What's the worst decision you've made in character creation that you didn't realize until 20 hours i

[RiftenWanderer]

I just hit level 32 on my current playthrough and realized I've been leveling Alteration the entire time because I kept casting Oakflesh out of habit, and now I'm locked into the mage stone without realizing I needed the Atronach stone for my actual build. Not a game-breaker obviously, but it's made me think about all the weird traps you can fall into early on that seem fine until suddenly they're not.

Like, I've definitely wasted perks on stuff that seemed useful at the time. Picked up a heavy armor perk once thinking I was going to be a tank, then immediately pivoted to light armor and never looked back. The perk points just... gone.

What's the dumbest character-building mistake you didn't catch until way too late? I'm curious if this is just me being bad at planning or if everyone does this.

 

[ScrollsOfTamriel]

yeah the standing stone thing is rough because you can't just respec it whenever you want. though honestly at level 32 you're not that far in - if it's really bothering you, you could always console command it or just accept the Mage Stone and lean into it. depends how much that's actually holding you back vs just feeling suboptimal.

my worst one was dumping perks into the heavy armor tree early because I thought "well I'm wearing heavy armor so obviously" and then realizing way later that the real value was in the smithing perks, not the armor perks themselves. like the perks that boost armor rating are almost always worse than just... making better armor. wasted a bunch of points that way before I figured out the smithing scaling is what actually matters.

also the Oakflesh thing - that's kind of inevitable tbh. every mage run I do I end up with way more Alteration than I planned because it's just the obvious spell to spam when you're not in combat. not really avoidable unless you just never cast it.