Leaderboard

Simon Magus is a great mod author who has sort of followed in the footsteps of EnaiSiaion, making mods very similar to Ordinator, Apocalypse, etc. But Simon's are much more lightweight and closer to the mechanics and implementation of vanilla. At least, that's how he (and users) describe his mods. I can't honestly say much more about them as I've never used them; only discovered recently, and I'm in the middle of a play-through. Mysticism I never understood why so many people seem to feel magic is underpowered in Skyrim. I've played through as many builds of vanilla Skyrim characters as I could possibly think to make, and mages were usually the most over-powered. The very beginning can be a little tricky, yeah; conjuration will help a lot with that, and grab a follower. I have found that most of the time when people say stuff like that; they weren't actually playing a 'straight' mage. They don't trust the magic system or something, so they wind up wearing armor, and using swords or bows or whatever. If you're going to play a pure mage, you want to be wearing clothing; ie the outfit they give you in the very beginning of the game that is perfect for a mage character. You want to take perks in whatever school of magic you want to build your mage around (alteration mage armor perks are essentially a necessity) and you don't want to use other skills too much. One thing to remember always in Skyrim; anytime you are using skills that are not your main combat skills, or directly supporting those skills, you are by proxy making yourself weaker. You level up, the world levels up with you, and you have not increased your ability to deal with the challenges of the world.

I could give you a big hug and kiss! I have never left that enabled in previous installations, but I missed it this time. Turning off the TEMP LODGEN mod fixed those awful ground texture issues. Thank you also for the tip for AF in the display driver, I'm not sure I've ever done that in previous STEP installs, and it cleared that weird colored grass issue right up. "The game isn't technically ready to play until you finish the guide though." I knew that might be the case, but I felt I should stop where I was because in previous installs the performance test never showed any kinds of visual issues minus the lack of LOD, so I was concerned something had gone terribly wrong. One more thing, I really appreciate you. You saved me more stress than this probably should have caused, but the STEP guide is a hefty one, so I dreaded having to possibly start over because I broke it. But I know now that this forum should always be my first stop because you were incredibly understanding and helpful.