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Don't forget to talk to Serana before and after the garden too for some wonderful dialog.  Are you planning on getting the dawnguard dlc conjuration spells? Regarding the whole vampire treachery, maybe some dev had an idea but I strongly suspect it was just thrown in to tick the box of treachery among the vampires to show they are untrustworthy and eeeviiiil. The best description I've ever heard of Skyrim is that it's two miles wide but only two inches deep.
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Jul 24, 2018 12:40
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I know the next bit is absolutely ridiculously dumb on the Dawnguard side, but I'm curious to see if the vampire version somehow manages to top it. At least it gives you a neat spell and a good shout.
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Jul 24, 2018 20:36
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I thought it was pretty lame that a fragment of creation, containing insights into the past and future through prophecy, acts like an appendix or preview to two other Elder Scrolls that just happen to be in the area rather than contain anything useful. Especially since Harkon already knows the prophecy, and that's his motivation to do anything. Sealing Serana away with that scroll was also equally pointless, because that knowledge is a step back from what Harkon already knows.
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Jul 24, 2018 20:47
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Orcs and Ostriches posted:I thought it was pretty lame that a fragment of creation, containing insights into the past and future through prophecy, acts like an appendix or preview to two other Elder Scrolls that just happen to be in the area rather than contain anything useful. Especially since Harkon already knows the prophecy, and that's his motivation to do anything. Actually you end up having to read all three scrolls at the same time to figure out where Auriel's bow is. So sealing Serana away does stop Harkon from getting it. Too bad nothing else about that makes sense.
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Jul 25, 2018 04:01
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You actually can craft crossbow bolts, but you need to start a set of quests that are only available on the Dawnguard side. Doing this also allows you to craft enchanted crossbow bolts which do elemental damage on top of enchanting the crossbow itself. Crossbows supposedly have a chance to stagger enemies without taking the archery perk - taking the perk raises the base chance. Certain crossbows also ignore 50% of enemy armour. However since the base damage of the highest tier of crossbow bolt is so low, it's highly unlikely that you'll be doing more damage than with a bow (especially when accounting for sneak bonuses which most bow wielding characters use) unless maybe there's an enemy where 50% of the armour reduction outstrips the damage gap, and I don't know how common that is. Plus since they're so slow to reload and fire you stagger less overall. Like all things in Skyrim except for sneaky archery, crossbows are cool and flavourful but suboptimal and, in the only example of meaningful choice in the game, gated behind a faction choice. Which is really not what players meant when they said they wanted meaningful faction choices. They're probably good if you're not playing legendary, but so is literally everything.
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Jul 25, 2018 11:01
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There are a few enemies with actual armor such as bandit chiefs with nordic steel but it's not improved and I have no idea about their skill and perks with armor. My guess is that even on legendary the 50% armor penetration is pretty much garbage.
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Jul 25, 2018 11:33
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Poil posted:Don't forget to talk to Serana before and after the garden too for some wonderful dialog. I do plan to pick up all the conjurations from the soul cairn (unless the tomes glitch and are missing). We’ll see how useful they prove. I also suspect that some dev had an idea for a vampire intrigue subplot, but then they were lazy or in a hurry and didn’t implement it. But it would have been better to cut entirely than include the nonsensical, half-assed version we got. Regarding crossbows and armor piercing, yeah the problem is that no enemies have significant armor. Even enemies who are visually WEARING armor typically have 0 armor value, and the few npcs like bandit chiefs who have reasonably high quality armor and a few perks still never even reach 15% reduction, so negating half of it is not even noticeable.
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Jul 26, 2018 18:44
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Every time I've ever used 'em I've found the Soul Cairn conjurations to all be really powerful. If only navigating it to find them didn't SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK. So close to getting access to my favorite Shout in the game.... even if part of it is irrelevant to Hjalti. RII VAAZ ZOL
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Jul 27, 2018 03:39
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Yessss, that one is fun. Especially for the civil war "quest"line. DG has great conjurations (even though what Serana says about them is super dumb). The expert level spell is the most sturdy summon by far and comes with a weapon of quality material. It does lack the ranged attack of the storm atronach and fire enchantment of the dremora lord but it won't ever get one shotted by a bowdraugr.
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Jul 27, 2018 08:57
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sweet geek swag posted:Actually you end up having to read all three scrolls at the same time to figure out where Auriel's bow is. So sealing Serana away does stop Harkon from getting it. Too bad nothing else about that makes sense.
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Jul 27, 2018 11:46
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I can explain why Serana does stupid things, I just assume that being asleep for so long gave her serious brain damage. But why does her mother, who supposedly loves her, lock her away for all eternity.
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Jul 27, 2018 18:37
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When you love something, never let it go. By locking it up forever in a place you can be sure it will never, ever leave you by force. Just like I keep my original issue #1 mangas in a temperature controlled safe
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Jul 27, 2018 20:08
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sweet geek swag posted:I can explain why Serana does stupid things, I just assume that being asleep for so long gave her serious brain damage. But why does her mother, who supposedly loves her, lock her away for all eternity. 
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Jul 27, 2018 21:12
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Poil posted:Maybe the brain damage was already there. It runs in the family.
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Jul 27, 2018 21:53
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If you assume Serana is a typical teenager who has no idea from moment to moment what she wants or why, and that she enthralled you the moment you opened her sarcophagus or whatever, then at least her actions and yours make sense. For a certain value of 'sense'. As for Harkon, well, he may just be certifiably insane. Valerica might well have known exactly what she was doing when she entombed Serana with the Scroll and then peaced out to the Soul Cairn. Spending eternity imprisoned there probably got to looking pretty good to her, compared to having to live with those two forever. Can't help the good folks at the Dawnguard, though. They're apparently just retarded. You have to consider that these are dudes the loving Vigilants of Stendarr of all people rejected. Eric the Mauve fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Jul 27, 2018 |
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Jul 27, 2018 22:48
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Eric the Mauve posted:Can't help the good folks at the Dawnguard, though. They're apparently just retarded. You have to consider that these are dudes the loving Vigilants of Stendarr of all people rejected.
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Jul 28, 2018 09:44
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Good point. It's probably even better to observe that the Vigilants of Stendarr are so stupid even the Dawnguard decided they were too life-threateningly stupid and left 
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Jul 28, 2018 13:51
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I'm not sure whether Valerica or Harkon comes off as stupider (or lazier) in this episode. It's obvious where Serana gets it from though. Days 38: Castlevania: Elegy of Boredom
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Jul 28, 2018 15:54
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The formula may not actually need her blood but the ritual equipment might if she made it that way. Oh and you totally missed some special Serana dialog in the first bit of the dungeon. The feral vampire also carries a diary which explains why there's one hiding out down there. Too bad the corpse went... somewhere.
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Jul 28, 2018 20:08
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Poil posted:The formula may not actually need her blood but the ritual equipment might if she made it that way. To summarize: That part of the castle was already in disuse because that wing belonged to Valerica, she went AWOL, and Harkon decided to let it sit rather than poke at the laboratory of a fairly powerful mage who knew all of his weaknesses and who probably had a grudge against him. Sort of reasonable, though you'd think that with hundreds of years since that happened, he'd have found some patsy to investigate at some point. Fast forward to a few years before you come in - some no-name vampire gets exiled from the castle due to court politics, but instead decides to sneak around the back and begin raising a fighting force to assault the castle from Harkon's own backyard for revenge. Which is also pretty reasonable, considering that this is apparently the one place in Skyrim where Harkon categorically refuses to go. Anything past the courtyard is most likely stuff that Valerica put in place to protect her wing of the castle, which is probably the smartest thing she did in the entire game and retroactively sort-of justifies Harkon's reluctance to investigate - getting assaulted by his disappeared wife's gargoyles in his own courtyard would probably be a very quick way for him to lose face in front of his court. I'll agree that the reasoning here is tenuous, but you can at least see what they were going for and it probably holds up if you don't think about it too much. Which is fair, considering that we're already in the position of fulfilling a prophecy to kill the sun because apparently Harkon didn't bother to tell the architect for the castle he commissioned to leave out the windows.
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Jul 28, 2018 21:29
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Maybe he's actually really clever and knows that if he just waits some dumbass is going to walk in and do all the work for him in exchange for a couple of shiny baubles. Arcomage posted:it probably holds up if you don't think about it too much.
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Jul 28, 2018 22:46
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Well, I haven't seen anything as dumb as forcing a Dawnguard Dragonborn to either become a vampire or letting a vampire take their soul yet. So far this is the less terrible of the Dawnguard questlines! And that is even with the assumption that you'll eventually kill Harkon and become the new lord of Volkihar Castle, as well as besieging Fort Dawnguard and killing everyone there.
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Jul 28, 2018 23:20
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My only problem with this episode is that you were so close to giving this episode the name Elegy of Ennui, but you missed it by thiiis much.
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Jul 29, 2018 00:27
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Why do these vampires even care about the sun? Like, not in a background lore sense, but just in a practical sense. Skyrim vampires can walk around in the sunlight with almost no problems. This is on the same level as putting all their effort into ending drizzle because they don't like getting damp.
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Jul 29, 2018 12:06
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I think lore-wise the sun is a lot more unpleasant than it ends up being mechanically. Serana and the Dragonborn are the only vampires who spend a significant amount of time outdoors, and they're both Extraordinary Individuals.
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Jul 29, 2018 15:59
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Sunlight was actually harmful to vampires in previous games.
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Jul 29, 2018 16:45
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i feel like there is not enough fire
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Jul 30, 2018 07:16
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I've been kinda playing along this Let's Play on the Dawnguard quest and holy crap is it getting bad and tedious. Also - is there any point to any of the Expert or Master destruction spells? Without using enchanting, even with the perks Incinerate seems too magica-inefficient to be worth using.
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Jul 30, 2018 16:58
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I'm pretty sure high level destruction spells are balanced around using enchantments to cut their cost way lower than the native -60% you get from perks alone. They do like 50% more damage than the Apprentice spells, which is not worth it if they drain your magicka pool in a handful of casts.
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Jul 30, 2018 19:44
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A tradeoff between dps and mana efficiency makes more sense on lower difficulties when it's not the case that everything is a giant sack of hp
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Jul 30, 2018 19:51
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In theory, yeah, but there's very few instances where a 50% DPS increase will ever outweigh having access another 10+ hits backed by Impact.
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Jul 30, 2018 20:00
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Poil posted:The formula may not actually need her blood but the ritual equipment might if she made it that way. Yeah, it's a shame about losing that corpse. Still, the 'explanations' in it are clumsy and don't really resolve the fundamental problems. If anything it makes it worse since for Harkon to either not be aware of or not deal with a renegade vampire building up a force inside his own castle is unbelievable stupidity. Mountaineer posted:Sunlight was actually harmful to vampires in previous games. It did physical damage in previous games, but I'd argue that it's actually worse here since in those games it was trivial to just run around healing constantly. In fact, it was a GOOD thing the sun hurt you in Oblivion since it was so ridiculously hard to level restoration. In Skyrim on the other hand, the only playable kind of vampire is the precise one I'm playing: a mage with level 40 restoration, because anything else becomes completely non-functional in the daytime (even as a stage one vampire, which was totally unharmed in previous games!). Zero stamina regen means you cannot run from enemies OR fight. Penalties to your max HP and so forth are a problem too, and the -100% magic regen is pretty harsh even on the well-equipped Hjalti. CommonShore posted:I've been kinda playing along this Let's Play on the Dawnguard quest and holy crap is it getting bad and tedious. I have actually never in my life cast an expert or master destruction spell. Destruction levels so ridiculously slowly that I think skill level 62 is the highest I ever attained! I mean, you guys have seen for yourself that I've barely passed 50 after 40 hours of playing... But yeah, I'm not missing out on anything. Most master spells of any school are unusable, with destruction quite possibly the worst. And the expert level spells are WAY worse than apprentice -unless you have 0% magic cost, in which case the game is unlosable anyway.
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Aug 1, 2018 03:50
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Destruction levels up (a bit) faster when you can afford to frequently cast the higher end spells. You don't even need to level Enchanting if you're good/lucky about finding gear with cost reductions. Also trainers. Those exist, and are quite beneficial for certain hard-to-level trees.
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Aug 1, 2018 04:27
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Melth posted:It did physical damage in previous games, but I'd argue that it's actually worse here since in those games it was trivial to just run around healing constantly. In fact, it was a GOOD thing the sun hurt you in Oblivion since it was so ridiculously hard to level restoration. In Skyrim on the other hand, the only playable kind of vampire is the precise one I'm playing: a mage with level 40 restoration, because anything else becomes completely non-functional in the daytime (even as a stage one vampire, which was totally unharmed in previous games!). Zero stamina regen means you cannot run from enemies OR fight. Penalties to your max HP and so forth are a problem too, and the -100% magic regen is pretty harsh even on the well-equipped Hjalti.
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Aug 1, 2018 06:40
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Time to take cairn of this Valerica subplot! Days 38-40: Soul Survivor (part 1)
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Aug 5, 2018 01:37
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That area looks so bad to play. Hey I've got a great idea for the capstone area to our expansion. What if it's enormous, everything looks the same, there's super limited enemy variety, and it's all monocolor? And we make the player go to the whole thing for quests! Sounds good, ship it!
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Aug 5, 2018 08:35
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I kind of like the Soul Cairn. It's something entirely different from the sort of environment the game has gone so far, and there's some good lines and NPCs here if you stick around to hear them. That said, it really does outstay its welcome. The video doesn't quite do it justice, but if you are a completionist and do not have the map that you apparently have, you will very quickly get lost among all the vaguely samey monuments and random undead encounters. The map is also just a little bit too big for the things that are actually on it, compared to the density of Skyrim proper, so you can spend quite a lot of time wandering about without making any actual progress towards anything. Valerica's motivation is... odd, to say the least, but there's some truth to it - Skyrim is generally much more accepting towards things like vampires and necromancy than any other province in Tamriel, and its particular strain of vampires can pass for human quite well. There's a fair few vampires out in Skyrim who are just working normal jobs and going about their daily lives without any particular need to blot out the sun forever, and you can generally interact with them without them immediately trying to kill you. That would probably end if Harkon has his way. More importantly, I think the point Valerica is making is that she's realized what Harkon hasn't - this sun-killing thing is going to paint a massive target on the vampires for any and all of the other inhabitants of Tamriel. While Castle Vokihar is fairly remote, secret and moderately well defended, I have serious doubts about it being able to stand up against the Thalmor fortress on the coast near them, let alone everyone else in Skyrim who would be more inclined to go kill vampires than cower in fear. Even if Harkon's plan goes off perfectly, odds are that he's not going to be around to enjoy it for very long.
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Aug 5, 2018 09:26
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There's that, and there's also that the plan is idiotic and self-defeating even if successful, as blotting out the sun will annihilate plant life, therefore the entire food chain goes to hell, and in the end there's nobody even left to feed on. Good job, idiots.
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Aug 5, 2018 10:46
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It also doesn't really come out in this Let's Play, but the Soul Cairn is by far the largest area in the game which does not allow for map travel or have any kind of shortcuts around it. You can go anywhere in the Skyrim overworld instantly if you've visited it once, and the game will just subtract a couple of in-game hours based on distance. Even if you want a somewhat more realistic traveling experiences, every major city has a carriage service you can use to travel to any of the other major cities for a token fee. Travel and exploration takes up exactly as much time as you want it to. It's also loaded with landmarks and points of interests, so you can always navigate Whiterun's province in relation to the city itself, since it dominates the area, and the Throat of the World is visible from nearly half the map. I don't even remember if the Soul Cairn has a map, but if it does, it's basically useless. It's a visually impressive area, but it's one of the worst places to navigate I've ever encountered in a video game. At least in mazes and dungeons you can always fall back to the old left-hand rule and get through eventually.
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Aug 5, 2018 10:54
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The Soul Cairn was far easier to navigate in VR since you're actually "there", and it is with PS3-level graphics from the PSVR version in mind I'm saying that, which after comparing to the video isn't very far off at all. That's how bad the place looks.
Ghosts n Gopniks fucked around with this message at 11:19 on Aug 5, 2018 |
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Aug 5, 2018 11:16
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