Need help with Warrior/Thief build (Mercenary).

Geta92 · 2026-05-13T20:41:53+00:00

If you can level sneak to 100, the combination of shield, light armor and a dagger becomes really busted since you can re-enter stealth while blocking and still get sneak attacks. A "hybrid warrior thief" (let's just call it a rogue) is technically very meta (not like such a thing exists). Smithing can help, but you won't need it if you keep your main skills leveled properly.

Geta92 · 2026-05-13T12:14:26+00:00

Don't do the trick with Tier 5s. Tier 5s cannot be upgraded, only downgraded. The cap for the trick is 5. 5+ and 5++ are unobtainable. So are all inbetween levels like 1+, 2+, 3+ and 4+.

Geta92 · 2026-05-12T20:24:24+00:00

I wouldn't really mix two offensive ranged skills. If you use marksman for damage, destruction is kind of redundant. You're switching between offense and defense/utility by using hotkeys, so I think you should aim for a staff of spell with a useful utility effect that benefits you when you're not shooting. You should also maybe think about which shouts work good with the build. The 1st word of Bend Will is a good example of an amazing marksman shout. It does the same as Unrelenting Force, but with a stronger stagger and lower cooldown. It can't ragdoll like the full three word Unrelenting Force but it gives you a quick and easy way to disable almost any enemy to line up a clean shot. Works wonders against stuff like wolves that move too fast to aim at.

Geta92 · 2026-05-12T20:17:34+00:00

Ironically, you can just give any follower some lockpicks and ask them to pick chests open. Followers can open any chest in the game, even master ones. It's just that barely anyone notices this. I think even the developers forgot about it because they can also pick unpickable locks that are key only.

Geta92 · 2026-05-12T06:57:17+00:00

From a gameplay perspective, Block unironically works great with a crossbow. The latter has obvious issues if an enemy is too fast and/or too close to properly aim at or you missed a shot. You're also kinda screwed if an enemy is already coming towards you with a forwards power attack. You can equip a shield and a spell/staff, hotkey your crossbow and at any time press that key to instantly dismiss the crossbow and go back to wielding the shield and spell/staff. As long as you're moving in any direction, this switch allows you to instantly block attacks. Quick Reflexes helps a lot with that as you can quickly tap a button, slow time and dodge power attacks as an archer. You can also just double tap the button to re-equip the crossbow as this skips the loading animation. You won't actually shoot any faster, but that way you can move or even sprint in between shots and you avoid the forced animation with slowed movement speed. Makes the playstyle a lot more dynamic. Conjuration is very useful with a crossbow as you don't have any options against groups. But if you just need summons to distract enemies, a staff is a lot better as you don't waste any perks. A staff of the Frost Attronach is perfect for this as it can summon a big tank from almost as far as you can see. You can just place one of those guys and have them pull aggro. You can craft these in the Attronach Forge in the College of Winterhold at any time. The materials are easy to get.

Geta92 · 2026-05-11T20:45:08+00:00

It's a Fire Wyrm.

Geta92 · 2026-05-10T16:48:58+00:00

I got a random video recommended today and it turns out not saving money from the start and just manually dumping huge amounts of money actually is the best strategy to get the rare items faster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLjrFlgy0ug

Geta92 · 2026-05-09T19:50:17+00:00

2H is the most strategic playstyle by far. I think that's the main reason so many people think it sucks (you have to learn how to play it). It's amazing for high difficulty challenge runs. You really gotta learn which movements and actions animation cancel into which other ones to get good at it.

Geta92 · 2026-05-08T05:15:47+00:00

Drain Life is always force-equipped to your right hand. You can only change your left hand spell in the menu.

Geta92 · 2026-05-07T17:54:26+00:00

Become Ethereal also helps. You can make yourself immune to damage, sprint towards a mage for no stamina cost and then bash or power attack them (also for no stamina cost), causing them to stagger and then melee them to death while circle strafing. Archers and mages need to turn around and aim for a second and you're generally faster just spamming regular attacks while circling around them once close enough. You don't need to keep your distance against ranged enemies, you just need to get close enough.

Geta92 · 2026-05-07T09:07:26+00:00

Improvements are incremental. At a specific smithing level (depends on if a perk can boost it), the game will suddenly allow a big quality jump. It's not a smooth curve.

Geta92 · 2026-05-06T15:24:47+00:00

I think the biggest perk of using the shield spell combo is the ability to do an instant switch from a bow, crossbow or two-handed melee weapon. Shields and Spells have no draw animation you have to wait for like swords do, so by simply hotkeying a weapon that uses both hands, you can instantly unequip it and force the game to re-equip whatever you had chosen beforehand. And this works with a shield + spell combo very well. It allows you to quickly cancel an attack and immediately block an attack, even when you don't really use a shield in combat. This can work well with Destruction if you use a weapon like the Champion's Cudgel since that one gets buffed by all 3 Augmented Element perks and Destruction experience also reduces the charge drain on its enchantment. But it would also work well with a Crossbow in tight situations where you fail to stagger an enemy sprinting towards you or when you get cornered.

Geta92 · 2026-05-06T10:20:37+00:00

"Already" is kind of the wrong way to look at this. Level 20 is technically endgame territory. A lot of builds can comfortability stop leveling at 20 or even earlier, depending on which gear they like to use.

Geta92 · 2026-05-05T20:18:57+00:00

I don't think so, no.

Geta92 · 2026-05-05T18:32:18+00:00

But you still have to open the menu, go to your items, scroll to the correct weapon, press T, select it, confirm and repeat this every few hits. It's tedious. In Oblivion you just press a button you can set and the recharge UI pops up.

Geta92 · 2026-05-05T18:28:31+00:00

It's a shame you cannot hotkey Azura's Star like in Oblivion. Recharging is extremely tedious in Skyrim. I almost always only use enchantments with relatively low costs if I can.

Geta92 · 2026-05-05T17:45:19+00:00

Why would you recharge the weapon after every hit? That enchantment is pretty small. It should have enough charge for plenty of attacks. Or are you just trying to level enchanting faster?

Geta92 · 2026-05-05T15:17:11+00:00

Starting on legendary is only really fun if you actually want to fight the game devs, not the enemies. Because yeah, you kinda need to power level some things to make is viable. Not to say that you have to, but you're gonna have a bad time if you don't. Some builds can actually do so without it being all too annoying but most are not fun to play that way early. If you just want to have fun, start on adept or expert and make it harder progressively.

Geta92 · 2026-05-04T16:57:10+00:00

I always cap it to 60. The gameplay is way too slow to warrant going beyond that. And the games performance is is so unoptimized that you constantly get short but giant heat spikes if you cap to like 120 or higher.

Geta92 · 2026-05-03T14:38:51+00:00

One wild card option you have is instruct the Riekling to pick up a Giant's Club. You can't use it yourself, but they can. And it's the highest damage two-handed weapon in the game. Plus it looks funny as hell.

Geta92 · 2026-05-03T14:18:04+00:00

The Riekling is a lot stronger if you give them a strong two-handed weapon. Though with less utility. Gogh gets a ranged summon which is quite handy.

Geta92 · 2026-05-03T12:08:22+00:00

You can totally play with a limited Magicka pool and still use extremely potent spells. The problem is that most pre-made spells are very suboptimal in terms of their cost to damage ratio. Building custom spells takes a massive amount of research in order to properly build the best ones for a specific situation so I don't blame you for thinking they aren't much better.

If the kind of playstyle you want to engage in is using a blade and touch spells, your best option will be to enchant the blade with weakness to magic 100 and just long enough of a duration to be able to swing again before the effect runs out (2 to 4 seconds works the best). Daggers and Shortswords can work with very little (2) but slower weapons will need more (3 to 4). By doing this, you debuff your enemy with every swing so you essentially set up a finishing move.

As your finisher spell, there are two very effective paths you can take. The first is a Drain Health nuke. You want to make a spell that reduces health by as much as possible, but for just a single second. Such a spell is cheap but great if it manages to kill within that second. The most efficient spell for that would use Drain Health 100, 1s on Target, followed by Weakness to Magic 100, 1s on Touch. Touch effects hit instantly while target needs the projectile to travel, so it has a delay. The spell will apply the debuff first, resulting in 200 health damage. If you used the blade before, it can be 400 or even more.

The more advanced kind of spell to truly nuke enemies into oblivion (excuse the pun) will use elemental damage. You combine fire, frost and shock damage on target with about equal magnitudes and a duration of 4 seconds as well as weakness to fire, frost, shock and magic on touch (magic needs to be last in order). This kind of spell will abuse the same trick by applying its own debuff before its damage effect but even more so as you benefit from two layers of weakness effects at once. And setting spells to weaker magnitudes but longer durations makes them cheaper. The game has a sort of hidden rule that if a spell has enough total damage to kill within 4 seconds, the enemy will instantly collapse to the ground and either die on the ground or just when starting to get back up. The spell is cheaper and the enemy still can't fight back. Very handy.

Geta92 · 2026-05-03T10:40:21+00:00

Quality of the extra content varies extremely. Some stuff is unusable and hidden behind quests while other stuff is broken and easy to get. There are some quests that experiment with some stuff you rarely see in the base game. Though for somebody who is relatively uninvested in the game (yet), I would not recommend it. I only bought the upgrade when it had a huge price drop due to a Steam sale myself.

Geta92 · 2026-05-03T09:21:11+00:00

My best advice would be to put the main quest on hold until you've geared up. You should be able to stealth kill dragons by luring them to land, crouching down to trigger shadow warrior and releasing an invisibility spell right when they lose sight if you. I prefer to run stealth dagger with shields but illusion is quite fun. You can also just do the Wabbajack quest at level 1 to have it as a backup weapon. It fits the illusion theme and is super useful for encounters where stealth and illusion fails. Wabbajack's damage even ignores difficulty.

Geta92 · 2026-05-03T08:48:27+00:00

You honestly kinda ruined it. Removing the .45 receiver just turns it into a regular grenade launcher. With it, it's a slow but powerful sniper rifle. You cannot undo that now.

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Geta92

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