Morrowind would be fantastic in this game, but they didn't even make the cut for Oblivion.
Impact. Destruction perk. Staggers anything you hit with a dual cast spell - even dragons and giants. You can kill essentially the entire game with Firebolt and not get hit by melee once you get the perk. But I prefer summoning a dremora lord and Incinerating everything. But forcing entire spawns to fight to the death is also fun. Magic is quite varied. Not nearly as much as previous games, but there’s a good bit of choice to it. Dual casting isn’t all about doing more damage. Also… atTRIButes would be multiple attributions, or credits. ATtributes are character details like strength. Inflection on the first syllable.
@@AwareWolfOnWheels The cost of the spell becomes 2.8x the normal cost for 2.2x the damage. This is only really viable when using a lot of spell reduction enchantments.
My first character was a stealth summoner, where I summon a fire lady then back off and shortly the enemy loses track of me, distracted by her, and she explodes when she dies. Rinse and repeat until dead.
This last month I tried 3 playthroughs, each only putting points into skill trees of a specific archetype. Even with enchanting, the Mage playthrough was a slog that felt underpowered. The Thief stone only had poison, so pickpocketing poison into people became the only wat to deal damage and it was way more fun than stealth archer, but the temptation was always there like you said.
Sounds like you and I have been doing similar things the last few weeks :P Reverse pickpocketing is such a goofy mechanic, but heavily relying on it does sound like an interesting playstyle
I wish stealth was implemented better in this game. When I have Sneak 100 I always prefer going in with dagger and stabbing everyone, but when it's not 100 stealth becomes almost impossible. Which is why Falmer have to be my favourite type of enemy. Take off your heavy armour, start moving slowly and don't bump into any of them (it's also like the one advantage of daggers, cause for some reason any other fucking weapon produces so much sound that everyone become instantly alerted
if you're playing stealth, you dont need armour. just wear clothing. and holster those daggers until you want you pounce, you move at incredible speed and are completely silent when you pull them out. just remember to put them away again until you need to move in quick for the kill again
In Skyrim there is a perk that when you crouch while discovered you vanish for a second. I once used it to take out 4 assassins that had a bounty on me. I crouched then sneak attacked 4 times in a row right in front of them.
I just wanna say for the record, I was gonna commit to a warrior build this run. But the game gave me a daedric bow of petrifying at level 8 in a dungeon chest. I took that as a sure sign that it was meant to be a stealth archer playthrough
@infected89 Yes that's correct. I'm pretty sure I have some manner of leveled loot mod enabled. Cause iirc, daedric items definitely can't spawn in dungeon chests when you're not even level 10. The game is modded because I refuse to play vanilla Skyrim 13 years after the game released
@@Tracker947 Admittedly modded. And it was a chest in a low level story dungeon. It wasn't bleak falls barrow, but it was maybe 8 - 10 hours after I did bleak falls barrow. Really, really weirdly early in the game
My playstyle in every Elder Scrolls game has been "pick cat for sneak bonuses and cover in heavy armor and give big chunk of metal for bonking". It worked against Dagoth Ur, Hircine, and Almalexia, it worked against Jyggalag and Marunes Dagon, and now it's working against Alduin, Harkon, and Miirak. I'm a simple man, and they're simple results.
Three reasons people gravitate to this style: It only needs 2 skills (archery and stealth). It negates scary enemies and the danger of getting hit. And finally, the thunk noise of stealth kills and chaining kills in slow motion is satisfying. It starts with players realising they can start combat from stealth for a damage bonus and to take on one enemy at a time. As skill increases they realise they can stay permanently crouched. Melee illusion is somewhat more powerful and fun though, as backstabs involve more risk element. And illusion frenzy can just clear dungeons very easily.
daggers and illusion are definitly more power options from stealth than bows for a high level charecter but they do have a significantly higher level of invesment needed in order to shows results so unless you are building for it from the beging you just use a bow from stealth and once you are already bowing it up there is never reelly a reason to stop since it is good enough
Talking specifically about the Labyrinthian section, while yes the magic drain presents a unique challenge to mages, you have to also consider the other factors of the dungeon, with the Staff of Magnus being capable of draining magicka at a distance from targets to allow you to cast, while Morokei gives light armor-using spellblade characters 100% extra magicka regen, which can potentially be useful as well. The dungeon itself also promotes magical combat with its many plateaus and causeways, and there's a section as well where it is tremendously easier to bypass a dangerous soul gem trap if you are capable of casting a ward spell, which the game hints at you by providing a warding tome close to where the trap is located. This builds upon the first lesson that Tolfdir teaches you when you start the questline. It's like saying the Companions questline is easier if you use magic, but then ignoring that the rewards you get from doing that questline are of particular interest to warrior type characters due to the Shield of Ysgramor being the second best shield in the game after Spellbreaker. It's not a masterpiece or anything but people are incredibly hard on Skyrim a lot of the time while ignoring some of the more subtle things they got right.
I agree. Of course dragons heavily encourage players, particularly new players (if that's even possible given the age of the game), towards an archer build. Especially if you start 'Dragon Rising' at a low level, which I think is what Bethesda intended.
Yeah even if you don’t play an archer the entire game dragon fights really incentivize at least some use of bows bc no one likes waiting fifteen minutes for the dragon to decide to land in a place you can actually whack them with a melee weapon
My first character was a Breton and I'm always playing a summoner in RPGs, so I naturally trended toward Conjuration. But just standing around and watching my minions isn't much fun. So I started using a bow. And then I noticed how much damage I could do at the start of the fight by crouching. And then I got better and better at hiding away if the first shot didn't kill them so that I could try it again. Pretty soon, the only reason I had conjuration was the bound bow 😅
My only stipulation with your description of the skyrim trinity is that ranged is not the 3rd, it is stealth, the skyrim trinity, is loud, quiet, and magic, magic works as a jack of all trades, so builds are unique and fun, loud builds allow for optimization of many different weapons and armors, keeping them fun, but for stealth, the optimal build is archer with a dagger as a secondary option, the benefits they both get from perks make stealth archer the defects stealth build, and it mostly comes down to the stealth mechanic being most efficient at range with a bow, if you could chain or sneak dash melee attacks other stealth builds become viable, but because of the combat system, the bow let's you fight multiple people while staying hidden, and a knife is great for a lone tough enemy, but because stealth only gets boosts from being hidden it means play passive or use a bow to fully use stealth Tldr, bows let you fight and remain stealthy, while all other weapons don't let you retain stealth
" if you could chain or sneak dash melee attacks other stealth builds become viable, but because of the combat system, " You can, it's called the invisibility spell.
I mean, its also a clear factor that one of the key enemies in the game are DRAGONS, who are not afraid to Spray and Prey from the sky until you can "convince" it to come down and bite you, meaning Ranged combat is already encouraged.
After watching your video, I can't help but be curious what you think about me: someone who broke away from the stealth archer on legendary and refuses to go back. Magic is a lot stronger than it gets credit for.
Stealth Archery solves the immediate problem of scaling and how we engage with the world. The shortcut to immense damage either from bound bow and their associated arrows that scales aggressively with illusion magic makes you feel VERY powerful with almost no investment. Enemies sometimes can't even fight back due to their own misfortune of being in a place with no way to get to you. As other comments have stated the kill cams feel good and as seen in "long shots" here on youtube you can actually play it skillfully without just abusing magic. Melee combat in skyrim without learning about it or min-maxing unmodded is a chore, takes significant setup/investment, and mostly crutches on using other skills/pot spam to stay healthy until you gain the perks to go ham. Magic is just LOUD archery without any scaling. You can do some really cool stuff with it. Wards to traps to manipulating objects to create physics interactions that snowball into absolute lunacy, but who wants to play 100s of hours using all those spells, honing that individual skill when 3 or 4 arrows or an equally leveled warrior just decapitates them with a power strike. Skyrim had very awkward power scaling for all the individual fighting types and I can't even remember unmodded play at this point.
I've been inspired to pick Skyrim up again after watching an "Ironman" ruleset video. Even with a bunch of self-imposed restrictions stealth archer bubbled to the top almost immediately. Another great video!
Yea, Imma comment before I made it throughout "the mage playstyle" but that part almost discoraged me from watching the video further, unlesss bro meant "bad" in a gamebreaking way. Dual casting, especially in vanilla, is always worth it and viable for any school of magic, unless you don't know what you are doing.
the problem with impact is that it is boring. it encourages spamming the same low-damage attack again and again and again until the enemy dies, which just fucking sucks imo I'd much rather play a melee character, at least with block you are encouraged to time your bashes to stunlock enemies.
Consider me an example of the opposite. I've never played a stealth archer. I attempted to multiple times, got bored and stopped early. Too easy on adept, outclassed by melee stealth on legendary.
The crafting skills are the biggest imbalance to me. Why would I not have smithing and enchanting outside of consciously limiting myself? Why would I wear robes as a mage when ill be just as effective in a full set of heavy armour outside of consciously limiting myself? Fallout has a similar issue with charisma stat and speech skill. There's never a reason to have any points in charisma outside of maybe 1 or 2 perks and speech is the best skill in the game especially in New Vegas but weirdly becomes one of the worst in Fallout 4
You wear robes because you're *not* as effective in custom heavy armor. The most powerful generic magicka regen enchants in the game (without exploits) are Master Robes of and a ring of recovery. Unless you're carrying your weight in restore magicka potions, you're gonna need that regen unless you neglect magic entirely until you've mastered enchanting and can make it free.
@@KelbPanthera you're right in the early game having the magic regen is good. But the end game for every single playstyle is smithing enchanting alchemy unless you want to consciously limit yourself. Especially for mages, alchemy being the only way for your damage to scale once you've stopped learning new spells
@RNS_Aurelius I'm a big time mage player. It's true that alchemy is an absolutely necessary for end game but you can neglect it for quite a while. Higher level spells, the augmented element perks, shalidor's insights, bought potions, and the Solstheim dragon priests' masks are all on the table too. Firing off incinerate, icy spear, or thunderbolt for ~380 damage each isn't bad at all. Smithing is worthless to a mage and enchanting is a mixed bag unless you're just straight-up negating magicka costs.
@@RNS_Aurelius learning all three is the reason for your imbalance. all races have 1 boost skill (except orcs which have two but have no healing magic). if you stuck to your race specific skill your character will struggle to get past level 42. now as stuff scales with you and destruction spells have set damage output and a limited number of skill points, normal to expert difficulty will remain a tough challenge.
The reason I never used magic in Skyrim was due to it feeling super weak. I "could" spent 5 minutes spamming fire bolts at an enemy, OR... I could just one shot the enemy with a two-handed crafted sword. OR... I could stealth snipe OHKO the enemy with a crafted bow. And on top of that, I remember it being relatively hard to make good spells in Skyrim too. Even with gear, and perks designed to reduce cast cost, and increase damage, it just never seemed to do much compared to martial weapon skills.
My first Skyrim character was a sword and boarder who organically morphed into stealth archer as I started running with the Thieves Guild. Was grateful I did by the time I hit the Dark Brotherhood and the rest of the later game activities. Seeing the meme grow has been a charming piece of my childhood that hasn't actually become nostalgia because I can still play a stealth archer whenever I want and live up to the meme 😂
I like your perspective on this topic for one simple reason: it resonates with how I approach games. The concept of "metagaming" in single player games always existed some way or the other in my mind in a sense that I've always tried to use the most optimal or more efortless way to go through the content of the game, sometimes even using legit yet gamebreaking stuff that literally obliterates games' fragile balance and sends it into the oblivion (not in the game called Oblivion, haha, pun intended). So, the concept itself was understood and accepted by me for quite some time, but I've never called it "metagaming" until around a year or two ago when I finally realized that this is indeed what can be called metagaming even if it is in singleplayer. And you are absolutely right: it is indeed very difficult not to use meta when you know that it exists and how you can use it to your own advantage. It's like an infohazard that poisons your mind and thoughts with just its existance, even if you don't use it. You just know that it exists abd you can use it if you want. And you don't see reasons not to until it is too late and a game loses its appeal due to how easy it becomes. I like that you pointed out this idea the way I would do that. Thank you for sharing your thoughts! I look forward to your next video however soon it will appear. Take care! 🤝
Or bystanders, for that matter. Lost count of times an NPC pushed themselves into my melee strike when fighting a dragon and being attacked by everyone for involuntary manslaughter.
There is some fun in meta rules on character. Especially when dealing with mods that add full LLM driven NPCs. I tried it once a few weeks ago and it changes your motivations in the game when npcs start commenting amongst each other about specific things they "see" you doing. It will make you "want" to play the role of an all powerful war mage or tank. Even the crafting builds become fun when you can hawk your wares to AI that will negotiate back at you.
Turns the NPCs into ChatGPT. It's got interesting applications for RPGs, since the NPCs can then react to anything, in theory, rather than just a set list of topics.
They are crap marketing, i agree.... but they make for interasting gameplay when they can talk back to you in character for video games like skyrim.@@Cethinn
Subscribed! You're funny. The sad part is that I play stealth archer (sniper) in ALL my open world games when its available... and it usually is. One time I set out to specifically make Rambo in Skyrim, shortly after the prologue I realized it was just the same thing I ALWAYS play with a Rambo looking skin, lol. Stealth archer is amazing in Oblivion as well. Wolves are a pain in the tall grass though, especially since they world level when you level. AND, I HAD to save scum ALOT to steal that glass bow from the tavern khajiit. I didnt play stealth archer in Morrowind! I played a dagger wielding psychopath who could kill guards... SLOWLY. One hand was a paralyzing dagger and the hand was a fire dagger... paralyze, stab-stab-stab, re-paralyze (x 50+ each), LOL. I showed my friend that I could tank 3 guards simultaneously, he just shook his head and "Whats wrong with you?!" Mind you he was playing a greatsword build and would crush things in a few hits. But I was having FUN!
5:23 I do it too, the internet has embedded a pedant into my brain that scrutinizes every thing that I say to make sure there's no _technical_ incorrection that someone can ignore the rest of my comment in order to harass me about
23:45 the main problem with archery being so op is the fact that yes, you can just not use it, but the gameplay will be significantly less fun knowing that you CAN use it and it takes effort to not use it which ultimately makes it less fun to play it also makes it to where if you don't want it to be op, you can't use it. there is no way to use it and not be op without creating more artificial limits
thanks youtube for sharing this video to me, I'll be waiting for this channel to explode I would like to see a video about the save system of Skyrim, I have always thought it was kinda silly that saving before each encounter was somewhat encouraged
If you're bored with stealth archery and want to have a ton of high stakes fun, do I have a viable build concept for you. Melee assassin that uses muffle and invisibility, one handed+daggers, and great stealth to sneak INTO groups of enemies and start picking them off. The challenge of pulling it off is thrilling, the combat gets cranked up to 11 as soon as you get caught, and it heavily rewards good timing (as you use your stealth roll to get out of detection trouble.) You do have to at least have muffle to pull this off at lower levels, so keep that in mind. But when you sneak into a group of Draugr so that you can assassinate the Death Overlord on Legendary difficulty? That experience is rewarding and thrilling. I highly recommend that you try this out for yourself.
1) dont wear armour, wear clothing! its silent, no need for muffle or invisabilty, also go at night time. 2) can totally avoid all skills on left hand side of sneak skill tree; thats for thieves, right hand side is for assassins) 3) holster your daggers until you want to move to strike, pulling them out makes you move really fast if only wearing clothes. 4) have lingering damage health potions, if you do get caught your enemy is dead in 2 swipes. its really not that challenging. fun?.........sure, challenging?................ no!
@@madisondines7441 yes, it's a stealth build. Only change you'll likely need is to dual wield power attack in the early game, and sleeping dragur would level that one handed skill seriously quickly. As a khajit I can usually leave Helgen with 30 sneak without cheesing ralof or hadvar. Why play on legendary though? 🤔 You get nothing for it, and you kill everything in one hit anyway with these builds totally negating the increase in difficulty
@@madisondines7441 it is until a orc in dwarven armour ambushes you with a fireball through the trees by Hilgrunds tomb. walking outside is dangerous. cursed sabre cats
As you can see from my Avatar, I played a Stealth Archer once, a long time ago. The last several years, I've been more of a Battlemage or Spellsword. This video has brought back a lot of memories, and I'll probably play a stealth archer again soon, a little more focused on fewer skills. Good video, Great analysis!
I think you're seriously undervaluing the use of non destruction magic! Especially illusion. I'm currently playing my assassin with illusion, and find myself just having the enemies kill each other via rage, or calm them and stab them repeatedly, instead of actually sneaking and stabbing (I purposely don't pick up bows) but similarly, using alteration's detect spells, the turn undead line or summoning spells is really powerful.
A lot of the higher level enemies you'll run into late game are straight IMMUNE to ALL illusion spells, even with all buffs and dual cast. So illusion doesn't just fall off, it literally dies in late game.
@@dragonmaster1360Name these enemies besides dragons. Because illusion can just straight up cross into the level 80-90 region with (no necromage) vampirism or potions
@@dragonmaster1360 dunno, there's a skill for that isn't it? But if that's the case, I#ll find out, also there will still be invisibility, to hard carry my stealth
I actually managed to beat the stealth archer, there was no full intent to do so, the intention was to make a death knight build. My death knight was a heavy armor 2 handed Goliath that used blood magic and necromancy and ever since playing that build I've been unable to pick up a bow and use it. Bows stopped being fun because I found my ideal Playstyle for the game. I was gonna type this earlier in the video but you said to stop typing what it was I was typing and so I decided to hear you out
I believe the Play style also taps into an instinctual ingrained behavior, dating back to the hunter gathering days. So it taps into that feeling of really hunting prey so to speak.
Great content man, seriously underrated channel. I enjoy your Morrowind vids, although I've been trying to lay off them since I don't want it all spoiled for me, as I'm just now playing it. I started with Oblivion, which I loved more than any game when I was a kid. Anyway, thanks for getting me into OpenMW. I never really played much as a stealth archer in Skyrim, which is weird since people often say it's impossible to NOT play as it. I always played as a warrior (although I did have one stealth playthrough) but honestly I can see what people are saying, it is just so freaking boring and repetitive to endlessly bum rush people and mash the buttons in Skyrim. Mage is the worst though imo, not even mashing the buttons just holding them down endlessly.
my first character ended up being a stealth archer not because of its strength or effectiveness, but as a culmination of my personality. i love being stealthy and generally sneaky and doing all the things with no one being able to see me. My first character was based off my first Dragon Age character, a dual-wielding rogue and after a while I kinda lamented not using a bow instead because of the range and because I've loved archery since I was a kid. It wasn't til I got a ways in that I learned it's strong, effective, and greatly rewarding getting those long-distance kill cams with nobody the wiser.
I love the dulcet doothing tones of his voice while having the constant sound of the soft music in the background. Listening to this while in bed trying to doze off is just the perfect video.
@Takarias hey thank you! And I did indeed fall asleep to it last night! Was just about to throw it back on to watch the whole thing from the beginning this time 🤟 Btw when you go in to play a new character in Skyrim and specifically have to force yourself not to pick up a bow, you know the game has a severe balance problem lol
Great video I expected the things you said to be the same old stuff you normally hear but this video ACTUALLY EXPLAINS why we as humans naturally devolve to the easiest strategy to win. Like why put forth the effort to do something else 10x as hard when you can do this other thing and get the same results for a fraction of the effort.
First character I ever played in Oblivion was a stealth archer. I love stealth, I love sniping and it was highly effective. When I progressed to Skyrim, I did the same and it was even more powerful. I tried being a mage in Skyrim. That lasted 2 hours, then I went back to the stealth archer. I've never tried a melee character. Why would I? You are absolutely spot on. Plus, it's a satisfying approach. You can see the damage (arrow in the head, yay I got a headshot) and there are more kill-cam scenes. It just feels better all round.
I'd argue that balance itself isn't the issue, but the accessibility of archery. You can snap Morrowind into tiny pieces with almost every skill available, but you have to figure it out first. It's a puzzle and it's very satisfying.
I’ve been streaming Skyrim over the past couple of weeks, started with a mage build. Will say that with Alchemy the Fortify Destruction potions you can make at 100 Skill and enchantments let you commit war crimes. These potions boost damage with most spells and the radius of cloaks. The patch that introduces some CC content also took destruction from meh to OP. Those elemental burst spells (fire/shock) have high damage for low magika cost. But I’ll assume these weren’t mention because we’re talking about a mostly “vanilla” version of Skyrim. I think they really should’ve let you have sneak attacks with certain spells. Like Ice spike can deal headshot damage. Imagine that with sneak criticals and quiet casting. Alchemy is the real MVP of the game. Fast money, broken damage. At about level 60 and 100 in all magic schools I’ve started using warrior and thief skills and having potions boosting my 1 handed by 100%+ is taking me well along my way to becoming an Ebony Warrior
Will add with dual casting that the math is shit but with the cost reduction enchantments and projectile spells you can stun lock enemies with the impact perk but in the high levels and high difficulties it’s pretty much just waiting for something to die rather then an engaging fight
I'm sure alchemy is great... but have you tried Magic Imbuing? That's been my go to since my first play through. Potions are short term, duration buffs. Magic items are permanent. Once I don a breastplate that triples my hitpoints as well as makes me regenerate faster than any heal spell, I can poke anything I want with a fork long enough to kill it. When your circlet makes fire damage hit for 400% damage, your weak fireball spell turns into a thermo-nuclear device... oh and it also costs no mana. Raising the skill, also like alchemy, will make you rich, with just a couple 'found' items to adjust prices. Plus just as easily abused with "restoration loops" to reach god tier numbers. It does all the same things with the benefit of always being on.
I love what Ordinator Perks mod did for Skyrim, honestly a must have if you wanna play a magic character, being able to play a stealth mage is so cool among other things
I primarily use two-handed and light armor. Dunmer. I use the shout that gives brief speed and stamina boosts. It's fun. I don't intend on getting really high level.
Another factor that determines how easily a particular playstyle can be used is how easy it is to level up the skill. Unless you realise how effective the "utility" skills of speech, alchemy, enchanting and smithing are in both generating cash for skill training and boosting the effectiveness of the combat skills, you're stuck with using skills that level up fast. Which the combination of sneak and archery both are. For mages, especially at higher difficulty levels, you need both the merchant perk and alchemy to buy training before it's safe to fight even low level bandits.
I would say the magic only playthrough with dual casting is saved with the Impact perk, which allows you to stagger opponents. My own memory of playing, the earlier bits are a challenging puzzle. Don't dual cast with novice spells but activate one at a time, and I think that conjuration is the second school you want to raise, and use whatever can stall opponents. Work towards alteration toward the middle when you can afford the extra magica of armour spells and being in the middle. It is a fun challenge.
Small story I feel like telling to elaborate on the "mechanics naturally lead into" part of this. Last year, I did a Dawnguard playthrough, and while I did use a couple combat mods, the primary mod I want to talk about is Vampire Killer - a mod that adds Castlevania's titular whip in as an evolving weapon, and also adds the five original subweapons as magic spells (which can also be upgraded after using them enough times). And before I get into how it went, I just wanna say: phenomenal mod, absolutely worth the download, the first and only time I've ever actually enjoyed a dedicated spellsword character. The throwing knives alone are worth the install, if you're into that sort of "weapon". However, those throwing knives are also the reason I'm telling the story, because they still fulfilled a similar role to the stealth archer. Since they're a spell, they don't benefit from the sneak-attack bonus or anything, so I wasn't really a "stealth" character. However, after defeating enough enemies with the base spell, it upgrades to a triple-knife variant; effectively tripling its damage output. The throwing knives are also the fastest and most spammable subweapon of the bunch, *and* you still get to hold a weapon in your main hand. So, surprise surprise, my playstyle turned into "spam throwing knives until an enemy gets close, then beat them to death". I did use some of the other subweapons here and there (the stopwatch in particular is probably the next best one), but for the most part, I was still fulfilling the notions that the game's design pushes you towards. That said, having two other party members also helped make up for the melee/magic shortcomings... which I think highlights how blah it is that vanilla Skyrim only lets you have one follower and one dog. Playing a heavy-armor vampire hunter wouldn't have been nearly as fun if I didn't bring both Erandur and Ma'kara (KWF) with me.
Great vid, so true on all accounts, we all have options, we all can force ourselves to not play the same style, and we sure do get a different experience, but its so true that we all suffer the same pull, same voices chanting "stealth + Archer", people can deny it all they want, fact is they just deluding themselves with compromises, they suffer the same pull we all do. Not saying they all succumb to them, but its still the same strong pull Post Edit : Skyrim does favor RANGED (this includes magic), a point you didnt add in which I feel contributes in a large way, is that dragons fly, ranged is often so much needed to fight them, and since magic is a little underwhelming, that really just leaves bow (I know you can melee, but its so much longer to do, as you need dragon to land, pre-Dragonrend Shout)
Awesome timing on this video, I just started another playthrough a couple of weeks ago. I always "force" myself to get destruction to 100 before I go full on stealth archer, so I can get the most out of double chaos/fiery soul trap enchant on my bow when I do swap over, but boy is that itch always there!! it's certainly a lesson in restraint....... At the end of the day for me personally, nothing beats stealthing through a dungeon and getting a 1 hit, sneak attack, kill shot on all the sleeping draugr. ( and, of course, now with the soul trap arrows that's double soul gems too, I know I will end up with far more souls than I can use and/or sell, but hey ho)
Being a mod boy really save this for me because I love filling Skyrim with magic mods and making it wizard simulator, I've literally never played Skyrim with weapons, it is THE magic game for me
I've taken on a more assassin approach with my latest character. She prefers killing with the dagger, something about "feeling their life leave their juggler" or some such. She also utilizes poisons
What's interesting is that the system is so ingrained that even moderate modding doesn't really change the game balance away from archery. Like even overhauls that bring up other builds still end up empowering archery as well.
I appreciate your approach to using less mods, evaluating the original game is key to analyzing it's flaws. "Balance" is subjective, in all games. If something makes sense in the real world, but players think that it is too powerful, should it be removed for the sake of balance? I've played Cyberpunk, on the max difficulty, and it was too easy for me until I began playing the game with no cyberware and then began modding the game. The problem with Cyberpunk was it's kinetic balance, the fact that the AI will not react as fast as the player or position properly against the player or use any of the same abilities the player does. The RPG balance became trivial when considering how well the player could abuse angles, positioning, let alone what you can do with Sandevistan and Netrunning. When I first started playing Skyrim on the High Elf mage, I was playing Skyrim was in that Warrior-Mage fashion, of doing everything poorly until you get good at it, and Legendary mode makes Magic pretty much useless except for engaging a fight after you've been discovered at range. My mage was always forced into melee, making me consider my movement very carefully in melee, and that's how I discovered this cute little, pattern if you will, with melee enemies. You see, every normal attack can be dodged if you strafe sideways into, and then sideways and backwards out of, your opponents attack range. But you cannot dodge heavy power attacks for some reason. No matter what you do, they will somehow find a way to hit you with the power attack. So you need to draw a sword and bash before they land it. This can be difficult to do with just one opponent out the gate, but nearly impossible to do while dodging arrows in the open, let alone with two or three melee enemies fighting you. Put some points into Block and Stamina for your bash, you should be good to go with fighting most melee opponents one on one, even if you're made of butter with 100 HP. So your positioning in Skyrim is still key for this playstyle, similar to a shooter game. But the problem with positioning, in general, is that enemies never account for the player's positioning, and therefore their positioning is always poor. This is why sneak in Skyrim is so good and yet so boring, enemies will not flush out the player after a certain distance, so you will never fail at sneaking away from the enemy if your positioning is accounting for this, taking the challenge out of the experience and leading into the stealth archer playthrough. But wait, I wanted to use magic! Yeah, every time I saw that Archery level go up, I immediately got jealous about how I wanted to do this with Magic. This issue, addressed in your title, I would find to truly be a kinetic issue with the world, the enemies and the limitations of the game, and not really an issue with RPG balance. However, I wish I could be a stealth mage too, which is hard to do, you can spam the Courage spell on a guard until you get the perks needed to cast spells quietly, I find that to be an unintuitive way to actually play that way. Yeah at this point I should just write a script.
There is actually a part of the pipeline (For me at least) that I feel is never mentioned. By the time my sneak is really high from all of my time bow hunting the denizens (Both nefarious and otherwise) of Skyrim, I end up pretty much abandoning the bow in favor of utilizing a dagger and sneaking around enemy camps so I can introduce it to their spleens and necks. For some odd reason, this playstyle really appeals to me, despite the fact that it probably requires the least amount of effort. Yes, my yearly Skyrim playthrough(s) will involve a stealth archer somewhere, but if that playthrough gets anywhere far, it will result in some kind of dagger assassin build. Just wanted to throw in my two cents because I wanted to add to the conversation. You have done splendid work in your research and presentation. You have definitely earned a subscriber!
When I started playing Skyrim in 2015, I spend the first few years just being your standard in-your-face, heavy-armor-wearing, Two-handed weapon-wielding warrior. It wasn't until the past couple of years that I decided to practice using bows. Once I got that down, that's when I graduated to favoring the stealth archer wearing light armor. I still keep a set of heavy armor and my trusty Elven warhammer on hand because I'm not always able to one-shot an enemy and active combat is too chaotic for me to use a bow.
I am myself working on a game of sorts where the thief in skyrim is the main inspiration, but by narrow scope can go much deeper. Playing stealth archer is still most viable from a combat perspective, but it also leaves a lot more evidence - which is a problem when you're trying to keep a low profile.
When I played as a kid it was stealth archer all the way, decided to get it for the steam deck for nostaliga and actively avoiding archery, going for a conjuration spellsword, I love the bound sword and atronochs. One thing I've noticed is all the dungeons/quests are significantly shorter than I remember, probably because I was sneaking around making strategic shots. Running in with a companion and conjured friends and getting to business is allowing me to experience it in a more manageable timeline, which I really apprecaite. Only time I bring out a bow is to fight dragons that never wanna land in Riverwood and I absolutely hate it.
This was a very well thought out and accurate video thanks. I would like to add to the thinking by pointing out if you are really into thematic role play and cheaty level up like I do(Xbox player) then you can gain those dozens of level by farming on the bear. Ironically when stealth archer is shown to a player and usually becomes so fun. But I honestly love necromancy. Mixed with stealth archer thief 🤣 Shadiss soulstealer. My Pyromancer build Phoenix ashborn (I love obvious names🤭) was dissatisfying and boring for the reasons you listed. My favorite character builds- Healer ONLY pacifist Or my shield only necromancer. That bash is so fun when unlocked. Just smash everyone down🤣 And fluffy. My kajhit who uses only gauntlets. It's so satisfying to be able to sell or display all the loot for armor and use the kitty to punch a dragon with one hit. Also it's endlessly hilarious when notes from the dark brotherhood mention killing fluffy🤣 So funny enough staying the game at level 90 can be very fun and makes me think level progression could be dealt away with for the sake of other intrinsic rewards.
Came back to Skyrim recently and to ween myself off of stealth archer I'm doing Illusion and dagger. Gotta say it's a lot more OP than I expected. The ability to calm a group of people and walk around cutting their throats hasn't gotten old. Only problem is I reset stealth because it was levelling so fast and that's right when the game started throwing Deathlords in every room of ruins which is rough without that 15X stealth crit
Spellsword is a really cool build that I would also say Skyrim is also optimized well for. Just focus on one handed damage and use magic in your off hand as a utility knife to deal with specific situations. Magic damage isn't great, but you'll probably focus on enchanted weapons instead. Turns one into a jack of all trades.
>Boots up new character.
>Set on playing spell/spell effects only.
>Lock in on illusion & conjuration.
>Muffle in left hand & Bound Bow in right.
And like that, it happened again.
Try Pacify instead, way more entertaining watching the AI have an existential crisis trying to figure out if you’re in combat or not
Legit my first playthrough ended up with those being my most used spells. Along with bound blade when it was time to fight in earnest,
@@johnsexton4352my alteration mage play though was SO much fun. I used companions and never actually saw combat the entire time
Unironically the best way to play an Archer. The Bound Bow has the stats of a Daedric Bow with a weight of zero, which makes it draw faster, giving it the highest DPS of any Bow, and also EXTREMELY broken in the early game. And the conjuration investment also gives you access to summoning extra meatshields to protect your squishy archer behind.
this happened to me just now 😂
You forgot the most critical thing. It feels good, kill cams are nice, exploring slowly is nice and it incentivizes lateral thinking and problem solving which tingles the smart monkey brain parts
I think that's the primary reason for playing that way: the cool kill cams.
@@octavianpopescu4776 also landing a kill shot on a deer early game is the most satisfying thing you can do
There's definitely an element of feeling like it rewards player skill more than other playstyles. Knowing which enemy to take out, when to take them out, and where to take them out from that your attack goes mostly unnoticed, as well as actually hitting a shot on a distant moving target.
While you can break the game just as much with the other playstyles, it's either through pure numbers or through free and unblockable stuns. There's nowhere near as much element of feeling like you have to actually be good.
@@octavianpopescu4776 This is definitely part of it. For stealth characters, the kill cams reward your good gameplay with shots of your character being skilled at the thing you built them to do. For other characters, they tend to interrupt the flow of combat and hinder your ability to do things that make those characters feel competent.
I love being stealth because you can see exchanges between enemies who would see and hear you otherwise from the other end of the dungeon. You can see how the natural wildlife act while they are not aware of your presence.
Magic got downgraded IMMENSELY in Skyrim. The lack of min-maxing customization we lost is why it became unsatisfying for me. I usually role a mage character in games.
Yep. It's really sad. In Morrowind magic was very fun to use. (It also was able to break the game easily, but it's magic so I think it's fine.) There were a lot of ways to interact with the mechanics in interesting ways to improve your abilities, and gathering spells to make custom spells with was fun. In Oblivion the capability got nerfed a lot, but it was still good enough to be fun. In Skyrim you're better off just ignoring it. There's almost no utility to benefit from and the damage spells are weaker than any alternative more easily accessible.
IIRC Todd liked playing a Barbarian style character, and it seemed had a grudge against how much utility mages had, but just make enchanted items and spell scrolls more accessible instead of removing anything interesting from it.
Morrowind even had a bunch of utility effects available through potions and scrolls, so it's not like they haven't solved this problem before.
It'snot that bad. I am playing thru for the first time since the game came out but without any melee (been there done that with oblivion back in the day.) It actually becomes OP as hell, if you know how to properly use alchemy you can break the game as a mage. It just takes a bit of patience to get the items and perks to get in to that point. But in retrospect its a whole new game compared to spamming attack button and stealth archery in all my previous runs.
Well, the mage gameplay in MW was as awesome as it was unhinged - a true freedom you can hardly find anywhere else. Oblivion was a bit nerfed, yes, but you still had a lot of freedom, enough to have to be careful not to make anything gamebreaking. Skyrim - well being a mage is more challenging, true, but once you get gear enchanted to spam spells like a machine gun for no cost, it becomes quite the fun. Especially those elemental blasts added later. And paralyze rune, that one is BRUTAL😂 but I have to get rid of any follower, since they die too quickly. After that... Boom boom BOOM time🤘
I have SO MUCH fun playing Necromancers. It's the best, most fun magic strat. If you REALLY want to have fun, do Azura's quest, and when you get to the guy's skeleton, ressurect him. Maximum fun.
Another issue is that magic doesn't scale damage in skyrim. A level 1 mage can cast a 40 point fireball. A level 50 mage can cast at best about 130 damage fireball. A level 1 archer can hit around 15 damage with unupgraded tools. My last character at level 28 archer hit for 128 damage before arrows, enchantment, poison, and stealth bonuses. I added fiery soul trap and chaos damage to my bow. I hadn't even maxed out my smithing, enchantment, destruction bonues, or alchemy yet. I checked the math at one point and if I poisoned my bow, drank an archery potion, landed all 3 chaos effects, and wore archery boosting equipment, I would hit for over 700 damage. So if I hit a steath hit, I'd slam them for over 3,000 damage. I basically fought peasants with a bolt action 50cal.
It's pretty wild how much Mages fall off in the later levels. Rough early game, rough endgame...
It basically forces the player to actively not level melee, ranged, or armor skills and to not prestige/legendary skills for more points in order to remain viable. Some spells entirely stop working at high enough levels without modding (looking at you, Illusion).
That's because magic's main strength isn't "raw damage" in Skyrim, it's Summon Dremora Lord spam+Destruction Impact stunlock as support. Combined with Quiet Casting perk from Illusion and some investment in sneak and you can't die just from the fact that you won't even be targeted by enemies that are perpetually distracted by your summons and losing attrition.
Yes, the spell school named "destruction" isn't actually for doing damage, it's stupid like that, blame Todd or whoever for the way it is.
@@stranger7131 Yeah, I was going to reply with "what about Impact!?" -- but you already mentioned the OP stunlock mechanic. 😆
@@josephpercy1558 so my options are to stunlock an enemy to death, and hope none of his buddies kill me or instant kill him from 30 yards away? Why would I ever choose magic? Todd hated Morrowind's magic so much he drug skyrim's magic out back and shot it.
I'd also add that one reason it feels so good to play a stealth archer in Skyrim is the map design. It's hardly always a flat plain, and instead gives you several vantage spots from which you can approach an enemy. Whether it's a hill, a tower, a rooftop etc... the game encourages you to look for higher ground in order to have an advantage, and oftentimes it rewards you with such advantage.
Then there is the reverse! You spot a group of enemies, they haven't noticed you yet. You have the low ground so if you approach the archers and mages of the group are gonna be taking lots of pot shots at you while you fight the melee fighters. So you pull out a bow, and shoot one of them first... Dead.
The enemy group is alerted but they don't know where you are. You shoot the other ranged enemy.... Dead
Now they know where you are. They start running towards you.... You have a bow in hand already, might as well shoot them before they reach you.
Because their AI lacks any sort of "group tactics", or concept of cover, they all B line straight towards you on the same path usually one at a time. Dead. Dead. Dead before anyone got within melee range.
Oops you just Archered them all.
Plus there is a reason long range weapons are very strong. Killing something before it even touches you or even knows you're there is how you survive long term. Period. Imo the early magic and sword/board isn't as strong as it should be to offset the strength of the sneak bow.
@about99ninjas56 it also feels nice because it gives you the chance to actually feel like your arrows are lethal. The enemies aren't damage sponges if you hit them just right, or your bow and arrows are strong enough.
The worst thing about trying to snipe enemies from high ledges is the game's inability to shoot an arrow downward at any sort of sharp angle without shooting it into the dirt at your feet. If you shuffle closer to the edge, you fall off. If you stand up, every man and his dog knows you're there. If the crosshair is sitting firmly over the bandit leader's face, why do I keep shooting myself in the foot just because I'm crouched? It's maddening and always makes me curse Todd Howard and all of his descendants.
An important reason that archery is something everyone is drawn to is that dragons are almost impossible to kill otherwise. In the early parts of the game your spells are short range, so until you unlock Dragonrend or higher level magic the bow is your only option for fighting the most common reoccurring boss in the game. You can't even unlock shouts until you kill a dragon, and you need a ranged weapon for that.
Fire and Storm Atranochs are pretty good options as well, of course. I find they're even better at taking down dragons than bows or shouts are. But you need to have high enough Conjuration to make the spell books spawn, purchase and learn them specifically, and then think to use a fire elemental against a fire breathing dragon before you'll ever get the chance to use them against a dragon. And before that happens, you'll probably have already picked up a bow.
You say that like I didn’t immediately go and master magic after reaching Whiterun and becoming a werewolf. I was like, “Oh, Companions sounds cool” when reading the instruction manual or whatever, then went, “Oh, Circle? Cool. I’m becoming a werewolf.” Then become Archmage of the College Of Winterhold. Then did everything else lmao
Fire and storm atronarchs are terrible, they have too few magicka and their AI focuses on ranged combat through spell attacks. Only frost atronarchs (unusually tanky for its level), dremora lord (summonable AGGRESSIVE humanoid melee NPCs with two handed weapon staggers), dawnguard (decently tanky skeletons), and Creation Club summons are actually decent.
@@stranger7131 Focusing on range is the point - they actually have attacks that can hit dragons, and they regularly use them. Fire Atranochs in particular are immune to fire breath attacks like most dragons use, so they'll survive long enough to bring the dragon down.
As for magicka, the fact that they come with their own pool is a good thing. They don't eat into yours after the initial summoning, and they regenerate magicka on their own, so they can keep casting spells. In the early game you can run out of magicka after a few firebolts, but for less mana you can get more firebilts from a Fire Atronoch.
It doesn't scale to late game, but this isn't about late game. This is about early game, before you've mastered Destruction magic or have the Dragonrend shout. This is about alternatives to using the bow to ground a dragon.
@@normal6483 If you want to fight dragons then just time destruction impact staggers to cancel their breath attacks, very easy to hit against the hover breath attack (which is probably the only really dangerous breath attack because who cares about the wildly inaccurate strafe version), and also easily done with the lightning bolt just because it's a hitscan attack. Also their accuracy (especially against flying dragons) is terrible if ranged attacks is your point of using them, and no, their magicka pool is so small that they'd immediately run out of them pretty quickly and while NPCs do regenerate magicka a lot faster in-combat than the player do, it's still pretty slow. Still, they ARE disposable ally NPCs that can distract the dragon, you are that much correct, but again, frost atronarchs or those other summons I mentioned likewise occupy the same role. And hey, you can only have two summons outside of ritual stone abuse, and spending it on something low impact as low damage output ranged ones is rather poor use of it.
@stranger7131 You need 50 Destruction to unlock Impact, meaning you'll already be halfway to maxing it out, and thus have already started fighting dragons with bows. You are at the point I talked about earlier, where you are strong enough in magic that it's no longer early game.
Also, while Frost Atranochs are great against a lot of enemies, this is about dragons, who fly. Why would you bring up bad aim when the alternative is being completely unable to attack at all.
Their aim is better than a controller users, because they can hit a flying dragon while most controller users need to wait for the dragon to hover before they can fire. So aim-wise they still have great aim, anyways. But even if they didn't... the alternative is still a summin that does nothing.
One thing I noticed when doing the restoration potion loop exploit is that you can get to a point where you can one shot everyone with a flick of your finger and are functionally immortal. The relevance is that when you encounter a dragon, the literal main gimmick of this iteration of the series, you are almost useless until the dragon decides to perch long enough and near enough for you to get a hit in. So despite being technically more powerful than literal gods, you still need to invest into archery.
You know what also encourages players to go stealth archer? The main selling point of Skyrim. The bloody dragons.
Unless you speed run getting Dragonrend, what is a melee build going to do against the flying buggers? But if you’re already sneaking, of some of that slow time and zoom, then all of a sudden you’re going more damage and a bigger amount of damage than any mage that has to flail around with a sparks spell that’s not in range and more likely to miss.
The game’s marketable enemy is forcing you to take up a bow.
I'm not an effective archer in active combat. Until I get Dragonrend, I just wait for the dragons to land and wail on them with my favorite warhammer. My archery is put to better use during dungeon crawls and I'm not always able to one-shot an enemy so my warhammer stays my secondary weapon for active combat situations.
Dude, the player can get become etheral shout pretty early on for a reason. You are suposed to fade the moment the dragons shout at you until they come down. Works like a charm
Me, who always plays a paladin (Heavy armor, one-handed, block, restoration, illusion): "Hmmmm, yes..."
Also a fun playstyle! I had a lot of fun with the melee character I made for this video, and I've enjoyed melee and melee/magic hybrid builds in the past. :)
It's just i feel like i have to harshly force myself to be that even if it means compromising on fun.
My favorite food is vegetable soup *turns into a god for 11 minutes*
I'm close to that: light armor, one-handed, restoration, illusion, sneak. I call my style stealth knifer. And it's not just in Skyrim, but I like to play this way in every game that I can. I was a stealth knifer in Elden Ring too. I was sneaking around taking enemies out one by one, whenever it was possible.
@@octavianpopescu4776You should check out Dark Souls 1 and 3 in case you haven't. You're going to LOVE the Bandits Knife
I played stealth archer once and only once. Spellsword is always what I end up defaulting to.
Spellsword is definitely my preferred build. Nothing like a spell in one hand and an enchanted axe in the other. Plus it means I can actually inflict weakness to magic poisons
I almost always played stealth archer like everyone because I'm no fool, but I also had a lot of fun as a spellsword/battlemage once (I went with battlemage; the latter were traditionally more heavily armored). The "enemies attacking you as you blast them with flames" isn't as much of a problem when you can spray them as they charge at you, and then hack them down with one or two hits when they reach you, having been already weakened by the flames.
It's a shame they made the game in a such a way that stealth archer was generally more (in most people's opinion apparently) and OP, because logically, it seems like, in a world where you can be a Jedi (ie magically-enhanced warrior, ie Spellsword/Battlemage), it seems like that would obviously be the ultimate. This is why I was always annoyed by the D&D attempts at balance and thought settings like Ars Magica were so cool. Obviously normal people and those with the ability to bend reality to their will aren't "balanced". Mages are walking artillery, so why should they be "balanced" anymore than cavemen are balanced with modern infantry? By why does having powers have to make you a weak, skinny bookworm? You can come up with justifications if that's the kind of setting you want, sure, but...why should you? Why can't they also hit the gym every now and then, and even use magic to make them faster and stronger?
Same thing happens with me. I've played a Stealth Archer about 2 or 3 times, and I always find it incredibly slow, and boring. I typically end up defaulting to Spellsword, or Two-Handed Warrior.
It's not just the most optimum play style, it's the most compelling too. Both magic and melee consist on pointing at the enemy and pressing a button ad infinitum while managing your health/magicka/stamina. When you're a sneaky archer, you need to sneak without being caught, position yourself, account for the arrow drop, correct in case the target is moving... It's way more compelling.
I dunno I always find it boring to use stealth archer. It's not hard. Just wait for em to stop and fire a few arrows until you get it right. The ai is so dumb that they won't notice if you do it fast enough.
*laughs in two handed axe wielding heavy armored berserker*
Stealth archer is too much of a time commitment for my impatient shrimp brain
What? Not two-handed mace? Nerveshatter is the "Win Button" of two-handed weapons, and all you need to get it are a piece of Amber and a piece of Chaos ore. It's stupid OP. ='[.]'=
funny enough, stealth archer often kills enemies faster
Great video! Also I think that the stealth archer build grants the most compensatory mechanical upgrade, like slowing down time and zooming in your targets. We don't really see a mechanical change like that in other builds, who usually just reduces damage taken and increases damage dealt if you use a certain weapon/armor/element (I'm just being very rough here, but it is what it feels like)
Maybe this was not a thing in Oblivion, because there were more meaningful mechanical changes that had more weight in each skill tree, like being able to paralyze an enemy when using fists or knocking down enemies with your arrows
I don't have the skill trees in front of me right now to go through them all, but block has a few mechanical perks. There's a time slow, disarming chance, and a sprinting shield bash. Most perks are just "X% more damage," though
@@Takarias oh? Might be a good reason for me to explore the blocking skill, didn't know that. I'm playing as a mage this time but it sometimes feels unrewarding indeed, I believe it might be mostly because of this "X% more damage" thing or "now you can do damage to THAT enemy too!", even though I believe the Illusion school is a little bit different from that logic
@@tic5418 I'm considering making a new character that leans on Illusion as much as I can. There's a few interesting perks in there that feel like there should be something to them.
@@Takarias Block's problem is how big of a pain it is to level to get to the interesting perks. Until you reach the point you can survive teasing a giant for skill ups, you level too slow to get to any of the fun ones. I remember having a pain finding the high level trainer for block too, but I may have just been a dolt.
There's also the habit in early to post-mid game of enemies just onehit kill you the moment they get in range - so that's a push factor you didn't mention.
I once made an army vet char. Expert difficulty, Alternate Start in Solitude, join the legion right away, no side quests till victory (this guy doesn't go awol), only use Legion issued armor and weapon, plus the once liberated from the stormcloaks, survival mode on [this makes getting to the battlefield an actual challenge instead of just being tedious busywork]. If you want to try it, this is actually a pretty engaging way to play the civil war questline.
Drawbacks, you're broke the hole time, for you can't carry enough loot, to sell and pay for the necessary food, potions and shelter. So you'll be hunting for food very quickly instead. See where I'm going? Also whenever you'll arrive at the battlefield you'll be frozen half to death, probably starving and in desperate need of sleep. Well that's no condition to get pummeled on by a bunch of longblade wielding stormcloaks... Then you'll remember that hunting bow, crouch behind your comrades and become a stealth archer.
Too make at least some money, I also had this char turn all the animal skins into leather armor, upgrade them and later even enchant them for additional value. The cheap soul gems lie about everywhere, and one is filled everytime you hit a deer. So my army vet character ended up being - an "arcane blacksmith merchant stealth archer", with basically no points in melee, but maxed out haggling. Ditched the armor alltogether once my tour of duty was complete.
Still it's an engaging setup for a character and you'll feel as desperate as real life civil war, drafted at level 1, soldier should - unless you safescum or use the console ^^
I think another issue with melee versus archery is that weapon poison only lasts for one hit which is much easier to understand with a bow than a sword. And you can’t apply poisons at all with magic. My mage characters take out a bow to apply weakness to magic poisons to dragons so that my destruction magic can actually deal enough damage for its cost
It would make sense if the poison was weaker on swords, but each hit 'stacks' in a way, able to poison multiple targets, while on an arrow, it's strongest to a single target as they get the full effect. A much better balance. Not sure about Mage, though.
@@Daltonisntabot Magic should probably benefit more from, or have more options for, potions. There's no good lore-friendly way to make poisons work for magic pures. They should also have access to spells and enchantments that can do similar things to poisons.
@@Cethinn I agree, just not too sure how you'd do that, unless it's done kind of Ward or something that activates in hit, like a Rune on the clothes or something. Maybe if you defeat someone, a poison Rune is placed where they're at. Definitely more utility though for Mages in Elder Scrolls 6.
Poison technically only lasts for one hit in archery, too, because the (vanilla) game pop-up indicates "Do you wish to poison your bow?" No, it should be poisoning your arrows, and doing it in multiples.
I had an idea for throwable poisons with AOE effects. Would be able to give utility to any character - explosives, smokescreens, lingering poison gas...
One underrated effect of the stealth archer is that it just feels good to defeat a foe with 1 or 2 blows. Most other methods (e.g. melee/magic) require spamming attacks over and over which makes them feel less good (i.e. more "noodle-like").
I think stealth dagger is even better for that tbh, with good investment in all the crafting skills and all other realavant perks I was able to do some 12 000 damage in a single sneak attack wiht no exploits or loops whatsoever, that's enough to oneshot both Alduin and Miraak.
@omppu3487 stealth melee is great, but it requires a high stealth skill, or you will get spotted as you approach. Stealth archers bypass that limitation by shooting from range and thus before detection, so it is "unlocked" from the get go.
I was looking for this comment. Paddling a bandit feels ludicrous. Melee is dull. With the exception sort of being set piece civil war battles.
@@omppu3487 craft is THE EXPLOIT/CHEAT in this game.
@@nicolasoliveira4903 I personally wouldn't classify a fully intentionally designed game mechanic an exploit, just bad balancing. Now if you make a loop out of fortify effects that's a different story, but I didn't.
Easy changes you could make to Skyrim's magic that would make the mage style more appealing, to rival stealth archer:
- you get the long range, fireball spell to start, instead of short range flames
- ward is a starting spell for Bretons and High Elves
- casting ward only depletes magicka when it blocks damage, or is very very cheap to cast and costs more when blocking damage
- if you start casting ward at the same time as the damage hits, you take zero of that damage, like a parry move.
- there is a stealth bonus for magic attacks (I always mod it in before playing)
- the mage armour spells have health not duration - recasting them all the time is tedious, so cast them whenever and they last until you take too much damage
- illusion needs spells that can be used in combat, eg: cast blindness on an enemy, and avoid them as they swing wildly
There are a lot of great ideas here but I propose some alternatives:
Ward needs to be completely reworked. A magic shield is a great idea but having it take up a hand slot is not. Dual-casting is integral to effective magic use, especially for Destruction at high levels. Having to give that up to deploy a shield isn't a good solution. It's not a good solution for physical shields either, honestly.
Rather than having time or health mage armor should just be permanent until dispelled and reduce your maximum magicka by its cost as long as it's active. Casting it again while active should dispel it and return your maximum magicka along with 25% of the cost to your current magicka, with a perk to increase that to 50%. Then add touch, distance, and AoE spells to dispel others' mage armor without returning any to current magicka, and maybe a perk to absorb some of it for yourself when you succeed.
Aside from that I agree wholeheartedly with everything, except that players should get to choose whether they want Flames or a long-range fire spell.
Also basic damage scaling at least for Destruction
This is funny because Illusion has Combat Spells, just see the Frenzy Spells.
Sneak in, Throw Voice to group enemies, cast AoE Frenzy and watch them kill themselves.
Combine this with Conjuration to resurrect an Enemy to cause more Havoc, and the Illusion Perk that makes you spell casting (and Shouts because they're "magic") silent and you have a very competent playstyle.
@@Heyhowsitgoin999 i don't think frenzy qualifies as a combat spell. I see it as a preemptive strike to allow the opposing force the opportunity to reduce themselves for my benefit.
Then the combat begins
I like your suggestions 👍
I've been saying it for ages.
Stealth archery is a combination of two playstyles with both very low cost to entry and opportunity cost and that synergize well together and can also fit into any build or be a build in and of themselves both individually and together.
First sneak. The cost to entry is incredibly low as the sneak button is always available and it's only cost is movement speed. The goal of stealth is to get to a point without getting seen (duh) and that makes it so that it's always the right option no matter what you want to do.
Want to go by unnoticed? well if you don't sneak that won't happen.
Want to engage an ennemy in melee? well you could charge in and get hit by ranged attacks, or you could sneak in and either you get spotted and you are in the same situation, or you don't and you end up in your favored spot able to engage the ennemy directly, maybe a more favorable ennemy than the one you'd have had to engage otherwise (and as a bonus you might get a sneak attack).
Want to engage ennemies at range? Well you don't have to sneak but sneaking makes it more likely for you to reach a favorable range for yourself and a vantage point that's hard to reach, and again if you get spotted you will still be in a better position than if you just walked in so it's better to do than not.
Those are assuming you don't take risks, the point is that even at zero risk you still get benefit from stealth, if you take risks you can get larger benefit but that's an option you don't have to. We're not comparing dangerous sneaking venture with no sneak. We're comparing sneaking to go to the same place as you would without sneaking, the low movement speed is only a cost to your patience as if you look at it from the ennemy's perspective you effectively teleported closer to your objective if you only count the distance traveled undetected, it's similar to using a shout like whirlwind sprint to get to an advantageous position. So yeah in a moment to moment gameplay there is no reason not to sneak as long as you are undected (especially since resuming to normal speed is pretty much instant).
The "moment to moment" gameplay matters as if you're trying to optimize a character, gaining levels can be detrimental so you might opt to avoid some actions, but if we're talking path of least resistance then your build will be decided by moment to moment effective gameplay, not long term optimization.
Now onto archery. The cost to entry is a bit higher as you need a bow and arrows but those are extremely easy to come by, you'll find a bow in the tutorial, and arrows are littered everywhere as you have access to your ennemy equipment on death (you can't loot their spell for exemple so magic is much harder to come by). It's also useful to note that arrow have a gold value but no weight, which means you should *always* be looting arrows even if you don't have or plan to use a bow. So yeah, most likely you'll have a bow and some arrow lying around. And similar to stealth the opportunity cost is very low.
If you are a mage the bow allows you to keep dealing damage without using your main ressource of magicka, and without taking additionnal risks. It also goes through wards which are otherwise annoying. It also got more range and/or accuracy than most of your spells making it a prefered engagement tool especially since you can hold off on draining your main ressource until it's needed, so both at the start or the end of a fight the bow is a good tool to have.
If you are melee a bow is still the prefered engagement method vs another melee ennemy as you will get free additionnal damage before they reach you, and can easily switch to melee when that's the case, it also allow you to attract ennemies to fight you in a more advantageous position. And it also allows you to reach otherwise unreachable ennemies, and in a game where the main boss ennemies are FLYING this is an obvious advantage.
If you use alchemy it's the best way to inject poisons.
Bows are also really good at cheesing overleveled ennemies (althoug magic wins here as the ressource is renewable meaning if you found a safe spot you can sit there forever, but a bow works fine enough in most cases).
They also don't have to deal with random elemental resistances making their damage pretty consistent compared to magic.
And even as a main weapon bows just deal good damage. If you level bows you'll find you deal similar dps throwing arrow in melee as you'd have done with a melee weapon, it's a bit awkward and definitely not the prefered way to do things but the point is that you're not sacrificing your damage by using a bow, it meshes well with any playstyle but it's a playstyle by itself.
Oof that was a long list... AND IT'S NOT OVER BABY!
That was what those weapon give to any playstyle without needing real investment or commitment. But the thing is those compound with each other. Bows range is usually high enough that sneaking while shooting arrows lets you kill ennemies before being detected, and it also make them the method of engagement of choice when sneaking. Remember that point about being a melee build that would rather engage in stealth first, and would rather whittle an ennemy with arrows before they reach you? Well if you do both you're whittling them down with arrow while they search for you and if they ever detect you AND reach you you can still fight in melee, it still didn't cost you anything.
Stealth also mean sneak attack which on top of the bonus damage does mean less arrow spent on ennemies (which is usually negligible but you might have high quality arrows you want to preserve) and a easier time to hit your target since it moves less, so again, goes hand in hand well.
But even at non combat utility bows go well with stealth. Bows can let you activate traps from afar or distract ennemies to a specific position which are doable but much harder with magic. Also if you are using magic to complement your stealth (with things like invisibility and silence) odds are you won't have magic to spare to cast spells while the bow and arrow is free.
It is ridiculous how many advantages having a bow in your inventory gets you. Even if you are roleplaying a character you'd have to find a justification why they aren't pulling out a bow when it's obviously the right thing to do in that situation (and they are visibly proficient enough at it to use it). You have to actively try to not use a bow or never sneak. No matter your playstyle, from the most frontal warrior to the whimpiest mage the bow always has a place in your arsenal and so does the stealth button.
If you have Conjure Bow, the cost for Archery gets even lower - infinite arrows, and you use the most powerful bow in vanilla Skyrim and second best arrow (I think, it's been a while since I played Skyrim).
@@ivanpetrov5255 I mean, conjuring a bow does take more investment than getting into archery in general, but yeah it's worth noting that it's actually a good payoff for a conjuration build and synergizes well with summoning something to distract ennemies so we can add that onto the pile of minor reason why you'd naturally end up using a bow while pursuing something else
Unexpected RAND analysis
@@tamlandipper29 RAND?
I love your enthusiasm for this game, but that all sounds... terribly dull. We've all completed the game numerous times, what's with this desire to number crunch and complete it in the most efficient way? Pure mage is and will always be the most fun. Unarmored, no melee weapons, just good old fashioned wizardry. High risk, sure. But high reward. Way more intense and varied battles. Stealth archer is so bland. One-shotting enemies, grinding for the best perk combinations every time, little jeopardy, minimizing risk as if your life depends on completing the game with no deaths, getting the exact same kills every time... it's like playing through a spreadsheet. I get the impression that many people who play like this will also spam Iron Daggers to level Smithing, and use the Alchemy exploit, etc. Isn't this a ROLEPLAYING game? What's with everyone's obsession with playing it the "meta" way? Completely misses the point of these games in my opinion.
There's no right or wrong way to play these games, that's the beauty of them. But roleplaying a character with vulnerabilities and figuring out how to navigate your limitations, without reverting to stealth kills, exploits and cheesing, is a lot of fun. If you're doing the stealth archer meta (yawn), you can't roleplay as...
- a scrawny, malnourished necromancer who relies on conjuration and raising the dead to fight for him
- a skilled alchemist who travels Skyrim with a band of warriors protecting him so that he can find rare ingredients and make potions/poisons to strengthen them in battle. He will draw his sword if absolutely necessary but relies on his mercenaries using his concoctions
- a Nord from Kynsegrove who rejects the Imperial pantheon and only worships the true Nord gods. A devotee of Kyne, he only hunts when it is necessary to feed his family and prefers to spend his time meditating atop mountains, relying almost entirely on Kyne's gift - the Thu'um - in battle
- an exiled Alik'r warrior duel-wielding scimitars, who believes stealth is the dishonourable domain of a coward
- a vigilant of Stendarr whose dominant arm was crippled in her youth and consequently struggles to wield weapons or aim bows. She cares not for bandits or dragons because her life's mission is to find and kill any daedric abominations she can find. She has mastered Illusion and Alteration to keep herself alive and uses sun damage spells from Restoration to deal damage
- a pacifist who refuses to harm any living creature... until the full moon takes him...
- a Dwemer researcher who is terrified of automatons so surrounds himself with a band of paid followers when delving into ruins. He is heavily armoured and carries only a sturdy shield to block attacks, knowing that carrying weaponry will only burden him and be of no use in combat with his lack of skill
- a hand-to-hand martial artist Khajiit with speed, agility, raw strength, and claws which nobody wants to mess with
- an aspiring Orc mage who left his stronghold to join the College, but not having a genetic predisposition to magicka, he relies on staves and scrolls in battle. He searches the province for legendary staves, even those of daedric origin...
- an alcoholic mercenary who relies on liquid courage to find the bravery to delve into dark dungeons. As such, his aim with a bow is unreliable, but brute force with a two-handed weapon comes naturally to him
- a druid who dedicates his life to protecting and preserving nature, and travels with bears and sabre cats using animal allegiance shouts (even spriggans if you use mods)
- a cripple who lost all feeling in his legs during the Great War, but continues to fight until his dying days exclusively on horseback. Skilled with a bow or a sword
These are just a handful of examples which don't use stealth archery, or destruction for that matter. Are they the most efficient way to play the game? Obviously not. Do some of them limit which quests you can do? Absolutely, but this is an RPG, and we've all completed the all the questlines numerous times over at this point, right? Will they result in a lot of deaths? Some of them, yes. Will they eventually run their course? Probably, but there is always another roleplaying idea to come up with. "Death means death" playthroughs are a way to keep things fresh and stakes high. You might find some of these suggestions boring, but I assure you you will stumble across some you like. This is an open world sandbox RPG, and the possibilities are endless. Sweating through the game with only the optimum strategies because their perks deal more damage and you can cheese enemies is robbing yourself of hundreds of ways to experience these great games. Just my take. Play however you like, as long as you enjoy it!
sneaking in morrowind even at high levels calls for casting invisibility. the difficulty is enough to drill the habit of quicksaving before all theft sessions into me.
It's called scum saving.
@@AwareWolfOnWheels in a way. save scumming is to me more akin to playing rotk x where when defeating an officer's unit you can save state and run the fight until the rng has the officer become your prisoner instead of running away. several times in morrowind i've had the stealth indicator show hidden and still been reported.
I have a Skyrim playthrough right now where I was determined to play a mage - because I played a stealth archer when the game came out - and I think it's only entertaining because I am playing on the Anniversary Edition, which includes a bunch of broken spells and access to better gear than exists in the base game.
my main takeaway from this run is that losing attributes - and to a lesser degree, skills - has been hugely detrimental to the magic system as a whole. like, if I was using magic in an earlier Elder Scrolls game, I would rely on Intelligence and Willpower to provide a baseline of power to every spell in the game. if I got Destruction up to 100, that meant I also tended to put a lot of points into Int and Will in the process. so, when I tapped into other schools of magic, I was still a powerful mage; it's just that the low skill meant I had a chance to fail to cast the spell. that was extremely elegant.
with these separate perk trees, being a master of Destruction provides absolutely no benefit AT ALL to Restoration or Conjuration. I still have to level those trees to even have a chance at casting higher tier spells, but, I'm essentially treated no differently than a level 2 nooblord putting their first points into the Resto tree. that's still true even if I've become Archmage and taken down Alduin.
add that unsatisfying mess to the fact that Skyrim has only a mere fraction of spell effects that we used to have, and Magic is an afterthought in Skyrim, at best.
like, Detect Key or Detect Enchantment from Morrowind would be fantastic in this game, but they didn't even make the cut for Oblivion.
Impact. Destruction perk. Staggers anything you hit with a dual cast spell - even dragons and giants. You can kill essentially the entire game with Firebolt and not get hit by melee once you get the perk. But I prefer summoning a dremora lord and Incinerating everything. But forcing entire spawns to fight to the death is also fun. Magic is quite varied. Not nearly as much as previous games, but there’s a good bit of choice to it.
Dual casting isn’t all about doing more damage.
Also… atTRIButes would be multiple attributions, or credits. ATtributes are character details like strength. Inflection on the first syllable.
There is also spell cost reduction enchantments. If you get 100% reduction for destruction magic, you can spam dual cast fireballs all day.
Wrong! The uespwiki literally says that dual casting overcharges the spell to be more poweful.
Magic still sucks to use
@@hereniho Yup Destruction is lame, Conj' and Illu' is where it's at!
@@AwareWolfOnWheels The cost of the spell becomes 2.8x the normal cost for 2.2x the damage. This is only really viable when using a lot of spell reduction enchantments.
My first character was a stealth summoner, where I summon a fire lady then back off and shortly the enemy loses track of me, distracted by her, and she explodes when she dies. Rinse and repeat until dead.
Cheesy! A fine brie, perhaps. I love cheese~
ah the tried and true method of GET THEM MINION!
This last month I tried 3 playthroughs, each only putting points into skill trees of a specific archetype. Even with enchanting, the Mage playthrough was a slog that felt underpowered.
The Thief stone only had poison, so pickpocketing poison into people became the only wat to deal damage and it was way more fun than stealth archer, but the temptation was always there like you said.
Sounds like you and I have been doing similar things the last few weeks :P
Reverse pickpocketing is such a goofy mechanic, but heavily relying on it does sound like an interesting playstyle
I've tried being a mage so much and before getting into mods it was so bad 😞
Wait you can poison people by putting poison in their pocket??
@spencercorpuz you need a perk, but yes. Putpocketing is hilarious fun. I recomend a paralyze and damage health over time poison.
@@DespereauxHarvey how do you kill draugr and animals?
I wish stealth was implemented better in this game. When I have Sneak 100 I always prefer going in with dagger and stabbing everyone, but when it's not 100 stealth becomes almost impossible. Which is why Falmer have to be my favourite type of enemy. Take off your heavy armour, start moving slowly and don't bump into any of them (it's also like the one advantage of daggers, cause for some reason any other fucking weapon produces so much sound that everyone become instantly alerted
if you're playing stealth, you dont need armour.
just wear clothing.
and holster those daggers until you want you pounce, you move at incredible speed and are completely silent when you pull them out.
just remember to put them away again until you need to move in quick for the kill again
@Christina-g4s imagine using a dagger without the gloves from the assassin questline, can't be me.
In Skyrim there is a perk that when you crouch while discovered you vanish for a second. I once used it to take out 4 assassins that had a bounty on me. I crouched then sneak attacked 4 times in a row right in front of them.
I just wanna say for the record, I was gonna commit to a warrior build this run. But the game gave me a daedric bow of petrifying at level 8 in a dungeon chest. I took that as a sure sign that it was meant to be a stealth archer playthrough
Vanilla or with mods? And what chest?
I call bs
it is bs unless you use mods to alter drop tables in which case you already destroyed gear balance/progression into irrelevance anyway
@infected89 Yes that's correct. I'm pretty sure I have some manner of leveled loot mod enabled. Cause iirc, daedric items definitely can't spawn in dungeon chests when you're not even level 10. The game is modded because I refuse to play vanilla Skyrim 13 years after the game released
@@Tracker947 Admittedly modded. And it was a chest in a low level story dungeon. It wasn't bleak falls barrow, but it was maybe 8 - 10 hours after I did bleak falls barrow. Really, really weirdly early in the game
My playstyle in every Elder Scrolls game has been "pick cat for sneak bonuses and cover in heavy armor and give big chunk of metal for bonking". It worked against Dagoth Ur, Hircine, and Almalexia, it worked against Jyggalag and Marunes Dagon, and now it's working against Alduin, Harkon, and Miirak. I'm a simple man, and they're simple results.
"It ain't much, but it's honest work" energy, and I appreciate it.
Three reasons people gravitate to this style: It only needs 2 skills (archery and stealth). It negates scary enemies and the danger of getting hit. And finally, the thunk noise of stealth kills and chaining kills in slow motion is satisfying.
It starts with players realising they can start combat from stealth for a damage bonus and to take on one enemy at a time. As skill increases they realise they can stay permanently crouched.
Melee illusion is somewhat more powerful and fun though, as backstabs involve more risk element. And illusion frenzy can just clear dungeons very easily.
daggers and illusion are definitly more power options from stealth than bows for a high level charecter but they do have a significantly higher level of invesment needed in order to shows results so unless you are building for it from the beging you just use a bow from stealth and once you are already bowing it up there is never reelly a reason to stop since it is good enough
Talking specifically about the Labyrinthian section, while yes the magic drain presents a unique challenge to mages, you have to also consider the other factors of the dungeon, with the Staff of Magnus being capable of draining magicka at a distance from targets to allow you to cast, while Morokei gives light armor-using spellblade characters 100% extra magicka regen, which can potentially be useful as well. The dungeon itself also promotes magical combat with its many plateaus and causeways, and there's a section as well where it is tremendously easier to bypass a dangerous soul gem trap if you are capable of casting a ward spell, which the game hints at you by providing a warding tome close to where the trap is located. This builds upon the first lesson that Tolfdir teaches you when you start the questline. It's like saying the Companions questline is easier if you use magic, but then ignoring that the rewards you get from doing that questline are of particular interest to warrior type characters due to the Shield of Ysgramor being the second best shield in the game after Spellbreaker.
It's not a masterpiece or anything but people are incredibly hard on Skyrim a lot of the time while ignoring some of the more subtle things they got right.
I agree. Of course dragons heavily encourage players, particularly new players (if that's even possible given the age of the game), towards an archer build. Especially if you start 'Dragon Rising' at a low level, which I think is what Bethesda intended.
Yeah even if you don’t play an archer the entire game dragon fights really incentivize at least some use of bows bc no one likes waiting fifteen minutes for the dragon to decide to land in a place you can actually whack them with a melee weapon
There will always be a new player to a game no matter the age as long as its available to play in some way shape or form.
My first character was a Breton and I'm always playing a summoner in RPGs, so I naturally trended toward Conjuration. But just standing around and watching my minions isn't much fun. So I started using a bow. And then I noticed how much damage I could do at the start of the fight by crouching. And then I got better and better at hiding away if the first shot didn't kill them so that I could try it again. Pretty soon, the only reason I had conjuration was the bound bow 😅
My only stipulation with your description of the skyrim trinity is that ranged is not the 3rd, it is stealth, the skyrim trinity, is loud, quiet, and magic, magic works as a jack of all trades, so builds are unique and fun, loud builds allow for optimization of many different weapons and armors, keeping them fun, but for stealth, the optimal build is archer with a dagger as a secondary option, the benefits they both get from perks make stealth archer the defects stealth build, and it mostly comes down to the stealth mechanic being most efficient at range with a bow, if you could chain or sneak dash melee attacks other stealth builds become viable, but because of the combat system, the bow let's you fight multiple people while staying hidden, and a knife is great for a lone tough enemy, but because stealth only gets boosts from being hidden it means play passive or use a bow to fully use stealth
Tldr, bows let you fight and remain stealthy, while all other weapons don't let you retain stealth
" if you could chain or sneak dash melee attacks other stealth builds become viable, but because of the combat system, "
You can, it's called the invisibility spell.
I mean, its also a clear factor that one of the key enemies in the game are DRAGONS, who are not afraid to Spray and Prey from the sky until you can "convince" it to come down and bite you, meaning Ranged combat is already encouraged.
Your channel is underrated af
The algorithm gets it right occasionally. ~grin~
Stealth archer also easily transitions into an illusion assassin which gives you access to another very fun playstyle to experiment with.
Skyrim released on 11/11/11. I was a stealth archer before 11/12/11. It just works
Are you American or normal?
@@elskaalfhollr4743 😀 "Is it one day or one month"...🙂
@@elskaalfhollr4743 I was going to pen a strongly worded condemnation of that response but I ate my last crayon
After watching your video, I can't help but be curious what you think about me: someone who broke away from the stealth archer on legendary and refuses to go back. Magic is a lot stronger than it gets credit for.
Stealth Archery solves the immediate problem of scaling and how we engage with the world. The shortcut to immense damage either from bound bow and their associated arrows that scales aggressively with illusion magic makes you feel VERY powerful with almost no investment. Enemies sometimes can't even fight back due to their own misfortune of being in a place with no way to get to you. As other comments have stated the kill cams feel good and as seen in "long shots" here on youtube you can actually play it skillfully without just abusing magic.
Melee combat in skyrim without learning about it or min-maxing unmodded is a chore, takes significant setup/investment, and mostly crutches on using other skills/pot spam to stay healthy until you gain the perks to go ham.
Magic is just LOUD archery without any scaling. You can do some really cool stuff with it. Wards to traps to manipulating objects to create physics interactions that snowball into absolute lunacy, but who wants to play 100s of hours using all those spells, honing that individual skill when 3 or 4 arrows or an equally leveled warrior just decapitates them with a power strike.
Skyrim had very awkward power scaling for all the individual fighting types and I can't even remember unmodded play at this point.
I've been inspired to pick Skyrim up again after watching an "Ironman" ruleset video.
Even with a bunch of self-imposed restrictions stealth archer bubbled to the top almost immediately.
Another great video!
5:56 Dual casting is bad *unless you also have impact, and then you stun lock everything for as long as you have magicka to spend.
Yea, Imma comment before I made it throughout "the mage playstyle" but that part almost discoraged me from watching the video further, unlesss bro meant "bad" in a gamebreaking way.
Dual casting, especially in vanilla, is always worth it and viable for any school of magic, unless you don't know what you are doing.
11:30 Oh no, perkless dual casting for destruction without proper gear is bad, who would have thought, but since spreadsheet said so 🤓
@@Necr0ticus dual cast turn undead spells are useless as are alteration spells.
Dual cast and impact make you a God.
the problem with impact is that it is boring. it encourages spamming the same low-damage attack again and again and again until the enemy dies, which just fucking sucks imo
I'd much rather play a melee character, at least with block you are encouraged to time your bashes to stunlock enemies.
In the same way that everything will eventually evolve into crabs, every Skyrim build evolves into stealth archer.
Consider me an example of the opposite. I've never played a stealth archer. I attempted to multiple times, got bored and stopped early. Too easy on adept, outclassed by melee stealth on legendary.
Magic is a slow burn that never burns as brightly as sniping a Dragon Priest from across the map before they even know you're there.
The crafting skills are the biggest imbalance to me. Why would I not have smithing and enchanting outside of consciously limiting myself? Why would I wear robes as a mage when ill be just as effective in a full set of heavy armour outside of consciously limiting myself? Fallout has a similar issue with charisma stat and speech skill. There's never a reason to have any points in charisma outside of maybe 1 or 2 perks and speech is the best skill in the game especially in New Vegas but weirdly becomes one of the worst in Fallout 4
You wear robes because you're *not* as effective in custom heavy armor. The most powerful generic magicka regen enchants in the game (without exploits) are Master Robes of and a ring of recovery. Unless you're carrying your weight in restore magicka potions, you're gonna need that regen unless you neglect magic entirely until you've mastered enchanting and can make it free.
@@KelbPanthera you're right in the early game having the magic regen is good. But the end game for every single playstyle is smithing enchanting alchemy unless you want to consciously limit yourself. Especially for mages, alchemy being the only way for your damage to scale once you've stopped learning new spells
@RNS_Aurelius I'm a big time mage player. It's true that alchemy is an absolutely necessary for end game but you can neglect it for quite a while. Higher level spells, the augmented element perks, shalidor's insights, bought potions, and the Solstheim dragon priests' masks are all on the table too. Firing off incinerate, icy spear, or thunderbolt for ~380 damage each isn't bad at all. Smithing is worthless to a mage and enchanting is a mixed bag unless you're just straight-up negating magicka costs.
@@RNS_Aurelius learning all three is the reason for your imbalance.
all races have 1 boost skill (except orcs which have two but have no healing magic).
if you stuck to your race specific skill your character will struggle to get past level 42.
now as stuff scales with you and destruction spells have set damage output and a limited number of skill points, normal to expert difficulty will remain a tough challenge.
The reason I never used magic in Skyrim was due to it feeling super weak. I "could" spent 5 minutes spamming fire bolts at an enemy, OR... I could just one shot the enemy with a two-handed crafted sword. OR... I could stealth snipe OHKO the enemy with a crafted bow. And on top of that, I remember it being relatively hard to make good spells in Skyrim too. Even with gear, and perks designed to reduce cast cost, and increase damage, it just never seemed to do much compared to martial weapon skills.
My first Skyrim character was a sword and boarder who organically morphed into stealth archer as I started running with the Thieves Guild. Was grateful I did by the time I hit the Dark Brotherhood and the rest of the later game activities.
Seeing the meme grow has been a charming piece of my childhood that hasn't actually become nostalgia because I can still play a stealth archer whenever I want and live up to the meme 😂
I like your perspective on this topic for one simple reason: it resonates with how I approach games. The concept of "metagaming" in single player games always existed some way or the other in my mind in a sense that I've always tried to use the most optimal or more efortless way to go through the content of the game, sometimes even using legit yet gamebreaking stuff that literally obliterates games' fragile balance and sends it into the oblivion (not in the game called Oblivion, haha, pun intended). So, the concept itself was understood and accepted by me for quite some time, but I've never called it "metagaming" until around a year or two ago when I finally realized that this is indeed what can be called metagaming even if it is in singleplayer.
And you are absolutely right: it is indeed very difficult not to use meta when you know that it exists and how you can use it to your own advantage. It's like an infohazard that poisons your mind and thoughts with just its existance, even if you don't use it. You just know that it exists abd you can use it if you want. And you don't see reasons not to until it is too late and a game loses its appeal due to how easy it becomes.
I like that you pointed out this idea the way I would do that. Thank you for sharing your thoughts! I look forward to your next video however soon it will appear. Take care! 🤝
I find it's the best way of not accidentally attacking my allies😂
Or bystanders, for that matter. Lost count of times an NPC pushed themselves into my melee strike when fighting a dragon and being attacked by everyone for involuntary manslaughter.
I made it through, having fun with a two handed sword once.
I tried magic the first time through and my archery was really good by the end.
There is some fun in meta rules on character. Especially when dealing with mods that add full LLM driven NPCs. I tried it once a few weeks ago and it changes your motivations in the game when npcs start commenting amongst each other about specific things they "see" you doing. It will make you "want" to play the role of an all powerful war mage or tank. Even the crafting builds become fun when you can hawk your wares to AI that will negotiate back at you.
What's LLM?
@@The-Grubber Large Language Model. It's the crap marketing people have been calling "AI" lately.
@Cethinn Got it. What's the use of it in the case of Skyrim?
Turns the NPCs into ChatGPT.
It's got interesting applications for RPGs, since the NPCs can then react to anything, in theory, rather than just a set list of topics.
They are crap marketing, i agree.... but they make for interasting gameplay when they can talk back to you in character for video games like skyrim.@@Cethinn
Subscribed! You're funny. The sad part is that I play stealth archer (sniper) in ALL my open world games when its available... and it usually is.
One time I set out to specifically make Rambo in Skyrim, shortly after the prologue I realized it was just the same thing I ALWAYS play with a Rambo looking skin, lol.
Stealth archer is amazing in Oblivion as well. Wolves are a pain in the tall grass though, especially since they world level when you level. AND, I HAD to save scum ALOT to steal that glass bow from the tavern khajiit.
I didnt play stealth archer in Morrowind! I played a dagger wielding psychopath who could kill guards... SLOWLY. One hand was a paralyzing dagger and the hand was a fire dagger... paralyze, stab-stab-stab, re-paralyze (x 50+ each), LOL. I showed my friend that I could tank 3 guards simultaneously, he just shook his head and "Whats wrong with you?!" Mind you he was playing a greatsword build and would crush things in a few hits. But I was having FUN!
5:23 I do it too, the internet has embedded a pedant into my brain that scrutinizes every thing that I say to make sure there's no _technical_ incorrection that someone can ignore the rest of my comment in order to harass me about
23:45 the main problem with archery being so op is the fact that yes, you can just not use it, but the gameplay will be significantly less fun knowing that you CAN use it and it takes effort to not use it which ultimately makes it less fun to play
it also makes it to where if you don't want it to be op, you can't use it. there is no way to use it and not be op without creating more artificial limits
conjuration sneak archer... the best.
If you play Skyrim as a RPG then these other fields make sense. If you like like a FPS then stealth archer
I use sneak archery to whittle down hoards, then I use the hammer when I start getting spotted. Though if they're mages, I use electric spells
It's good to have multiple tools in your backup kit! I do the same thing on most characters :)
thanks youtube for sharing this video to me, I'll be waiting for this channel to explode
I would like to see a video about the save system of Skyrim, I have always thought it was kinda silly that saving before each encounter was somewhat encouraged
If you're bored with stealth archery and want to have a ton of high stakes fun, do I have a viable build concept for you.
Melee assassin that uses muffle and invisibility, one handed+daggers, and great stealth to sneak INTO groups of enemies and start picking them off.
The challenge of pulling it off is thrilling, the combat gets cranked up to 11 as soon as you get caught, and it heavily rewards good timing (as you use your stealth roll to get out of detection trouble.)
You do have to at least have muffle to pull this off at lower levels, so keep that in mind. But when you sneak into a group of Draugr so that you can assassinate the Death Overlord on Legendary difficulty? That experience is rewarding and thrilling.
I highly recommend that you try this out for yourself.
1) dont wear armour, wear clothing!
its silent, no need for muffle or invisabilty, also go at night time.
2) can totally avoid all skills on left hand side of sneak skill tree; thats for thieves, right hand side is for assassins)
3) holster your daggers until you want to move to strike, pulling them out makes you move really fast if only wearing clothes.
4) have lingering damage health potions, if you do get caught your enemy is dead in 2 swipes.
its really not that challenging. fun?.........sure, challenging?................ no!
@Christina-g4s see I don't use poisons really. Do you play this way on Legendary difficulty?
@@madisondines7441 yes, it's a stealth build.
Only change you'll likely need is to dual wield power attack in the early game, and sleeping dragur would level that one handed skill seriously quickly.
As a khajit I can usually leave Helgen with 30 sneak without cheesing ralof or hadvar.
Why play on legendary though? 🤔
You get nothing for it, and you kill everything in one hit anyway with these builds totally negating the increase in difficulty
@Christina-g4s well, the enemies hit harder, so getting caught is more fun.
@@madisondines7441 it is until a orc in dwarven armour ambushes you with a fireball through the trees by Hilgrunds tomb.
walking outside is dangerous.
cursed sabre cats
As you can see from my Avatar, I played a Stealth Archer once, a long time ago. The last several years, I've been more of a Battlemage or Spellsword. This video has brought back a lot of memories, and I'll probably play a stealth archer again soon, a little more focused on fewer skills. Good video, Great analysis!
I think you're seriously undervaluing the use of non destruction magic! Especially illusion. I'm currently playing my assassin with illusion, and find myself just having the enemies kill each other via rage, or calm them and stab them repeatedly, instead of actually sneaking and stabbing (I purposely don't pick up bows)
but similarly, using alteration's detect spells, the turn undead line or summoning spells is really powerful.
A lot of the higher level enemies you'll run into late game are straight IMMUNE to ALL illusion spells, even with all buffs and dual cast. So illusion doesn't just fall off, it literally dies in late game.
@@dragonmaster1360Name these enemies besides dragons. Because illusion can just straight up cross into the level 80-90 region with (no necromage) vampirism or potions
@@dragonmaster1360 dunno, there's a skill for that isn't it? But if that's the case, I#ll find out, also there will still be invisibility, to hard carry my stealth
I actually managed to beat the stealth archer, there was no full intent to do so, the intention was to make a death knight build. My death knight was a heavy armor 2 handed Goliath that used blood magic and necromancy and ever since playing that build I've been unable to pick up a bow and use it. Bows stopped being fun because I found my ideal Playstyle for the game.
I was gonna type this earlier in the video but you said to stop typing what it was I was typing and so I decided to hear you out
I believe the Play style also taps into an instinctual ingrained behavior, dating back to the hunter gathering days. So it taps into that feeling of really hunting prey so to speak.
What I got from this was. . . an itching to start another playthrough of Skyrim. Thanks a lot.
"Mmmmmranged" 😂
If you ever do merch in the future, thats it.
There are three kinds of people in the world: Magic, Melee, and Mmmmranged
Great content man, seriously underrated channel. I enjoy your Morrowind vids, although I've been trying to lay off them since I don't want it all spoiled for me, as I'm just now playing it. I started with Oblivion, which I loved more than any game when I was a kid. Anyway, thanks for getting me into OpenMW. I never really played much as a stealth archer in Skyrim, which is weird since people often say it's impossible to NOT play as it. I always played as a warrior (although I did have one stealth playthrough) but honestly I can see what people are saying, it is just so freaking boring and repetitive to endlessly bum rush people and mash the buttons in Skyrim. Mage is the worst though imo, not even mashing the buttons just holding them down endlessly.
rice
saltrice
Oh my god. The short blade user getting off the dock and failing to hit an enemy. This meme is not used enough, 10/10
my first character ended up being a stealth archer not because of its strength or effectiveness, but as a culmination of my personality. i love being stealthy and generally sneaky and doing all the things with no one being able to see me. My first character was based off my first Dragon Age character, a dual-wielding rogue and after a while I kinda lamented not using a bow instead because of the range and because I've loved archery since I was a kid. It wasn't til I got a ways in that I learned it's strong, effective, and greatly rewarding getting those long-distance kill cams with nobody the wiser.
I love the dulcet doothing tones of his voice while having the constant sound of the soft music in the background. Listening to this while in bed trying to doze off is just the perfect video.
This makes me smile so much. I appreciate content I can fall asleep to, so believe me when I say I understand this compliment. I'll keep 'em coming
@Takarias hey thank you! And I did indeed fall asleep to it last night! Was just about to throw it back on to watch the whole thing from the beginning this time 🤟
Btw when you go in to play a new character in Skyrim and specifically have to force yourself not to pick up a bow, you know the game has a severe balance problem lol
That was exactly what I did.
I got the game, saw a cute cat person, and thought that a cute cat person would be a good stealth archer.
Great video I expected the things you said to be the same old stuff you normally hear but this video ACTUALLY EXPLAINS why we as humans naturally devolve to the easiest strategy to win. Like why put forth the effort to do something else 10x as hard when you can do this other thing and get the same results for a fraction of the effort.
First character I ever played in Oblivion was a stealth archer. I love stealth, I love sniping and it was highly effective. When I progressed to Skyrim, I did the same and it was even more powerful. I tried being a mage in Skyrim. That lasted 2 hours, then I went back to the stealth archer. I've never tried a melee character. Why would I? You are absolutely spot on. Plus, it's a satisfying approach. You can see the damage (arrow in the head, yay I got a headshot) and there are more kill-cam scenes. It just feels better all round.
I'd argue that balance itself isn't the issue, but the accessibility of archery. You can snap Morrowind into tiny pieces with almost every skill available, but you have to figure it out first. It's a puzzle and it's very satisfying.
8 playthroughs in....
I will NEVER be caught without a bow.
It's embedded in me for all of Skyrim eternity.
I’ve been streaming Skyrim over the past couple of weeks, started with a mage build.
Will say that with Alchemy the Fortify Destruction potions you can make at 100 Skill and enchantments let you commit war crimes. These potions boost damage with most spells and the radius of cloaks.
The patch that introduces some CC content also took destruction from meh to OP. Those elemental burst spells (fire/shock) have high damage for low magika cost. But I’ll assume these weren’t mention because we’re talking about a mostly “vanilla” version of Skyrim.
I think they really should’ve let you have sneak attacks with certain spells. Like Ice spike can deal headshot damage. Imagine that with sneak criticals and quiet casting.
Alchemy is the real MVP of the game. Fast money, broken damage. At about level 60 and 100 in all magic schools I’ve started using warrior and thief skills and having potions boosting my 1 handed by 100%+ is taking me well along my way to becoming an Ebony Warrior
Will add with dual casting that the math is shit but with the cost reduction enchantments and projectile spells you can stun lock enemies with the impact perk but in the high levels and high difficulties it’s pretty much just waiting for something to die rather then an engaging fight
I have 600+ hours in Skyrim, and I'd have to say roughly 50% of my levels came from Alchemy, regardless of what build I used.
I'm sure alchemy is great... but have you tried Magic Imbuing?
That's been my go to since my first play through. Potions are short term, duration buffs. Magic items are permanent. Once I don a breastplate that triples my hitpoints as well as makes me regenerate faster than any heal spell, I can poke anything I want with a fork long enough to kill it.
When your circlet makes fire damage hit for 400% damage, your weak fireball spell turns into a thermo-nuclear device... oh and it also costs no mana.
Raising the skill, also like alchemy, will make you rich, with just a couple 'found' items to adjust prices.
Plus just as easily abused with "restoration loops" to reach god tier numbers.
It does all the same things with the benefit of always being on.
Thank you for validating every feeling I’ve ever felt about Skyrim mages!
I love what Ordinator Perks mod did for Skyrim, honestly a must have if you wanna play a magic character, being able to play a stealth mage is so cool among other things
I primarily use two-handed and light armor. Dunmer. I use the shout that gives brief speed and stamina boosts. It's fun. I don't intend on getting really high level.
Another factor that determines how easily a particular playstyle can be used is how easy it is to level up the skill.
Unless you realise how effective the "utility" skills of speech, alchemy, enchanting and smithing are in both generating cash for skill training and boosting the effectiveness of the combat skills, you're stuck with using skills that level up fast. Which the combination of sneak and archery both are.
For mages, especially at higher difficulty levels, you need both the merchant perk and alchemy to buy training before it's safe to fight even low level bandits.
I would say the magic only playthrough with dual casting is saved with the Impact perk, which allows you to stagger opponents. My own memory of playing, the earlier bits are a challenging puzzle.
Don't dual cast with novice spells but activate one at a time, and I think that conjuration is the second school you want to raise, and use whatever can stall opponents. Work towards alteration toward the middle when you can afford the extra magica of armour spells and being in the middle. It is a fun challenge.
Small story I feel like telling to elaborate on the "mechanics naturally lead into" part of this.
Last year, I did a Dawnguard playthrough, and while I did use a couple combat mods, the primary mod I want to talk about is Vampire Killer - a mod that adds Castlevania's titular whip in as an evolving weapon, and also adds the five original subweapons as magic spells (which can also be upgraded after using them enough times). And before I get into how it went, I just wanna say: phenomenal mod, absolutely worth the download, the first and only time I've ever actually enjoyed a dedicated spellsword character. The throwing knives alone are worth the install, if you're into that sort of "weapon".
However, those throwing knives are also the reason I'm telling the story, because they still fulfilled a similar role to the stealth archer. Since they're a spell, they don't benefit from the sneak-attack bonus or anything, so I wasn't really a "stealth" character. However, after defeating enough enemies with the base spell, it upgrades to a triple-knife variant; effectively tripling its damage output. The throwing knives are also the fastest and most spammable subweapon of the bunch, *and* you still get to hold a weapon in your main hand.
So, surprise surprise, my playstyle turned into "spam throwing knives until an enemy gets close, then beat them to death". I did use some of the other subweapons here and there (the stopwatch in particular is probably the next best one), but for the most part, I was still fulfilling the notions that the game's design pushes you towards.
That said, having two other party members also helped make up for the melee/magic shortcomings... which I think highlights how blah it is that vanilla Skyrim only lets you have one follower and one dog. Playing a heavy-armor vampire hunter wouldn't have been nearly as fun if I didn't bring both Erandur and Ma'kara (KWF) with me.
Jokes on you, I've managed to cure the archer part of the stealth archer. Now I just need to stop using stealth...
Just clicked on the video, before i watch i just gotta say the title is spot on.
Just finding this video. I totally feel you with spreadsheets. I have so many spreadsheets for so many games. I absolutely love creating them.
Great vid, so true on all accounts, we all have options, we all can force ourselves to not play the same style, and we sure do get a different experience, but its so true that we all suffer the same pull, same voices chanting "stealth + Archer", people can deny it all they want, fact is they just deluding themselves with compromises, they suffer the same pull we all do. Not saying they all succumb to them, but its still the same strong pull
Post Edit : Skyrim does favor RANGED (this includes magic), a point you didnt add in which I feel contributes in a large way, is that dragons fly, ranged is often so much needed to fight them, and since magic is a little underwhelming, that really just leaves bow (I know you can melee, but its so much longer to do, as you need dragon to land, pre-Dragonrend Shout)
0:01 came in here to say I've never played as a stealth archer. Good day.
Awesome timing on this video, I just started another playthrough a couple of weeks ago. I always "force" myself to get destruction to 100 before I go full on stealth archer, so I can get the most out of double chaos/fiery soul trap enchant on my bow when I do swap over, but boy is that itch always there!! it's certainly a lesson in restraint....... At the end of the day for me personally, nothing beats stealthing through a dungeon and getting a 1 hit, sneak attack, kill shot on all the sleeping draugr.
( and, of course, now with the soul trap arrows that's double soul gems too, I know I will end up with far more souls than I can use and/or sell, but hey ho)
Being a mod boy really save this for me because I love filling Skyrim with magic mods and making it wizard simulator, I've literally never played Skyrim with weapons, it is THE magic game for me
I've taken on a more assassin approach with my latest character. She prefers killing with the dagger, something about "feeling their life leave their juggler" or some such. She also utilizes poisons
What's interesting is that the system is so ingrained that even moderate modding doesn't really change the game balance away from archery. Like even overhauls that bring up other builds still end up empowering archery as well.
I appreciate your approach to using less mods, evaluating the original game is key to analyzing it's flaws. "Balance" is subjective, in all games. If something makes sense in the real world, but players think that it is too powerful, should it be removed for the sake of balance? I've played Cyberpunk, on the max difficulty, and it was too easy for me until I began playing the game with no cyberware and then began modding the game. The problem with Cyberpunk was it's kinetic balance, the fact that the AI will not react as fast as the player or position properly against the player or use any of the same abilities the player does. The RPG balance became trivial when considering how well the player could abuse angles, positioning, let alone what you can do with Sandevistan and Netrunning. When I first started playing Skyrim on the High Elf mage, I was playing Skyrim was in that Warrior-Mage fashion, of doing everything poorly until you get good at it, and Legendary mode makes Magic pretty much useless except for engaging a fight after you've been discovered at range. My mage was always forced into melee, making me consider my movement very carefully in melee, and that's how I discovered this cute little, pattern if you will, with melee enemies. You see, every normal attack can be dodged if you strafe sideways into, and then sideways and backwards out of, your opponents attack range. But you cannot dodge heavy power attacks for some reason. No matter what you do, they will somehow find a way to hit you with the power attack. So you need to draw a sword and bash before they land it. This can be difficult to do with just one opponent out the gate, but nearly impossible to do while dodging arrows in the open, let alone with two or three melee enemies fighting you. Put some points into Block and Stamina for your bash, you should be good to go with fighting most melee opponents one on one, even if you're made of butter with 100 HP. So your positioning in Skyrim is still key for this playstyle, similar to a shooter game. But the problem with positioning, in general, is that enemies never account for the player's positioning, and therefore their positioning is always poor. This is why sneak in Skyrim is so good and yet so boring, enemies will not flush out the player after a certain distance, so you will never fail at sneaking away from the enemy if your positioning is accounting for this, taking the challenge out of the experience and leading into the stealth archer playthrough. But wait, I wanted to use magic! Yeah, every time I saw that Archery level go up, I immediately got jealous about how I wanted to do this with Magic. This issue, addressed in your title, I would find to truly be a kinetic issue with the world, the enemies and the limitations of the game, and not really an issue with RPG balance. However, I wish I could be a stealth mage too, which is hard to do, you can spam the Courage spell on a guard until you get the perks needed to cast spells quietly, I find that to be an unintuitive way to actually play that way.
Yeah at this point I should just write a script.
There is actually a part of the pipeline (For me at least) that I feel is never mentioned. By the time my sneak is really high from all of my time bow hunting the denizens (Both nefarious and otherwise) of Skyrim, I end up pretty much abandoning the bow in favor of utilizing a dagger and sneaking around enemy camps so I can introduce it to their spleens and necks. For some odd reason, this playstyle really appeals to me, despite the fact that it probably requires the least amount of effort. Yes, my yearly Skyrim playthrough(s) will involve a stealth archer somewhere, but if that playthrough gets anywhere far, it will result in some kind of dagger assassin build. Just wanted to throw in my two cents because I wanted to add to the conversation. You have done splendid work in your research and presentation. You have definitely earned a subscriber!
When I started playing Skyrim in 2015, I spend the first few years just being your standard in-your-face, heavy-armor-wearing, Two-handed weapon-wielding warrior. It wasn't until the past couple of years that I decided to practice using bows. Once I got that down, that's when I graduated to favoring the stealth archer wearing light armor. I still keep a set of heavy armor and my trusty Elven warhammer on hand because I'm not always able to one-shot an enemy and active combat is too chaotic for me to use a bow.
I am myself working on a game of sorts where the thief in skyrim is the main inspiration, but by narrow scope can go much deeper. Playing stealth archer is still most viable from a combat perspective, but it also leaves a lot more evidence - which is a problem when you're trying to keep a low profile.
When I played as a kid it was stealth archer all the way, decided to get it for the steam deck for nostaliga and actively avoiding archery, going for a conjuration spellsword, I love the bound sword and atronochs.
One thing I've noticed is all the dungeons/quests are significantly shorter than I remember, probably because I was sneaking around making strategic shots. Running in with a companion and conjured friends and getting to business is allowing me to experience it in a more manageable timeline, which I really apprecaite. Only time I bring out a bow is to fight dragons that never wanna land in Riverwood and I absolutely hate it.
This was a very well thought out and accurate video thanks.
I would like to add to the thinking by pointing out if you are really into thematic role play and cheaty level up like I do(Xbox player) then you can gain those dozens of level by farming on the bear. Ironically when stealth archer is shown to a player and usually becomes so fun.
But I honestly love necromancy. Mixed with stealth archer thief 🤣 Shadiss soulstealer.
My Pyromancer build Phoenix ashborn (I love obvious names🤭) was dissatisfying and boring for the reasons you listed.
My favorite character builds- Healer ONLY pacifist
Or my shield only necromancer. That bash is so fun when unlocked. Just smash everyone down🤣
And fluffy. My kajhit who uses only gauntlets. It's so satisfying to be able to sell or display all the loot for armor and use the kitty to punch a dragon with one hit. Also it's endlessly hilarious when notes from the dark brotherhood mention killing fluffy🤣
So funny enough staying the game at level 90 can be very fun and makes me think level progression could be dealt away with for the sake of other intrinsic rewards.
"Sneaking and attacking from afar" is the tactic still used in real life.
That slow time perk when firing your arrow never gets old. It's like vats in fallout 3...
Came back to Skyrim recently and to ween myself off of stealth archer I'm doing Illusion and dagger. Gotta say it's a lot more OP than I expected. The ability to calm a group of people and walk around cutting their throats hasn't gotten old. Only problem is I reset stealth because it was levelling so fast and that's right when the game started throwing Deathlords in every room of ruins which is rough without that 15X stealth crit
Spellsword is a really cool build that I would also say Skyrim is also optimized well for. Just focus on one handed damage and use magic in your off hand as a utility knife to deal with specific situations. Magic damage isn't great, but you'll probably focus on enchanted weapons instead. Turns one into a jack of all trades.
You have such a soothing voice! Fun listen while I’m toiling away for my corporate overlords