You don't need a Nexus account to download mods from there. That, and while it's your prerogative, that sounds sort of like saying, "I want to ride around on this bike with punctured tires and jammed brakes for a few weeks before I fix it." :|
Leaving aside the obvious stuff like the community patch and Sky UI which are pretty much required, there's also a good selection of mods that enhance the combat in the literal meaning of the word: improved balance, increased difficulty, greater tactical depth, &c.
Here's a heavily abridged list of the combat mods I use, if you do change your mind:
Magic:
1. Apocalypse Spells: Hands down the best spellpack mod there is. It's got something like 140 spells spread evenly across the schools and skill levels that appear in vendors and loot lists exactly like vanilla ones. Better yet, rather than a bunch of repetitive OP attack spells that slow down your game, the author went for breadth; relatively few of the spells are direct-damage types, most that are have some sort of interesting quirk to them, and every spell is designed and placed to fit with vanilla balance and scaling. Better yet, most of them have their own effects.
2. Better Magic: A moderate and much-needed rebalance + bugfix of the magic perk trees.
3. Invested Magic: This is pretty much required if you're going to play a mage without going insane over micromanagement. It changes all mage armor, cloak, effect (invisibility/muffle/waterbreathing/etc.), and summoning spells to make sense. They have a relatively small initial cast cost, but while a given spell is active that cast cost is removed from your magicka pool. Effectively this turns all of these spells into toggles (though they automatically deactivate if you completely run out of magicka) with upkeep costs instead of stupidly short durations that force mages to use obsessive levels of menu micromanagement.
Melee/Bow:
1. Duel Combat Realism: A massive rebalance of both combat mechanics (conducted mostly via relatively minor changes to just about everything) and to AI tactical behavior (ranged AI will use cover intelligently, melee AI won't run straight at you and stand still to normal-attack). It also increases the alert time for enemies who have seen one of their allies die. There are two releases; one focuses heavily on the blocking and strike-counterstrike dynamic, the other on momentum and very fast high-damage fights. I use the latter; usually both your PC and the enemies will die from <3-4 clean hits, or 1-2 clean power-attacks/headshots. But either one is better than the mindnumbing vanilla combat.
2. ACE: A modular mod (heh) which rebalances every aspect of combat and combat-support skills; you can pick and choose which aspects to use. Some of the better ones are the submod which changes the damage and effects of attacks based on the positioning of the attacker and target, the one which rebalances the armor perk trees to differentiate them from one another, the one which splits the one-handed weapons into different perk branches, and the one which adds small synergy bonuses for having complimentary perks (E.g. 80+ in 1H weapons and 80+ in Smithing would give a bonus to tempering 1H weapons).
3. Faster Arrows: Exactly what it says. Faster arrows with flatter trajectories; easier to hit long-distance shots that are well-aimed, and much more difficult to dodge enemy arrows.
Stealth:
1. Sneak Tools: This is great. It adds a couple nice features: Throat-cutting animation. If you sneak up on someone with dagger drawn, you can activate them to attempt an instant kill; this succeeds or fails based on your respective levels and skills + how alert the target is; success is a neat animation and a kill, failure is them being alerted and attacking. KOing--same as throat slitting, but with fists/mace; success KOs the target for ten minutes realtime, during which you can drag them, loot them, &c.
There are also some new items and interactions with the environment; pretty much every fire-based lightsource can now be doused with water arrows and relit or lit with fire arrows. There are also rope arrows which, when they strike terrain, will drop a rope which the player can interact with to climb up or down (while locked in first person POV); you can even grab one while in midair if you're fast enough. The ropes are auto-cleaned after two game days. There's also noisemaker arrows, which work pretty much like you'd expect.
2. Tougher Traps. This is more of a general mod, but it fits well enough here. Basically every trap in the game has heavily increased, level-scaling damage, and a lot of them have added or increased detrimental effects on-hit. It's deceptively entertaining having to figure out how to circumvent things like instagib runes in narrow halls. xD
And that's pretty much the minimum acceptable in my book, excluding a ton of minor and aesthetic changes. But maybe I'm prejudiced from first playing Skyrim on console.
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Topic: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Read 1615546 times)