The Gaming Den

Stinktopus wrote:Aryxbez,

Is the Nord Thunderfist supposed to scale in damage?

As written no, but it probably should. That still wouldn't put Polar Ray out of a job and I wouldn't cast Polar Ray as a 1st level spell.

Since I'm not as up on Skyrim lore as I should be, can someone explain why Dwemer armor is shit? I mean, the way people talk about it in-game you'd think it would be the best. Is it because modern smiths have an imperfect understanding? Or just gameplay-story segregation?

So, I installed Cloaks of Skyrim, and the expansion of it, and have recently gotten to Smithing 100, so I have a full set of dragonscale armour waiting for my enchanting to catch up so I can have my ultimate light armour set.

I'm disappointed, however, that it seems I can't make a matching cloak. Does anyone know of a mod that allows that, or if I'm overlooking something with CoS?

JigokuBosatsu wrote:Since I'm not as up on Skyrim lore as I should be, can someone explain why Dwemer armor is shit? I mean, the way people talk about it in-game you'd think it would be the best. Is it because modern smiths have an imperfect understanding? Or just gameplay-story segregation?

IIRC Dwemer Armor was the third-best Heavy Armor type (far behind Ebony and Daedric, the two best. This is barring partial armor sets and artifacts) in vanilla Morrowind, and fourth in Oblivion (Orcish Armor was Medium Armor in Morrowind, but better than Dwemer despite being in a lower weight class.) I can't speak for Daggerfall or Arena on this matter, but it's a game consideration and legacy mechanic. I have no idea why steel full plate is now better than Dwemer-made full plate in Skyrim, but the stuff made by Orcs has been better since Morrowind.

Lore-wise, there's at least one in-game book (I'm pretty sure it's in Morrowind, I think it's in the later games too, and I think there are more books to the same effect) that implies modern Dwemer armor isn't particularly strong because it's made from really old (and often mismatched) armor plating of Dwemer automatons, and the secrets to actually do better than copy such parts found were lost with the Dwarves themselves. Assuming this is the case, if you could get a Dwemer-crafted set where all the parts were brand new and perfectly matching, it would theoretically be super awesome. Which is really another way of saying with enough Smithing, you can make the armor hit the armor cap and not care.

But mostly I think it's just a disconnect between flavor and mechanics, with an after-the-fact justification for it.

Prak_Anima wrote:So, I installed Cloaks of Skyrim, and the expansion of it, and have recently gotten to Smithing 100, so I have a full set of dragonscale armour waiting for my enchanting to catch up so I can have my ultimate light armour set.

I'm disappointed, however, that it seems I can't make a matching cloak. Does anyone know of a mod that allows that, or if I'm overlooking something with CoS?

I don't have the mod, so I have no idea.

Prak_Anima wrote:I'm disappointed, however, that it seems I can't make a matching cloak. Does anyone know of a mod that allows that, or if I'm overlooking something with CoS?

Install Winter is Coming and the compatibility patch for Cloaks of Skyrim. You won't get a dragonscale cloak out of it, but WiC cloaks look better with the armor set.

If you plan on using mods in Skyrim, you will want to install and run LOOT and Wrye Bash so you can 1) put your mods in the proper order and 2) make sure that all of the mods that you are loading that modify monster/treasure/level lists all play together nicely and don't conflict with each other. If you're just getting into modding, that may seem a bit daunting, but LOOT is pretty easy to use, and you can find a good tutorial on how to use Wrye Bash here.

You are also going to want to download and installSKSE if you want to use some of the best Skyrim mods out there (such as SkyUI).

As far as Skyrim mods go, here are some of my favorites:

Run For Your Lives and When Vampires Attack make citizens run AWAY from dragons and vampires instead of TOWARDS them like they do in the vanilla game. This is a must-install as far as I'm concerned - unless you like seeing the streets littered with the bodies of NPCs, of course.

Better Magic - This mod that modifies magical spells and perks in Skyrim so it is better balanced against melee and bow users. It doesn't add any crazy spells or anything; it just aims to make spellcasters suck less and makes it easier to manage upkeep on Alteration spells. You also don't have to rely on Impact to stunlock enemies as a Destruction mage.

Conjure Rideable Ethereal Horse - You'll never have to worry about your horse dying after you install this mod. This spell allows you to summon a spectral horse almost anywhere - even in towns and dungeons - and it's much faster then the standard horse. You'll also want to download the patch here that keeps it from drawing aggro from guards when it is summoned or you dismount from it.

Immersive Armors - A compilation of custom armors compiled by hothtrooper, this mod is invaluable for Light Armor users that don't want to be running around in Elven or Glass Armors from the mid-point to the end of the game. That's not to say that it doesn't have great Heavy Armors either, but almost all of the Heavy Armors look cool, while the Light Armors leave something to be desired. I *would* also recommend Immersive Weapons, but it frankly doesn't meet the same level of quality as Immersive Armors right now, though hothtrooper has started that he (?) plans on cleaning it up at some point in the future.

Skyrim Immersive Creatures isn't *quite* as immersive as it purports to be - you'll need to go into the options menu to switch it to "Purist" and then turn off Ore Elemental spawning - but once you do that it adds some additional enemies and random spawns to the game that make things a bit more interesting. It also adds some new summon spell tomes to the game that can be found scattered throughout the world.

Complete Crafting Overhaul Remade - The central piece of a series of crafting overhaul mods that include Weapons & Armor Fixes Remade, Clothing & Clutter Fixes, and Smithing Perks Overhaul Remade. It also incorporates Bandoliers - Bags and Pouches, JewelCraft, and JaySus Swords in its code; you'll just need to load the textures for those mods, and then you can unload the ESP files that came with them and let CCO Remade do the heavy lifting. Also has special patched versions of Cloaks of Skyrim, Heavy Armor, and Winter Is Coming. Does an excellent job of re-balancing the crafting system and fixing some of the bugs that the designers did not address whenever they shipped the game.

Cutting Room Floor - Like the title implies, this mod restores some NPCs and quests that weren't finished in time for the game to ship. Some quests were too complex or didn't have enough voice acting recorded to be restored, but there's enough extra content to justify installing it.

Civil War Overhaul - Turns the relatively static and staid Skyrim Civil War series of quests into an actual military campaign where you not only have to conquer enemy holds, but you have to make sure that you can defend your own. You can actually lose Civil War battles now! *gasp*

Atlas Map Markers = Pretty much the best map mod out there. Reduces the size of icons on the map to make it easier to fast-travel to specific shops and areas inside of cities.

Dragon Combat Overhaul - Makes dragons a more difficult to fight, but also allows you to shoot them out of the sky, typically with hilarious results. Alas, they still tend to wander off and attack other targets like they have ADD as soon as another target (any target) within range appears. Supposedly makes Alduin super-powerful, but I haven't tested that supposition just yet. On a side not, I don't recommend installing Deadly Dragons; DD just makes dragon fights tedious and they tend to use abilities that kill everyone in the area before they can get to safety.

So, after spending hours selecting, installing and activating mods, realizing I installed the wrong version of windows and thus couldn't use all 8gb of ram I installed, spending more hours selecting more mods, installing everything and activating it again, I opened up Skyrim and found that it was running insanely choppy. I'm not sure there's a word in gaming for the opposite of laggy, or if that's what people mean by choppy, but my character will fly across rooms with the slightest touch of W.

Any idea how to fix this? I ran fraps and it showed my fps wildly vacilating between 40-something and 60-something fps.

This is the system I finally built, so yay full hardware list so people know exactly what I'm working with.

Did you try installing some sort of framerate limiter?

Prak wrote:So, after spending hours selecting, installing and activating mods, realizing I installed the wrong version of windows and thus couldn't use all 8gb of ram I installed, spending more hours selecting more mods, installing everything and activating it again, I opened up Skyrim and found that it was running insanely choppy. I'm not sure there's a word in gaming for the opposite of laggy, or if that's what people mean by choppy, but my character will fly across rooms with the slightest touch of W.

Any idea how to fix this? I ran fraps and it showed my fps wildly vacilating between 40-something and 60-something fps.

This is the system I finally built, so yay full hardware list so people know exactly what I'm working with.

40-60fps fluctuation should barely be noticeable. It shouldn't fling you across the room. I actually doubt your video card is the bottleneck here. Probably too many mods conflicting with each other and bogging the f*ck out of skyrim.

If you move excessively far from tapping W, that probably means something is screwed up in either the system that determines how long it's held down for or someone fucked up and linked something to CPU cycles instead of time. Or one of the mods accidentally set everything to move stupidly fast. What happens if you switch off the mods?

Also, are you having weird keyboard problems elsewhere? If so it's possible the I/O driver is screwed up.

When I turned all mods off it still occurred. I did a reinstall and it still happened. I installed RealVision ENB last night, and then realized it was 3am, so I haven't tested that, but as I understand it, that should be a framerate limiter, so I'll try that later today.

No weird keyboard problems anywhere else. Skyrim just runs crazy fast. I went through the Companions bit and the part where you get formally inducted into them had everyone saying their lines at once. I went to an armour workbench and my character was pounding on it like a jackhammer.

Uh, that sounds like everything is pegged to CPU cycles so it runs extra fast because the CPU is faster than they anticipated when designing. Except I'm pretty sure they didn't do that because it's retarded, so I don't know what the fuck.

I am almost certain that the problem is unrelated to your graphics card. That wouldn't make things happen faster, it would make things show up on the screen sooner after they happened. The CPU tells the graphics card where something is and the graphics card draws it there.

I don't know a lot about computers, so I have no clue. I know that if you let me tinker with a program I can usually figure out how to work it, that is the extent of my computer knowledge.

What are the results of the following console commands Prak?

Player.GetAV SpeedMult

Player.GetBaseAV SpeedMult

Also [Ctrl] + [PrtScr] seems to double the gamespeed.

name_here wrote:Uh, that sounds like everything is pegged to CPU cycles so it runs extra fast because the CPU is faster than they anticipated when designing. Except I'm pretty sure they didn't do that because it's retarded, so I don't know what the fuck.

This can happen even if the software isn't pegged to CPU cycles if for some reason the processor is running slower or faster than the program thinks it is. For example, there's a bunch of processor overclocking utilities that end up working like speedhacks in certain games because the processor can't accurately report the rate at which it's running because it's being improperly overclocked by third party software (the operating system itself will report fairly bogus values).

So my first instinct here would be to make sure you aren't running any of that software and make sure you aren't overclocking your processor. To the bios!

Both commands return "100.00"
Things seem to be working appropriately now

I've been getting repeated CTD on my skyrim. I think I may need to do a clean install. I attempted to last time, but about half of the mods I had in there were back after the reinstall.