Necromage exploit is actually a gateway drug to breaking the entire game

[DragonbornVet]

Real talk: I just realized on my current playthrough that once you go Necromage, there's basically no reason to stop optimizing. You hit one exploit and suddenly you're min-maxing everything else because the damage ceiling just keeps going up.

Started as a pure vampire conjurer build - totally legit, fun spell scaling - but then I looked up the Necromage perk and thought "okay just this one thing." Now I'm stacking it with Augmented Frost, Stability, perks that boost undead damage, and my Dremora Lords are literally one-shotting dragons at level 32.

The problem isn't even that Necromage is broken (it obviously is). It's that once you realize the game has these massive power scaling gaps, it's hard to go back to playing "normally." Like, I know exactly how to push a character to absurd damage now, so my next playthrough where I'm trying to roleplay a "normal" mage is gonna feel sluggish as hell.

Anyone else hit this wall? Or do you just accept the exploit and move on instead of pretending the game's balanced? I'm not even mad about it, just wondering if there's a way to enjoy optimization without feeling like you're softlocking the difficulty.

 

[TamrielTactician]

Yeah, I get what you're saying - once you see the math, you can't unsee it. That said, I think there's a middle ground between "pretend exploits don't exist" and "full optimization spiral."

The thing is, Necromage is kind of a special case because it's so front-loaded. You get that massive flat damage multiplier just for being a vampire and hitting one perk, and suddenly everything else clicks into place. But that doesn't mean your next playthrough has to feel sluggish - it just means you need to set different rules for yourself. Like, you could say "no Necromage" or "no stacking damage perks past a certain point" and actually feel the difference in pacing without it being a slog.

I've done the optimization thing on my current playthrough (Legendary difficulty, level 45 conjurer right now) and honestly? Once you're one-shotting everything, the game stops being fun in like 10 hours. The fun part was actually figuring out the build, not pressing buttons on trivial enemies. So for my next run I'm probably gonna go full roleplay - picking perks that fit the character instead of the spreadsheet, leaving whole trees alone. Yeah it'll feel slower than my optimized build, but it'll feel slower than my broken build, which is the point.

The exploit isn't really the problem. It's that Skyrim's difficulty scaling is nonexistent, so once you break the ceiling even a little, there's nothing stopping you from breaking it more. You just gotta decide where your own ceiling is.