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[Shadowlord]

If you dump a ton of skill into smithing, you can massively upgrade your low-tier weapons and armor. Of course, you could do that with the higher-tier ones too if you got the perks for them. The armor cap frees you from having to choose the highest-tier armor, as long as your smithing is good enough to reach the armor cap or get near it on the armor you want to use. I don't think there's anything like that on weapons, though, which seems unfortunate.

[miauw62]

Meeeh. I like Skyrim better than Oblivion. Sue me.

I got into Skyrim much easier because there's less worrying about not doing things correctly. A classless system made it twenty times easier, the lack of the strength, luck, dexterity, etc stats meant I worried less about being under statted for how far I am in the game.

Then again, I might just be an idiot console peasent

this is how i feel about a lot of games.

skyrim is just relaxing. you're a murdergod and you roam the land finding cool dungeons and cool loot and murdering people and you get even murdergoddier along the way. the fact that i can just relax while playing it makes it so much easier for me to immerse myself in the game.

in a lot of games i get this thing where im worried about my build not being able to stand up to the endgame etc. so whenever a game has an easy respec system im super happy.

[Rolan7]

My personal RPG pet peeve is awesome looking low level equipment (especially armor). I really hate it when I need to remove my cool looking imperial steel armor (to use skyrim as an example) simply because it is too weak compared to my new set of dragon bone. Same goes for weapons, Maybe I want to use a glass dagger with a poison enchant (green dagger + poison == awesome), but it is simply too weak compared to the best I can get, so I end up with dragon bone or daedric instead.

I would love a system where you could imbue any item with the "spirit" of a different item. That way you could look however you want, but have the stats you need to succeed.

Skyrim actually offers a solution, at least regarding armor...  Armor protection is capped at a value that's really easy to reach by improving with max smithing (particularly if you use CHIM alchemy).  I don't remember if you can quite hit that armor cap with fur, but pretty sure imperial armor was good enough.  At that point it's literally as much protection as legendary dragonbone.

Weapons though, yeah, gotta use that legendary daedric dagger for those sweet stabs.  What Good Is a Glass Dagger, indeed ):

[milo christiansen]

I just used Skyrim armor as a semi-random example, the problem exists in many RPGs.

Good point about the armor cap though, I forgot about that...

[Gunner-Chan]

My only real issue with skyrim was I can't seem to get it modded and stable at the same time. I really don't understand why not...

[Rolan7]

Some open world games don't let me be a vampire.  Or even a werewolf!
What's up with that, GTA?

[Arcvasti]

Enemies with unlimited bullshit healing powers:

See above. Some enemies have an ability that heals them, often for a large chunk of their health. This is ok if it has limited uses or a big cooldown or initiates a new phase of the boss fight or something. But sometimes it has neither of those things and the only "Counter" to it is redoing the boss fight over and over until they don't spam it. Or being so overpowered that you can kill the boss really quickly, I guess. Ereshkigal in DC:SS is a good example of this, having a spell that can easily restore her to full health that she casts whenever her health starts getting low. The solution to this is either to be strong enough that you can go through this multiple times or to teleport away to heal every time this happens. The Giant Tree in Touhou Labyrinth 2 is even worse about this, since its heal isn't confined to emergency situations.

[SeriousConcentrate]

Yeah, this is why Old King Doran in Demon Souls is one of the hardest people to fight (assuming you do it legit instead of the 'break pathing, use poison' cheese) since he can heal himself instantly to full with no way to stop it, and he's scripted to do it at least once during the fight; if you're really unlucky he might do it again, and it's not like he doesn't have really good defense/offense and high HP. Getting his armor and stamina regen ring is a PAIN.

[Rolan7]

Enemies with unlimited bullshit healing powers:

See above. Some enemies have an ability that heals them, often for a large chunk of their health. This is ok if it has limited uses or a big cooldown or initiates a new phase of the boss fight or something. But sometimes it has neither of those things and the only "Counter" to it is redoing the boss fight over and over until they don't spam it. Or being so overpowered that you can kill the boss really quickly, I guess. Ereshkigal in DC:SS is a good example of this, having a spell that can easily restore her to full health that she casts whenever her health starts getting low. The solution to this is either to be strong enough that you can go through this multiple times or to teleport away to heal every time this happens. The Giant Tree in Touhou Labyrinth 2 is even worse about this, since its heal isn't confined to emergency situations.

Jeez, yeah.  I think that's mostly found in old JRPGs or roguelikes, in my experience, and it's easy to see why it was abandoned.  Frustrating and random.
Haven't played the Dark Souls games (including Demon Souls) but somehow I'm not surprised, SC

[SeriousConcentrate]

Nah, he's the only enemy that does that in Demons/Dark/Dark2. Bloodborne has a few bosses that can heal (at least one I remember, Vicar Amelia) but you can interrupt those, and I honestly don't care enough about Dark3 to remember if any NPC invaders heal (though the Twin Princes do have something of a healing gimmick; Lothric will continually rez Lorian but the idea is you beat the hell out of Lothric while he's doing that). The Souls games generally aren't bad about that sort of thing.

TLDR; Old King Doran is a dick.

[Rolan7]

I do like when it's interruptable.  Killing Floor 1 was great about that:  Once wounded, the end-boss Patriarch would turn invisible and run off *very* fast, finding a safe spot to use one of his limited (3) healing syringes.

But it was very possible to stop him.  The cloak was good but not perfect (it's a dark game, but if you look closely...) so medics and berserserkers could give chase.  The commando could see through the cloaking at a decent range.  And failing all that, when the Patriarch roared in pain and cloaked, you could just open fire on the area and have a decent chance of finishing him off.

[SeriousConcentrate]

Yeah, making it interruptible is the best way to allow an enemy to heal and still let it be fair. Plus it's pretty satisfying when you have them down, they try to heal, and they just end up giving you the clear window you need to finish them off because you have fast enough reactions/know the enemy well enough to predict it.

[LoSboccacc]

let me add: proprietary hardware required.


this was killed many years ago, haven't seen a game tied to physical items in a long time but...

now every vr system is hardcoded with drivers and shit and each is incompatible with each other. frankly it sucks. it's against everything the linux/osi movement fought for all these years.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Yeah, making it interruptible is the best way to allow an enemy to heal and still let it be fair. Plus it's pretty satisfying when you have them down, they try to heal, and they just end up giving you the clear window you need to finish them off because you have fast enough reactions/know the enemy well enough to predict it.

You can also have a situation where accomplishing goals throughout the level leaves the boss with fewer self-heal charges, which helps incentivize exploration and sidequest completion.

[SeriousConcentrate]

Mentioning that actually reminds me of Fume Knight in Dark Souls 2's Iron Crown DLC. He had these four statues surrounding his arena that continually regenned his health, but if you had four Iron Stakes you could destroy them and cut off his healing.

(Incidentally, last I heard Fume Knight beats players 93% of the time. So you really want to destroy those statues. )