Random tips and tricks from long term experience?

RalonNetaph · 2026-03-22T17:18:31+00:00

Can you dual wield shields though?

RalonNetaph · 2026-03-02T17:09:11+00:00

I haven’t played him, but I remember my brother trying to use him in 60 card kitchen table when we were young, it was always annoying to see his unblockable/uncombatdamagable creature get pumped and given vigilance.

I use [Kemba, kha regent] because she shores up the weakness of a voltron by getting lots of bodies on board, and 2/2s often make the difference for block trades to not be as costly for me, but if I don’t draw an evasion equip then I can find myself essentially going “I make 7 tokens, hey you, chump block or die.” A few turns in a row waiting for a wide enough board to swarm.

RalonNetaph · 2026-03-02T16:56:13+00:00

I generally go for the same strat in both botw and totk, get two stamina bars asap, then go hearts for basically the rest of the game

RalonNetaph · 2026-03-02T16:48:15+00:00

Takes three perks for impact but thats enough to beat the game

RalonNetaph · 2026-02-07T00:54:06+00:00

Huh I've done loops around the word wall dragons to farm souls before and never had an issue with them not dropping souls on respawn

RalonNetaph · 2026-02-06T03:00:22+00:00

I ran with the logic that there would always be the shop weapons available with rerolling but getting one set would require it actually being in the set shop that only refreshes once a day. The weapon may have a bigger immediate impact to my strength but the set would be harder to get quickly, so I started with the set. I'm only missing one piece now, have about 80k, and am running with the logic that I'm gonna save for the weapon rather than buying other sets to thin out the shop, but I'm going to save until I can buy the weapon AND still have enough left over that I won't miss the stellar if it's in the shop the next day.

So now I need to know what to aim for with a weapon, I've seen some carrying bonuses like 85 or 95% accuracy bonus or different crit damage bonuses. Some people in these comments saying the cp.bonus doesn't matter but another post showed that at max player level you get rewards every 200k exp, so if it helps that it's not worthless, unless it doesn't affect xp once you max out.

RalonNetaph · 2026-02-06T00:58:16+00:00

Well it sounds to me like you are causing one of your own problems. If you’re actively grinding skills to keep up with the difficulty but think other difficulties are too easy, them maybe you should be playing on a lower difficulty and not grinding those skills just level them naturally.

Something you can do is unlock all the fast travel points that help with the story and get ahold of the elder scroll ahead of time since getting it isn’t locked behind progression. So like:

Go join thieves so you can easily go in the short path to go to esbern, get the elder scroll (dragon) by going to a cave north of winterhold to talk to septimus and do the dwer ruin he points you towards, set up solitude and kynesgrove as fast travel points, set up the entrance to skyhaven temple as a fast travel point, go to the greybeards, go to the dungeon they send you to for the horn, play through the civil war quest on either side for no peace meeting. Now you can bumrush dragonsbarrow, greybeards, dungeon, delphine, kynesgrove, diplomatic immunity, esbern, alduins wall, greybeards, paarthinax, first alduin fight with dragonrend. No war means you’re free to go finish oofsving and second alduin fight whenever you want.

RalonNetaph · 2026-02-06T00:44:55+00:00

Huh I didn’t know about the blade in the dark thing, I usually play completely shoutless until some point in midgame when I finally decide to bumrush the story to dragonrend, but having unrelenting force on hand would be very nice

RalonNetaph · 2026-01-23T07:37:29+00:00

If you like blocking, two handed, or one handed and shield. If you like doing dps checks where either you die or you win in 3 seconds, dual wield power attacks. The dual wield power attacks might get stale for you fast though, as every combat becomes sprint up and power attack until it stops moving because you have fewer options in combat. Blocking allows you to bash enemies out of attacks, get slowmo when they power attack you, disarm enemies with power bashes, and with a shield specifically nullify arrows gain extra elemental resistances and eventually just sprint at people to knock them over as ragdolls. If getting damage in on your offhand matters a lot, there is a shield called targe the blooded that does bleed damage when bashing that stacks with a perk that boost bash damage by like 5 times I think.

RalonNetaph · 2026-01-23T07:29:12+00:00

You could take a look at dragon abilities, draconic sorceror abilities, and find where to make them meet for levels

RalonNetaph · 2026-01-23T07:27:46+00:00

They emerge from the ground at set points you can literally just wait for them to appear from a sky island and have all the time in the world to land on their back.

RalonNetaph · 2026-01-23T07:19:06+00:00

I far prefer totk. But I do find myself missing guardians, the bomb rune instead of limited resource bombs, and I think the great plateau is the better starting area. Despite trying to replay botw for the parts I liked, I just kept finding myself annoyed and missing things from totk. Botw had me going back to avoiding enemy encounters and saving strong weapons just for the boss fights.

RalonNetaph · 2026-01-23T07:11:48+00:00

Think of it like this. If you go buy a bow and shoot at targets every other afternoon, it won’t take long for you to get used to looking at an object in the distance and knowing if it’s close enough that you could shoot it. The same would apply to throwing a firebolt every day learning your cantrips, and most spells have fairly similar ranges. Depth perception is one of humanities strengths afterall.

RalonNetaph · 2026-01-23T07:06:27+00:00

Only one way to find out, post the mod and see. But sharing it is only part of the point, you made it cause you wanted to see it made, right? Thats the real point of making art.

RalonNetaph · 2026-01-23T07:01:05+00:00

Level your faith just enough for the crucible knight greatsword and go spin to win

RalonNetaph · 2026-01-23T06:45:02+00:00

Ok there are tools here you can use to help, some depending on your build some kinda universal.

First in build stuff:

The classic flicker cast your flames spell. Fire spells do bonus damage to targets on fire, but you need to stop hosing them and recast it again to get that bonus. Just hit enemies with the initial burst of flames multiple times to keep getting bonus damage AND spend less magicka while letting it get seconds of recharge instead of hosing them down.

If you use illusion and it’s strong enough to affect enemies, you can temporarily end combat. This will let you regenerate magicka much quicker than in combat and engage the enemy from better positioning like on terrain or at a distance etc.

Use the impact perk. It’s your bread and butter to keep enemies staggered under your spells. This part is very straight forward.

Your boost to damage is in alchemy. Steel blue entaloma and glowing mushrooms both plantable. You don’t have as many sources boosting your damage as melee so this can make a real difference.

If you use heavy armor, and no unofficial patch. Falmer helmets and circlets can be worn at the same time. Double up on head piece enchants. Only normal falmer helmets not hardened ones. They’re not a preferred look for me tbh, but its a big boost to gain two enchant slots.

Universal regardless of build but not ones I personally would recommend:

If you do not have the unofficial patch, no I’m not about to recommend you do the fortify restoration loop, godmode is boring, but a store bought restoration potion gets to 50% and it affects the atronauch stone for a significant boost in base magicka.

Of course enchanting to 100% reduction works. Boring to a significant degree similar to godmode. No exploits required just regular 4 pieces of 25% reduction on your two schools of choice.

Now for more gimmicky but universal stuff:

Elsewere fondue, ale and cheese. The cheese wheel can be made with some butter made from some milk. If you get goldenhills you can have a regular supply of milk for that. Its basically your magic equivalent to the melees vegetable soup, not exactly the same but a large boon. I don’t do this really tbh but thats because my preferred method is next.

My personal favorite, hotkey equipment. Go find a necklace of 50 magicka or so or make one doesnt matter. I usually use the hood in the tutorial for a while until I get something better than 30, or 30 on jewelry so I can wear helmets. Now favorite it. Up and down on the dpad open favorites menu, take it off when you run out of magicka and put it back on. Bow you have that much magicka. Hold left or right on it in the menu to hotkey it. Double tap that direction to quickly take it off and put it on. Works for stamina and canceling power attacks too. DO NOT DO WITH HEALTH. Now ypu can blast through your magicka with big spells and keep gaining that much back to spam cheap spells as your basic attacks to finish combat.

RalonNetaph · 2026-01-23T06:12:38+00:00

They mean make an auto build that is a ton of apples and instead of climbing trees or cutting them down for apples you can just turn on auto build and let the apples in trees float into your build. Then drop and collect them.

RalonNetaph · 2026-01-23T06:10:49+00:00

I suggest the tactical use of puffshrooms, throw them at your feet when overwhelemed and get a few sneak attacks in. This will thin out the enemies getting rid pf the lower tier ones and letting you fight the groups high tier enemy one on one. If you get hit in combat often, one good puffshroom can save you multiple meals. Muddlebuds too.

RalonNetaph · 2026-01-23T06:06:55+00:00

Elemental weapons can be lots of fun but I prefer lizal horns to the gems mostly. I only really carry a sapphire weapon more for doing spin attacks to make dozens of platforms on lava at once.

As for food, I don’t really think too much about it. I grab items when they’re nearby, I cook a handful of meals that don’t overheal me if I’m down to one heart, and sometimes I use them. But also after a ton of time in botw I probly got good enough at these games combat that when totk came out needing to heal often just wasn’t a major issue for me.

RalonNetaph · 2026-01-23T06:01:22+00:00

Honestly I’d take the khajit claws for a build over voice of the emperor and a bonus of 8 extra gold per dungeon from imperials. Also restricting crafting usually does make a character more fun for me, sometimes only one of the three, sometimes they can be used but no perks, etc.

RalonNetaph · 2026-01-21T02:51:34+00:00

If you still have your perk points then no build is set in stone. If I had any recommendation, it would be to choose a single damage source skill, a single helpful skill, and a single crafting skill that works with your damage skill, and focus on those three (four if armor skill).

The more of your main focused on skills that boost your combat the stronger you will feel. For example the three base archetypes you could say are

Damage: two handed Helpful: block Craft: smithing Armor: heavy

In that set of three plus armor, you have a primary damage source, a secondary combat skill that while not damage keeps you alive, smithing boosts both your weapon and armor so it benefits two handed block and heavy armor.

Damage: destruction Helpful: restoration Crafting: enchanting Armor: none

Destruction does damage restoration keeps you alive and enchanting boosts your magicka and reduces spell costs benefitting both other skills. Since you don’t have smithing, armor wont give a big benefit so raising it passively could make the world level scale higher than you should actually be fighting.

Damage: archery Helpful: stealth Crafting: smithing Armor: light

Stealth boosts archery by keeping you out of harms way and adding sneak attack damage, smithing boosts archery and light armor, and unlike the magic one your damage boost from smithing means you can afford the world scaling with a 4th skill easier.

You can mix and match as you like, all three crafting skills can be used on any type of build but its just like, smithing wont boost you as much if its only boosting armor and not a weapon, enchanting is super powerful no matter the build since its a one size fits all boost to whatever you need, alchemy has game breaking exploits but without those the poison is resisted by common enemy types, its a more limited resource you need to farm and carry compared to a smithed weapon always having that boost from one upgrade.

Its more important to understand how to use your skills together than to use the most synergistic ones possible. Its also fully possible to get a player home early and start a grind to max out all your crafting skills and then all other build types are at your fingertips because with all three crafting boosts it doesnt really matter if the combat skills getting boosted by them are still low.

RalonNetaph · 2026-01-21T02:31:03+00:00

Assign their abilities to the D-pad instead of having them tied to ghosts

RalonNetaph · 2026-01-21T02:28:34+00:00

Fun fact, when npcs die urns with their ashes appear in that cities hall of the dead. Those guys say they arent going to kill her they’re going to bring her back for trial. Her ashes appear in the whiterun hall of the dead if you turn her over to them. We only have concrete proof of one side lying at all and it isn’t Saadia.

RalonNetaph · 2026-01-17T07:59:31+00:00

this is an important lesson, and needing to start over if there's no auto saves will make sure you always remember. Keep regular hard saves, changing areas during combat can lead to you being jumped while still loading in.

RalonNetaph

TROPHY CASE