Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

[nosimpleway]

Ah, the simple joy of using FUS to shove an enemy over a cliffside to their doom for the first time

followed by the annoyance of not being able to find their corpse to loot it. I wonder if they had a quest item or something on them, because there's nothing else to "investigate" at this location.

[nosimpleway]

"I name you Thane. Your housecarl will report in shortly."
.........fuck, is this why I've never met a Lydia in my entire life until after I named my daughter that? Do people think I named her after this character?

[Thad]

I assure you my first association with the name "Lydia" is

[Mongrel]

Until the day I die, my reaction will forever be "I can't believe that's Michael Keaton."

(to Beetlejuice, I mean. Not Lydia)

[Upthorn]

So you would believe it if someone told you that Lydia was played by Michael Keaton?

[beatbandito]

I personally think Keaton in that is 100% more recognizable than Baldwin.

[Mongrel]

Hm. Where does Jeffrey Jones fit into this hierarchy you propose?

[beatbandito]

prison

[Mongrel]

EDIT: Ah shit, got two actors mixed up.

[nosimpleway]

If you ask me the ability to duck underwater and grab a salmon with your bare hands is a lot more impressive than some innate magic ability to yell really loud

[nosimpleway]

"My eyes inside the prison tell me the Forsworn King is dead. So I've pulled a few strings and gotten you a pardon from the Jarl, so you're free to go..."
"Hey, can we wrap this conversation up soon? I've got cultists hacking at me with an axe and I can't move or fight back until you shut the fuck up."

[nosimpleway]

I know I'm super late about everything I'm discovering about this game that goddamn near everyone else who draws played ten years ago but

like

Alchemy. You test ingredients you're unfamiliar with by eating them.
Aside from *chomp chomp* "This would make an excellent poison" you've got all sorts of stuff that it can't possibly be advisable to eat. Any number of mushrooms, including one that's already identified as a fly agaric? Delish! Lubricant oil from a machine invented in an earlier age? Slurrrrrp! The still-beating prosthetic wooden heart of someone or something I just killed? Nom! Actual human flesh, either fresh or zombie-rotted? Just chow down!

[Mongrel]

You're only supposed to take a little taste. You know, like cops checking for cocaine in an 80's movie.

*sniff*

[nosimpleway]

1) buy up all the iron ore you can find
2) Transmute that shit into gold ore, smelt into ingots (Alteration magic levels up rapidly)
3) forge gold ingots into gold rings (Smithing skill levels up rapidly)
4) enchant that shit with Fortify Sneak (Enchantment skill levels up rapidly)
5) sell the rings off for a tidy profit, used to buy up even more iron ore (Speech skill levels rapidly, dolla dolla bills)
6) once in a while, go do some dungeon crawl and shoot things with a soul-stealing bow to collect more materials for enchanting (Sneak/Archery skills level moderately, quests progress slowly)

Downside: ????

It's an open-world game where the more tools there are to be found the more exploits there are. I'm wondering when I get the ability to break down all the crap weapons and armor I find into their base materials to craft other, better things with. Then we'll be cookin'.

[Mongrel]

The classic and most notoriously broken version of this loop is:

⇳ Click to Expand Summary

1) Find or make (via disenchanting) a set of gear which can be have the Fortify Alchemy enchantment (ring, gloves, and two other gear bits, I forget which).
2) Put the gear on and also consume a Fortify Alchemy potion if you have one.
3) Make some Improved Smithing potions and take one
4) Make Improved Smithing gear (the loop can also start here if you find Smithing gear first), now you have two sets.
5) Put on your Improved Smithing gear and consume another Improved Smithing potion
6) ...
7) Profit! (loop around, selling your old gear as you go to make cash and level speech)

This gets fucking absurd because the curve is exponential. You very quickly learn to make 10,000% increased Fortify Smithing/Fortify Alchemy potions and nearly as stupid gear. Of course you can then make yourself crazy potions of all sorts and armour which will crush any endgame content (there IS an armour cap - the lowest grade of armour which can be tempered to hit it with maxed-out Smithing is Elven, which is also one of the lightest sets in the game and very easy to obtain).

Consuming Restoration potions alongside Fortify Alchemy potions also works to get started because the game's code sees Fortify Alchemy as a restoration effect (since it's self-targeted).

[WARNING] This is stupid and basically renders the rest of the game trivial. Don't do this. Unless you wanna.

[Mongrel]

Oh and, funny enough, there's actually no melting down gear in the vanilla game, IIRC.

[Sharkey]

I stumbled on that loop early in my first playthrough and used it to make a bow that trivialized the entire rest of the game and one-shotted the final boss. Named it Godfucker. I don't regret it necessarily, but it's basically a GameShark.

[Friday]

Total Skyrim players: 16489236549
Total Skyrim players playing Stealth Archer: 5473895723907529075

[Mongrel]

That stat, while true, kind of annoys me because I will play stealth guy over hand-to-hand guy in any game I can mechanically get away with it (TF2 was not one of those games).

H2H for me either ends up being like vanilla Skyrim (get tank gear if necessary, run up to dudes, mash attack button like a muppet, and kill them) or heavily-modded Skyrim (various forms of engaging combat with countering, blocking, dodging, etc. systems included to provide an actual melee combat simulator), which I am invariably completely terrible at.

But also I just like sneakin' around. Even in TF2 I rocket ninja'd more often than I attacked head on, to say nothing of ninjaneering (well, the old version).

[nosimpleway]

If I were going for that I'd want to forge the Godfucker as, like, a table fork

Base damage 1, bonus damage oneshots the last boss