Friday, April 17, 2020

Skyrim Complete - Character 3 - Sheria

I was browsing through my old posts and noticed that I wrote about finishing the main quest in Skyrim almost three years ago on April 21, 2017.

As it happens, we just "finished" our third play-through of this fantastic game on Wednesday, April 15, 2020.

I'm not near the game system right now, so I won't document the character to the extent I did in that post, but we played as:

Sheria - a Breton

She was level 63 when we stopped.

As I read the previous post, I realized that Sheria never even did the "bar fight" that led to Will acquiring the Sanguine Rose staff, so I already know there's a quest we could go play, if we wanted.  That's indicative of an attribute of Skyrim which is so enjoyable -- there are hundreds of quests you can undertake, most of them not even connected to the primary story line.


Character Name: Sheria
Level: 83
Game Days: 490
Calendar days: 178  10/19/19 - 4/14/20
Play time: 441 hrs; 57 min; 32 sec

Skills: Primary skills I focused on are above the line.
  •  Conjuration 100; Legendary; 51 - We even started the early game summoning familiars and raising zombies for a while.  As soon as we could, we got the Summon Dremora spell and started using "Dreamy"
  • One Handed 100; Legendary; 59 - Started with a mace, because swords are scarce early, but soon moved into a sword. Eventually, after Legendary, we even took the Dual Flurry perk and started using a sword (right) and mace (left)
  • Smithing 100 - never went Legendary so we could make the best (Dragon) weapons.  Sadly, in this play through, the key NPCs required to start the quests for Stahlrim smithing had been killed, so while we collected a bunch of stahlrim, we never got to smith with it.  We collected every stahlrim weapon and piece of armor we could, but it was not the same.
  • Enchanting 100 - again, never Legendary, so we could dual enchant items for ourselves and our companion 
  • Alchemy 100 - just so we could certainly get our Smithing and Enchanting to be as high as possible when using them
  • Light Armor 100 - never went legendary, so we could gain the benefit of no-weight dragon scale armor.
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  • Speech 96 - we bought levels very early on, to get to the Merchant perk, which allows sale of any kind of goods to any kind of merchant (Speech 50 - critical to the way we play the game), but I think we only bought between 10 and 15 levels.
  • Destruction 96 - we tried to use Destruction magic early, but I am bad at aiming, and hit Lydia too much.  It becomes much easier after the Companion's Insight active effect is obtained, but that's from a Black Book quest in Solstheim, which we completely avoided until all the main quests were done.
  • Lockpicking 100 - We never tried to raise this. It happened organically.  We did eventually use some "Legendary Acquired" perks to get to the Unbreakable (100) perk so we could stop spending so much time unlocking the tough locks.
Late in the game we started working our way to Extra Pockets (Pickpocket 50) but only got as far as 41, because we don't like picking pockets.  These levels were almost all taught to us by instructors, with a few books.


Companion: Lydia for the whole game, except a brief time when we were trying to decide who we should marry.


Spouse: Argis the Bulwark

Children: Lucia (girl) then Alesan (boy)

Main Quests:

Dragon: Sovngard reached and dragon killed on January 1, 2020.
Civil War: Chose Stormcloaks again.
Dawnguard/Vampire: Never became a vampire; defeated around January 18, 2020
Black Books: All of them. Key (Apocrypha) complete February 1, 2020.

Quests completed: 130


I fully expect to play this game again sometime in the future -- starting a new character.  After a year or so, Sherry and I miss being in the world, and we've forgotten enough details that playing becomes "fresh" again. If we do decide to play, I think I'll try it on the PS4 -- I don't mind paying for the game again; we've had so much enjoyment from it -- so I can determine if transitions would be shorter on the more advanced system.