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Do eet
Well I'll say it, since this came up in the comment threads several times recently: I am turned off (as are many of you) by overpowered builds--the sneak archer, the 100% spell-cost-reducer, the resto-looped swinger of oversmithed swords, etc. Basically after so many playthroughs it's tough to get excited about any build that isn't bringing some new mechanics or concepts to the table. Some people like to min-max, I get it--to each his or her own.
I mean I love reading lots of builds that are more vanilla--for the writing, backstories, etc.--so they aren't really "turn offs," but I don't often play them. That's why the few builds I've done, and any I do in the future, will almost definitely be modded heavily--I am not being super creative with them, I'm just combining Enai's mod suite together, he's opened up hundreds of new mechanics and playstyles.
EDIT: Credit where credit is due to all of y0u folks who have built, and continue to build, all of these amazing creative concepts in vanilla Skyrim. I'm always amazed at what people have come up with within the vanilla game's boundaries.
You’re basically against the most optimal builds. What’s the point of any build other than the most effective tactic available - aka the meta?
Dude....METAs only apply to competitive games. They certainly dont apply to open sand box games where literally anything can be viable if you know what you're doing.
Hell, you can make a build using the Wooden Sword and running around naked viable
Just roleplay a cyco that think he's slaying dragons but for real he's just swinging the sword mid-air hitting nothing. Done.
Roleplay = viability
Very insightful +1
Appreciate the question, welcome to the community; if i can offer a few answers? Apologies to the community if you guys think I’m speaking out of turn.
1) The game is inherently unbalanced for any min max build and becomes too easy well before completing much more than a single quest line. We have all had many playthroughs that ended with “I became an OP mess by level 30 and restarted.” We are all aware of the most efficient strategies, we know that sneak archery works, we know that sneak attacks with smithed daggers are beastly, we know how to resto loop with necromage, we know how to enchant away spell costs and reach the armor cap. We have exploited every exploit there is to exploit. All of that becomes boring fast if you outpace the challenge of the game.
2) There are only a few min max builds, I’ve played them all many times, I don’t need to do it again. Sure, ganking dragons from stealth is fun. At first.
3) The game is nearly seven years old and I can still find pleasure in it, but only by shaking things up.
4) I play ESO and other games where I do seek to keep up with the meta. That’s because the game evolves and thus the meta evolves, and because it’s competitive with scores and rankings and e-peens and such.
5) A meta build, frankly, does not actually require writing a build, it just needs a short explanation of a few mechanics.
Finally—builds, at least on this site and in this community, are very much creative expressions. From experience, I’ve seen that this community shares common preferences like balance, challenge, creativity and innovation. If everyone posted meta builds, those five or six builds would have been posted by early 2012 and the community would have long since dried up and died.
I note that you’ve commented on the merits of optimal builds a few times—like I said in my initial post, to each their own, no one’s opinion is more valid than anyone else’s. But you are not going to see much here that qualifies as meta, nor will you hear many of us (I daresay any of us) looking for builds like that.
I hope that helps—i just didn’t want a new member to end up feeling frustrated arguing a point no one agrees with, at least not without trying to clearly explain the philosophy that most people here share. You are welcome to disagree and welcome to keep bringing it up, but I suspect that people will soon ignore those comments—that also feels crappy when you’re new to a group.
All of this assumes that you are engaging in good faith and asking genuine questions—thats what it sounds like, so I answered. If you’re just trolling, then...well...I guess I still agree with everything I wrote.
Very eloquent explanation, Avispon. Most of us have been playing long enough to get bored with the more standard stuff. In fact, a lot of us here on the Forge don't necessarily love the mainstream builds like FudgeMuppet for example, because they're pretty simple and are just builds we've all played before with a new paint job.
I guess that would be my piece of advice: come up with something new and exciting. What I do is come up with an idea (often based off of something else I've seen in a game, book series, or movie) and see if it has been done before. If it has, I often will abandon the idea, unless it was done poorly in which case I'll probably go ahead and do it my own way.
What I'm saying is try not to upload repeat builds. Sure playing a stealth vampire can be fun, but you've gotta come up with something that's new and different about your stealth vampire that's going to make people want to play it.
To run with that example and to give you an idea of what I am talking about, I created a Vampire character myself. However, I've noticed a general lack of modded builds on both the Forge and YouTube, so decided to throw Ordinator and Sacrosanct into the mix and build the character based off of those. These provided all sorts of fun changes I could mess around with, making the character both effective but also fresh and fun to play as.
Thus, I found my niche (modded builds), and people seem to like it. So that's the main bit of advice I'd give anyone who is trying to get into Skyrim character building:
Find what you're good at, and stick with it. But keep in mind that the real key is to keep it fresh and creative so that both casual and seasoned ES players will enjoy it.
I just want to throw something else into this discussion because honestly making builds that use new mechanics well over 7 years after the game's release is without some miracle in gameplay pretty much impossible. That new and different thing you add to a build you make doesn't even have to be gameplay related. I've seen a ton of amazing builds released years after Skyrim's own launch that have no outstanding game mechanics compared to what's already been done, but stand out the most just because of outstanding use and description of the build's roleplay and lore.
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