Started playing this again to see if I can find any interesting items or dungeons before I try Requiem. I have a level 17 'battlemag" and a lvl 7 thieving character. And some questions for those who've seen a lot of the content (vanilla game).
1. Any point in caring about lock-picking or thievery in general? Like Oblivion, do high level chests still have crap in them? Any vaults or treasure halls to infiltrate? Is the item scaling as bullshit as it was in OB?
2. When do I start getting unique items? Do they come at the end of questlines? All the shit I can craft is better than anything I'm finding or being given.
3. When do the questlines start introducing Dwemer ruins? I haven't seen one yet.
4. What spells and skills do people think are worthwhile? I've looked over the perk trees and nothing stands out. Spells don't seem interesting either.
5. Pertaining to #4, are "builds" a thing in this game? Anyone try making a Necromancer or Paladin type character? Is it gratifying to play as a specific class, even if only in a LARPy manner?
6. What is the most satisfying way to play: Follow quests, or hiking simulator and dungeon crawling on one's own, or a mixture of both?
1. Lockpicking and pickpocketing in the vanilla are pretty worthless, since you don't need any perks to open locks and no one has really anything interesting to steal (since money is not a problem). Sneaking is great though. Item scaling can be pretty annoying sometimes.
2. Crafting is completely fucking broken in this game and when abused makes exploring the game's world very unrewarding, since the loot/quest rewards will be always shit in comparison to what you can create with smithing+enchanting. Oh, and the unique items.. most of them are given to the player after finishing a daedric quest.
3. There are a quite a few of those quests.. not in the early game though.
4. Aside from the broken as fuck smithing and enchanting you have bows, sneaking, light armor, 1h weapons, conjuration.. and I think that's it
In general magic is pretty underpowered, especially destruction.
5. Builds are "a thing", mainly due to the perk system.
6. I'd say a mix of both is best. Personally I don't like the main questline that much and I try to avoid it, but some of the side quests are pretty cool.
seriously though.. dun b stupet, yous mods. Vanilla sucks in comparison, mods fix a lot of issues (broken crafting, exploits, bugs, balance, shitty magic, level scaling, etc ...)