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ELDER SCROLLS OMNIBUS THREAD


JLSigman

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I have never talked to Sven's mom before.  Now I am glad I did.  Not only should you fuck Sven over in favor of Faendal because Sven is a lunkhead, do it because Sven's mom is a blazing racist.

Is Mephala overcompensating for something?  The Ebony Blade / Black Hands Blade was a dagger in Morrowind and it was still the second best melee weapon in the game.  Now it is a fucking nodachi that weighs a million pounds and eats your friends / companions? Fuck that.  To the armory it goes.

Dual wielding the Nightingale Blade and Mehrune's Razor almost feels like cheating, although I don't feel terribly heroic about my deed at the end of the Razor quest.  Killing that guy was strictly meta to get me closer to the Oblivion Walker achievement.

I still have a lot of fishing left to do if I am going to get my hands on the Fang of Haynekhtnamet and really OP myself when I am using it in tandem with the Razor.  I am almost at the point where I can kill a Giant with uber magical dagger backstabs even without the Razor's proc kicking in (Assassin't Blade perk = x15 SA damage).  Once I can sneak attack a Mammoth to death, I will be satisfied.

So, you can get Morag Tong body art in ESO after completing a quest to prove your loyalty to the guild:

Morag-Tong-Body-Tattoos-Argonian-Back.jp

It also shows up on Khajiit skins as war paint.

If I ever decide to spend money on an MMO again, I think I may have found my new addiction.

Edited by J.T.
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Speaking of racists, in my past playthroughs I usually do the quest to spring the Grey-mane kid out of the Thalmor prison but after hearing Fralia diss the Khajiit caravans while talking to Isolde, I am inclined to let his punk ass stew this time around.

Olavia laughing about boring holes my skull to divine my future sounds like a threat.  I may have to poison her with an envenomed apple after breaking into her house and stealing all of her food since I cannot outright stab her to death without drawing a fine.  Trepanning my ass.

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I tried starting a new playthrough without any mods so I could get the XB1 achievements and I dunno if it's my Xbox or what but my copy is buggy as shit. It crashes on me frequently. So much so I gave up and started a new Cyberpunk playthrough instead, which so far I've had no issues with

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Sometimes the risk / reward in Skyrim bothers me.  I just finished the Kyne's Sacred Trials quest for Froki Whetted-Blade and the reward is a bit lackluster to say the least.  For running around the entire continent killing spirit animals (one of which is a fucking Mammoth) you get an amulet that provides 10% Damage Reduction (Animals) and adds 5% damage to bows.

The damage resistance is nice, but it is very situational and both the DR and the Bow damage bump become non-factors once you have access to high quality armor and weapons.

There is actually a mod called Kyne's Token Isn't Garbage that improves the DR to 20% and the Bow damage to 30%.  I don't install mods because doing so deactivates achievements.

In the cave where you defeat the spirit troll, you will find Froki's bow.  It is a normal long bow that is enchanted so that it does 20 points of Stamina damage.

Yeah, it will gather dust in one of the chests in one of your houses when you are all done.

Really, the only reason to do this quest is for the callback so that you can see what happened to Haming after Hadvar saved his little ass at Helgen.

I am annoyed because I missed the flash sale at Microsoft Store.  ESO was like 60% off or something crazy.

Edited by J.T.
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On 4/21/2022 at 7:04 AM, J.T. said:

Sometimes the risk / reward in Skyrim bothers me.  I just finished the Kyne's Sacred Trials quest for Froki Whetted-Blade and the reward is a bit lackluster to say the least.  For running around the entire continent killing spirit animals (one of which is a fucking Mammoth) you get an amulet that provides 10% Damage Reduction (Animals) and adds 5% damage to bows.

The damage resistance is nice, but it is very situational and both the DR and the Bow damage bump become non-factors once you have access to high quality armor and weapons.

There is actually a mod called Kyne's Token Isn't Garbage that improves the DR to 20% and the Bow damage to 30%.  I don't install mods because doing so deactivates achievements.

In the cave where you defeat the spirit troll, you will find Froki's bow.  It is a normal long bow that is enchanted so that it does 20 points of Stamina damage.

Yeah, it will gather dust in one of the chests in one of your houses when you are all done.

Really, the only reason to do this quest is for the callback so that you can see what happened to Haming after Hadvar saved his little ass at Helgen.

I am annoyed because I missed the flash sale at Microsoft Store.  ESO was like 60% off or something crazy.

Yeah, you're better off killing Froki early in the game since you get the Token and his fortify archery ring if you really want it.

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On 4/23/2022 at 11:26 AM, Ramo2653 said:

Yeah, you're better off killing Froki early in the game since you get the Token and his fortify archery ring if you really want it.

I couldn't bring myself to kill Froki.  That's Haming's grandfather.  The little guy has been through enough......

...I actually considered killing Froki so that I could adopt Haming and use Froki's shack as a base of operations, but then I thought better of it.... 

I am a horrible person for even thinking that.

Well, I finally re-cracked the code on keeping Meeko, the sad stray dog.  I totally forgot how I got him to stay at my house the first time I played.  The Hearthfire DLC allows you to keep Meeko as a bet, but your kid won't accept Meeko if you bring him home before the kid brings home a stray animal and asks to keep it as a pet.

Also if you tell your kid "No pets ever" and then try to bring Meeko home after the fact, the kid will not accept him.

So tell your kid that he / she can't keep the first pet they bring home (Lucia brought a fucking fox to the crib..) and then go get Meeko.  Once your kid accepts Meeko, tell him to go back home and Meeko will stay at the house where your child is currently living.  He won't go back to the shed near Morthal.

Sadly, I think you can only have one pet per household and the pet has to co-locate with your children, so if you bring Meeko home you cannot also have the husky from the Dawnguard DLC or the war hound that is for sale near the stables at Markarth.  The war dog at the Markarth stables can level up to max, but Meeko's story breaks my heart so I have usually brought him home when I could.

 

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I've also done like three of the Alternate Armors quests.  The Crimson Dirks backtory is kinda interesting.  My armor gallery in Shadowfoot is slowly coming together.

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I hate this game sometimes.  If you are a thieving dirtbag like me, you have spoken to Rune in the Thieves' Guild and heard his tale about a fisherman finding him as a child barely alive near the wreckage of a ship off the coast of Solitude.  He has used the money from his guild jobs to finance the task of finding out his true identity.

I did some wandering in game and discovered that there are at least two shipwrecks near Solitude and I think there are as many as five or more.  None of them have to do with Rune.  After finally getting tired and consulting online reference, I found out that Rune's story angle was abandoned during development so that the game could meet release date. 

Modders have found the code relating to the quest, but there is too much missing to piece a mod together that will run without crashing.  Unsurprisingly, one of the game geolocs mentioned in the code is the shipwreck at Orphan's Point.   You can actually see this location from a vantage point in the mountains when you are almost to Rimerock Burrow aka the cave where you go to obtain the Rueful Axe as a part of the Daedric quest to earn the Mask of Clavicus Vile.

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Well, I had to use my best Invisibility potion, but I finally committed to finishing the Dawnfang / Bloodthirst quest line.  Infiltrating Faldron's Tooth was more time consuming than skulking through Broken Fang Cave during the finale.  Invisibility potions made the disposal of the guardian vampires almost trivial and adding Illusion magic to my arsenal was a good call. 

I should probably go to Winterhold and purchase the advanced versions of my crowd control spells as well as get my hands on Muffle, a Paralysis spell, and an Invisibility spell.  The Shadow sign giving me 60 seconds of Invis once per day is not cutting it and the damage falloff for the Bow of Shadows is getting noticeable.  I need to get a bow with decent damage and lighter weight that I can improve without Arcane Smithing (for the time being) and shift the brunt to potions and spells to quench my thirst for Invisibility On Demand.  I will probably seague from BoS and Orcish Arrows to a Smithing-improved Foresworn Bow and Corkbulb Arrows (25% Chance of Paralysis per arrow!) from the Rare Curios stuff from Creation Club until I finally decide to wade through Dawngard and acquire Auriel's Bow.

There is a bug where Dawnfang does not fit properly on a weapon rack, so Bloodthirst is sheathed in my arsenal at Shadowfoot and I will wield Dawnfang until I hit 40th and go quest for Goldbrand.  I tried questing for it around 30th after setting up alternate saves and it did not go well. I've been holding off of burning points in One-Handed but I will have to invest in Savage Strike when I get Goldbrand.  I will have a katana and it won't make sense if I don't have the skill that allows me to outright decapitate fools in a swordfight. I am all about maintaining the bullshit stereotypical superiority of the katana over traditional European swords.

I'm now going back and doing fetchits for the Thieves' Guild in Solitude so that I can build their rep up for the specialty job.  I really should've done this earlier in the Thieves' Guild questline, but there is so much to do and it is easy to lose track.

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Well, I somehow talked myself into chewing through the totally annoying No Stone Unturned quest aka the worst thought out quest in the game.  

Basically, you will find objects called Unusual Gems around the world and if you are a member of the Thieves' Guild, you can take one of the gems to Vex to get it appraised.  You will then discover that the gems are the stones that are a part of the Crown of Barenziah and you are off to collect all 24 gems, return to Vex, fetch the Crown from some Falmer infested dungeon, and restore the Crown to its former glory so that it once again serves as the crown jewel of the Thieves' Guild objects of plunder.

It wouldn't be so bad if the quest simply sent you all over hell and breakfast in order to retrieve the gems.  The problem is that in order to recover some of the gems, you will have to join factions that you might not have considered joining because of your build.  Case in point, one of the Stones is located in the Arch-Mage's quarters in the College of Winterhold which you cannot access unless you join the College.  So if you have been neglecting your magical skills or did not want to commit to working on any College quests, too fucking bad.

The devs also like to put gems where the odds of you drawing a weapon are pretty high, yet the whole point of being a thief is to enter and exit undetected.

The juice is somewhat worth the squeeze as it is cool to return the Crown back where it belongs and the reward perk you receive pretty much allows you to pull Flawless gems out of your ass whenever you loot a container.  I just wish that this quest would've been thought through a bit better and had taken a more roguish route for acquiring the gems like sneaking through dragon lairs or the like.  I am a completionist so if I start the College of Winterhold quest line, I'm going to finish it no matter how much I may suck at being a mage.

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it was even worse in the original release of the game where one of the gems was somewhere in the Thalmor Embassy so if you didn't think/know to pick it up during that specific main story quest then Too Fucking Bad For You

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6 hours ago, BobbyWhioux said:

it was even worse in the original release of the game where one of the gems was somewhere in the Thalmor Embassy so if you didn't think/know to pick it up during that specific main story quest then Too Fucking Bad For You

Yeah, I have five now and I will probably pick up the one in Jorrvaskr when I get home for work and attempt to take a nap so that I won't sleep when Rampage is on tonight. 

The game is still Too Fucking Bad For You when it comes to this particular quest.  If you have no interest in magic, sorry dude but at least two gems will remain out of reach.   If you've got no interest in being a thief, then you miss the quest altogether.  Why a quest that starts off in the Thieves' Guild requires you to join the College of Winterhold to complete a step totally baffles me.

I feel they could've done a much better job with this quest. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I started a new game because...because apparently I'm completely out of my goddamned mind.  Well, I also wanted to see the "new" content and so far, um, there is none?  I mean, I can smith some new arrows, and that...is...the extent.  Wow.  Boring.  I'm probably too low level to run off and do whatever Ri'saad cares about.  Wasn't about to spend money on this fucking game yet again, either.

Plus, this is a little bit of an unusual playthrough.  I just, uh, don't have dragons.  Bleak Falls Barrow?  Nah.  Farengar and Baalgruuf?  Nah.  I'm gonna be over here mixing potions for about 6 months, we'll worry about your dumbass civil war and vampires and freakout sessions later.  I think I'll just make my way to literally every single Word Wall and learn them all safely first!  Oh, hey, look, they put 3 skeletons in at each of those locations when you haven't spawned dragons yet.  Hahahah, oh, those zany skeletons and their attacks, ho-ho, I'm awful spookied!

Having shotgunned about 2 months' worth of Witcher 3 at the end of last year, I'm also realizing what a bush-league game Skyrim really is.

Edited by Contentious C
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After so many years (with long and veeery long pauses) I haven't finished Skyrim yet...actually I'm quite far from finishing it, lol, even if I've been playing it for more than 400 hours.

My Skyrim folder size is about 60 Gb atm, with more than 300 installed mods and the game has become virtually "infinite". For example, a couple of months ago I've finally spotted an area (a village built on trees) from a mod I installed 6 years ago.

Damn...I need to finish at least the main quest...which I heavily modded and "enriched" as well... ?

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On 5/8/2022 at 11:37 AM, Contentious C said:

I started a new game because...because apparently I'm completely out of my goddamned mind.  Well, I also wanted to see the "new" content and so far, um, there is none?  I mean, I can smith some new arrows, and that...is...the extent.  Wow.  Boring.  I'm probably too low level to run off and do whatever Ri'saad cares about.

 

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On 5/8/2022 at 2:37 PM, Contentious C said:

Having shotgunned about 2 months' worth of Witcher 3 at the end of last year, I'm also realizing what a bush-league game Skyrim really is.

I'm not sure if I would call Skyrim "bush-league."  It was pretty rad when it came out.

The support for the game certainly is bush-league.  I try to overlook the broken pathing and broken bits in quests, but it is hard.   The fact that the Sinding bug has remained unpatched since launch really is unforgivable.

Edited by J.T.
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On 5/9/2022 at 6:19 PM, BrianS81177 said:

 

The base 30th Anniversary game already has Fishing, Survival Mode, Rare Curios, and Saints / Sinners installed as well as Hearthfire, Dawnguard, and Dragonborn.  IIRC the upgrade you can purchase installs nearly all of the CC content, which is a bit of a pain in the ass if you are trying to manage your Quest queue.  It will feel like Couriers will hound with deliveries you every time you level up.

I only have Goldbrand, Dawnfang / Duskfang, and Hendraheim installed and I only installed Hendraheim because I wanted someplace out of the way to dump the Elytra Nymph pets from Saints / Sinners.  Followers can be a hinderance when you use a heavy Stealth build.  I installed Dawnfang / Duskfang because (duh!) katanas.

I was going to install Shadowfoot Sanctum since I am a dirty Khajiit cutpurse and hedge mage and wanted a secret Batcave-esque hideout, but I found out that the Jarl of Riften will still make you purchase Honeyside as a condition of becoming Thane and there is no sense in owning two houses in the same town that are so close to one another.  Honeyside is also an awesome house even if it is ridiculously expensive   Also, despite being a kleptomaniac, I have some sense of code and was not crazy about having to go steal the Golden Claw from the Valerius siblings so that my collection shelf in Shadowfoot would have no gaps.

I thought about installing Bittercup, but Falkreath hold already has some decent fetchits as well as two Daedric quests centered there.  Meanwhile, there is fuck all to do in Morthal other than solve the town mystery, fetch the Horn of Jurgen Windcaller for the Greybeards, and build your first Hearthfire lodge.  Not like you'd spend that much time in Morthal anyway since it doesn't even have a fucking blacksmith or a general goods store.

You could maybe adopt my amusing challenge of engineering the death of at least one guard in each hold so that you can put up a livery shield in your local house to rep where you're from.  It is pretty easy to get a guard killed in Whiterun, Falkreath, and Morthal to get shields for Breezehome and the two Hearthfire lodges in Morthal and Falkreath.  Riften was a bit of a challenge, but I managed to get the Dragon Cultists to drop one of the guards in Ivarstead so that I could have a Riften shield to use for decoration in Honeyside.

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I suppose I didn't make that clear enough; I have the free "upgrade", not the $20 ripoff one.  If I wanted to do Survival Mode, I could have done the mod version years ago.  Fishing is the dumbest RNG bullshit possible (how many different Zelda games have a better version of fishing in them?  Yeesh), so it bored me from the word go.  So really, the only included content that's "new" for me is Saints & Seducers, and...I'll get to that eventually I suppose.  I thought "Rare Curios" was going to be something more than a couple of Oblivion tchotchkes and some Morrowind alchemy crap.

This playthrough has only been salvaged by also installing Inigo for the first time, and letting him bail me out of a bunch of situations I couldn't have handled on my own.  The changes to the load screens are decent, too.  Probably helps that I have a bunch of other mods anyway that delay vampires & Dragonborn stuff to specific points, since it never made any sense to me to do a standard playthrough, where you hit Ustengrav sub-level-10 and then suddenly the Cultists are walking out of the fog and electrocuting you and entire towns. 

 

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If you have no mods, the Cultists from Dragonborn usually hit you around 14th level or so.   Around that time I am usually coming down from High Hrothgar with the second word to Unrelenting Force.  The cultist pick a fight with me in front of the Inn in Ivarstead and are usually mercked by the town guard.  

Unless you make extensive use of the Corkbulb Arrows (which frankly, you shouldn't when Elven and Glass arrows become available and your poison brewing skills are up to snuff) or you just enjoy Alchemy in general, there is no real value to be gained from Rare Curios.  The Khajiit merchants travel schedule makes it nigh impossible to keep up a stock of their items and since the rare Alchemy ingredients are mostly from Vvardenfell, you cannot harvest them locally in Skyrim.

Yeah, I hate Fishing but the rewards are nice.  There are two elemental resist rings that come in handy for dragon and wizard fights and Skryim's incarnation of the Fang of Haynekhtnamet is the second best dagger in the game, so suffering through RNG while running all over hell and breakfast is a small price to pay.   Dual wielding the Fang with the Razor or Goldbrand almost feels like cheating.

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10 hours ago, BrianS81177 said:

The Cultists won't attack until you complete "The Horn of Jurgen Windcaller" iirc

Nope.  I had just received the quest to retrieve the Horn and the Cultist were waiting for me outside of the inn in Ivarstead.   I had to fight them carefully as Klimmek's punk ass was standing in between us and I didn't want to earn a fine while defending myself.

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  • 1 month later...

Finally picking up where I left off about a month ago.   It has taken this long to get my body adjusted to being awake during the day. 

I am really tired of giants and bandits killing the fucking farm animals at my Morthal manor house every 20th time I fast travel to the crib to dump off some loot.  Replacing a horse is 1K gold.  I haven't bothered to get a bard or a carriage.  I seem to recall the bard at my Dawnstar manor getting stuck in the fireplace the first time I played this game, so I am not trying to enconter this bug ever again.

At long last, some asshole finally dropped an Amulet of Dibella and I have a shrine to all Nine Divines at the Morthal crib.  It is one of my crowning achievements along with having an Angler and a Scorpion Fish in my aquarium and collecting enough Nordic Carved Armor pieces (including the shield) to put on a mannequin.  I have not even thought about breaking ground on Falkreath manor house, even though I know I've earned the right to buy land and have done enough good deeds to earn my title of Thane. 

I am afraid of having to go fishing again to fill the aquarium as well as the bloodbath I will take when I dip into my money reserves to pay for construction materials.  I am also two amulets short of a full set of nine, so I will probably wait and save gold until I come across an Amulet of Mara (not the one you use to get married) and an Amulet of Julianos.  Once that's done I can complete another shrine at the Falkreath crib.

I think I will always make the east wing of these manors a kitchen.   The Morthal crib has a greenhouse and an alchemy lab to go with the kitchen.  Not sure what configuration I will have for the Falkreath crib.  I want it to have at least one tower since the Falkreath crib has a view of the lake but I don't want to build another alchemy lab, so I will have to see what west wing addition is a tower.

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Falkreath has the fishery option so you can farm salmon for salmon roe which can be mixed with nordic barnacle and garlic for a big money potion. I'm not sure you're really hurting for funds like that tho.

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