Is “stealth archer” just a meme, or do people talk about it so much because it’s actually a good play style?

Is “stealth archer” just a meme, or do people talk about it so much because it’s actually a good play style?

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It's more than just a meme, the game unintentionally made it the most satisfying and rewarding way to play. No matter what kind of character you play, there's literally no downside to getting a few sneak attacks in with a bow on the enemy at the beginning of combat, and getting a one shot kill and hearing that sneak attack sound is really satisfying.

That and enemies tend to fly away when they die from projectiles which is always fun to watch.

The problem is made even worse on the VR version of the game since archery is far and away the most fun playstyle there.

Granted I've only played Oblivion and Skyrim, but it's been my preferred class each time starting out. I did make a tank warrior in Skyrim and try a mage, but couldn't get into tthe mage. Might have just been tired of the game by that point.

Kind of translates to their Fallout games too. Always preferred taking enemies out quietly from a distance.

why bother with anything else when maxed stealth makes you 100% invisible in broad daylight and you can one shot everything with your bow without spending the effort to walk up to the enemy

dual dagger power attacks are good for bosses tho

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Stealth archer is boring and consumes too much time, just go sword and shield warrior and use destruction and restoration.

I started a new campaign a few days ago.
Archery is almost at 100 already purely from stealth archer.

It's insanely overpowered if you have the right perks, bow and enchanted armour/jewelry.

depends on what you mean by a meme, it is far and away the easiest way to play because you can just one-shot all the enemies in a room in like 5 seconds and they never see you, even moreso with poisons

Use training arrows with frenzy poison and watch a whole camp turn on itself.

>it’s actually a good play style?
Not really, it's just insanely broken and overpowered.
Still more satisfying than the awful melee combat tho.

I wanted to be a magical stealth archer. At first it was slow, boring, and ineffective outdoors. So I switched to something I found more fun. Eventually my character ended up decent at it and then it was alright. It's a nice change of pace from melee combat and archery seemed far superior to destruction magic.

It is the only pleasant way to play. Melee weapons and magic feel weak.

I dont play it, I just always play a pure mage/warmage

Sneak is broken in the game and arrows let you sneak crit from a distance, you do the math.

Melee weapons only feel weak if you don't take part in the alchemy, smithing, enchanting loop.

This, they can become buff as fuck if you do it.

They are still not pleasant to use. It feels like cutting air. It looks like cutting air. Even with a heavy mace.

magic is broken, it's terrible and boring to play as and depending on vanilla or mods, it's either way too OP or takes too long to get usable. I never found a good middle ground and even then you're just skating away from enemies and charging spells. it's fucking awful.

Any kind of melee is so painful it's even hard to talk about. The worst combat of any game I've ever played. sad and pathetic.

stealth archer, especially removing the reticle, provides the only semi decent fun and challenging combat in the game but essentially breaks the game because you one shot quickly are able to one shot everything.

It's easy to avoid detection when using bow, even with shitty stealth, and there is no real demerit to opening combat with a ranged critical hit, so if you don't purposefully avoid doing this, your supplementary stealth archery eventually becomes your primary killing method due to skill growth.

It's the build that requires the least amount of investment in crafting since the game gives you plenty of good unique bows. When it comes to using melee weapons, most unique ones suck shit compared to the ones you can craft and enchant so you end up spending a lot of time playing craftsman and merchant which most people find tedious.

the combat is so bad that stealth archer is the only way to make is bearable
morrowind had bad broken combat too but at least it was so dumb and made by idiots that you could have fun breaking it. in skyrim they finally fixed the basics and added limitations to make it so you can't break the game as easily but they didn't actually make it enjoyable or challenging so it lost all charm of being able to have stupid fun
i really hate bethesda though, they are the most incompetent developers I can think of, god damn

Destruction magic is worthless at higher levels in vanilla, only illusion and conjuration are worth a damn and then both of those combined still result in a character exploiting stealth and hiding while they make enemies kill each other or summons kill them. Alteration and Restoration are memes.

X30 Damage double dagger stealth power attack. I think it just rounds your damage to a billion.

Stealth archer is insanely good if you're running vanilla. As soon as you install any combat overhaul mod it becomes less worthwhile because nearly every overhaul nerfs the shit outta stealth archer. So it's mostly a console fag meme

speaking of magic, the level cap for some schools is rather annoying, why does it even exist

RESTORATION IS A PERFECTLY VALID SCHOOL OF MAGIC

unlike in oblivion, the archery is really really good, and yes, stealth archer is the only way to go. magicka gets dull after a while when you're just firing projectiles and waiting for your magicak bar to fill up again, and what more do i need to say about melee? so basically skyrim is best played as an fps.

Not in vanilla, why do so many fucking spells dedicate themselves to scaring away weak as shit undeads?

so basically skyrim is an open world fps with powers, like bioshock. not that i'm knocking on it or anything i like skyrim.

mode in force powers, OP spells and lower magicka reqs. and have fun throwing people off cliffs, summoning white sabrecats and hurling boulders down corridors and lightning nuking the battlefield

everytime we talk about skyrim its always "shit without mods" and then people discussing vanilla restricted playstyles

Destruction
>50 different shades of shoot fireball/ice/lightning spells
>Damage doesn't scale so enemies eventually get too much HP for it to be a viable killing method
Restoration
>Spells either heal self or other or turn undead
>Only offensive spells are part of dawnguard and even then it's just another cloak variant spell or a shoot light spell
Alteration
>Wow it's literally fucking nothing except armor spells which are shittier than wearing actual good armor, gimmicky utility spells you don't even need to specialize in the tree to effectively use and paralyze, the one good spell in the entire tree
>Look at me I can make a ball of light to light up my path instead of carrying a fucking torch like a normal person

Fuck magic in skyrim

playing with mods is daedric.

>melee weapons and bows can both be upgraded to deal at least five times as much damage
>enchantments related to both increase damage
>potions related to both increase damage
>both have perks that double all damage for 5 points investment

>magic
>perks that require 6 points total if you want all magic to do _50%_ more
>can't upgrade spells at forge
>enchantments don't increase damage but are mandatory anyway since high level spells eat extreme amounts of magicka
>only potions have damage bonus

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Enchantments only cutting down spell cost was one of the dumbest decisions Bethesda made during the game's development.

All playstyles in vanilla Skyrimjob are different shades of boring trash

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is there any mod or combination of mods that fixes the combat or is the combat just fucked from the beginning so hard not even mods can fix?

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It's funny how desperate the alteration skill tree is in ordinator. It's just trying to scrape the bottom of the barrel and makes the entire tree gimmicky as fuck with shit like Vancian magic, a random teleportation skill, an annoying pillar that pops out beneath you if you stand still with a spell equipped for a few seconds, that perk that sucks magic out of everything around you making it so you can't cast shit unless surrounded by other things and a bunch generic resistance buffing perks to try to tempt people into investing in it.

I don't like stealth archery, I prefer to get up close and personal with that x30 dagger damage.

I have literally never played as a warrior. Only ever assassin or Mage.

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Because of the way stealth/detection works the hidden archer is objectively the correct way to play any gamebryo elder scrolls, just like stealthy sniper is the objectively the correct way to play any gamebryo fallout. With about 30% of total points possible invested, usually by the second town or third dungeon, you will be more or less instagibbing people before they know you're there every time.

Oh and of course those 2 random perks that remove any cast cost for novice and apprentice spells as if people actually cared about the cost when it's negligible. The only trees funnier are the pickpocket and lockpick trees that try to make both of them have some semblance of combat utility.

>be dagger assassin
>hit stealth 100
>shadow warrior perk unlocked
>literally running up to people, crouching down in front of them and murdering them

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Fucked is putting it lightly. In order to make it work you would need to totally and completely overhaul, from scratch, all light/detection/line of sight mechanics so you can no longer use active camo, the way npcs interact with each other (in order to be able to call a warning that they're being engaged and rally a camp), the way npcs interact with the world (pathfinding, determining how best to search for a stealthy player) and generally unbuggering the whole game engine in the process so flying mobs don't get stuck on ledges.
And that's just to fix the stealtharcher/sniper build. There's probably no way at all to ever make melee or magiccombat satisfying in first person or the janked as shit third person fixed over the shoulder view provided.

Sword and board is the greatest, especially when the slow mo perk bugs out and doesn't turn off and you basically achieve chim, dodgin enemy attacks in slow motion and wheeling around behind before they can react.

any tips on fixing the optimization for Skyrim? stuttering and FPS drops are my main issue.

Too boring, slow and ineffective. In Skyrim there's very little reason not to go for two handed if you're melee.
Sword and board was the best in Oblivion because of the insane stagger that the enemies could lock you into.

Get a better PC

Sneak is extremely overpowered and stealth archer is unironically the most mechanically complex playstyle in the vanilla game, which speaks volumes for how basic melee and magic are.

Yeah I mean you have to take into account for the bow's power and draw speed, doesn't the arrow flying speed also depend on the bow?

Are you playing original Skyrim or Special Edition?

That loop literally breaks the game.

If you want to do that just save yourself the time it takes and lower the difficulty down to minimum for the same effect.

i've never made an archer in morrowind, oblivion or skyrim. bows are meme tier

already have a good pc

When the slow-mo glitch happened you are basically in ultra instinct mode

original

So does stealth archery though

Keep in mind there are one or two story encounters where the enemy is hostile immediately so it becomes harder to stealth archer.

LE is capped at 3.1gb of ram usage even with the patch make sure you're not going over or you'll stutter heavily

>max shield
>bash to disarm
>watch as you send a high level enemy’s weapon flying across the room and he’s forced to slap you ineffectively
It’s fun

Yeah. This isn't really even a secret. The guy in the beginning tells you
>hey use that bow to shoot that Bear a few times first!

Dagger + bow is the only way to play Skyrim.

Enable Memory Patch from SKSE.

kek, melee is rancid dogshit no matter how much you roid it up, it's floaty, like you're wielding a salmon smacking shit with it and the enemy hit reactions are turgid aids
it feels weak no matter what, you'd have to make 1hk weapons with a physics mod to make ragdolls fly to get anything resembling satisfying in skyrim

>play melee
>UNGA BUNGA HOLD LEFT CLICK
>play mage
>UNGA BUNGA HOLD LEFT CLICK
>play stealth archer
>to kill this enemy, I gotta shoot at this angle, oh wait no, maybe a little higher, and shoot, there it is, a perfect kill!

>Ineffective
Slow sure. And boring is up to personal taste. But I wouldn't call it ineffective.

It's absolutely a waste of time against mages and other spell casting NPCs like dragons or dragon priests because shields in Skyrim can't protect you from magic. Unless you have Spellbreaker but that's a weak shield otherwise.
With two handers you can at least DPS them quicker.

Spellcasters that are legitimately strong enough to threaten you are few and far between. The dragon priests are the only enemies I can think of that gave me trouble.

>wasting 5 perk points when you could just craft a invisibility potion

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>pickpocket skill
>its literal RNG if your going to level your skill up and if you don't savescum you are just going to end up paying it all back off

what the fuck is the point?

holy fucking cringe

It makes the fucking game piss easy

Do you mean there's another way of playing? baka

Not to mention the fact that the AI is REALLY stupid and will just give up looking for you if you remain out of sight after shooting an arrow into their face.
There really should have been some programming that puts humanoid NPCs on like, 24 hour alert if someone shoots them with an arrow. Instead they look around for 20 seconds and then determine that the arrow must have just been the wind and then go back to waiting for you to shoot them again.

It's pretty much the playstyle the game was made around since it lets you engage with enemies on your terms and effectively allows you to bypass the anemic qualities that'd normally come with the combat

Just enchant your shit with resist magic, no mage will be a real threat anymore, besides knocking over people with a shield is fun.

stealth archer becomes boring with mods though

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Lol, I got the reference