....3 more days....

[Brugdor]

I'm in my mid-30s now with my orc sword and board build. I'm the proud owner of several daedric artifacts all of which I found on my own through exploration. I've also found quite a few word walls out in the world but then learned that once you've seen the Greybeards as part of the main quest you can return to their leader to ask if he knows where any are located. He'll drop a side quest on you for one word at a time.

I'm also a master smith now. I just did that around level 30 and have a full suit of deadric armor. I'm currently trying to level Enchanting to a decent point so I can enchant the armor.

I just switched my stone blessing to the mage from the warrior so I can try to level up some casting skills faster. My warrior stuff was all at least in the mid-70s so it was time to switch.

I became a werewolf but found it pretty useless for a melee character so I used the cure.

Today for the first time I had to use a console command to skip to the next part of a quest as the part I was on seemed broken. I've found one cave that made me crash every time I rounded a particular corner but other than that I've had 3-4 crashes. All of those but one were due to me alt-tabbing.

[Solwyn]

I'm in my mid-30s now with my orc sword and board build.

Every time you say that I want to make a sword and board Nord named Fjord.

[Solwyn]

I became a werewolf but found it pretty useless for a melee character so I used the cure.

Also from what everyone's telling me, werewolf is useless UNLESS you're a melee character. I know it was for my friend the archer. I'm not sure how it'd go for my magic swordsman, but probably not great.

[Shard]

Right now I'm trying to run a pure archer, no melee or magic, and I've had no problems with it so far up to level 15 but I've been told it can't keep up later. Suppose I'll find out

[Brugdor]

I became a werewolf but found it pretty useless for a melee character so I used the cure.

Also from what everyone's telling me, werewolf is useless UNLESS you're a melee character. I know it was for my friend the archer. I'm not sure how it'd go for my magic swordsman, but probably not great.

Hrmm...well I'd never use it because it's not nearly as effective as using a weapon and shield. Also, the time it takes to change doesn't make it an effective "Oh crap" button either. So I guess it's pretty much just useless for everyone then.

[Hatchetman]

I don't really know how it wouldn't be able to keep up. Magic and daggers are the only things that don't scale in damage from any base effect, only from perks (dagger's sole damage buff is the 15x backstab, no other enchants or talents apply to it). With mobs having various hard caps on their level scaling, I have very little room before there's no mobs any higher than what I see right now.

At 44 with 100 smithing, 100 enchanting, 29 enchanting (so my potion buffs while making gear sucked) and only 72 archery, meaning I don't have full Overdraw yet, this is my bow;



And this is my bow on drugs;



I'm missing a few % off my gear, you can get the bonuses to 47%, mine are 45%. I've also yet to encounter anything that I actually felt the need to use a potion to up my damage on. I barely use berserker anymore, sneak attacks off of base damage is killing basically everything.

There's actually a post on the Bethesda forums showing with hard numbers and methodology that dual wielding one-handed weapons is the highest potential dps, followed closely by archery, then two-handed, weapon and shield, and daggers dead last. You backstab almost 30% more damage with a one-handed weapon than with a dagger.

Werewolves are really meh. With decent stamina and armor perks, being a wolf I couldn't run farther than I do normally, the speed increase isn't really noticeable, and it's a huge damage loss. The only good part was it's funny to use power attacks to fling people and using it to fast-travel while encumbered (which is also rather less useful with various perks)

[KMD]

    Level 16 Redguard Archer here (I alt with my Daedric Mace)

So much better than Oblivion in many ways. The quests have much more personality, the combat has been improved, and the new GUI is awesome.  The only bad things:

-Close combat can still be a pain in the ass, especially since I always play in first-person

-The change in skills in pretty strange. I miss Acrobatics. Also being able to cast my custom "disposition +100 for 10s" spell.

-It's less obvious who has what spells you can buy

   It's nice that bows have been improved. I remember bows in Oblivion totally sucking but now I can one-shot almost anybody. Sweet.

Edit: Also the Perks. Good idea, but none of them are really fun. Nothing like the perks in FO3, just boring "increase your [skill damage] by 20%" (except for backstab) And this should have been more violent! I feel like the combat would have been more satisfying with more blood.

[Brugdor]

I feel like the combat would have been more satisfying with more blood.

Take the one hand perk that gives you a chance to decapitate with every swing. My orc gets quite a few of those kills.

For a challenge I decided to go pure caster and to run through the mage quests at low level. I started the quest line at 4 and am on the very last quest now at level 11 I think. I've already done the hardest part with the dwemer dungeons and taking on the worst boss. Now I'll get the mage tower as my house with easy access to alchemy and enchanting.