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Flash Event Build: The Sweeping Wind

Tags: #Character Build Unarmed  #Character Build Mods  #Ordinator  #Race: Khajiit  #Flash Event 3  #Sandaro 
  • Leader
    April 21, 2018

    INTRODUCTION

     

    The latest Flash Event (#3) came along at a tricky point for me. Having just replaced my PS4 with a shiny new Xbox One. I wanted to take the opportunity to get into Ordinator. But with the short timescale and little available playing time I didn’t have the capacity to make anything particularly original.

     

    So what we have here is the Ordinator Version of my recent Suplex Cat Build, my offering for the recent Songs of the North event. It’s my attempt to see how viable a badass unarmed Khajiit would be using ONLY the perks in Ordinator, and without recourse to any other unarmed mods.

     

     

    RACE: Khajiit

     

    STANDING STONE: Thief

     

    STATS: 0/1/1

     

    SKILLS: Light Armor; Sneak; Pickpocket; Lockpicking; Restoration

     

     

    MODS

     

    Ordinator Perks of Skyrim

    Aurora Standing Stones of Skyrim

    Imperious Races of Skyrim

    Alternative Start – Live a new life

    BIG Ultimate Skills

    Beasts of Tamriel

    Khajiit Speak – complete dialogue overhaul

    Better looking Khajiit

     

     

    UNARMED IN ORDINATOR

     

    The only unarmed perk in vanilla Skyrim is – somewhat oddly – in the Heavy Armor tree, which is fine if you want to play as a juggernaut brawler. If you want to be a sneaky, thief-like dude, then not so much. The author of Ordinator has dealt with this by putting the perks in Light Armor – and not simply a single perk, but rather a range of perks right the way up the left hand side of the perk tree.

     

    With the Event being capped at Level 20 (and therefore just perks to play with) the challenge is to make the character viable and yet fun. Of course the difficulty with putting perks into Light Armor is that, whilst you become increasingly buffed defensively, you aren’t benefitting from any attacking! No matter how much you pound enemies with your fists, you aren’t progressing through the levels…

     

    Here is the perk spread at Level 20

     

     

    I wanted to access the exciting-looking Hissing Dragon perk, which enables elemental fist damage. This requires Light Armor 70 – quite the challenge to get to by Level 20. This meant focussing almost obsessively on Light Armor. This is accomplished in two ways

     

    1. Take advantage of increasing toughness from Light Armor perks to allow yourself to take a lot of pounding in combat. Have healing potions on hand and keep the starting Restoration spell favourited to buff up health. (Restoration levels naturally but isn’t perked in this build). 

     

    2. Grelka, the incredibly grumpy Nord lass in Riften Market place will train you all the way up to 70. You’ll need a LOT of gold to pay for this – hence perks into Pickpocket to allow you to acquire sufficient trinkets to fence at the Thieves Guild.

     

    3. Perking Light Armor does give an amount - a small amount granted - for unarmed attacks. Iron Fist grants not only increased attack damage but also light armor experience, which comes in handy

     

     

    COMBAT VIABILITY

     

    As with all Khajiit, you start with the vanilla 10 damage from fists, plus the bonus 12 points from claw damage, meaning that straight out the gate you’re hitting for 22. 

    The Iron Fist perk adds damage based on stamina. You’ll only get the first two levels in this build as you need 80 in Light Armor for the final level and it really can’t be raised that high in a Level 20 build without ‘grinding’.

     

    At Level 40 you can grab Sweeping Wind which further increases the damage from unarmed attacks by 25%

     

    Hissing Dragon (Level 70) adds a choice of elemental damage (I went with sun damage for a change, but you can opt for fire, shock, lightening or poison as well). I picked this up by Level 18. At the next level I took Wardancer, which adds a further 20% damage

     

    The Gloves of Puglist are obtained early, as I was based in Riften anyway. Many of the Light Armor perks in Ordinator trigger only when wearing all Light Armor, so actually wearing them was counter-productive. Instead, they can be deconstructed and the enchantment placed on a ring and necklace, adding further attack damage. I took the decision to wear the Thieves Guild Armor for its decent defence as I knew I was going to be taking plenty of beating.

     

    Another thing to keep in mind is that quite a few Light Armor perks - notably Iron Fist, Sweeping Wind and Rushing Tide - require two free hands. What I did was to keep my Healing spell in my favourites bar, so that I could restore health as I was being pounded; then switched out back to an unarmed fist to attack the foe whenever I felt I needed to bring the combat to a conclusion.

     

    I don’t have a way of doing detailed maths on all of this, since the interface doesn’t show unarmed damage. However, I found that the amount of damage that I was dishing out ‘kept up’ as I progressed through the levels. Is it viable? Yes, it definitely is from Level 1 through 20. You’re going to take a lot of damage from groups of enemies – but you want that anyway to level Light Armor, and you do enough fist damage to prevent yourself getting killed.

     

    With the build wrapping at Level 20, here is how the skills looked at this point (no other skills were higher than their starting point, except from skill books) 

     

     

     

    GAMEPLAY

     

    I used Alternate Start – Live Another Life, to start in Riften. Join the Thieves Guild and start doing their quest, plus take as many jobs as you can from Vex and Delvin. Start doing quests around Riften – there are plenty around, and eventually you’ll make friends with the Jarl.

     

    Once you’ve exhausted the city quests in Riften, you can start doing city quests organically as Vex and Delivn send you off around Skyrim. But don’t be joining other Guilds – you’re not in the least bit magically-inclined, nor an assassin, nor do the Companions appeal to you. You are not the Dragonborn, so no reason to go to see Balgruuf…

     

     

    SUMMARY

     

    The point of this build was to answer the question: Is a pure unarmed build feasible using the Ordinator Mod? The answer is a qualified ‘yes’. If you are going to stick purely to unarmed, with no magic or other combat abilities, then you’re going to have to ‘grind’ (at least to some extent) through the Light Armor Tree. So it’s not a lot of fun if you want to play as a lethal sneak with specialises in quick takedowns. There’s no avoiding some lengthy fights where you’re concentrating on staying alive whilst taking one hell of a beating…

  • April 21, 2018

    Hey Paul, glad to see the build :D I quite like the approach you've taken to writing the build here, nice and simple and it explains everything mostly well. I thought the little skill break down at the end was actually rather genius, it's pretty rare to show off the exact skill levels and I think it's really useful for these Flash Events where some of us are going for these high levelled perks. Uh, there are a few things I wanted to point out though, just a few small errors in the write-up and a couple of quick suggestions that I thought I'd drop, but overall a damn fun read.

    So technically speaking, you can increase your Light Armour without getting hit thanks to the combination of Light Armour Mastery and Iron Fist. The former increases your EXP just by being in combat while the latter adds an EXP gain for hitting enemies. It's not a lot of experience, well actually it is pretty decent but compared to what you get for getting hit it's not major. 

    There's a small error where you called Hissing Dragon, Hissing Tide just below the Perk Spread. Would also be useful to mention that unarmed attack boosts from perks are pretty much all going to require two hands-free. I'd also add in links to all the mods you used, people can look for themselves of course but it's a lot more useful just to throw them in.

    Anyway, loved the build Paul (both this and the original) and thanks for participating in the Event, hope you enjoy the new Xbox mate :D

  • Leader
    April 21, 2018

    Thanks DB for comments and encouragement. Corrections and additions made.

    I'd actually completely failed to recall that Iron fist added some Light Armor experience. Given that every attack move from Level 2 was perked by Iron Fist, then a fair chunk of my Light Armor levelling must inevitably have come from there!