Much like my buddy Kris's kleptomania. I have a problem as well. I am a Min-maxer and yes this is a disorder, and addiction really.
Wikipedia describes min-maxing as: the practice of playing a role-playing game, with the intent of creating the "best" character by means of minimizing undesired or unimportant traits and maximizing desired ones. This is usually accomplished by improving one specific trait or ability by sacrificing ability in all other fields.
What this means in my case is that you can give me the most beautiful, open, and immersive world ever digitized (And that is what Skyrim most certainly is bar none) and with in an hour I have started the downward spiral of figuring out how to best conquer the world with an iron fist down the world's throat as it screams for help.
Enter the Sword and Shield Warrior.
From the very beginning of most RPGs I tend to gravitate to melee combat unless it becomes clear ranged combat has an overwhelming advantage. In Skyrim it became clear the destruction line which is the pure damage magic line did not have any advantage over melee combat. In fact once out of magic (which quickly happens at lower levels of the game) your choice is to either run away or attack with a weapon. Since one could just cut out the middle man and become stronger in melee combat which I was already inclined to do. That is where I decided to develop my skills. Now I had to take a look at what type of melee combat I was going to do. Skyrim does not have just one choice for melee combat but 4 basic paths one could go.
Two handed weapons at first seemed like the path I should take. With the highest weapon damage rating being on the two handed weapons and still having the ability to block somewhat if needed it was definitely the better damage choice to me over the dual wielding style.
The dual wielding style irritated me to no end as swinging either hand was not independent of each other, in fact you had to wait for the swing animation to complete with one hand to start the other. You could do an animation that would swing both weapons at once but it seems to stop all forward movement your character was making which isn't a problem on a stationary target but becomes a problem if your target is moving at all away from you or around you resulting in many misses. Swinging with a two hander you could continue to move forward and even have very long reaching side swings that no amount of strafing from my enemies could avoid
The third style of melee combat is sneak attack assassinations and back stabs. This requires patients.... I have none, I'm more of a charge the front lines kinda guy so that was out.
It was at this time I started fighting dragons, and it became apparent that they either breathed fire or frost and that these would be some of the main monsters that I would be running into and quite frequently. I noticed a shield perk that reduced fire/frost/shock damage by 50% when blocking, and as the dragons just loved to fly around me not to come down to the ground for a while, all the while breathing fire on me like the cowards they were. So I decided to take up blocking and never looked back.
After a few perks in to block I discovered a perk that slowed down time when I was blocking a power attack. The results of this once I invested this perk were astounding as they were humorous. I could literally strafe around an enemy like a giant as they were stopped in time while I could release a hail of strikes to their back. While I was not doing as much damage per hit as a two hander, my attacks were not that much less damaging and was relatively save from even the hardest hitting attacks behind my shield and just had to wait until the right moment to let out my fury.
I then went about finding "creative" ways at increasing the proficiency in my chosen skills of Block, One-handed weapons, and Heavy Armor. After a time I figured out how to increase my levels even more by increasing skills I didn't use giving me access to more perks, health, and stamina.
So with the combat type dilemma solved, I discovered I had more perk points then I needed so I looked into smithing as it said I could improve my armor and weapons which such a skill. I discovered I could double my damage and armor rating and was very amused. Amused is a great word for it... and then.. I ran into a quest that gave me a glove that increased my smithing even more... now my smithing was already maxed, so I wondered if it would even matter that I had this time. But I gave it a try and sure enough I increased the damage on my seemingly maxed damage weapon by a few points... That was the turning point of the game.
At this point I am going to have to explain two things.
First is that my character was already deadly, Anything that I could swing at was not a challenge, the only challenge was getting in range to swing at something thus dragons and mages/archers were still an annoyance yet nothing to really fear.
Second was that I had at this point also already discovered the enchanting skill although I had not put it to much use as I had not increased its skill at all. With the new found smithing gloves I decided to change that. After discovering I could sell iron daggers (that normally sold for about 18 gold) for 1300 gold if I put a banishment enchant on them which cost me 100 gold to produce I quickly became a wealthy man and this enabled my ability to get to 100 skill in enchanting in a mere hour of buying, selling, and enchanting. With perks invested in the enchant tree I discovered I could take my 15% smiting gloves and turn that enchant into a 25% enchant which I could put on 4 different armor pieces... My weapon damage and armor doubled.... but that was not the end of the ridiculousness. I found different elemental resists, and one handed damage increase enchants that I could put on my armor.
The end result of my enchant train was that I had 100% resist to fire/frost/shock damage and had 160% damage increase to one handed damage on just my enchantments alone. ..... This ment with my armor I was all but impervious to physical and magic attacks. My only vulnerability was poison which I only had a 50% racial bonus to. My weapon damage had gone from before smithing of a 42 damage Daedric Sword, to a 518 damage Daedric Sword. I had transformed into a Demi-God.
With my quest for Godhood complete I was finally able to sit back, smell the roses, and the burning ash of the discarded remains of the victims of my carnage.... for how does one test ones Godhood but with the destruction of an entire city wielding nothing but a blood soaked sword.
As far as Skyrim goes, its the best, most complete RPG I've ever played. Skill based games are really the way to go and I'm glad Bethesda walked away from the class based model. There are 3 things however that would have made Skyrim the best game ever made, or at least the best RPG ever made.
1. Drop in - Drop out Co-op.
Do not tell me it is not possible. You have followers in the game, a friend could merely take the place of them. Would it have added a bit more work for the developer? Yes. but is it in the realm of possibility. YES!!
2. Dead Island-esk Melee delimb/decap physics.
Does Skyrim have decap physics.... not really.. its just an animation, not real physics and half the time ends up looking pretty awkward for the one hand version where the head stays suspended in the air for a couple seconds. And then there is delimbing. Its a mature title and they could have done it. Dead Island did and was pretty fun.
3. Stronger dragons.
Now don't get me wrong, you have to fight A LOT of dragons to get your souls for your shouts. But they could have ramped up the number of souls for the harder dragons like the Elder or Ancient and then made them an actual fight. Once I was the level where these were spawning I was walking through them and that was even with the impairment of them mainly doing ranged damage until they were down to 1/3 or so health and me being a melee centric character.
