‘Divines smile on you, friend!’
‘Don’t…’
‘Don’t do that!’
‘I’ll have you know that there’s no pizza… ARGH!’
Skyrim is a beautiful game.
Exactly 7 years ago to this day, I loaded it for the first time, and explored the lands
with the greatest character I’ve ever made: Odgrub the Basher.
I loved that man.
*FUS-RO-DAH!*
He and I, we have so many good memories together.
With him, I beat the guilds. He beat the guards. He beat innocent people. And it was with him
that I mastered something that makes the game ridiculously easy.
*Innocents screaming*
Last month I talked about games with scaling levels, mentioning Skyrim in particular. The
enemies in this game will try to match your level so that the game forever remains a challenge.
But there’s something that I discovered with Odgrub that made him more powerful than
the game could have prepared for!
It’s all too easy to focus on the cool stuff, like levelling up your armour and mastering
the blade. So much so, in fact, that you may fail to dabble with stuff like smithing. Or
enchanting. Or alchemy.
After all, who wants to crush plants when you could instead be doing THIS?!?
*Angelic singing*
‘HELP! SOME ONE!!!’
Okay, focus, Odgrub.
For these 3 skills hold a secret. A terrible secret. A terribly BRILLIANT secret.
For master these 3 and they will make you a GOD.
I’m going to show you how Odgrub did it, back in 2011.
I mean, don’t ask me how he thought it up.
It’s not like he’s the smartest soul in Skyrim.
*FUS-RO-DAH!*
Meet my new character. Imaginatively known as Odgrub the Second. He has just spent countless
hours grinding smithing, alchemy and enchanting.
They’re all (finally) maxed out at level 100.
First, I needed a full set of armour. Did you know that with a high enough smithing
skill, you can make any set of armour the maximum armour value? This means that even
boring old hide armour can get just as good as LEGENDARY HEAVY DRAGON PLATE ARMOUR!
But hide doesn’t look very bling.
So I first set about getting a full set of HEAVY DRAGON ARMOUR! Just like Odgrub had,
all those years ago. For this I needed dragon parts. This should
have been easy, since Skyrim is littered with dragons-
…until you need them, it seems.
I couldn’t believe it! I had been drowning
in dragons when I didn’t need them. I had grown tired of having to eat so much dragon
soup! These oversized cliff-racers had single-handedly caused global warming! They were EVERYWHERE!
Until I needed them. Now they seemed as dead as the dinosaur.
Stupid game, at this rate I’ll never-
-And then I found them. ALL of them.
Everywhere.
And some epic fights later, I had enough dragon stuff to make some cool stuff out of.
And Lydia was more than happy to carry it all back to town for me.
‘I am sworn to carry your burdens’
Now, I know this video’s already shown a bit of killing and that you guys must be getting
bored with all that mindless violence by now. But it’s important to see how good Odgrub
the Second is BEFORE he exploits the game. That way, when we show it at the end then
you’ll see how much of a difference all this exploiting makes. You know… for science.
Even in plain old orc-armour and weapons, he’s already pretty good, taking on all
the city’s guards at once and holding his own against them.
But something about this… lacks the oomph a legendary hero should have.
He has to resort to cheap tricks, wheras I want people to be see him in combat and to
be literally blown away!
…and figuratively.
Time to make that bling set of armour.
He got his dragon parts back from Lydia…
‘I am sworn to carry your burdens’
*FUS-RO-DAH!*
Then, using these, Odgrub crafted himself a full set of Dragon-plate armour.
And it made him look absolutely fabulous.
And then he set out to make it even better.
How? I’m glad you asked...
You see, with 100 smithing you can improve this armour, but you can get even better at
smithing if you first enchant clothing with fortify smithing magic. But you can also enchant
clothing to make you better at alchemy and then you wear those as you use alchemy to
make even better potions to improve your smithing even further. You then equip the clothing
and drink these potions and then smith items up to a GODLY level!
Of course this is simplifying things a bit since you can also make potions to make you
better at enchanting, then use those to enchant clothing that makes you better at alchemy,
creating an infinite loop IMPROVING YOUR ABILITIES TO OBLIVION AND BEYOND, thus ending back in
Skyrim again.
And that’s exactly what Odgrub did! He then headed over to his smithing station, donned
his clothes of improved smithing, downed his potion of improved smithing, and quickly worked
on improving as many items of armour as he could before the potion wore off.
He even had time to do it with his weapons as well.
Doing all this upped his armour rating to a stonking great 963, which is well beyond
Skyrim’s maximum armour level. And his weapons now also dealt triple the
amount of damage that they would have previously. As you can imagine, Odgrub the Second is now
truly formidable. His stats, unrivalled. But not so fast! Before we test out how great
he is, there’s one more step that-
This may be a good time to explain why Odgrub the Basher- despite his name- chooses to wield
a one-handed sword, as opposed to, say, an axe, or a massive great Warhammer.
It's simple, really.
When it comes to beating people off, size isn’t everything. People make the mistake
of grabbing the shaft of the largest weapon they can find, thinking that using 2 hands
is better than 1. But they’re mistaken! I have found that, with enough practice and
technique, grasping your sword with just one hand can yield better results. Especially
if you can still finish the enemy in one thrust! Keeping one hand free, you remain nimble,
dodging enemy blows and opening up cracks in their defence, catching them with their
pants down and letting you slide your sword right in where they least expect it.
They never see it coming.
Now to enchant Odgrub’s weapons and armour. Each item can improve Odgrub in one way, be
it more health, strength or so on. This alone is useful! …but if you unlock THIS skill,
each item can improve Odgrub in TWO ways! Use this on all of his armour and weapons
and he will become an unstoppable killing machine.
And that’s exactly what he did, all under the influence of his potent ‘improve enchanting’
potions. Choosing enchantments isn’t an exact science. He chose to prioritise attack
strength, followed by making him stronger or more resistant to shock spells. Odgrub’s
had one too many bad experiences with conjurers.
This enchanting stage alone must have doubled or tripled Odgrub’s power.
As for enchanting his weapons… Odgrub was spoilt for choice! He could choose to absorb
his enemies’ health. Or set them on fire! Or paralyse them! Or make them fear him and
run away! Or to paralyse them AND make them fear him and try to run away! Or he could
steal their soul. There was something Odgrub liked about it
absorbing just one point of health. Like the ultimate humiliation just before their doom.
Plus this enchantment gave the weapon a really pretty red glow. But ultimately, 1 point of
damage was a waste of an enchantment. He also toyed with paralysing them AND making
them fear him at the same time. It didn’t always work, but when it did they’d hilariously
flop to the ground, screaming. It also seemed to break the unkillable characters, who would
either remain on the floor or who would stand there with a silly look on their face for
the duration of the effect.
'You're not as dumb as- HNEUGH!!!'
But sadly, these 2 effects combined drained
the enchantment too quickly, so to improve his weapons’ battery-life he settled for
just 1 second of paralysing.
Doesn’t always kick in, but when it does it really puts the laughter into slaughter.
'I can still put up a fight!!!'
With armour and weapons fully pimped out and this video quickly approaching the 9-minute
mark, you might be tempted to click off right now. I hear 3kliksphilip’s just posted something
really dank on Twitter.
Probably.
But if you were to check this out then you’d miss Odgrub making some really pretty jewellery!
Which can also be enchanted for extra hax. Any old jewellery would work perfectly well,
but as you’ve probably guessed, for Odgrub, any old jewellery isn’t bling enough.
He wants the best: and that’s gold with diamonds! And so began perhaps the longest
and most pointless leg of his journey thus far.
Odgrub set off on his adventure. The journey there would be long and treacherous.
He braved moor and mountain, field and frost troll and traversed the most dangerous mountain
passes that Skyrim had to offer.
For there’s only one place that he could get such precious jewellery.
Only one that could live up to Odgrub’s demands.
…And that’s Radiant Raiment, the finest clothes shop in all of Skyrim! It also sells
pretty and rare pieces of jewellery. A regular favourite for Odgrub, even if the owners aren’t
the friendliest. If anywhere was to sell gold with diamonds stuck to it, it would be here.
Problem was, their shop had broken in some way and remained locked, when it should have
been open. This normally happens when the owner gets lost and dies in some horrible
way… but Odgrub swears he had nothing to do with it!
So he did what any respectable person would have done and broke in. The owner was in there,
alive and well- but Odgrub was told to leave.
‘YOUR NOT SIPPOSED TO BE IN HEAR’
‘IM NOT GOIN 2 WARN U AGAIN OUTLANDER’
Not wanting to squander his chance to get the finest jewellery, he did as he was told.
He tried waiting a while to see if that would fix the game…
‘UR NOT SUPPOSED 2 BE IN HEAR’
…but the shop remained off-limits and a random guy was now in charge of it for some reason.
‘GO AWAY N LEAF US ALONE OUTLANDER’
So Odgrub was all like ‘screw it’, and went down the local for a pint.
Incredibly, this worked and when he returned, the clothes shop was open for business again!
But they didn’t have what Odgrub was looking for.
Time for plan B.
He ran to the other end of Skyrim on his most boring journey yet. He was attacked by bandits,
orcs, thieves, wolves, bears, trolls, giants and a dragon along the way.
He could have just fast-travelled. But he was part of the hate-crowd back in the day
and still stubbornly refuses to use it, even though secretly he’s beginning to see the benefits.
FINALLY, and 22 GB of 4K footage later, he
arrived at Riften: the city of thieves.
‘I FIND UR HAND IN MY POCKET ILL OWN U SO BAD NOOB’
What he needed was locked away in a house that you’re not supposed to be able to access
until later in the game. But fortunately, 7 years on and a thousand
releases later, Skyrim is still a buggy mess and Odgrub was able to glitch his way in.
He and Lydia proved to be a good team. Odgrub would bash them and Lydia would set them on
fire… or simply bash them herself. Odgrub found the hidden passages and triggered
the traps, and Lydia… carried his burdens. Eventually he reached the room with the diamond in.
Odgrub got what he wanted.
Now onto one of the only goldmines in Skyrim!
Even the formidable Briarheart, equipped with shock spells (His previous weakness), failed
to hurt Odgrub in the slightest. He tore through the bandit like a butter through knife hot
and collected as much gold as he could eat.
Armed with gold AND diamonds, he returned to civilisation to craft himself some jewellery.
Although once he got there he realised that Lydia had been wearing the bling jewellery
that he wanted all along. God knows how long she’s had that stuff for.
*FUS-RO-DAH!*
Finally, Odgrub enchanted them. His necklace of doom and ring of power were made and once
equipped, Odgrub the Second was finally complete.
And now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for: Odgrub the Second, at full power and
in his final form.
He and Lydia tore up the castle at Windhelm.
His bow was perfect in the villages around Solitude.
He moved onto Solitude Castle where the stairs complemented his sword of paralysing nicely.
It wasn’t a good day for Skyrim.
Onto whiterun next. And his bow proved itself again on the steps leading to the castle.
Those who were invincible soon wished they weren’t. But this was all a bit easy.
So he moved onto dragons.
Killing regular ones in 3 arrows…
…and ancient epic noscope 360 ones in 3 blows of his sword.
He went to take on the greybeards.
Although it’s not possible to KILL them...
...I think it’s safe to say that Odgrub won.
In fact, nothing was a challenge any more!
Odgrub the Second had made the game too easy.
The illusion of Skyrim had been ruined.
And on that disappointment…