Starting at max difficulty-How?

[FrozenWolf150]

I'm thinking that for my next playthrough on the hardest difficulty, I'm going to pick an Altmer with the Atronach birthsign, for the sake of challenge. What kinds of skills would you recommend for this type of character?

[FrozenWolf150]

BTW I have a couple more tips pertaining to poisons.

In the early game, with Alchemy skill 25, the fastest way to make poisons of Damage Health is to gather sacred lotus seeds from the pools in the Imperial City, then collect unlimited purgeblood salts from Deepscorn Hollow.

Later in the game, with Alchemy skill 75, you may notice that you have an overabundance of certain ingredients, assuming you've been picking up and stealing every ingredient that isn't nailed down. I always end up with a surplus of daedra hearts, like several hundred of them, after closing a few Oblivion gates. A good way to use them up is the combination of daedra hearts + bergamot seeds + apple + nightshade. Unlike most of the ingredients listed on the Useful Potions page of the wiki, these are extremely easy to come by. You'll get a poison of Damage Health, Damage Magicka, Damage Luck, and Silence.

A custom spell of 100% Weakness to Magic + 100% Weakness to Poison on target, plus Invisibility on self, for 10 secs each is useful for setting up enemies for the kill. You can poison your weapon without breaking Invisibility. Then just sneak up, cut them with the poison, and run away. This works great on Argonians, atronachs, and the undead.

[Chicken Slayer]

I don't have Deepscorn Hollow so I can't take advantage of that tip, butit sounds good. I don't know if I have included it in this thread, but the flat and low area just north of Chorrol, between the road to Cloud Top and the road to Bruma has about 35 St. Jahn's Wart, which is just enough (with the lotus seed) to take down Umbra or the Underfrykte Matron (with 25 Alchemy). You can find a ton of nightshade and other poison ingredients in the Bawn, Fathis Tower, Fort Irony area, but it is a much larger area to search.

Ten seconds seems like a lot of time on that spell. I go for three or four seconds and can slam four or five of them into the target before my magic runs out, more if I'm juiced up. That is 3-4x stacking of the weaknesses, either for poison or a drain health sword (sword = 100 drain health, 100 weakness to poison, 100 weakness to magic.) The weakness just needs to be in effect when the poison is applied, not for the duration.

Deadra hearts, mort flesh, troll fat, and rat meat are all very similar. You can make straight, low weight Silence + Damage Health poisons with them if you name the potion after making it with common, light-weight ingredients first. Apples, onions, and a bunch of other odds and ends serve the same function in recipes as nightshade, and peony seeds.

Don't get too excited about Damage Magicka poisons. I did a lot of testing, and Xivilai are about the only thing that I got any results with at all (they have stunted magic.) I had to wait around (i.e run for my life, sit invisible, etc.) for the poison to drain them...long after one of us would be dead in a normal fight. Those poisons didn't do squat to the big spiders and their little leg-biters. If something magical isn't dead by the time Silence wears off it will start to heal itself and/or conjure something to come after you.

[FrozenWolf150]

Ten seconds seems like a lot of time on that spell. I go for three or four seconds and can slam four or five of them into the target before my magic runs out, more if I'm juiced up. That is 3-4x stacking of the weaknesses, either for poison or a drain health sword (sword = 100 drain health, 100 weakness to poison, 100 weakness to magic.) The weakness just needs to be in effect when the poison is applied, not for the duration.

Yeah, I know, I had designed it for use with a bow, not a melee weapon, as I was trying to keep my distance from enemies at the time. It allows me to get in about 4 poisoned shots. However, 3-4 seconds is indeed plenty if you're using a melee weapon.

Deadra hearts, mort flesh, troll fat, and rat meat are all very similar. You can make straight, low weight Silence + Damage Health poisons with them if you name the potion after making it with common, light-weight ingredients first. Apples, onions, and a bunch of other odds and ends serve the same function in recipes as nightshade, and peony seeds.

I do that all the time too. I tend to have hundreds of simple Damage Health + other negative effect potions on hand.

Don't get too excited about Damage Magicka poisons. I did a lot of testing, and Xivilai are about the only thing that I got any results with at all (they have stunted magic.) I had to wait around (i.e run for my life, sit invisible, etc.) for the poison to drain them...long after one of us would be dead in a normal fight. Those poisons didn't do squat to the big spiders and their little leg-biters. If something magical isn't dead by the time Silence wears off it will start to heal itself and/or conjure something to come after you.

Okay. I was only using that particular combination because the ingredients are very common and very easy to collect in large quantities. I usually run out of mort flesh, troll fat, and even rat meat very quickly. Damage Magicka is just a bonus. It's the Silence + Damage Health that kills them. Also, I was experimenting with Shivering Isles ingredients to see what poisons I could make out of the more common ones, and found a 5 effect combo: Black tar + letifer orca digestive slime + fly amanita cap + morning glory root pulp. This results in Burden + Damage Fatigue + Damage Health + Damage Magicka + Shock Damage. Another useful one for pure damage is black tar + fly amanita cap + steel blue entoloma cap + spiddal stick, which gives you Damage Health + Fire Damage + Shock Damage + Burden.


More relevant to the topic at hand, I was using the 100% Chameleon loadout and found it took away all the challenge. So I switched around my gear and am instead using a combination of 100% Resist Magic + 100% Reflect Damage. The only things I have to worry about are arrows and diseases.