Level 18 right now, and I've only put in a few points into the 1H Weapon, Destruction, and Restoration trees. I'm currently sitting on ~10 perks available to me. I love ALL the playstyles I've rolled with so far: 1H+magic, dual wield, bow, 1H+shield.

I'll probably save, make a decision, then roll with it for a while, and if I don't like it I'll go back and change it.

Anyone else having this issue? I think it's a real testament to the game w/r/t how diversely you can play it.

I did the same. I think it's a real testament to the fact that they need to put in a reroll perks button.

My first playthrough was easy enough, since I always choose archery. I'm having a hard time in my second though. I wanted to be a battlemage, but I'm at level 10 now and I really love 1H with heavy armor. I've put pretty much all my perk points into destruction, but I barely use it anymore, so at the moment I'm pretty weak. I did find a complete set of heavy armor, and got the 25% armor bonus, but plenty of enemies are still a pain to kill. Of course, I also want to make my own dragon armor and eventually enchant it, so I have to put points into those skills too. Ahhh, choices.

@mandude: I'm assuming a mod will put in a "Potion of Reroll" or something to that effect. But yea, it would be cool to have that option now.

@ZimboDK: My initial thought was doing the battlemage thing as well, but I'm not a fan of the apprentice Destruction spells. Ice Spike and Fireball (the ranged, single blast ones) are just too hard to land for me, and the flame cannon doesn't do enough damage as you level up. I'm leaning towards grabbing two 1H swords, getting some sweet light armor and going with a dual wield build. I'll probably have to put points into light armor to improve my survivability, but my playstyle will focus on sweet, sweet burst damage.

I like the perminance of your choices. But if they had a quest chain that let you respec I wouldnt mind.

i didnt use any perk points till level 27. suddenly felt underpowered so used some of them. its a bit easier again.

Press `

Help "perk name here" 4

note the 5 digits that come after the 3 zeros. This is the ID of the perk

Player.removeperk BAB30 (or whatever the previous id was.)

Repeat but use Player.addperk d3d3d (or whatever) to add.

Now you can manually respec.

I made a rule that it cost me 15% of my money for each perk.

I plan on playing this game through multiple times so right now not Im playing pretty stickly one handed with a shield, so ive put close to no points in anything else, since i plan on doing so in other playthroughs.

just put all your perks in stealth and the game becomes easy mode :P

I've put most points into three categories. But I more or less planned how I was going to play the game beforehand. I'd suggest finding that "one" playstyle as jumping from save to save can get tedious.

Why are you so afraid of commitment?!?!

Nah, there are so many choices it's tough to pick. I get where you're coming from. I planned how I wanted to play beforehand and have been pretty good about putting up the blinders for the other skill trees but I keep getting tempted to put some points in enchantment or smithing. I still might.

@Marz said:

just put all your perks in stealth and the game becomes easy mode :P

Except I can't sneak up on a dang dragon!

@ZimboDK: My first character was 1H + Shield in heavy armor, and I completed the main story line and the companions. I am on my second character, because a stealthy guy probably fits the thief and dark brotherhood stuff more.

For a 1h hand warrior you want Block, Smithing, Heavy Armor, 1hand (9 points) and 2 points in Restoration. Block & Smithing is were the action is though. The slow down time and magic resistance perks in Block are essential, the more damage to bashing is also nice, as you can bash guys to death. Buy +Smithng enchanted gear (rings, gloves) at vendor, or find them and/or enchant them your self. Grind up smithing (Iron Daggers, Hide Bracers). Get Ebony Ore and Daedric Hearts. Make your Full Daedric Set + Shield and Sword. Put on all your smithing gear, pop a blacksmith's elixir -> Improve everything. Get about 400-450 health. Unstoppable. Physical damage is nothing to you and the extra damage form improving your sword + the base damage and crit perks make even your fast attack super hard hitting. You can pass down your old heavy armor to followers which makes them formidable. Only dragon priests will give you a little trouble. The time slow shout is great against them.

Problem is only that mid game these synergetic effects do not fall into place. My first blood dragon was a nightmare with unimproved pieced together armor.

@Wuddel: Weird. I did what you described, but I found the game intensely boring it was so easy, I could basically kill everything by standing there and chopping at it. At lvl 23 I decided to start improving my smithing/speech/whatever so the game would get a bit tougher and I could check some stuff out.

Granted, I did find an ebony chestpiece at about lvl 15 which helped a lot haha

@ZimboDK: how are you on your second play though? theres so much to do

You have like 80 perks over 80 levels. It's OK to make a few choices. I'd say enchanting and smithing are 2 core skills that benefit every single character build since you can craft gear and enchant it to then fortify and boost whatever stat or ability you like. That's how I felt about magic in Oblivion because if you were a mage you could be good at anything because of the ability to create buff spells and enchant insane items.

@gjedwards said:

i didnt use any perk points till level 27. suddenly felt underpowered so used some of them. its a bit easier again.

What the...really? That's..."wrong"? I don't even know. That just seems very strange to me.

@Jimmi: Well, obviously. I am not really in for the challenging combat in Skyrim. Though it resulted in ditching this character and starting a stealthy one. Some fortunate loot is quite a factor though. I too found a ebony shield with insane +20% magic resist which helped me a lot.

When in doubt, pick enchanting ;)

All this talk of perks is making me want to start over and try some new stuff...but I'm already at level 26 and 50+ hours of playtime.

@Chaser324: Tell me about it I've been itching to start a mage. On the other hand, I'm level 30 with my Thief type who hasn't even started the main story yet.

@Marz: So true...I have gained over 6-7 levels just from stealth - lockpicking - pickpocketing. Thief = EASYMODE Skyrim leveling. At level 20 now and haven't even killed the first dragon yet. Class - Archer/Thief and plan on playing a Paladin style class on my second play through (heavy armor/restoration spec)

I'm level 41 now. I've redone my spec (through the console) twice now.

Started light armor and dual wielding swords with destruction spells. It kinda sucked. Damage output didn't keep up with the damage I took...turns out running into dudes flailing swords about doesn't keep up with magic damage or well armored individuals with large sharp and/or blunt objects. I started trying to correct it, dumping points into healing when I could and investing as many as possible into my armor, then decided why not just go that route entirely.

So I switched to heavy armor with much of the same plus blocking and healing. Worked great. I was a walking healing, stabbing, flame-throwing tank, and so was Lydia in matching ebony gear with a bigass warhammer just for kicks. But I wanted to see what everyone was raving about with stealth and archery.

So now I'm primarily light armor, sneak, archery, one handed (swords), healing.

It's cool...once you dump a LOT of points into sneak and/or archery and skill up quite a bit.

You do go from cruising through dungeons being able to go toe-to-toe with just about everyone to having to slowly sneak around or take pot-shots with the bow and arrow though. It's a different play style. But having spent much of my time as a rogue in WoW, and as someone who primarily played alone, I really don't mind.

So yeah, be careful. But all that said, it seems clear that as long as you focus on a few areas and invest heavily in them you'll be fine. Spreading them out too thin is what gets you in trouble.

Personally, I think setting a core 'idea' of what your character is/will be early on is the only way to avoid this stress. Despite what Brad seems to argue, I'd go so far as to say that there aren't enough perks. You can't switch classes mid-way (I mean, you could, but the difficulty will take an un-fun turn).

The way I approach every character design idea: pick 2 major trees, pick 3 minor trees. Example: Alteration, One-Handed / Heavy Armor, Restoration, Block.

Generally speaking, you'll reach a point where the two major trees reach a point where the skill level isn't high enough to continue investing perks, and then you spread into your minors.

@AlisterCat said:

You have like 80 perks over 80 levels. It's OK to make a few choices. I'd say enchanting and smithing are 2 core skills that benefit every single character build since you can craft gear and enchant it to then fortify and boost whatever stat or ability you like. That's how I felt about magic in Oblivion because if you were a mage you could be good at anything because of the ability to create buff spells and enchant insane items.

Well, Smithing is useless to a cloth-mage. Especially one who decides to go for the Mage Armor perk in the Alteration tree.

Kind of depends on playstyle but definitely sink some points in smithing as your gear can get improved quite a lot on it's own & also getting the ability to easily upgrade some of the magic items in the game gives you some killer gear to play with & improved for not a lot of the raw ingredients.

It's kind of shitty that if you go up the light side of smithing all the way to dragon armor like I did, you cant go back down the other side one perk to get Daedric (for the weapons). You HAVE to pick up dwarven orcish and ebony first.

Same for the other way around. If you go heavy you cant go back down one for glass (not that you would).

Also, we should be able to smith arrows...because I have a LOT of ingots just hanging around that I would love to turn into some orcish/dwarven/glass arrows. I know there's a mod for it already but it should be in the game.

I'm hoping they handle respeccing like Diablo 2, where you were given a chance to respec when the expansion was released. But I wish they would do it like WoW where you just had to pay gold, I don't care how much it costs I just want one chance to redo my perks.

I'm not sure what the reason is to not allow respeccing, because it is inevitable you may spend points on a specific skill which turns out to be worse than expected.

@Robo: I have to think making arrows was part of the game at some point, right? It just seems like such an obvious thing to do. They had to have a reason not to have that mechanic but I would have no idea why. Or maybe the didn't think of it. Who knows.

@Robo:

Very much this. To all going up smithing, even for light armor: TAKE THE RIGHT PATH. They both lead up to Dragon Armor, which has both light and heavy armor, but it lets you craft the best base weapons in the game.