Skills comparison between Merawen and Alarrah

Folks who follow me on social media have already seen these videos on my Facebook and Twitter feeds, but for those of you who read my blog or who follow me on Dreamwidth, here’s a post doing some skills comparison between the two Skyrim runs I’ve done so far!

This gets a separate post from Merawen’s main playthrough posts, because it’s not directly related to Merawen’s playthrough actions. But she did just hit level 62, and I wanted to take the chance to call that out. Because level 62 is where I got with Alarrah when I decided to retire the character.

And Merawen is not yet done with Dragonborn-related content. Nor has she finished the main plot. So I feel like I’ve got at least a couple more weeks of play time with her before I get to the point of retiring her.

Because of this, I thought it’d be interesting to compare where her skills are at now vs. where Alarrah’s were when I stopped playing that run!

(Stats geekery and a couple of videos behind the fold.)

And this was an easy thing to compare, now that I know how to take video on the Switch. So I took one video of going through Alarrah’s skill trees, since I did retain her final save file and can still pop back into her game if I want to.

Here’s that video:

And here’s the similar video I took of Merawen’s skills in her game:

I see several things off the bat by looking at these videos:

1. I’d forgotten that I’d made three of Alarrah’s skills Legendary: Light Armor, Smithing, and Sneak. And that I’d kept Enchanting at 100 with her, to retain the ability to do dual enchantments on items.
2. It was intriguing to me that the exact same four skills, Light Armor, Smithing, Sneak, and Enchanting, are the ones I’ve had hit 100 with Merawen.
3. Of the skills that aren’t up to 100 yet for Merawen, the highest ones are mostly comparable to the highest skills for Alarrah for the most part, signifying where I’ve tended to put my play emphasis:
   • Light armor preference for both characters
   • One-handed (though Alarrah’s number on this is better, possibly signifying that I’ve spent more time with Merawen using magic and/or archery to take out opponents)
   • Sneak
   • Smithing (SO MUCH SMITHING, I do loves me some smithing)
   • Alchemy (though Merawen’s done less of this than Alarrah, Alarrah threw more training at it)
   • Speech (because of selling stuff to so many people)
4. Where Merawen’s skills differ appear to be due to the following:
   • Lockpicking is much higher due to Thieves Guild activity, as I’d expect
   • Pickpocketing likewise higher, though that’s due to throwing training at it rather than active use, I’ve favored lockpick-based thievery instead of pickpocket-based
   • Placing more emphasis on developing magic for use in combat
   • More time using bows as primary weapons
   • More time favoring Blades armor as my primary armor, and therefore boosting the Heavy Armor stat
5. Merawen’s skills all across the board are higher. This is a direct result of my taking way better advantage of skill trainer NPCs throughout Merawen’s run.

All of this also raises a few interesting questions I’ll have to ponder for the remainder of Merawen’s run.

1. Will it be worth it to me to try to set any of Merawen’s skills Legendary? It did occur to me that since I’ve been working on bumping up her Heavy Armor stat, if I decided to reset Light Armor, I would not leave myself defenseless.
2. Do I have any fucks to give about trying to bump up Two-handed? With both characters that stat is pretty pitiful. But two-handed weapons don’t really seem in character for Merawen, any more than they did for Alarrah.
3. Neither Alarrah nor Merawen really have done much with Conjuration at this point. Both characters made it into the 50’s partly because I keep throwing money at Phinis for training at the mage college. But in terms of actually using that school of magic, I feel like I’ve barely touched it. That might warrant further experimentation.
4. Ditto for Illusion.

So yeah this is fun. And I’ll be real interested to see how much farther along Merawen gets when I finally retire her as a character. I would kind of like to see if I could at least make it to level 80, just so I can trigger the encounter with the Ebony Warrior.

But I also feel like I might not make it that far? Kind of depends on how much extra time I spend on Solstheim.