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I'm on my second playthrough (PC, USSEP), level 35 right now, and I just noticed my healing potions barely tickle my health bar anymore. Early game they were keeping me alive through everything, but now a basic potion heals like 40 health when I'm sitting at 300+. I've got some alchemy perks...

I'm on my 5th playthrough and just hit level 40 illusion for the first time on purpose, and I have to say this school is completely underrated. Like, everyone talks about how useless it is compared to destruction or conjuration, but the perk tree is actually insane if you know what you're doing...

Spent like 200 hours trying to build around Conjuration for actual DPS and it was always underwhelming. Switched it up last playthrough and summoned stuff purely for crowd control and tanking while I actually use my main weapon, and it's night and day. The thing is, the game doesn't really want...

I've been thinking about this on my current playthrough and it finally clicked. Restoration isn't broken or underpowered—it's deliberately underwhelming because the game wants you to feel like you're choosing a harder path. Every other magic school gives you something that trivializes problems...

I'm on my second playthrough trying to actually commit to a mage build instead of defaulting to stealth-archer garbage, and I picked Conjuration as my main damage source. But summoning Atronachs for the first 20 levels feels so slow compared to just casting Fireball. Do I just bite the bullet...

Okay hear me out. I've got like 1200 hours in this game across multiple playthroughs and I think we collectively gaslight ourselves about stealth archer being some kind of default fun build. You spend half the game sneaking through dungeons doing chip damage while enemies walk in circles. It...

I'm on my third playthrough (PC, vanilla AE) and I hit Legendary difficulty at level 35 with a melee build. My enchanted gear was solid up through Adept, but now everything feels like wet paper even with maxed Smithing and decent enchantments. I know the loop exists—better gear, better alchemy...

247 plugins isn't actually that bad if they're all working. The real question is whether you've got actual conflicts or just paranoia. One CTD per 20 hours is solid - plenty of people run way messier setups with worse stability. That said, there's a difference between "the game runs" and "the...

Blood on the Ice is such a nasty little quest because it doesn't let you off the hook. You're basically forced to play detective in a city that's already morally compromised, and by the end you realize the Jarl doesn't actually care who the killer is - he just needed the problem gone before it...

Yeah, that's solid advice. I'd just add - don't sleep on the sustain angle either. On my Switch run I found that having even a basic summon up meant I could actually use healing spells or potions without getting immediately wailed on, which sounds dumb but changes everything for a...

Nah, you're not wrong about the perk tax, but I'd push back a little on the conclusion. The real issue is that Smithing scales with your character level in a way most skills don't - you're right that grinding through Dwarven and Orcish sucks if you're only chasing the endgame stuff. But if...

That's solid advice. I'd add though - the sleep requirement thing is way more annoying than hunger imo. You can manage food by just looting corpses and cooking stuff as you go, but if you're doing a roleplay playthrough where you're actually exploring dungeons and doing quests, getting fatigued...

I keep seeing people skip Block entirely or dump a few perks in and move on, but I just finished a run where I actually committed to the tree and it's night and day. Not talking about shield bashing everything - I mean the actual defensive scaling. The perk that reduces incoming damage while...

miraak has been kicking my ass on my current playthrough and I finally realized I've been treating him like a regular dragon. he's not. he's a spellcaster first and you can't just tank his damage with heavy armor and a shield like you would with, say, Alduin. the moment I switched to using...

Conjuration summons are genuinely fragile compared to actual followers, yeah. They have way less health and armor than Lydia, and the AI doesn't position them well - they just run straight at enemies. But it's not unviable, you're just using them wrong for tough fights. The real trick is that...

Been replaying with a pure Illusion build on Legendary and I'm genuinely shocked how little people talk about this. Like yeah, Necromage is busted if you stack it right, but at least you need to be a vampire and do some setup. Illusion? You get Mayhem and Fury spells and the game just stops...

nah you're onto something. markarth's layout is definitely more intentional than people give it credit for, though I'd say it works better for some playthroughs than others. the forsworn conspiracy questline absolutely benefits from that disorientation - you're supposed to feel like you're being...

You're onto something here. Isran's arc is genuinely well-constructed - that slow shift from "prove yourself" to actual respect hits different when you pay attention to it. A lot of players probably just rush through the questline and miss the nuance because they're focused on Serana's questline...

I'm on my 5th playthrough and I just realized I've been wasting perk points on Heavy Armor for literally years. Like, the actual damage reduction caps so fast that investing past the first couple perks is just padding your numbers without changing how the game plays. Think about it. You get the...

Yeah this tracks. I did a conjurer run last year and hit the same wall around level 20-25 on Adept - your summons just weren't tanky enough and I was eating damage I shouldn't have been. The Illusion angle is legit though, that perk that makes enemies turn on each other (the one in the middle...