Walyn's Guide To Skyrim Legendary Difficulty, Part 0.5: The Clothes Make The Dragonborn (not die)

Previous: Part 0: When There's No More Room Left In Helgen

If you don't want to deal with a lot of information-dumping and just want to see what we will be getting (skills, quests, equipment), skip to the end of the post. However, you may miss some valuable information.

So first, we need to find out what we need to reach. According to uesp.net, we reach the armor cap at 567 armor. Let's deal with that first. The Lord Stone gives both 50 armor rating and 25% magic resistance. The Lord Stone is pretty much the best Standing Stone to use for Legendary, when not actively leveling. This brings the required armor to 517. Full Glass Armor, when Legendary, gives 156 armor, 390 armor after Light Armor perks (+150%). So, we have 127 more armor to chew through. Luckily, every point of Light Armor skill increases armor rating by 4%, so that 390 becomes 429, putting us at 98 armor rating left to get. This is almost close enough to be comfortable, so we just close the distance to 80% physical damage resistance by putting Fortify Light Armor on and we're good. Combining this with the 10% chance to negate all physical damage from the final perk for Light Armor, and we end up at an effective 82% physical damage reduction. We can also use potions for temporary boosts in armor rating, and Alteration spells will surely fill the last bit of armor we may need (the reason that we don't rely on it is because we may forget to use it).

Now, for the resistances. They all cap at 85%, and we can only place the 4 major ones (fire, frost, shock, magic) on shields, rings, necklaces, and boots. This may seem like a strange decision, but other than that boots have nothing going for them in the enchantment department, and if other items could use those enchantments it would be very easy to reach max resistances. Tackling Resist Magic first, the quest The Book of Love can be done at level 1, carries no risk except through traveling around Whiterun's plains, and gives us a permanent 15% magic resistance. As stated earlier, the Lord Stone gives us 25% magic resist, so that brings us to 40%. The Magic Resistance perks in the Alteration tree gives us 30%, bringing us to 70%, just short of the cap. However, this is all we need. I will explain after we go over elemental resistances.

Sadly, there isn't any free bonuses for elemental resistances, so we have to enchant our equipment to handle it. The cap is 85%, but we should simply shoot for 75%. The base magnitude of all Resist Element enchantments is 15% (which is what we get if a level 0 enchanter used a Grand Soul Gem to enchant it). 125% in total from perks from the Enchantment tree put us at 33.75, which is not close enough, even with two enchants. However,  as we will be getting 100 Enchanting, this will end up being enough, and even then, we can use an Enchanting potion to boost us to 75% total if we need to. But why is this enough, on freaking Legendary? Because we will only be taking 7.5% elemental damage, because all elemental damage is considered to be magical, including dragon breath attacks. So even an Ancient Dragon's Fire Breath will only be doing 45 damage to us. (The bite is more worrisome, dealing 60 damage at the armor cap)

For offensive purposes, a key thing to note is that elemental effects on weapons are multiplied by the Destruction perks related to them, will also multiply other damage effects on the weapon, and if the enchantment on the weapon  is a Destruction type enchantment (which most of them are), a higher Destruction skill will let us use less charges when using the weapon, similar to a staff. In particular, there are two enchantments that give a Fire effect - Fire Damage, And Fiery Soul Trap. The first one is common enough, but the second one can only be found in a specific dungeon. By using both of these, we don't need to spend more points on multiple perks, and get the full 2.25x damage bonus from the Destruction perks we will be taking. In addition, we will be using Archery and Two-Handed weapons, as these do higher damage than One-handed weapons, and we don't need a shield.

While we're on the topic of The Elder Scrolls, here is a beta key for The Elder Scrolls Online (stress test, starts this Friday at time of posting) : 5CGN9NYE5YXF55X5CNPT (once you have redeemed the code, or if it says it is already used, please post in the comments that it is so that I can edit this post to address it being used)

So, what weapons do we want to use? Surprisingly enough, it is quite easy to get some very good weapons very early on. The Ebony Blade, which can be acquired once we finish Dragon Rising (which in itself is very doable, but the danger lies in the random dragon attacks), is a very powerful weapon that can be gained starting at level 20, and the Bound Bow with the Mystic Binding perk, even with Dragonbone weapons being added with Dawnguard, has the highest DPS out of all the bows - at least, before enchantments. We can switch to a Dragonbone Bow once we have plenty of arrows and can enchant it to be outright more powerful than the Bound Bow. Two things we won't replace, however, is the Wabbajack and the Sanguine Rose. Being able to turn enemies into sweetrolls and summon Daedra is so amazingly good, we cannot afford to leave them at home. Eventually we will get a weapon known as the Longhammer, which has the highest DPS of any two handed weapon once upgraded, but attempting to get it before you have all of your gear is suicide at its finest (And no, having the Nord or Imperial "Get out of Fights Free" card won't help - I tried it.)

For skills, we're going to be focusing first on getting our crafting skills (Alchemy, Smithing, Enchanting) up to needed levels, except for Alchemy, which we can level at our leisure, then we want to level the skills that open up the way for defensive stats (Light Armor, Restoration, Alteration), and finally we will get the perks that let us deal damage (Archery, Destruction, Conjuration, Two-Handed, Sneak). I'll be going over what to level and when in greater detail throughout the guide, just keep those skills in mind. Those skills are what we care about.

Finally, we want access to a few other things. We will be joining the Thieves Guild, The Dark Brotherhood, and The College of Winterhold. Those three factions have some very nice loot inside that we cannot get otherwise. The Thieves Guild even gives us a fence, which helps greatly with cash flow, and also gives us some good starting armor. We do not bother joining the Companions as we can just waltz in and steal their items.

Also, since it's important to use every tool in our arsenal, we will be going to go for max Conjuration so we can have two Storm Thralls (unlimited time Storm Atronachs) at our side. However, this will take a long time to be prepared for (with the Master Conjuration perk, it costs 325 or so magicka to cast), so we'll just be preparing for it as we go along.

So in all, we have:

Armor
Light Helmet (Fortify Archery, Destruction)
Light Chest Armor (Fortify Light Armor, Fortify Health)
Light Gauntlets (Fortify Archery, Fortify Two-Handed)
Light Boots (Resist Fire, Frost) - If Nord or Dunmer, replace your resisted element with Fortify Two-Handed
Ring (Resist Frost, Shock)
Necklace (Resist Fire, Shock)

Weapons
Ebony Blade (until replaceable with:)
The Longhammer (Fire Damage, Fiery Soul Trap)
Bound Bow (until replaceable with:)
Dragonbone Bow (Fire Damage, Fiery Soul Trap) with Ebony Arrows for normal use, Dragonbone Arrows for bosses
Wabbajack
Sanguine Rose

Perks (not listing prerequisites)
Smithing (Level 70 Perks, Level 76 Needed For Legendary Items): Dwarven Smithing, Dragon Smithing (from Light Armor side)
Light Armor (Level 100): All perks
Sneak (Level 40): Deadly Aim
Conjuration (Level 100): All perks except Dual Casting, Necromancy, Dark Souls, focus on getting to Soul Siphon first
Restoration (Level 90): Avoid Death
Alteration (Level 100): Magic Resistance 3, Atronach
Enchanting (Level 100): All perks except Soul Squeezer and Soul Siphon
Two-Handed (Level 100): Barbarian 5, Deep Wounds 3, All Perks Past Champion's Stance
Archery (Level 100): All perks except for Steady Hand, Hunter's Discipline, Ranger
Alchemy (Level 100): All perks except for Green Thumb and Experimenter
Destruction (Level 60): Augmented Flames 2

Quests and Standing Stones
The Book of Love
The Lord Stone
Taking Care of Business
With Friends Like These
First Lessons

Thoughts so far: To me, a good way to see how a game is balanced is to crank the difficulty setting up as high as you can get it and see if you can plan effectively. This took me a total of two hours to plan out completely. Some of the skills (Speech, Pickpocketing, Lockpicking) seem to only have luxury perks.  Overall, the skills all have some usefulness if you look well enough, although typically it is only worth a small splashing of perk points. In particular, the Smithing skill tree is a pain to deal with, as to get Ebony weapons when you're a Light Armor wearer, you have to go through two perks you do not care about, and if you stay on the Heavy side of the Smithing skill tree, there are large gaps between perks (goes from 30 to 50 to 80).

Next: Part 1: Sheogorath is the One NPC I Don't Skip Dialogue On