Necromage exploit is so good it almost feels like cheating

[DragonbornVet]

I'm on my third playthrough and decided to finally commit to a vampire build instead of just dabbling. Became a Vampire Lord, did the whole Dawnguard questline siding with Harkon, got Necromage perked out. And yeah. I get why people talk about this now.

The damage boost is genuinely absurd. I'm not even running an optimized build - just slapped on some Daedric gear and a couple spell mods - and I'm melting Legendary difficulty enemies that were giving me problems on my stealth archer. Undead enemies just die instantly. It's honestly less fun because there's no tension anymore.

Which is weird because the quest to get there is actually pretty good? The whole Dawnguard DLC questline is solid. But once you have Necromage active it's like the game just... stops being a challenge. Makes me wonder if the exploit was intentional or if Bethesda just didn't playtest vampire builds enough.

Anyone else feel like this breaks the game's difficulty scaling? I'm tempted to just... not use it even though I have it, but that feels dumb when it's sitting there. How do you guys handle it?

 

[ScrollsOfTamriel]

Necromage is wild, yeah. The thing is it's not really an exploit - it's technically working as designed, just... Bethesda didn't account for how hard it scales when you stack it with everything else. The perk itself is fine on paper (boost to damage against undead), but the fact that it affects you while you're a vampire, and then you can also raise undead thralls who get the boost, and then buff those thralls further... it compounds in a way that breaks the intended balance.

I think the reason it feels so weird is that most of Skyrim's difficulty scaling is pretty loose anyway. Once you hit a certain gear threshold and pick the right perks, the game stops being hard regardless. Necromage just does it faster and more obviously. If you're already melting things on Legendary with a stealth archer, you're already past the point where the game is challenging - Necromage just makes it impossible to ignore.

As for whether to use it - honestly, if it's not fun, don't. I've definitely had playthroughs where I just avoided certain builds because I knew they'd trivialize everything. There's no achievement in using something overpowered if you're not enjoying it. That said, if you wanted to keep the vampire fantasy without the ridiculous damage, you could always just... not take the perk. You can be a vampire without committing to the full min-maxing.