Side note: you've not only inspired me to play more Oblivion, but more importantly just learn the basic of google sheets/excel. I'm having so much fun with it, and it's sooo useful.
3:40 "That wasn't introduced until Skyrim." Counterpoint the premade classes that existed as far back as Arena and persisted UNTIL Skyrim. Oh, and the Birthsigns introduced in Morrowind that included "Warrior, Mage and Thief." You have criticized the Classes in Oblivion before as badly built, but that in turn shows the intent. Oblivion had the same intent it was just bad at carrying it out. The three basic classes are the "Fundementals" builds are created on top of them/very from their starting point. These three give you a baseline if you can't make them work that tells you something has gone wrong, either a misunderstanding of the mechanics by the players or a misimplementation by the developers (See Weapon Damage Formula). I'll go further and note that EVERY prebuilt class is/should be a viable pick and play option since Custom Classes are/should be for people who know what they're doing/have knowledge of the game. I look forward to seeing your warrior playthrough progress since that's the most criticizd build.
Very well put! Yeah, the prebuilt classes show they definitely had it in mind and are what most new players would likely gravitate towards. I think it's easy for veterans to forget that custom classes are not what most people will go towards on their first few playthroughs given most games have you just chose an existing class.
I agree. While I love TOK's content, "actually maybe don't stick to the trinity" just sounds like a sneaky admission that - yes - you do need magic to succeed, and that - yes - warrior/thief pure playstyles are not going to hold up at all. Skyrim has doubtlessly lost a lot of depth compared to its predecessors, but that you CAN be a successful warrior/mage/thief pure in that game, in my opinion, makes it a better roleplaying game as far as the freedom to play a role goes.
I don't wanna be rude. But the warrior, mage, thief trinity was in Arena, as you answer questions you lean more toward one of the three. The specializations of magic, stealth, and combat again are that trinity. I don't think it's a wild thing to want to play a pure warrior, thief or mage.
Exactly. Should every character be forced to join to the Mage's guild and do spell crafting? I like Oblivion's world, atmosphere, and combat better than Skyrim, but Skyrim's leveling system is still slightly better than Oblivion. I think reintroducing attributes and specializations to the series along with perks could be a nice middle ground way to give everyone what they want.
I love playing as a "pure mage" in RPG games, I am boring like that. Something about the idea of playing as a character who is too much of a bookworm, too weak to lift armor, but smart enough to work around all her problems with intellect, sounds really fun to me. I love oblivion, but whenever I would play I would have lots of fun early on, but around mid game I would fall behind and really struggle. The internet said I should do efficient leveling but whenever I would try that I would have a horrible time and give up on the game. I came across your videos during the holidays and it got me curious enough to try the game again without worrying about efficient leveling. I didn't choose conjuration and alchemy as majors, even tho I love the skills, cause they level really fast, but I still used them as much as my majors. Also the Weakness spells made a huge difference during mid and late game and I actually had a great time!! I didn't need to do proper leveling. My Willpower was usually around +3-4? and I didn't always pick endurance. My Int maxed out quickly fortunately. I do think its kinda silly and counter intuitive to not pick up Alchemy and Conjuration to avoid overleveling, although maybe my build wouldn't have suffered all that much if I did.... I would have to test this. Knowledge how to do good custom spells and not doing silly things like "make a custom training spell to get mysticism and Illusion to level 100 asap" helped out a lot and make the game more enjoyable!! I do prefer Morrowind's approach where you have Major-Minors-Misc. Maybe you don't want all your preferred skills to level up at the same rate.
@@annawinters3576 thanks for sharing your experiences, I’m glad I helped you enjoy the game! That’s awesome! I agree that the system isn’t super intuitive, and I do think that there are missed opportunities with mages staves, mage orbs in off hands, and unarmored as a skill to make the mage archetype more of an RP experience
Yeah I played the Mage prebuilt as is once out of curiosity and made good use of potions, poisons, and summons, and similarly found myself leveling very quickly, I felt like I was ripping through content and maxed willpower and endurance very quickly relative to how much of the game was left to play. Basically it felt like I peaked quickly and finished the game with very little left to do with my character. A similar thing happened with Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning where focusing on mage skills got me almost all the perks I wanted at the 3/5 mark.
@annawinters3576 - I like the idea of a "pure mage" as well. But in TES games it's more efficient to mix and match magic with other things because the majority of the time your character really doesn't have any full-time party members, such as in D&D, Baldur's Gate, etc.
Man I love your channel and how you break everything down and explain it. I’ve been playing this game since 2009. It was my first RPG and I was 11. You’ve taught me so many things about this game I didn’t know even existed or didn’t know the specifics of. Thank you for this channel and the work you put into it.
I think the idea the leveling system is broken comes from all of us having the same experience. We encounter damage sponge enemies late game and wonder why our pure weapon damage characters are bad. Then to counter that we think "I should just not level up for long periods of time" only to realize your attribute bonuses don't carry over to the next level. "Oh I know! I'll make the skills I want to use minor skills so I can choose when to level up and maintain attribute bonuses!" Then you end up with a boring character to play that takes forever to level up for attribute bonuses that are very insignificant. Very roundabout way of trying to solve the goblin warlord problem but the real solution is to use enchantments and magic. I think adjusting the damage formula like you mentioned is a great idea so people don't feel obligated to supplement weapon builds with magic. As far as choices, I do have a criticism that some skills are underwhelming and shallow which tends to feel like investment traps. Hand to hand, marksman, and sort of sneak have awful damage which isn't fun to play imo. Despite the stealth archer memes I'm glad Skyrim made sneak and marksman so broken because it at least acknowledged the problem. Speechcraft, security, and mercantile all should be making you rich which should convert to training and buying better gear. Problem is you're capped at 5 training sessions, the money you gain/save is terrible, and the shop system doesn't allow you to purchase incredible gear. Armorer is just boring but and Skyrim did a nice improvement with smithing. Mysticism had valuable spells like absorb health (a monstrously good spell with area effect due to sustaining yourself when you have a whole mob to absorb from) moved to restoration and mark/recall removed due to the fast travel system. It felt a little bit pointless aside from soul trapping and reflect damage/spell absorb builds where the progression is destined to tgm. I guess my point is that I don't think the leveling system is the problem so much as these skills are a bit lackluster however this exists in each Elder Scrolls game for a different set of skills.
The leveling system feels broken because it runs counter to what people expect leveling system to be. You expect your character to become stronger when you level up, but instead you get weaker (relative to the enemies). Growing weaker because you level up is a fundamentally broken concept to most people
The RPG trinity thing loosely existed in Arena and Daggerfall, then was Solidified in Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim, there's a reason Morrowind and Oblivion had 3 Specialisations, and why the latest 3 had a number of Skills that can be divided by 3 (27 in Morrowind, 21 in Oblivion and 18 in Skyrim) The ultimate goal being to mix and match these archetypes into something you enjoyed. The reality is though that in Oblivion you had to use Spells under the Mage Specialisation past level 20-25 for your build to be Viable, and even earlier on higher difficulties, UNLESS you playing an Orc who can stack a ton of damage with just their Racial Power. In all 3 builds you've showed that you needed some amount of magic to be strong, your Old Man Warrior who you said in the first video has a disdain for magic, either had to do like 6 Mage Quests or drop a bunch of money on a Wizards tower to get eventually get fortify blunt, maybe even Fortify Fatigue later. Aswell as buff his weapons to a decent extent, that or kept struggling through Oblivion Gates for an at best 30 damage enchant These sort of necessecities to keep up with the scaling kill a ton of RP, Builds and Archetypes that don't wanting to engage with Mage Specialisation skills. Morrowind and Skyrim not necessitating Magic use just allow for way more options in terms of RP and quests you want to do etc. Also Skyrim legit just has WAY more ways to play the game, along with way more weird and creative stuff to do, like the Solstheim Spiders, Pure Werewolves/Vampire Lords, pure pickpockets that just use poison to kill people etc. Oh yeah and i have played purely the archetypes in Oblivion, and after a while they become non-functional/hella boring unless you're berserking every fight or using supplementary magic for utility.
I definitely agree the biggest lacking point in Oblivion is lack of skills. I think each attribute needs 4 skills, frankly. Also, your claim about playing a pure archetype makes me think you don’t really play a lot of RPGs because the archetype of Magic User, Fighter, and Thief (and cleric which TES lacks admittedly) is not at all related to MMOs and comes from the oldest versions of D&D which is the original tabletop game. They also don’t fit into an MMO mold since the thief is meant to be a utility class and not based around crazy damage or anything. Brushing that off is just silly, as is claiming it’s a concept added in Skyrim when both Morrowind and Oblivion literally make you chose a specialization of combat, magic, or stealth which follows this archetypal breakdown exactly. It’s literally baked into creating a class in all three of those games. It has nothing to do with MMOs at all.
Yeah MMOs just implement the system of mage/warrior/thief, and not all MMOs do. Destiny 2 is an MMO, but its 3 classes are way different to just warrior/mage/thief.
I brought up the MMO trinity as an example of a real “trinity” in games that works and makes sense. Solo character rpgs should not have any trinity at all, it doesn’t work well. Your specialization is one of 4-5 major decisions when making a character in morrowind and oblivion. Looking at morrowind you pick major skills, which most likely will not all fall under one specialization, 5 minors (same concept) a race which will dramatically change your character, and a birth sign which has massive gameplay implications. The thief/warrior/mage specialization is a tiny part, and while you CAN play a straight warrior, you are incredibly gimping yourself if you ignore magic. You give up the ability to teleport until you find the right magic items, to fly into the air on command, to restore your attributes, to make insanely powerful potions and to enchant your own gear because what, you picked 5 different weapon skills as majors? Seriously no one does that. It doesn’t even have a penalty for mages wearing armor, because it isn’t that type of game. It is not until Skyrim that it is feasible and powerful to just ignore casting any spells, making any potions, entirely ignore stealth, illusion, alteration, destruction, and more just because you never need it and even if you wanted it, it doesn’t really help your character. I’m actually kinda shocked how much pushback im getting on this. I clearly should’ve elaborated much more in the video. I must’ve not been clear about what exactly I was referring to.
@@theoldknight85 Yes, your class is more than just your specialization but it's obviously part of the core conceit of the game, plain as day, and it is insane to me to suggest that it's not part of the influence for these games and also part of class building. The game even includes classes named for the three core archetypes, and while premade classes in Oblivion are scuffed, they were clearly intended as viable playstyles given their inclusion. The issue is that in any other RPG you are not locked into needing to play a hybrid character constantly, and you are able to play just fine as whatever role you want. That's the core of a Role Playing Game after all; if you do not play an actual role and just kind become generic "adventure man" then it's not much of an RPG. Take a look at Daggerfall, for example. Magic is very useful, but you can easily forego it entirely, and if you don't build a character for it you'll have hardly any magic points to cast spells and spells will be super expensive. Despite that, you can absolutely play a pure pacifist and use language and personality skills to pacify enemies and stealth to sneak around them or running, jumping, and climbing to just avoid fights if you so choose. The entire Thieves Guild quest pool in fact never even sends you to a dungeon. You can also play a pure warrior and use a variety of weapons, and while you're bound to find some enchanted weapons and armor (which most games with item-based progression include) you never need to cast a spell or invest in magic. Hell, alchemy isn't even a skill yet and if you don't join a guild that offers potion making you'll just use what you loot. And you know what? It all works, and works really well. I think we can reject outright the notion that just because a game is solo RPG that you must by necessity play a character that basically behaves the same but maybe chooses a different flavor of damage to deal. Also, it's very easy to ignore magic in Morrowind and stealth is kinda scuffed so even easier to ignore. Having decent combat skills will let you beat down everything in the game pretty handily and it's very easy to just ignore skills you don't actually use as part of your class. For the record, I do quite like Oblivion and your videos are getting me to start up another playthrough. The only thing I find fundamentally broken with the Oblivion scaling is that some enemies just disappear and that some scaling math is bizarre but I largely agree with you that most of the issues are overblown in Oblivion. It's just this take is a fundamental misunderstanding of the genre of RPG.
@@theoldknight85 "Seriously, no one does that." If interviews are to be believed Todd Howard and some other lead Devs do and have done exactly that for all of the 3D games
I definitely think that from a balance and gameplay interest perspective Oblivion was the best, and still stands as a very unique and interesting game. However, those designs still lead to some unfortunate things. Firstly, how quickly the player tends to outlevel unique quest rewards such that generic randomly generated stuff becomes better. In Morrowind each time you unlock an S tier item in a slot, it *stays* that way, and it often totally changes the game. Secondly, without difficulty gating certain areas, people just end up fighting the same enemies the entire game and you don't *feel* the sort of progression you do in morrowind (ie, in morrowind you generally move from kwarmas to ancestral tombs to bandits to dwemer ruins to daedric ruins to red mountain to sewer goblins to werewolves). In oblivion you kinda just always fight humans, animals, zombies or daedra.
OG Oblivio player from around when it came out. Big disagree on the class trinity only being a thing in Skyrim. The skills are defenitely divided between warrior, mage and thief (even if it's not always making sense). It might even be presented like that in the manual. There's also the class specialization and obviously the signs.
@@nngnnadas I agree a little bit, yeah it exists, but is not even in the same ballpark as Skyrim. Oblivion and morrowind heavily encourage you to branch out from your archetype at every stage of the game and it is just obvious from the quest design as well as the system designs that the archetypes are guidelines, not builds.
I cycled through Vilverin the other day testing classes on max difficulty. It's all about your approach. You don't have to kill everyone in the room. An assassin, for example, wouldn't do that- they would stick to a target via stealth, and be ready to run and hide when mobbed. Oblivion's open-ended nature is it's challenge- it won't really stop you from making "bad" choices, but it's easy enough to beat where any choice will ultimately work. That's why it's so fun imo
Yeah, people often forget that you very rarely need to kill everything in a dungeon and can often sneak through or just sprint and jump past a lot of danger if you so choose. The fun of playing a thief is sneaking in and out with the biggest loot payday and not even alerting the bad guys.
1:05 do note however that if enemies end up leveling their skill levels, they will never end up casting Master level spells, which is still rather unfortunate imo. And yes, some enemies do end up with too high health, and should likely be capped at 30, but additionally, some enemies also get too much health per level (looking at you, Goblin Warlord, Grummite Deathdealers and Gloom Wraiths). Also, I commented this under an older video you didnt responded to, but melee damage really isnt too low when you calculate in enchantment damage. I think the problem Oblivion merely has with the leveling system (and what ppl usually talk about), is that some enemies simply get too strong later in the game. Take Goblin Warlords f.e., and Bandits wearing glass armor and daedric weapons, and Marauders wearing daedric armor and weapons. And I commented this under your last vid, but what Oblivion really needs for balancing is lowering the spell effectiveness for armors. Heavy Armor should be lowered to about 50% or so, and Light Armor to say 65%. Because as it is now, why ever use mage clothing or Light Armor? Heavy Armor at lvl 100 isnt even slowed down, and can carry two aditional enchantments compared to a clothed mage. Battlemages are always the strongest choice. There is no reason to ever go with a dedicated mage build, or dedicated Light Armor archer build. Because Heavy Armor only gets a 5% lowering. It should be more like -10% an additional piece, and perhaps -7% for Light Armor. A fully daedric/madness armored battlemage gets a 85% damage reduction, plus additional when he blocks using a shield (to 96.25%). What does a mage get? 0%. He/she needs to cast significant amounts of shield spells before he/she can get up to 85% armor reduction. So there absolutely needs to be a significant penalty for wearing armor in order to make it more balanced.
you can get the same armor from casting a single spell one time as a mage. you can also enchant clothing and wear that instead of a robe which will let you use all equipment slots, including gloves by keeping the shackles you start with and using them as unarmored gloves which can also be enchanted. It sounds to me like you just haven't thought about how to play a pure mage very hard.
@IAreSmeegoo 3 in-game shield spells (Defend, Guard & Shield) with lvl 100 Alteration still cost about 40 magicka per 30 seconds. And then it has 85% damage reduction to weapons, not 96.25%. Do you know what the battlemage has? Only a 5% spell effectiveness reduction, when combined with 250 magicka and 100 Willpower only means a 250 x 2.75% x 30 x 0.05 = 10 magicka per 30 seconds reduction. Thats still 4 times lower than what it would cost a mage. And then we're still not talking about 96.25% vs 85% reduction, AND the fact that your example still has one less armor pieces to enchant (when adding the wrist irons as an enchantment, namely the shield slot). Also, lets say we would go for 3x25% shield sigil stone enchantment. Then we're off worse than the other option, since that would still only bring us to 75%, rather than 96.25%, AND leave us with 6 less pieces to enchant.
Good video, and definitely agree there should be a cap on hp because there is effectively a cap on how much damage a player can do. Yes, I know destruction can overcome that, but melee requires doing some unnatural things to boost that much.
I chose a Breton with the Mage birth sign and the mage standard class and I’m eating everything in the game. I don’t wear armor and only carry a staff.
3:44 I agree, there were always just classes, not pure warrior, mage, thief. However, these 3 are real classes that you can pick from list, but they aren't balaced really. I played Morrowind as barbarian with no magic once, but I played on -100 difficulty.
No sane person should play Oblivion without mods that tone down the enemy gear and attribute scaling. With those fixed, the game becomes a lot more playable - especially for pure thief or warrior classes which apparently "don't exist" and "don't belong" in TES. UA-cam's been recommending a lot of those "can you beat TES games with X?" clickbait videos to me lately. Out of curiosity I checked if anyone tried to beat Oblivion without using magic. Only a handful have done so, and all did it by exploiting quest followers or purposefully never leveling up. By way of comparison, I made a no-magic Nord warrior in Morrowind and he ended up pretty powerful, with no trouble completing quests and fighting endgame enemies. Because Morrowind is a mostly unscaled world, and is open-ended enough that almost any type of character can finish the game.
my most recent playthrough (that you inspired, grats on being an influencer) i played a pure paladin, i leveled restoration via training just to level quicker and enchant some gear, but outside of literally levels 17-21ish i never used restoration or any other magic, i stopped playing on lvl 22 with str+end at 100 and blade and h armor at 100, used the honorblade of chorrol, blackwater blade with no charge, and umbra with no charge as my weapons of choice the overwhelming majority of my playtime….pure warrior is absolutely viable…..at least to lvl 22 as i cant speak to it past that…but i dont see a point going much further than 22 as all loot that im aware of can drop at lvl22
Rate my build: Breton Male - Mage Sign - Favor Endurance and Strength Major Skills: Armorer Heavy Armor Block Alteration Destruction Illusion Mysticism Pump Conjuration thru Bound Dagger and Blade by doing quests and fighting summoned zombie every fast travel. Spam restore health constantly and train every level to level resto to 100 immediate. Points goes +5 End +5 Str +5 Int till around level 16 then start wis
I'd love to hear your thoughts on the Attribute Progression Redesign by JakeAlaimo on Nexus Mods. How do you think it would affect the progression/power level in early, mid and late game? Also just a general note, I dig your videos, especially the spreadsheeting and math parts of em.
I replayed Oblivion thanks to Old Knight and used APR, real retroactive health formula, gentleman's smart level scaling overhaul and deadly weapon damage (x2), among other things. Didn't use any npc rebalancing mobs. APR easily gives you +5/+5/+1 each level without even trying, but it's better than "+5 every level" mods because you have to cycle your skills a bit with APR at least. Recommend Skill Diary Undone to help keep track of things. Can't say much for scaling since GSLSO and DWD massively buffs all weapon damage, and it applies to npcs as well. I was getting beat up very badly at first, even 1-2 shot by some, but with high level heavy armor it's fine and I'm have 100 in every attribute, except agi, by now. Most enemies still take to many hits even with this massive melee buff and destruction is still OP. Edit: biggest change is getting rid of that sinking feeling that you're always losing out on bonuses every level. Yes, I've watched every video on this channel and I agree that attributes are not as powerful as they seem so it's not a big deal, but it's not a rational thing. Instead every thing you do pays off, eventually.
Funny thing is you absolutely CAN play pure warrior/mage/basically whatever you want. I've played some characters where I gave myself restrictions like no casting spells on max difficulty + no 100% chameleon and was still able to get through everything on max difficulty. Even a pure physical damage warrior is doable if you make a character where you drain your stats: you can stack a bunch of diseases so you have 1 maximum fatigue and then stack a bunch of fortify fatigue equipment, giving all your attacks a massive damage multiplier even with 1 strength. While you lose most of your health, you keep anything gained from leveling and you can still be tanky via 100% reflect damage/resist magic. With 3 gear slots taken for reflect damage, 1 for resist magic (+ being a breton), and 1 for feather, that leaves 4 slots for fortify fatigue. This gives you a 101x damage multiplier. It often takes some planning, but you can almost do absolutely anything you want simply because the system is broken enough to accommodate it. It's not that there's a lack of build diversity, it's that oblivion often has a very different way of getting to the desired result than other games, and I don't think that's a bad thing.
Sure, all you need to do is game the system and drop your fatigue to the basement. Totally reasonable & something a player would be expected to learn without peering at the damage calculations on the wiki. (Obvious sarcasm should be obvious, but just in case...) How to play a pure warrior? Just follow these convoluted & nonsensical steps! The way to hit harder is to have strength and fatigue values of 1. It just makes sense!
Too much depth can be a bad thing. Luckily, Bethesda games rarely have that charge pointed in their direction. Nothing says roleplay like single dialog options. A few quests have multiple ways of accomplishing them & other options if you fail, but they're the exception rather than the rule. The entry quests for the Thieves' & Fighters guilds come to mind. The devs put in fail-safes so a player has to really try to be excluded from a faction.
I do not like the Oblivion leveling mechanic for the following reasons: I like attributes as an idea and mechanic, but do not like the +1 - +5 based on skill usage. It feels bad to not get +5 in your desired attributes. And it kind of feels bad to overdo it as well. It should not be an unfixable mistake. Your health should be a product of endurance and level and not a product of when you increased endurance in my opinion. Maybe attributes should just be an average of your skills of that attribute. Perhaps getting the best use out of a sword should include knowing the techniques of a hammer. Maybe there should not be a limit at +5. That way an attribute accurately represents usage. Maybe you just don't even choose attributes and get all the +'s. If I use 4 very different major skills evenly, perhaps the game should reflect that. Maybe the game should just say screw it and let you increase them like fallout. I believe that and probably major vs minor skills should be reworked in some way. It should not be possible to largely ignore the entire leveling system by choosing to not use certain skills and outscale the level 1 enemies. Maybe minor skills give a tiny amount of level experience or something. Maybe certain non-combat skills should be limited to minor skills to avoid this. They should not be chosen for major skills anyways and then you would be giving up some really important mechanics to not use the skills. Maybe there should be less level-dependent enemies and more x-level enemies to force the player to be a particular power. I hate leveled items. Skyrim got rid of most of them. Oblivion has a ton of them. I should not get punished in game for choosing to focus doing x quest early (especially the dark brotherhood or even sleeping at the wrong inn) instead of waiting until I am the ideal random level for the quest. Maybe they should be marked as an evolving item or something and level with you somehow if they are implemented at all. Maybe the powerful versions of the items should be behind difficult enemies or an optional bonus for a task, or be upgraded based on story progression.
Hey there i have;nt seen people made a video about this for oblivion but, have you done a fatigue exploit for melee to utterly break the damage scaling by the hundreds? Using a combination of drinkable damage attributes potions to reduce your base fatigue to a single of 1 (one) unlocked from level 75 Alchemy for damage Strength, Endurance, Willpower and Agility( base fatigue equals total of str, end, will, agility to be one; i.e 1str 0 end 0 will 0 agility = 1 fatigue) . Then finishing up with armor enchantments of Fortify Fatigue and Feathers as the result of the reduced carry weight. Your damage will then scale to the amount of Fortify fatigues in your equipment maximized with the use of sigil stones. You will never have to efficient level ever again.
I think there's a place for *trinity*, but not in TES. Try playing Daggerfall or Morrowind without levitation or mark/recall and you'll have a really hard time no matter how much you want to play as pure warrior or rogue. This setting is filled to the brim with magic and staying away from using it is just pure insanity.
You could crawl in Daggerfall so levitation wasn't a necessity, Mark and Recall mostly saved the slog of backtracking but was rarely necessary unless you spent waaaaay too much time on a dungeon to turn in the quest by fast traveling at reckless speed. Morrowind only required levitation for House Telvani. A Mages faction (even then scrolls exist, so it was still possible to get through on a non mage character)
@@cyberninjazero5659 Very true, a morrowind playthru I did got by just fine carrying a stack of cheap levi potions from the temple. Never did anything with telvani tho
The MMO trinity definitely poisoned the well when it comes to understanding how RPGs work. The thing about Oblivion is that there isn't a party working as a unit. You, the character, have to have an answer to every problem the game throws at you. You can't just be a tank with high damage reduction and nothing else because you have no healer or dps to do the other parts of combat. You have to be a one man army in Oblivion. Whether or not that's too game-y is up to everyone's own personal interpretation, but it's my belief that you should meet a game where it's at and not impose your own beliefs and biases onto it. The mechanics simply exist. And once you understand this Oblivion really opens up. Say you want to be a tanky warrior. Why *wouldn't* you want to level Restoration and Alteration, the two skills that raise your survivability astronomically? By saying you don't want to use magic in Oblivion you are essentially saying "I want to be an auto attack dps class with no utility." In other RPGs this is obviously a bad thing and no one would question it. But because people want the fantasy of a warrior who doesn't use magic, they blame the game because it isn't catering to them instead of looking at how the game mechanics actually work. You have to learn a game's mechanics before you comment on its balance and design. You don't need to do that to play, but saying the game is bad without understanding its systems is just ignorant and a waste of everyone's time. And within archetypes magic offers so many playstyles. Giving a sword and shield warrior just one school of magic to use and no others is a completely different experience from the rest. Sadly, the four weapon skills do not provide that same experience, which is a valid criticism. Anyway tl;dr people impose their beliefs on the game instead of learning it to understand its potential and that's where these criticisms come from
The MMO trinity is tank, damage, and healer and not Fighter, Magic User, and Thief. They don't even map at all as thief is designed with a utility focus and isn't supposed to be a big damage class or able to take a lot of damage. This is the original tabletop class design, not MMOs. Frankly, that you frame things in terms of "DPS" shows your way of thinking is much more poisoned by MMO mechanics rather than the true core of an RPG which is inhabiting an actual role in the world and is more than just what flavor of damage you deal.
@mightystu49 tabletop RPGs are just one kind of RPG anymore dude. The genre has long since evolved past that and branched into multiple different types of game. Some people enjoy the mechanical aspects of RPGs and so tend to play ARPGs and TRPGs over CRPGs and TTRPGs. You aren't really playing a role in most ARPGs or TRPGs, you're managing characters represented by varying statistical values and abilities. Oblivion with its combat is very squarely an ARPG and should be judged as such, not compared to TTRPGs or even CRPGs because the mechanics and gameplay are so vastly different as to be alien
@mightystu49 meaningless pedantry that doesn't in any way dismiss my point and it doesn't matter anyway, people call these games RPGs so that's what they are and what you refer to them as when discussing them
I feel somewhat spoiled by Oblivion, because I naturally tend to gravitate towards "armor wizard", or whatever the local equivalent for the game is, with a focus on bredth of options and utility, and I feel like that's the playstyle Oblivion rewards the most, besides maybe weakness stacking. Pretty much the only thing stopping it from being perfect is the Absorb Health spell being a bit too expensive to be a truly viable core combat option, in my opinion. Pretty much the only game I feel rewards the role as much... is heavily, heavily modded skyrim, at which point, that's more up to the sculpting preferences of the person making the modwad. That said, I figured out some of the basics of "efficient levelling" as a kid, mostly just having one or two major skills you actually use, then a bunch you don't, to keep you levelling, but not rocketing through things, and I've always felt that this was a good way to play the game. I do think it's not ideal that a game requires a degree of metagaming to get a character that still works later on, but, I don't think it's nearly as bad as the reputation the game has garnered. I was able to figure out a set of things that worked as an idiot kid, and I didn't even know the difficulty slider existed to prop up the other end. I do also feel that Oblivion is something of a last gasp of game design not married to the strict class archetypes of thief, warrior, mage, or DPS, Tank, Healer. It's a game that doesn't WANT you to specialize, except by role play desire, with the understanding that doing so is at your detriment, the same way that role playing as a dishonored circus performer with no real combat ability would be. That said, I can see people feeling slighted by having their pure caveman bonk character not really work, the same way I feel spoiled by my armor mage working well.
it genuinely blows my mind that people dont wanna use magic in a world full of it. In elder scrolls games you should always fit some sort of magic in there. Even when playing skyrim ill still use magic like if im a heavy armor warrior you bet that thing is fully enchanted and i got ebony flesh with the backup restoration. If you dont wanna use magic in a fantasy rpg thats fine but the elders scrolls is brimming with magic everywhere
I pretty much always use restoration, it's useful for every build. If I want to be a warrior, I only use restoration on the side. But if I want to be a stealth archer, I'll use illusion for invisibility. Sometimes I do a hybrid warrior/mage, where I use sword and shield, restoration, destruction, alteration etc...
i totally agree too many people get fixated on playing a "pure warrior/thief" and they get this idea that they are not allowed to cast any spells or Greater or Lesser powers. i understand that some may wish to impose limitations on their character for roleplaying, but they are going about it in the wrong way, and this is thanks to Skyrim's "trinity" thing it has going on. logically, if you're a guy who likes to steal stuff and you live in a world that has magic and spells that would help you be better at that, why wouldn't you at least try to learn it?
I dislike guides because if the game has already been optimized then why am I even playing? Why not just watch a computer play? That's why I fundamentally don't like games like World of Warcraft. The players only care about numbers and they rush through all the content so why even have content??? Why not just have an excel spreadsheet with numbers and a simulation playing everything? Why even have a fantasy game attached? The whole point of a fantasy game IMO is to be FANTASTICAL. Players should be incentivized to be immersed, and to explore and to feel moments of awe and mystery. Like IMO magic in fantasy should be scary and chaotic. You should feel like you are weilding powers beyond understanding. When you cast fireball there should be a fear to it, that you could burn yourself from the fire. That you are dealing with very dangerous forces. That's such a common theme in fantasy. Even in Elder Scrolls we see mages who mess with stuff they shouldn't have and they pay the price. Yet rarely do we see that in gameplay.... Morrowind IMO did it best because the spells are wacky enough that you can totally kill yourself with them. There will always be minmaxers and I am not saying it's evil, but I think you should focus on non minmax players and let the minmaxers figure things out on their own over time. If I were making a fantasy game I would try and have trade offs and compromise. Like a summoner if you fail a summoning cast you summon a demon who isn't under your control. Or a fireball burning you. Or an archer who breaks an arrow if wielding a bow out of his level.... Playing World of Warcraft is just following a script, which makes the game a chore to be done and not a game to be experienced. Most of my time playing WoW was just a series of small daily chores to take care of. Not fun.
I kinda hate the "pure" archetype arguments ("I can't play a pure mage"). I always saw TES in a similar way to D&D in class design. Even wizards have some simple weapon proficiencies. Some fighter/barbarian/rogue subclasses use magic or magical features. Everyone uses enchanted items, potions, etc.. Archetypes are a framework, not a complete picture So thankful for these videos, reignited my love for Oblivion and made me want to try new things. Playing a high elf mage with Apprentice. Totally changes the game's dynamic, so glad you recommended it
That's only in the newer WotC D&D, actual D&D from the TSR-era had none of that. Yes, you had a couple basic weapons to use as a magic user, because your spells were very limited and very powerful. Like, you have one spell a day but if the bad guy fails it he's charmed by you for (in some cases) at least a month. This pure archetype literally comes from D&D. I suggest looking into editions besides the most recent (and worse designed, frankly) of D&D.
@@mightystu49 "actual dnd" pal relax. Not gonna start exhuming ttrpg designers to find the ancient scrolls to tell me what "real" rpg mechanics are. Those strict archetypes also ignore multiclassing. Warriors with magic capabilities have been around since at least what, 2e? Yes there were restrictions etc. but to pretend like we've not seen people move outside those strict class paradigms until the icky new editions is just incorrect.
@@PerennialAnna Moving the goalposts. You're talking about subclasses; you're clearly referring to 5e. Multiclassing is a different beast entirely and if you really want to draw the comparison is only really like Skyrim where you have no class at all and just level whatever. Every other TES game has you make a class and stick with it. You could have brought up that there are classes designed to sort of bridge the gap in earlier editions like Cleric being originally a hybrid Fighter/Magic User, but that would belie that your understanding of D&D comes from an edition that didn't exist until after new TES games stopped being made. Also using enchanted items has never been something a class doesn't do except Barbarians sometimes when it was an RP restriction; that was actually one of the main reasons to play a fighter. No one else could use swords really and all the best magic weapons were magic swords. It's sort of archetypal to the fighter fantasy of being worthy enough to wield the sword of legend, like Excalibur. No one says that a pure fighter should only use a basic iron longsword the whole game; gear progression has always been a thing. Your character gets better from more than just leveling up.
@@mightystu49 dear, it's an imperfect analogy. Not everything will be 1:1 and a lot of your points are, in my opinion, splitting hairs. I did say everyone uses enchanted items so I guess we agree on something? Honestly, this entire thing made me sad. The condescension was utterly unwarranted, and your posts only reinforce the perception among many 5e players that older edition communities are full of seething elitists that hate 5e and everyone who plays it. You do your community a disservice, especially going about implying people aren't playing "real" dnd because it's not your preferred edition. Do better, your community should not suffer for your lashing out. I'm disengaging here, there's nothing else to be gained from this back and forth, but I sincerely hope you self-reflect and show more grace in the future.
Side note: you've not only inspired me to play more Oblivion, but more importantly just learn the basic of google sheets/excel. I'm having so much fun with it, and it's sooo useful.
I second this.
3:40 "That wasn't introduced until Skyrim." Counterpoint the premade classes that existed as far back as Arena and persisted UNTIL Skyrim. Oh, and the Birthsigns introduced in Morrowind that included "Warrior, Mage and Thief."
You have criticized the Classes in Oblivion before as badly built, but that in turn shows the intent. Oblivion had the same intent it was just bad at carrying it out.
The three basic classes are the "Fundementals" builds are created on top of them/very from their starting point. These three give you a baseline if you can't make them work that tells you something has gone wrong, either a misunderstanding of the mechanics by the players or a misimplementation by the developers (See Weapon Damage Formula).
I'll go further and note that EVERY prebuilt class is/should be a viable pick and play option since Custom Classes are/should be for people who know what they're doing/have knowledge of the game.
I look forward to seeing your warrior playthrough progress since that's the most criticizd build.
Very well put! Yeah, the prebuilt classes show they definitely had it in mind and are what most new players would likely gravitate towards. I think it's easy for veterans to forget that custom classes are not what most people will go towards on their first few playthroughs given most games have you just chose an existing class.
I agree. While I love TOK's content, "actually maybe don't stick to the trinity" just sounds like a sneaky admission that - yes - you do need magic to succeed, and that - yes - warrior/thief pure playstyles are not going to hold up at all. Skyrim has doubtlessly lost a lot of depth compared to its predecessors, but that you CAN be a successful warrior/mage/thief pure in that game, in my opinion, makes it a better roleplaying game as far as the freedom to play a role goes.
I don't wanna be rude. But the warrior, mage, thief trinity was in Arena, as you answer questions you lean more toward one of the three. The specializations of magic, stealth, and combat again are that trinity. I don't think it's a wild thing to want to play a pure warrior, thief or mage.
Exactly. Should every character be forced to join to the Mage's guild and do spell crafting? I like Oblivion's world, atmosphere, and combat better than Skyrim, but Skyrim's leveling system is still slightly better than Oblivion. I think reintroducing attributes and specializations to the series along with perks could be a nice middle ground way to give everyone what they want.
I love playing as a "pure mage" in RPG games, I am boring like that.
Something about the idea of playing as a character who is too much of a bookworm, too weak to lift armor, but smart enough to work around all her problems with intellect, sounds really fun to me.
I love oblivion, but whenever I would play I would have lots of fun early on, but around mid game I would fall behind and really struggle. The internet said I should do efficient leveling but whenever I would try that I would have a horrible time and give up on the game.
I came across your videos during the holidays and it got me curious enough to try the game again without worrying about efficient leveling. I didn't choose conjuration and alchemy as majors, even tho I love the skills, cause they level really fast, but I still used them as much as my majors. Also the Weakness spells made a huge difference during mid and late game and I actually had a great time!! I didn't need to do proper leveling. My Willpower was usually around +3-4? and I didn't always pick endurance. My Int maxed out quickly fortunately.
I do think its kinda silly and counter intuitive to not pick up Alchemy and Conjuration to avoid overleveling, although maybe my build wouldn't have suffered all that much if I did.... I would have to test this.
Knowledge how to do good custom spells and not doing silly things like "make a custom training spell to get mysticism and Illusion to level 100 asap" helped out a lot and make the game more enjoyable!!
I do prefer Morrowind's approach where you have Major-Minors-Misc. Maybe you don't want all your preferred skills to level up at the same rate.
@@annawinters3576 thanks for sharing your experiences, I’m glad I helped you enjoy the game! That’s awesome!
I agree that the system isn’t super intuitive, and I do think that there are missed opportunities with mages staves, mage orbs in off hands, and unarmored as a skill to make the mage archetype more of an RP experience
Yeah I played the Mage prebuilt as is once out of curiosity and made good use of potions, poisons, and summons, and similarly found myself leveling very quickly, I felt like I was ripping through content and maxed willpower and endurance very quickly relative to how much of the game was left to play. Basically it felt like I peaked quickly and finished the game with very little left to do with my character. A similar thing happened with Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning where focusing on mage skills got me almost all the perks I wanted at the 3/5 mark.
@annawinters3576 - I like the idea of a "pure mage" as well. But in TES games it's more efficient to mix and match magic with other things because the majority of the time your character really doesn't have any full-time party members, such as in D&D, Baldur's Gate, etc.
@@josephpercy1558my summoned skelebros and other summons are the family I choose
Can't call it a meat shield if it ain't got meat
Man I love your channel and how you break everything down and explain it. I’ve been playing this game since 2009. It was my first RPG and I was 11. You’ve taught me so many things about this game I didn’t know even existed or didn’t know the specifics of. Thank you for this channel and the work you put into it.
@@LegendoftheParagon thank you so much!
I think the idea the leveling system is broken comes from all of us having the same experience. We encounter damage sponge enemies late game and wonder why our pure weapon damage characters are bad. Then to counter that we think "I should just not level up for long periods of time" only to realize your attribute bonuses don't carry over to the next level. "Oh I know! I'll make the skills I want to use minor skills so I can choose when to level up and maintain attribute bonuses!" Then you end up with a boring character to play that takes forever to level up for attribute bonuses that are very insignificant. Very roundabout way of trying to solve the goblin warlord problem but the real solution is to use enchantments and magic. I think adjusting the damage formula like you mentioned is a great idea so people don't feel obligated to supplement weapon builds with magic.
As far as choices, I do have a criticism that some skills are underwhelming and shallow which tends to feel like investment traps. Hand to hand, marksman, and sort of sneak have awful damage which isn't fun to play imo. Despite the stealth archer memes I'm glad Skyrim made sneak and marksman so broken because it at least acknowledged the problem. Speechcraft, security, and mercantile all should be making you rich which should convert to training and buying better gear. Problem is you're capped at 5 training sessions, the money you gain/save is terrible, and the shop system doesn't allow you to purchase incredible gear. Armorer is just boring but and Skyrim did a nice improvement with smithing. Mysticism had valuable spells like absorb health (a monstrously good spell with area effect due to sustaining yourself when you have a whole mob to absorb from) moved to restoration and mark/recall removed due to the fast travel system. It felt a little bit pointless aside from soul trapping and reflect damage/spell absorb builds where the progression is destined to tgm. I guess my point is that I don't think the leveling system is the problem so much as these skills are a bit lackluster however this exists in each Elder Scrolls game for a different set of skills.
Indeed
I longs for the oblivion remake tho. Hope they make it more polish and fix all the core problem
All builds r viable that is what i hope
The leveling system feels broken because it runs counter to what people expect leveling system to be. You expect your character to become stronger when you level up, but instead you get weaker (relative to the enemies). Growing weaker because you level up is a fundamentally broken concept to most people
Your breakdowns have demonstrated to me that a crank here, and adjustment there, and the game might’ve been “perfect”
The RPG trinity thing loosely existed in Arena and Daggerfall, then was Solidified in Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim, there's a reason Morrowind and Oblivion had 3 Specialisations, and why the latest 3 had a number of Skills that can be divided by 3 (27 in Morrowind, 21 in Oblivion and 18 in Skyrim)
The ultimate goal being to mix and match these archetypes into something you enjoyed.
The reality is though that in Oblivion you had to use Spells under the Mage Specialisation past level 20-25 for your build to be Viable, and even earlier on higher difficulties, UNLESS you playing an Orc who can stack a ton of damage with just their Racial Power.
In all 3 builds you've showed that you needed some amount of magic to be strong, your Old Man Warrior who you said in the first video has a disdain for magic, either had to do like 6 Mage Quests or drop a bunch of money on a Wizards tower to get eventually get fortify blunt, maybe even Fortify Fatigue later. Aswell as buff his weapons to a decent extent, that or kept struggling through Oblivion Gates for an at best 30 damage enchant
These sort of necessecities to keep up with the scaling kill a ton of RP, Builds and Archetypes that don't wanting to engage with Mage Specialisation skills.
Morrowind and Skyrim not necessitating Magic use just allow for way more options in terms of RP and quests you want to do etc.
Also Skyrim legit just has WAY more ways to play the game, along with way more weird and creative stuff to do, like the Solstheim Spiders, Pure Werewolves/Vampire Lords, pure pickpockets that just use poison to kill people etc.
Oh yeah and i have played purely the archetypes in Oblivion, and after a while they become non-functional/hella boring unless you're berserking every fight or using supplementary magic for utility.
I definitely agree the biggest lacking point in Oblivion is lack of skills. I think each attribute needs 4 skills, frankly.
Also, your claim about playing a pure archetype makes me think you don’t really play a lot of RPGs because the archetype of Magic User, Fighter, and Thief (and cleric which TES lacks admittedly) is not at all related to MMOs and comes from the oldest versions of D&D which is the original tabletop game. They also don’t fit into an MMO mold since the thief is meant to be a utility class and not based around crazy damage or anything. Brushing that off is just silly, as is claiming it’s a concept added in Skyrim when both Morrowind and Oblivion literally make you chose a specialization of combat, magic, or stealth which follows this archetypal breakdown exactly. It’s literally baked into creating a class in all three of those games. It has nothing to do with MMOs at all.
Yeah MMOs just implement the system of mage/warrior/thief, and not all MMOs do. Destiny 2 is an MMO, but its 3 classes are way different to just warrior/mage/thief.
I brought up the MMO trinity as an example of a real “trinity” in games that works and makes sense.
Solo character rpgs should not have any trinity at all, it doesn’t work well. Your specialization is one of 4-5 major decisions when making a character in morrowind and oblivion. Looking at morrowind you pick major skills, which most likely will not all fall under one specialization, 5 minors (same concept) a race which will dramatically change your character, and a birth sign which has massive gameplay implications.
The thief/warrior/mage specialization is a tiny part, and while you CAN play a straight warrior, you are incredibly gimping yourself if you ignore magic. You give up the ability to teleport until you find the right magic items, to fly into the air on command, to restore your attributes, to make insanely powerful potions and to enchant your own gear because what, you picked 5 different weapon skills as majors? Seriously no one does that.
It doesn’t even have a penalty for mages wearing armor, because it isn’t that type of game.
It is not until Skyrim that it is feasible and powerful to just ignore casting any spells, making any potions, entirely ignore stealth, illusion, alteration, destruction, and more just because you never need it and even if you wanted it, it doesn’t really help your character.
I’m actually kinda shocked how much pushback im getting on this. I clearly should’ve elaborated much more in the video. I must’ve not been clear about what exactly I was referring to.
@@theoldknight85 Darn.. I guess you just have to make another video today to go more in depth..
@@theoldknight85 Yes, your class is more than just your specialization but it's obviously part of the core conceit of the game, plain as day, and it is insane to me to suggest that it's not part of the influence for these games and also part of class building. The game even includes classes named for the three core archetypes, and while premade classes in Oblivion are scuffed, they were clearly intended as viable playstyles given their inclusion.
The issue is that in any other RPG you are not locked into needing to play a hybrid character constantly, and you are able to play just fine as whatever role you want. That's the core of a Role Playing Game after all; if you do not play an actual role and just kind become generic "adventure man" then it's not much of an RPG.
Take a look at Daggerfall, for example. Magic is very useful, but you can easily forego it entirely, and if you don't build a character for it you'll have hardly any magic points to cast spells and spells will be super expensive. Despite that, you can absolutely play a pure pacifist and use language and personality skills to pacify enemies and stealth to sneak around them or running, jumping, and climbing to just avoid fights if you so choose. The entire Thieves Guild quest pool in fact never even sends you to a dungeon. You can also play a pure warrior and use a variety of weapons, and while you're bound to find some enchanted weapons and armor (which most games with item-based progression include) you never need to cast a spell or invest in magic. Hell, alchemy isn't even a skill yet and if you don't join a guild that offers potion making you'll just use what you loot.
And you know what? It all works, and works really well. I think we can reject outright the notion that just because a game is solo RPG that you must by necessity play a character that basically behaves the same but maybe chooses a different flavor of damage to deal.
Also, it's very easy to ignore magic in Morrowind and stealth is kinda scuffed so even easier to ignore. Having decent combat skills will let you beat down everything in the game pretty handily and it's very easy to just ignore skills you don't actually use as part of your class.
For the record, I do quite like Oblivion and your videos are getting me to start up another playthrough. The only thing I find fundamentally broken with the Oblivion scaling is that some enemies just disappear and that some scaling math is bizarre but I largely agree with you that most of the issues are overblown in Oblivion. It's just this take is a fundamental misunderstanding of the genre of RPG.
@@theoldknight85 "Seriously, no one does that." If interviews are to be believed Todd Howard and some other lead Devs do and have done exactly that for all of the 3D games
I definitely think that from a balance and gameplay interest perspective Oblivion was the best, and still stands as a very unique and interesting game.
However, those designs still lead to some unfortunate things.
Firstly, how quickly the player tends to outlevel unique quest rewards such that generic randomly generated stuff becomes better. In Morrowind each time you unlock an S tier item in a slot, it *stays* that way, and it often totally changes the game.
Secondly, without difficulty gating certain areas, people just end up fighting the same enemies the entire game and you don't *feel* the sort of progression you do in morrowind (ie, in morrowind you generally move from kwarmas to ancestral tombs to bandits to dwemer ruins to daedric ruins to red mountain to sewer goblins to werewolves). In oblivion you kinda just always fight humans, animals, zombies or daedra.
OG Oblivio player from around when it came out. Big disagree on the class trinity only being a thing in Skyrim. The skills are defenitely divided between warrior, mage and thief (even if it's not always making sense). It might even be presented like that in the manual. There's also the class specialization and obviously the signs.
@@nngnnadas I agree a little bit, yeah it exists, but is not even in the same ballpark as Skyrim. Oblivion and morrowind heavily encourage you to branch out from your archetype at every stage of the game and it is just obvious from the quest design as well as the system designs that the archetypes are guidelines, not builds.
I cycled through Vilverin the other day testing classes on max difficulty. It's all about your approach. You don't have to kill everyone in the room. An assassin, for example, wouldn't do that- they would stick to a target via stealth, and be ready to run and hide when mobbed. Oblivion's open-ended nature is it's challenge- it won't really stop you from making "bad" choices, but it's easy enough to beat where any choice will ultimately work. That's why it's so fun imo
Yeah, people often forget that you very rarely need to kill everything in a dungeon and can often sneak through or just sprint and jump past a lot of danger if you so choose. The fun of playing a thief is sneaking in and out with the biggest loot payday and not even alerting the bad guys.
1:05 do note however that if enemies end up leveling their skill levels, they will never end up casting Master level spells, which is still rather unfortunate imo.
And yes, some enemies do end up with too high health, and should likely be capped at 30, but additionally, some enemies also get too much health per level (looking at you, Goblin Warlord, Grummite Deathdealers and Gloom Wraiths).
Also, I commented this under an older video you didnt responded to, but melee damage really isnt too low when you calculate in enchantment damage.
I think the problem Oblivion merely has with the leveling system (and what ppl usually talk about), is that some enemies simply get too strong later in the game. Take Goblin Warlords f.e., and Bandits wearing glass armor and daedric weapons, and Marauders wearing daedric armor and weapons.
And I commented this under your last vid, but what Oblivion really needs for balancing is lowering the spell effectiveness for armors. Heavy Armor should be lowered to about 50% or so, and Light Armor to say 65%. Because as it is now, why ever use mage clothing or Light Armor? Heavy Armor at lvl 100 isnt even slowed down, and can carry two aditional enchantments compared to a clothed mage. Battlemages are always the strongest choice. There is no reason to ever go with a dedicated mage build, or dedicated Light Armor archer build. Because Heavy Armor only gets a 5% lowering. It should be more like -10% an additional piece, and perhaps -7% for Light Armor.
A fully daedric/madness armored battlemage gets a 85% damage reduction, plus additional when he blocks using a shield (to 96.25%). What does a mage get? 0%. He/she needs to cast significant amounts of shield spells before he/she can get up to 85% armor reduction. So there absolutely needs to be a significant penalty for wearing armor in order to make it more balanced.
you can get the same armor from casting a single spell one time as a mage. you can also enchant clothing and wear that instead of a robe which will let you use all equipment slots, including gloves by keeping the shackles you start with and using them as unarmored gloves which can also be enchanted. It sounds to me like you just haven't thought about how to play a pure mage very hard.
@IAreSmeegoo 3 in-game shield spells (Defend, Guard & Shield) with lvl 100 Alteration still cost about 40 magicka per 30 seconds. And then it has 85% damage reduction to weapons, not 96.25%. Do you know what the battlemage has? Only a 5% spell effectiveness reduction, when combined with 250 magicka and 100 Willpower only means a 250 x 2.75% x 30 x 0.05 = 10 magicka per 30 seconds reduction. Thats still 4 times lower than what it would cost a mage. And then we're still not talking about 96.25% vs 85% reduction, AND the fact that your example still has one less armor pieces to enchant (when adding the wrist irons as an enchantment, namely the shield slot).
Also, lets say we would go for 3x25% shield sigil stone enchantment. Then we're off worse than the other option, since that would still only bring us to 75%, rather than 96.25%, AND leave us with 6 less pieces to enchant.
Now I want to make a hammers only run in Oblivion.
Good video, and definitely agree there should be a cap on hp because there is effectively a cap on how much damage a player can do. Yes, I know destruction can overcome that, but melee requires doing some unnatural things to boost that much.
I chose a Breton with the Mage birth sign and the mage standard class and I’m eating everything in the game. I don’t wear armor and only carry a staff.
Blunt vs Blade Deepdive?
I rather limited choice as opposed to more red green or blue and the option to lock myself to only ever using one type of weapon ever
Did you hear about the remaster news? It is a remake with balance changes and is planned to release in June of this year.
10:18 I would also enjoy some D2 Res content!
your popping an entire tin of mystery drugs and running into a party mage build looks realyl fun ngl
maybe armorer should've been a strength skill and hand to hand should've been endurance
I gotta admit
Ever since i watch all of his videos
I replay Oblivion more calculated not just rushing for max level to get op items
3:44 I agree, there were always just classes, not pure warrior, mage, thief. However, these 3 are real classes that you can pick from list, but they aren't balaced really. I played Morrowind as barbarian with no magic once, but I played on -100 difficulty.
I'm curious as to how" power leveling" has any kind of negative effect on Morrowind
Nice points, yea the Level Maximum could be fine tuned for each Leveled Actor, that effectively blocks their Leveling after a certain Level
How different would the leveling be if you needed more than 10 skill ups per level? Would make it easier to get +5s and slow leveling down
No sane person should play Oblivion without mods that tone down the enemy gear and attribute scaling. With those fixed, the game becomes a lot more playable - especially for pure thief or warrior classes which apparently "don't exist" and "don't belong" in TES.
UA-cam's been recommending a lot of those "can you beat TES games with X?" clickbait videos to me lately. Out of curiosity I checked if anyone tried to beat Oblivion without using magic. Only a handful have done so, and all did it by exploiting quest followers or purposefully never leveling up. By way of comparison, I made a no-magic Nord warrior in Morrowind and he ended up pretty powerful, with no trouble completing quests and fighting endgame enemies. Because Morrowind is a mostly unscaled world, and is open-ended enough that almost any type of character can finish the game.
my most recent playthrough (that you inspired, grats on being an influencer) i played a pure paladin, i leveled restoration via training just to level quicker and enchant some gear, but outside of literally levels 17-21ish i never used restoration or any other magic, i stopped playing on lvl 22 with str+end at 100 and blade and h armor at 100, used the honorblade of chorrol, blackwater blade with no charge, and umbra with no charge as my weapons of choice the overwhelming majority of my playtime….pure warrior is absolutely viable…..at least to lvl 22 as i cant speak to it past that…but i dont see a point going much further than 22 as all loot that im aware of can drop at lvl22
Rate my build:
Breton Male - Mage Sign - Favor Endurance and Strength
Major Skills:
Armorer
Heavy Armor
Block
Alteration
Destruction
Illusion
Mysticism
Pump Conjuration thru Bound Dagger and Blade by doing quests and fighting summoned zombie every fast travel.
Spam restore health constantly and train every level to level resto to 100 immediate.
Points goes +5 End +5 Str +5 Int till around level 16 then start wis
I'd love to hear your thoughts on the Attribute Progression Redesign by JakeAlaimo on Nexus Mods. How do you think it would affect the progression/power level in early, mid and late game?
Also just a general note, I dig your videos, especially the spreadsheeting and math parts of em.
I replayed Oblivion thanks to Old Knight and used APR, real retroactive health formula, gentleman's smart level scaling overhaul and deadly weapon damage (x2), among other things.
Didn't use any npc rebalancing mobs.
APR easily gives you +5/+5/+1 each level without even trying, but it's better than "+5 every level" mods because you have to cycle your skills a bit with APR at least. Recommend Skill Diary Undone to help keep track of things.
Can't say much for scaling since GSLSO and DWD massively buffs all weapon damage, and it applies to npcs as well. I was getting beat up very badly at first, even 1-2 shot by some, but with high level heavy armor it's fine and I'm have 100 in every attribute, except agi, by now.
Most enemies still take to many hits even with this massive melee buff and destruction is still OP.
Edit: biggest change is getting rid of that sinking feeling that you're always losing out on bonuses every level.
Yes, I've watched every video on this channel and I agree that attributes are not as powerful as they seem so it's not a big deal, but it's not a rational thing. Instead every thing you do pays off, eventually.
Funny thing is you absolutely CAN play pure warrior/mage/basically whatever you want. I've played some characters where I gave myself restrictions like no casting spells on max difficulty + no 100% chameleon and was still able to get through everything on max difficulty. Even a pure physical damage warrior is doable if you make a character where you drain your stats: you can stack a bunch of diseases so you have 1 maximum fatigue and then stack a bunch of fortify fatigue equipment, giving all your attacks a massive damage multiplier even with 1 strength. While you lose most of your health, you keep anything gained from leveling and you can still be tanky via 100% reflect damage/resist magic.
With 3 gear slots taken for reflect damage, 1 for resist magic (+ being a breton), and 1 for feather, that leaves 4 slots for fortify fatigue. This gives you a 101x damage multiplier.
It often takes some planning, but you can almost do absolutely anything you want simply because the system is broken enough to accommodate it. It's not that there's a lack of build diversity, it's that oblivion often has a very different way of getting to the desired result than other games, and I don't think that's a bad thing.
Sure, all you need to do is game the system and drop your fatigue to the basement. Totally reasonable & something a player would be expected to learn without peering at the damage calculations on the wiki. (Obvious sarcasm should be obvious, but just in case...)
How to play a pure warrior? Just follow these convoluted & nonsensical steps! The way to hit harder is to have strength and fatigue values of 1. It just makes sense!
@@Mr._Anderpson This is literally what I said in the last paragraph...
@@top5g04t My apologies. I was being sarcastic. Its a moronic system is what I was trying to convey.
Too much depth can be a bad thing. Luckily, Bethesda games rarely have that charge pointed in their direction.
Nothing says roleplay like single dialog options. A few quests have multiple ways of accomplishing them & other options if you fail, but they're the exception rather than the rule. The entry quests for the Thieves' & Fighters guilds come to mind. The devs put in fail-safes so a player has to really try to be excluded from a faction.
I do not like the Oblivion leveling mechanic for the following reasons:
I like attributes as an idea and mechanic, but do not like the +1 - +5 based on skill usage.
It feels bad to not get +5 in your desired attributes. And it kind of feels bad to overdo it as well. It should not be an unfixable mistake.
Your health should be a product of endurance and level and not a product of when you increased endurance in my opinion.
Maybe attributes should just be an average of your skills of that attribute. Perhaps getting the best use out of a sword should include knowing the techniques of a hammer.
Maybe there should not be a limit at +5. That way an attribute accurately represents usage.
Maybe you just don't even choose attributes and get all the +'s. If I use 4 very different major skills evenly, perhaps the game should reflect that.
Maybe the game should just say screw it and let you increase them like fallout.
I believe that and probably major vs minor skills should be reworked in some way.
It should not be possible to largely ignore the entire leveling system by choosing to not use certain skills and outscale the level 1 enemies.
Maybe minor skills give a tiny amount of level experience or something.
Maybe certain non-combat skills should be limited to minor skills to avoid this. They should not be chosen for major skills anyways and then you would be giving up some really important mechanics to not use the skills.
Maybe there should be less level-dependent enemies and more x-level enemies to force the player to be a particular power.
I hate leveled items.
Skyrim got rid of most of them. Oblivion has a ton of them. I should not get punished in game for choosing to focus doing x quest early (especially the dark brotherhood or even sleeping at the wrong inn) instead of waiting until I am the ideal random level for the quest.
Maybe they should be marked as an evolving item or something and level with you somehow if they are implemented at all.
Maybe the powerful versions of the items should be behind difficult enemies or an optional bonus for a task, or be upgraded based on story progression.
Hey mam, theres no sound in this vid
Hey there i have;nt seen people made a video about this for oblivion but, have you done a fatigue exploit for melee to utterly break the damage scaling by the hundreds?
Using a combination of drinkable damage attributes potions to reduce your base fatigue to a single of 1 (one) unlocked from level 75 Alchemy for damage Strength, Endurance, Willpower and Agility( base fatigue equals total of str, end, will, agility to be one; i.e 1str 0 end 0 will 0 agility = 1 fatigue) . Then finishing up with armor enchantments of Fortify Fatigue and Feathers as the result of the reduced carry weight. Your damage will then scale to the amount of Fortify fatigues in your equipment maximized with the use of sigil stones. You will never have to efficient level ever again.
I think there's a place for *trinity*, but not in TES. Try playing Daggerfall or Morrowind without levitation or mark/recall and you'll have a really hard time no matter how much you want to play as pure warrior or rogue. This setting is filled to the brim with magic and staying away from using it is just pure insanity.
You could crawl in Daggerfall so levitation wasn't a necessity, Mark and Recall mostly saved the slog of backtracking but was rarely necessary unless you spent waaaaay too much time on a dungeon to turn in the quest by fast traveling at reckless speed.
Morrowind only required levitation for House Telvani. A Mages faction (even then scrolls exist, so it was still possible to get through on a non mage character)
@@cyberninjazero5659 Very true, a morrowind playthru I did got by just fine carrying a stack of cheap levi potions from the temple. Never did anything with telvani tho
Daggerfall is the game where you need it the least, and magic items are always an option for all classes.
Dang I'm about to play diablo 2 now
The MMO trinity definitely poisoned the well when it comes to understanding how RPGs work. The thing about Oblivion is that there isn't a party working as a unit. You, the character, have to have an answer to every problem the game throws at you. You can't just be a tank with high damage reduction and nothing else because you have no healer or dps to do the other parts of combat. You have to be a one man army in Oblivion. Whether or not that's too game-y is up to everyone's own personal interpretation, but it's my belief that you should meet a game where it's at and not impose your own beliefs and biases onto it. The mechanics simply exist. And once you understand this Oblivion really opens up. Say you want to be a tanky warrior. Why *wouldn't* you want to level Restoration and Alteration, the two skills that raise your survivability astronomically? By saying you don't want to use magic in Oblivion you are essentially saying "I want to be an auto attack dps class with no utility." In other RPGs this is obviously a bad thing and no one would question it. But because people want the fantasy of a warrior who doesn't use magic, they blame the game because it isn't catering to them instead of looking at how the game mechanics actually work. You have to learn a game's mechanics before you comment on its balance and design. You don't need to do that to play, but saying the game is bad without understanding its systems is just ignorant and a waste of everyone's time.
And within archetypes magic offers so many playstyles. Giving a sword and shield warrior just one school of magic to use and no others is a completely different experience from the rest. Sadly, the four weapon skills do not provide that same experience, which is a valid criticism.
Anyway tl;dr people impose their beliefs on the game instead of learning it to understand its potential and that's where these criticisms come from
The MMO trinity is tank, damage, and healer and not Fighter, Magic User, and Thief. They don't even map at all as thief is designed with a utility focus and isn't supposed to be a big damage class or able to take a lot of damage. This is the original tabletop class design, not MMOs.
Frankly, that you frame things in terms of "DPS" shows your way of thinking is much more poisoned by MMO mechanics rather than the true core of an RPG which is inhabiting an actual role in the world and is more than just what flavor of damage you deal.
@mightystu49 tabletop RPGs are just one kind of RPG anymore dude. The genre has long since evolved past that and branched into multiple different types of game. Some people enjoy the mechanical aspects of RPGs and so tend to play ARPGs and TRPGs over CRPGs and TTRPGs. You aren't really playing a role in most ARPGs or TRPGs, you're managing characters represented by varying statistical values and abilities. Oblivion with its combat is very squarely an ARPG and should be judged as such, not compared to TTRPGs or even CRPGs because the mechanics and gameplay are so vastly different as to be alien
@@darkfireslide If you aren't playing a role it's not an RPG, simple as. It might be an action game, but it isn't an RPG.
@mightystu49 meaningless pedantry that doesn't in any way dismiss my point and it doesn't matter anyway, people call these games RPGs so that's what they are and what you refer to them as when discussing them
@@darkfireslide Whatever you say, chief.
I feel somewhat spoiled by Oblivion, because I naturally tend to gravitate towards "armor wizard", or whatever the local equivalent for the game is, with a focus on bredth of options and utility, and I feel like that's the playstyle Oblivion rewards the most, besides maybe weakness stacking. Pretty much the only thing stopping it from being perfect is the Absorb Health spell being a bit too expensive to be a truly viable core combat option, in my opinion.
Pretty much the only game I feel rewards the role as much... is heavily, heavily modded skyrim, at which point, that's more up to the sculpting preferences of the person making the modwad.
That said, I figured out some of the basics of "efficient levelling" as a kid, mostly just having one or two major skills you actually use, then a bunch you don't, to keep you levelling, but not rocketing through things, and I've always felt that this was a good way to play the game. I do think it's not ideal that a game requires a degree of metagaming to get a character that still works later on, but, I don't think it's nearly as bad as the reputation the game has garnered. I was able to figure out a set of things that worked as an idiot kid, and I didn't even know the difficulty slider existed to prop up the other end.
I do also feel that Oblivion is something of a last gasp of game design not married to the strict class archetypes of thief, warrior, mage, or DPS, Tank, Healer. It's a game that doesn't WANT you to specialize, except by role play desire, with the understanding that doing so is at your detriment, the same way that role playing as a dishonored circus performer with no real combat ability would be.
That said, I can see people feeling slighted by having their pure caveman bonk character not really work, the same way I feel spoiled by my armor mage working well.
it genuinely blows my mind that people dont wanna use magic in a world full of it. In elder scrolls games you should always fit some sort of magic in there. Even when playing skyrim ill still use magic like if im a heavy armor warrior you bet that thing is fully enchanted and i got ebony flesh with the backup restoration. If you dont wanna use magic in a fantasy rpg thats fine but the elders scrolls is brimming with magic everywhere
I pretty much always use restoration, it's useful for every build. If I want to be a warrior, I only use restoration on the side. But if I want to be a stealth archer, I'll use illusion for invisibility. Sometimes I do a hybrid warrior/mage, where I use sword and shield, restoration, destruction, alteration etc...
i agree, its like bringing a knife to a gunfight and then complaining about it.
i totally agree too many people get fixated on playing a "pure warrior/thief" and they get this idea that they are not allowed to cast any spells or Greater or Lesser powers. i understand that some may wish to impose limitations on their character for roleplaying, but they are going about it in the wrong way, and this is thanks to Skyrim's "trinity" thing it has going on.
logically, if you're a guy who likes to steal stuff and you live in a world that has magic and spells that would help you be better at that, why wouldn't you at least try to learn it?
I dislike guides because if the game has already been optimized then why am I even playing? Why not just watch a computer play? That's why I fundamentally don't like games like World of Warcraft. The players only care about numbers and they rush through all the content so why even have content???
Why not just have an excel spreadsheet with numbers and a simulation playing everything? Why even have a fantasy game attached?
The whole point of a fantasy game IMO is to be FANTASTICAL. Players should be incentivized to be immersed, and to explore and to feel moments of awe and mystery.
Like IMO magic in fantasy should be scary and chaotic. You should feel like you are weilding powers beyond understanding.
When you cast fireball there should be a fear to it, that you could burn yourself from the fire. That you are dealing with very dangerous forces.
That's such a common theme in fantasy. Even in Elder Scrolls we see mages who mess with stuff they shouldn't have and they pay the price. Yet rarely do we see that in gameplay.... Morrowind IMO did it best because the spells are wacky enough that you can totally kill yourself with them.
There will always be minmaxers and I am not saying it's evil, but I think you should focus on non minmax players and let the minmaxers figure things out on their own over time.
If I were making a fantasy game I would try and have trade offs and compromise.
Like a summoner if you fail a summoning cast you summon a demon who isn't under your control. Or a fireball burning you. Or an archer who breaks an arrow if wielding a bow out of his level....
Playing World of Warcraft is just following a script, which makes the game a chore to be done and not a game to be experienced. Most of my time playing WoW was just a series of small daily chores to take care of.
Not fun.
I kinda hate the "pure" archetype arguments ("I can't play a pure mage"). I always saw TES in a similar way to D&D in class design. Even wizards have some simple weapon proficiencies. Some fighter/barbarian/rogue subclasses use magic or magical features. Everyone uses enchanted items, potions, etc.. Archetypes are a framework, not a complete picture
So thankful for these videos, reignited my love for Oblivion and made me want to try new things. Playing a high elf mage with Apprentice. Totally changes the game's dynamic, so glad you recommended it
Logically, you'd think that these in-game characters would definitely use more magic in a world where it's ubiquitous.
That's only in the newer WotC D&D, actual D&D from the TSR-era had none of that. Yes, you had a couple basic weapons to use as a magic user, because your spells were very limited and very powerful. Like, you have one spell a day but if the bad guy fails it he's charmed by you for (in some cases) at least a month. This pure archetype literally comes from D&D. I suggest looking into editions besides the most recent (and worse designed, frankly) of D&D.
@@mightystu49 "actual dnd" pal relax. Not gonna start exhuming ttrpg designers to find the ancient scrolls to tell me what "real" rpg mechanics are.
Those strict archetypes also ignore multiclassing. Warriors with magic capabilities have been around since at least what, 2e? Yes there were restrictions etc. but to pretend like we've not seen people move outside those strict class paradigms until the icky new editions is just incorrect.
@@PerennialAnna Moving the goalposts. You're talking about subclasses; you're clearly referring to 5e. Multiclassing is a different beast entirely and if you really want to draw the comparison is only really like Skyrim where you have no class at all and just level whatever. Every other TES game has you make a class and stick with it.
You could have brought up that there are classes designed to sort of bridge the gap in earlier editions like Cleric being originally a hybrid Fighter/Magic User, but that would belie that your understanding of D&D comes from an edition that didn't exist until after new TES games stopped being made.
Also using enchanted items has never been something a class doesn't do except Barbarians sometimes when it was an RP restriction; that was actually one of the main reasons to play a fighter. No one else could use swords really and all the best magic weapons were magic swords. It's sort of archetypal to the fighter fantasy of being worthy enough to wield the sword of legend, like Excalibur. No one says that a pure fighter should only use a basic iron longsword the whole game; gear progression has always been a thing. Your character gets better from more than just leveling up.
@@mightystu49 dear, it's an imperfect analogy. Not everything will be 1:1 and a lot of your points are, in my opinion, splitting hairs. I did say everyone uses enchanted items so I guess we agree on something?
Honestly, this entire thing made me sad. The condescension was utterly unwarranted, and your posts only reinforce the perception among many 5e players that older edition communities are full of seething elitists that hate 5e and everyone who plays it. You do your community a disservice, especially going about implying people aren't playing "real" dnd because it's not your preferred edition. Do better, your community should not suffer for your lashing out.
I'm disengaging here, there's nothing else to be gained from this back and forth, but I sincerely hope you self-reflect and show more grace in the future.