Poll shows our members favour sneak skill for their Thief characters

• Posted by Paul October 27, 2011 - 622 views

  The most recent poll ended up as a bit of mess, as it was conducted across the old site and new site. No doubt some voted on the old site, others here on the new site - and quite a lot probably voted twice. What was interesting, though, was that the proportions across the two sites was almost exactly the same!

  Here are the results

  

  As we can see, faced with a choice of the six stealth-orientated skills and asked 'which of these skills are you most looking forward to?' almost half of you chose Sneak. We know that the sneak perk tree offers potential lethal multipliers to sneak attacks, not to mention a cool sounding forward roll attack and the ability to blend into the surroundings. Then there's the awesome looking sneak finishing moves to add to the mix - and who doesn't want to at least try sneaking up behind someone and silently slitting their throat?

  Forging into second place in the poll, with almost one in five of the votes, was Alchemy - newly shifted into the Stealth archetype. I think most people thought alchemy was kinda OK in Oblivion, but apart from spamming health potions it often seemed a bit too much trouble to be worth the effort. But moving into Stealth gives it a new focus - we can now concentrate on adding poison to daggers and arrows, and making potions that enhance our skills.

  Lockpicking, Pickpocket and Speech all polled roughly the same in the poll, with around a tenth of the vote. I postulated in the discussion that the surprisingly low result for Speech might have been skewed by the (bad) memories of the much-derided Persuasion mini-game in Oblivion. To some extent the same might be true for Lockpicking - although a lot of people seem to be assuming they'll just be able to get by with Illusion spells or maybe grab the Skeleton Key.

  Bringing up the rear is Light Armour. We haven't had any details about the perks for Light Armour yet, hopefully they will make Light Armour appear more enticing. Personally I wish they'd include penalties for sneaking in heavy armour - it always seems bizarre that a sneak character could walk around in full plate armour! But we'll probably need mods for that.

  So, that's the sneak poll. What was there in this poll that surprised and stood out for you? Or was it much as you would have expected? Discuss it here on this thread.