Skyrim Tips and Tricks » Discussions


Surviving Legendary

Tags: #Guide 
  • January 16, 2018

    Surviving Legendary

    There's a lot of builds online that end up really OP at higher levels, the kind of character that wouldn't be out of place on Legendary. However, I've noticed a trend of these builds having a steep bellcurve in what difficulty they thrive at, only ramping it up once a preplanned setup has been fully realized. I myself have been guilty of power leveling to acquire a certain perk, or speed-running a questline on Novice just to get the artifact at the end. Who hasn't? Honestly, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.

    However, a few of us have instead started trying to develop builds that can make it though Legendary from start to finish without ever having to touch the difficulty slider. It's no measure of anyone's abilities as a player or a builder, so I wouldn't encourage anyone to try it just for the bragging rights, but it's still pretty fun for several reasons: It creates a new challenge for long-time builders, it forces you to put more thought into leveling and early to midgame setups and strategies, it gives gameplay a renewed sense of accomplishment, and it makes you level up insanely fast.

    Anyway, not sure how many people will get use out of this, but I've been asked to put together a little something with a few tips on facing down legendary difficulty, so here it goes...no groundbreaking tactics here, just discussing their importance and implementation in Legendary.


    Damage Avoidance Strategies

    Dodge - Learn the attack animations of different enemies. Figure out the reach and speed of different weapons. Analyze each battle and stay out of harm's way as best you can. This may be a risky strategy on its own, but it plays well with others. I'd recommend using it to a certain extent in any legendary playthrough, especially characters with a focus on Damage Mitigation (you simply can't sponge every hit).

    Stagger - Stagger is just such a great mechanic and comes in so many forms that it can be used by nearly any class or combined with any other strategy. It's inherently pretty balanced, but when exploited is OP even on legendary. So, you know...don't. It's reliable enough without exploits that when used tactically can be viable in even Dead is Dead playthroughs, but with enough close calls to keep your heart pounding!

    Stealth - Stealth can be difficult to train on legendary due to the inherent squishiness of traditional stealth classes. If you're having trouble assassinating targets, then you might want a secondary strategy that can take advantage of a weakened target once you inevitably face direct combat. The silent mace trick can also help boost your initial unperked sneak attack damage.

    Distract - Obviously, this is a classic. Followers, summons and reanimated dead are all a great way to take some of the pressure off you in combat and scale with the difficulty. You won't need to combine this strategy with any others for it to be effective, in fact it has the tenancy to be boringly OP even on legendary. Instead, consider coming up with nerfs or restrictions for a character using this strategy that might help make combat more exciting.

    Paralyze - Paralyze is interesting to me because it's one of very few things that seems to be balanced for legendary. With how many hits enemies can take, enchantments trend to activate much more reliably (often several times per enemy). However, by the same token, getting paralyzed isn't nearly the death warrant it is on lower difficulty levels. More like a slight advantage and (most importantly) a way to temporarily even the odds when fighting multiple foes. Potions and magic can still be pretty OP, but with so many enemies immune, trying to rely on them is an even worse idea on legendary.


    Damage Mitigation Strategies

    Block - Block is a great hybrid skill for any legendary character. Bashing falls under the stagger strategy and provides Block experience. So unlike some of the other damage mitigation strategies, you don't have to keep taking hits if you want to raise how much damage you can absorb. A raised shield can be just as effective as armor when you need it but a lot less risky to train when you don't.

    Armor - Both armor skills are useful for absorbing damage, but training them is difficult on legendary. There's no way around it, the only way to get exp for the armor skills is to get hit...and everything on legendary hits hard. In fact, if you out level your armor skill you might never be able to train it because eventually nearly everything will OHKO you. If you're going to focus on these skills then start early and make sure you have plenty of reliable healing available as well. Smithing is an easy way around having to take damage to raise AR...but only to a certain extent.

    Flesh Spells - Flesh Spells are a great Mitigation strategy, even for characters who prefer the Damage Avoidance tactics. Unlike the armor skills, Flesh Spells will grant Alteration experience without you constantly having to sponge damage. This provides a nice scaling safety net to help otherwise squishy characters cling to life whenever you take the occasional glancing blow. Obviously, damage Mitigation characters can also benefit greatly from the added AR.

    Healing - Restoring lost health has its obvious advantages, but it's also nearly required if you want to train your armor skills on legendary. Stamina potions or the perk respite will also benefit those who prefer avoidance strategies, specifically dodging and staggering. If you don't want to level Restoration then keep those potions hotkeyed because they're going to be important.

  • Member
    January 16, 2018

    For the majority of my Skyrim playthroughs, they were on Novice, back on PS3, and Adept when I switched over to PC. It's only recently that I've garnered an interest for Legendary difficulty. It just feels so much more fulfilling winning fights on legendary because you can't take anything for granted. Since legendary difficulty was so new to me, I definitely had trouble in the beginning. While these tips may seem blatantly obvious, any players wanting to take on the daunting task of legendary difficulty without creating an OP character should definitely take these to heart and remember them dearly.

  • January 16, 2018

    Aysleph said:

    ...While these tips may seem blatantly obvious...

     

    Gee, thanks! Lol.

     

    In all seriousness though...your right, when you asked about this I knew I wouldn't be blowing any minds here. Legendary is still the same game with a few altered numbers after all. So instead my aim was to help kind of plan what skills/strategies you'd want to incorporate. It can be startling when you have a build in mind for legendary and suddenly realize that nearly everything can survive your sneak attacks, or that the big advantage of heavy armor is just that you can retreat with a sliver of health instead of getting OHKO'd. It's a good idea to combine things in different ways and hopefully this might help.

     

  • Member
    January 16, 2018

    Tysoyaha said:

    Aysleph said:

    ...While these tips may seem blatantly obvious...

    Gee, thanks! Lol.

    Alright, maybe that came out wrong. What I'm trying to say is that some of these tactics like using armor, flesh spells, and blocking seem like an obvious solution to playing on legendary, but most people don't know how to use it properly. This is a great start to the Legendary Survival guide, but I think you should also add how to use these tactics properly. Some things are just different on legendary and don't work like normal, for example, your armor skill. Like you said, you can't blindly tank blows and level up your armor skill on legendary like you're playing on adept, you just won't survive. Similar to how you explained this, I think you should go over how you use each of these tactics. When do you paralyze? When/how do you dodge? (Skyrim combat is gimmicky and you can literally rotate 360 mid-swing, so dodging is difficult sometimes) When do you choose to bash or stagger? etc.

  • January 17, 2018
    What you said came out fine. You know...other than providing me the opportunity to rag on you about it. Lol. You're right though, I was trying to be concise, but I probably went too far the other way and left things vague. I'll give it some thought and try to expand on it in a bit.
  • January 17, 2018

    I'd actually argue that Armour is the worst way to protect yourself on Legendary unless you're running Smithing + Alteration + Armour. The 200 or so AR that most builds using any two of these are going to be able to reach (realistically without grinding) just isn't going to protect you from anything other than low-level mobs.  Actually, just saying that means there is some use, though I suppose you could add in that dodging is a lot harder with Heavy Armour, making it slightly less viable (especially with how difficult it could be to grab the Steed depending on how much luck you get around there. 

    That said, really Legendary is tough for any build on low levels because of Archers...they suck, and when you've got more than one on you can be incredibly difficult. Add in the fact that most areas would have 1 or more Archers + other enemies, and it can be incredibly difficult to have enough room to dodge melee attackers while also dodging arrows. But Archers can't dodge Archers, Melee characters can't block arrows until Level 30 Block (which you can only easily level by bashing properly).

    Just some thoughts. Love the thread idea Tyso, and might end up linking this somewhere in CB soon (will let it gather up more attention here and hopefully get expanded :D).

     

  • January 17, 2018

    Mega-Dragonborn-of-Doom (1921) said:

    I'd actually argue that Armour is the worst way to protect yourself on Legendary.

     

    Agreed. I consider it a safety net skill, the kind that might help you hang to life long enough to retreat if something unexpected happens. You should still try not to get hit at all if you can. Like you said, the main benefit is in weak mobs when things are harder to keep track of but enemies don't hit as hard. Though even then training it is horrible on a Legendary, you basically need to supplement it with healing spells and grind bandits constantly. You're much better off with similar skills that can be trained without having to take damage like Block and Alteration.

     

    Plus, like Aysleph said, things like "dodge" could easily sound like I'm saying to strafe attacks which, with aim-bot enemies, is a terrible idea. You need to know attack animations, weapon reach and swing speed (which, luckily almost always have an inverse relationship) so that you can kite attacks. I really should get to work on providing explanations for these things...hey, you're both pretty experienced on the topic too. Wanna help? Lol.

  • January 17, 2018

    Man, you know I might pop by in the morning with some more thoughts and help flesh it out a little. Bit late for me at the moment (well, not really but better I head off now rather than push it), but yeah sounds good :D

  • January 18, 2018

    So I think I'm down for helping out with this one. Well, I knew I was but I'm even surer now if you're still alright with that plan. Don't know how you want to handle it, but I was thinking that it would work fairly well is if we just sort of broke it down, tackled some of the tips one by one. Personally I'd like to expand on Blocking and Staggering out of what you'd mentioned, and then would love to go into the powers of CONJURATION 

  • January 18, 2018

    Mega-Dragonborn-of-Doom (1921) said:

    So I think I'm down for helping out with this one. Well, I knew I was but I'm even surer now if you're still alright with that plan. Don't know how you want to handle it, but I was thinking that it would work fairly well is if we just sort of broke it down, tackled some of the tips one by one. Personally I'd like to expand on Blocking and Staggering out of what you'd mentioned, and then would love to go into the powers of CONJURATION 

     

    Yea, I originally wanted to go more in depth with the various tactics and then list all the skills and how they fit into those strategies (I.e. Alteration starts off as Damage Mitigation with Flesh spells, but eventually leads to Damage Avoidance strategies by way of Ash and Paralyze spells). I was also thinking of rating the various skills/tactics as either "Core Tactics" that you could build an entire legendary playthrough around (Distractions/Block), "Support Tactics" that can be useful backup for Core Tactics (Armor Spells/Healing) or "Reliant Tactics" that can act as Core Tactics but only with the right Support Tactics (Sneak/Armor). Though I figured all this might be really restrictive and the more detail I put the more I realized I was over-generalizing and needed to clarify (which was just more detail that I probably over-generalized) so I eventually just lightly touched on everything. Maybe we should just add to the introduction something about how this is just an overview to help people get started, and that everything probably can (and definitely should) be proven wrong if you're creative enough.