My birthday was Friday (I'm 46 now) but I mostly celebrated on Saturday, despite having a lot to do since I'm in the process of moving. I made fish tacos, watched Rogue One, and played a lot of Skyrim. I feel like it's going to be a while before I'm able to have quality time with Skyrim again so I tried to make the most of it.
I have two characters going lately, a magic user named Nancy and a warrior named Alistair. Nancy is a real challenge because I made her to be an entirely support character. For a long time, I'd wanted to see if I could get through the game with Illusion magic as my primary skill. It could be frustrating at times so when I just wanted to hack at things I'd switch over to Alistair. But I've gotten Nancy to level 41 which, I think, is the highest level I've gotten any character in years. The Ordinator perk tree mod adds a lot of abilities to Illusion to keep it interesting. It's always fun to cast "frenzy" on a group of bandits from a hiding spot and watch them all attack each other and, with the mod, you're able to use Illusion spells even on very high level monsters if you're at a high level yourself, something that really ought to have been a vanilla feature. It's not as though swords won't affect certain high level monsters. There are several illusion spells that summon doppelgangers of enemies to fight them, which I love, and mental manipulation abilities to use on people you come upon sleeping. You give them dreams about you to make them your devoted follower or simply steal their dreams and convert them into useful buffs. Unfortunately, Illusion spells seem to be useless against dragons so when there's a dragon I mostly run around casting healing and buff spells on my followers.
Mostly I have to credit the follower mods for keeping things interesting. Since Nancy has little to offer in terms of offensive capabilities, she needs a team of damage dealers around her. So she has custom modded followers Remiel, Val Serano, Ashe, and Lydia. Lydia is actually a vanilla character but I have a mod that completely replaces and expands all of her dialogue. Nancy's high Speech skill also grants her an animal companion (a cave bear at the moment) and I've levelled her high enough in Conjuration that she can have two summons at a time, thanks to the Ordinator perk tree mod. The trade-off is that if she has no summoned creature she has a reduced magic resistance and armour rating.
It was hard to get a screenshot with every follower visible. I just realised I got Ashe mid-blink. The ice monster is one of the summons.
Val Serano and Remiel have all the best dialogue, some of it banter with each other, despite the fact that the two characters come from two different mod authors. Val Serano has some genuinely funny lines though too many of them are references to Indiana Jones and The Princess Bride. Remiel, though, has become easily my favourite companion and the only one I have with my warrior character, Alistair.
Even most of the best follower mods have a bunch of annoyingly obsequious dialogue and the characters have ridiculously powerful attacks and abilities. Not so Remiel. The only really powerful thing she has is that she can pick any lock and the mod author made a very handy spell function for her so you can just point and click at a lock you want her to pick. I can see her being a must have for any playthrough of Skyrim for the foreseeable future.
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