Crimson Scar
It has been twelve years… twelve years since they purged my brethren… twelve years since I barely escaped with my life… twelve years since I swore I would make them pay, make them pay for what they did. I’ll show them the power they could have had, but tossed aside. I’ve finally found it, a way to have my revenge on those fools. Mathieu Bellamont, a crazed lunatic out for revenge, I can use that. All he is missing is an “unwitting” puppet…
The Build
Race: Orsimer (Vampire)
Gender: Female, mainly because they don’t have the penalty to Intelligence that Male Orcs do, but if you want to make it harder for yourself by all means play as a Male.
Birthsign: Tower, now I’m about to say something that won’t make much sense to many of you, this Birthsign is the key to this character’s defence. Don’t understand? Well you’ll just have to read on.
Skills: Block, Destruction, Hand-to-Hand, Mysticism, Restoration, Security & Sneak
Primary Attributes: Strength & Agility
Secondary Attributes: Willpower & Endurance
Quests: Dark Brotherhood (This one’s a little obvious guys), Mage’s Guild (Mainly for Spellmaking, but you can always use it as part of the character’s cover if you so wish), Arena & Fighter’s Guild (Both of these help to level up two of our skills that wouldn’t get much use otherwise: Hand-to-Hand & Block)
Equipment: This character’s defence doesn’t come from her armour, so that means we’re free to use whatever equipment we wish. For those that are unsure here are a couple of combos that I found looked quite nice.
- Set 1: Mythic Dawn Hood, Leather Cuirass, Fur Gauntlets & Sack Cloth Pants.
- Set 2: Black Hand Hood, Chainmail Cuirass, Orcish Gauntlets, Black Wide Pants & Chainmail Boots.
As for any jewellery, anything that boosts any of our Primary and Secondary Attributes or boosts Health or Fatigue is a good idea. One amulet that I highly recommend is Cruelty’s Heart since it boosts both strength and willpower. As for armour enchantments since we aren’t increasing our character’s Intelligence I’d suggest throwing a couple of fortify magicka enchants onto your equipment.
Skills
Block: What is cooler than blocking a sword with your bare hands? Nothing that’s what. Show me someone that disagrees and I’ll show you a liar. Plus the boosts to endurance that this skill will provide us with are very nice.
Destruction: Our focus with destruction is touch spells, since we’ll be spending a lot of our time during combat up close, they fit right in. Spells of elemental damage or disintegrate all come in handy, even more so when making a combination spell to do both at once.
Hand-to-Hand: The build’s main form of damage, early on the low damage may not seem all that valuable, but let’s not forget that it damages our opponent’s Fatigue as well meaning that they’ll be doing less damage the longer the fight goes on. Once we acquire Vampirism its boosts to both strength and Hand-to-Hand will increase our damage, this is most noticeable in the early levels, but starts to drop off later on since damage stops scaling at 100 strength and Hand-to-Hand.
Mysticism: You may have been wondering what I meant earlier about the Tower being “the key to this character’s defence”, if not what do you want? A medal? Well tough luck you aren’t getting one. For those of you that haven’t figured it out, what I meant was that we will be taking the Tower’s Tower Warden power (one of only two ways to get this effect) and be using it to create spells of Reflect Damage that shall make up the base of this character’s defence.
Other than that this school of magic also houses the effects detect life and dispel, which come in handy when tracking a target or fighting one of those pesky mages, respectively.
Restoration: Pretty straightforward here, restoration provides us with the ability to heal as well as to steal our opponent’s health and make it our own.
Security: Again fairly straightforward, with this we can access places we couldn’t before, which is necessary for an assassin to do. For those of you that hate the lockpicking mini game, I suggest picking up the Skeleton Key since it allows you to just spam the auto attempt, breaking the skill.
Sneak: What assassin would be complete without at least some knowledge of this skill? When hunting a target the Crimson Scar prefers to stay hidden until she can close in to deal the deathblow.
Vampirism
While the sun damage may be annoying, this character benefits quite a bit from becoming a beast of the night. Not only does Vampirism give increases to two of our focused attributes Strength and Willpower, and our chosen skills Hand-to-Hand, Destruction, Mysticism and Sneak; but those bonuses to our skills act as actual skill levels. What this means is that should the boost send us to the next rank in a skill, it will give us access to that rank’s perk, so for the magic skills we’ll be able to cast stronger spells faster and for Hand-to-Hand we can use more power attacks earlier than normal.
Fun fact 100% resist disease isn't actually disease immunity, this was done so that Vicente can infect you even with 100% resist. What this means is that even as a vampire you can still contract Poryphyric Hemophilia, just thought I'd throw that out there since it happened to me and I found it a little amusing.
Combat
When approaching combat you have two options, the first being that you can attempt to sneak up on your unsuspecting target to try and start the fight off with a sneak attack, the second is to forgo the element of surprise and charge in swinging.
If you have decided on the first option than you'll want to have our custom detect life spell at the ready, by using this you can keep track of your targets movements while you creep ever closer, readying your strike. Once you've managed to land your first attack it's a good idea to cast a reflect damage spell before your target has the chance to retaliate.
If you either picked the second option or you were unsuccessful in landing a sneak attack, you should cast your reflect damage spell before your target can land a blow. Depending on your target's weapon; longsword or bigger, you should attempt to disarm them by mixing in sideways power attacks as this will severely limit the amount of damage they can do. If your target happens to start blocking than this is the perfect chance to start whittling away at their health with a couple of destruction spells.
Custom Spells
Turn the Blade - Reflect Damage 10-40 points on self for 5-15 seconds. When creating this spell the Magnitude and Duration are influenced by your total magicka and what percentage of that you are willing to spend on one spell. I liked to keep it in between 40-60% of my magicka pool so that I could use other spells when needed.
Far Sight - Detect Life in 100 ft on self for 3 seconds. While the duration of 3 seconds doesn't seem all that long, the glow effect takes a couple of seconds to fade after the spells wears off, making it as though it last for 5 in total. Combining this with Detect Life's low cost results in us being able to cast this almost constantly without having to worry about running out of magicka.
Agonizing Touch - 15 points Fire and Shock damage on touch for 1 second. This one is fairly self explanatory really.
Roleplay
The first thing you need to remember about this character is that she's not quite sane, the past twelve years of her life have been filled with thoughts of revenge against the Black Hand. The second thing is that she fully believes in her power as a vampire, to the point were you could say she is arrogant. The guilds and quests outside of the Dark Brotherhood aren't just a good cover they're also the perfect opportunity to demonstrate just how powerful you are, even if most people don't know the reason for your power.
Perhaps you've heard of an ancient Akaviri amulet that no one else has managed to retrieve? or a Bosmer who claims he's being watched? Both of these and more are the perfect chance to demonstrate your power.
Crimson Scar
It has been twelve years… twelve years since they purged my brethren… twelve years since I barely escaped with my life… twelve years since I swore I would make them pay, make them pay for what they did. I’ll show them the power they could have had, but tossed aside. I’ve finally found it, a way to have my revenge on those fools. Mathieu Bellamont, a crazed lunatic out for revenge, I can use that. All he is missing is an “unwitting” puppet…
The Build
Race: Orsimer (Vampire)
Gender: Female, mainly because they don’t have the penalty to Intelligence that Male Orcs do, but if you want to make it harder for yourself by all means play as a Male.
Birthsign: Tower, now I’m about to say something that won’t make much sense to many of you, this Birthsign is the key to this character’s defence. Don’t understand? Well you’ll just have to read on.
Skills: Block, Destruction, Hand-to-Hand, Mysticism, Restoration, Security & Sneak
Primary Attributes: Strength & Agility
Secondary Attributes: Willpower & Endurance
Quests: Dark Brotherhood (This one’s a little obvious guys), Mage’s Guild (Mainly for Spellmaking, but you can always use it as part of the character’s cover if you so wish), Arena & Fighter’s Guild (Both of these help to level up two of our skills that wouldn’t get much use otherwise: Hand-to-Hand & Block)
Equipment: This character’s defence doesn’t come from her armour, so that means we’re free to use whatever equipment we wish. For those that are unsure here are a couple of combos that I found looked quite nice.
- Set 1: Mythic Dawn Hood, Leather Cuirass, Fur Gauntlets & Sack Cloth Pants.
- Set 2: Black Hand Hood, Chainmail Cuirass, Orcish Gauntlets, Black Wide Pants & Chainmail Boots.
As for any jewellery, anything that boosts any of our Primary and Secondary Attributes or boosts Health or Fatigue is a good idea. One amulet that I highly recommend is Cruelty’s Heart since it boosts both strength and willpower. As for armour enchantments since we aren’t increasing our character’s Intelligence I’d suggest throwing a couple of fortify magicka enchants onto your equipment.
Skills
Block: What is cooler than blocking a sword with your bare hands? Nothing that’s what. Show me someone that disagrees and I’ll show you a liar. Plus the boosts to endurance that this skill will provide us with are very nice.
Destruction: Our focus with destruction is touch spells, since we’ll be spending a lot of our time during combat up close, they fit right in. Spells of elemental damage or disintegrate all come in handy, even more so when making a combination spell to do both at once.
Hand-to-Hand: The build’s main form of damage, early on the low damage may not seem all that valuable, but let’s not forget that it damages our opponent’s Fatigue as well meaning that they’ll be doing less damage the longer the fight goes on. Once we acquire Vampirism its boosts to both strength and Hand-to-Hand will increase our damage, this is most noticeable in the early levels, but starts to drop off later on since damage stops scaling at 100 strength and Hand-to-Hand.
Mysticism: You may have been wondering what I meant earlier about the Tower being “the key to this character’s defence”, if not what do you want? A medal? Well tough luck you aren’t getting one. For those of you that haven’t figured it out, what I meant was that we will be taking the Tower’s Tower Warden power (one of only two ways to get this effect) and be using it to create spells of Reflect Damage that shall make up the base of this character’s defence.
Other than that this school of magic also houses the effects detect life and dispel, which come in handy when tracking a target or fighting one of those pesky mages, respectively.
Restoration: Pretty straightforward here, restoration provides us with the ability to heal as well as to steal our opponent’s health and make it our own.
Security: Again fairly straightforward, with this we can access places we couldn’t before, which is necessary for an assassin to do. For those of you that hate the lockpicking mini game, I suggest picking up the Skeleton Key since it allows you to just spam the auto attempt, breaking the skill.
Sneak: What assassin would be complete without at least some knowledge of this skill? When hunting a target the Crimson Scar prefers to stay hidden until she can close in to deal the deathblow.
Vampirism
While the sun damage may be annoying, this character benefits quite a bit from becoming a beast of the night. Not only does Vampirism give increases to two of our focused attributes Strength and Willpower, and our chosen skills Hand-to-Hand, Destruction, Mysticism and Sneak; but those bonuses to our skills act as actual skill levels. What this means is that should the boost send us to the next rank in a skill, it will give us access to that rank’s perk, so for the magic skills we’ll be able to cast stronger spells faster and for Hand-to-Hand we can use more power attacks earlier than normal.
Fun fact 100% resist disease isn't actually disease immunity, this was done so that Vicente can infect you even with 100% resist. What this means is that even as a vampire you can still contract Poryphyric Hemophilia, just thought I'd throw that out there since it happened to me and I found it a little amusing.
Combat
When approaching combat you have two options, the first being that you can attempt to sneak up on your unsuspecting target to try and start the fight off with a sneak attack, the second is to forgo the element of surprise and charge in swinging.
If you have decided on the first option than you'll want to have our custom detect life spell at the ready, by using this you can keep track of your targets movements while you creep ever closer, readying your strike. Once you've managed to land your first attack it's a good idea to cast a reflect damage spell before your target has the chance to retaliate.
If you either picked the second option or you were unsuccessful in landing a sneak attack, you should cast your reflect damage spell before your target can land a blow. Depending on your target's weapon; longsword or bigger, you should attempt to disarm them by mixing in sideways power attacks as this will severely limit the amount of damage they can do. If your target happens to start blocking than this is the perfect chance to start whittling away at their health with a couple of destruction spells.
Custom Spells
Turn the Blade - Reflect Damage 10-40 points on self for 5-15 seconds. When creating this spell the Magnitude and Duration are influenced by your total magicka and what percentage of that you are willing to spend on one spell. I liked to keep it in between 40-60% of my magicka pool so that I could use other spells when needed.
Far Sight - Detect Life in 100 ft on self for 3 seconds. While the duration of 3 seconds doesn't seem all that long, the glow effect takes a couple of seconds to fade after the spells wears off, making it as though it last for 5 in total. Combining this with Detect Life's low cost results in us being able to cast this almost constantly without having to worry about running out of magicka.
Agonizing Touch - 15 points Fire and Shock damage on touch for 1 second. This one is fairly self explanatory really.
Roleplay
The first thing you need to remember about this character is that she's not quite sane, the past twelve years of her life have been filled with thoughts of revenge against the Black Hand. The second thing is that she fully believes in her power as a vampire, to the point were you could say she is arrogant. The guilds and quests outside of the Dark Brotherhood aren't just a good cover they're also the perfect opportunity to demonstrate just how powerful you are, even if most people don't know the reason for your power.
Perhaps you've heard of an ancient Akaviri amulet that no one else has managed to retrieve? or a Bosmer who claims he's being watched? Both of these and more are the perfect chance to demonstrate your power.
