Skyrim | The Most Useful and Useless Perks
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In Skyrim, you are given the option to pick whichever perks you want each level. The max level is 81, so that’s the maximum amount of perks you will be allowed to choose, but most players don’t nearly make it to that level. Also, there are a total of 251 perks from 18 skills. Therefore, through your 50 or so levels in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, you’ll have to pick your perks carefully. Here are the most useful and useless perks in the game.
Note: I’m not going to include most of the combat perks, because picking which are useful and useless in those is largely subjective. Also, I’ll go a lot more in-depth with the “Useless” perks, because most, if not all, of the “Useful” perks are self-explanatory.
The Most Useful Perks
- Respite (Restoration 40) – Restore stamina with healing spells? Very useful for most builds, if you use restoration spells, of course. Even if you don’t regularly use healing, you can use it to get you from place to place faster.
- Recovery (Restoration 30) – A 25/50% increase in Magicka regeneration! I always love passive abilities like this, and if you even use a tiny bit of magicka, this perk is worth it.
- Green Thumb (Alchemy 70) – This perk helps you collect far more ingredients from plants, and if you invest into the alchemy tree, it adds up very quickly.
- Extra Pockets (Pickpocket 50) – Increasing your carrying capacity by 100 is awesome, it’s helpful in basically any situation.
- Wind Walker (Light Armor 60) – The main reason why I prefer light armor over heavy armor – there isn’t a useless perk in the tree.
- Merchant (Speech 50) – This one’s purely for convenience’s sake, you can sell all your gear to anyone.
The Most Useless Perks
- Fists of Steel (Heavy Armor 30) – Who uses unarmed attacks, especially while using heavy armor?
- Cushioned (Heavy Armor 50) – Halve damage from falling if wearing all heavy armor… This may help you if you accidentally fall down a large bridge that’s at the perfect height where it won’t kill you, and at the bottom is a large amount of enemies, all while you’re out of potions. Basically, these two Heavy armor perks are only useful for getting the Conditioning perk, so you should decide beforehand if Conditioning is worth choosing Heavy Armor over the Light Armor perk path.
- Destruction Dual Casting (Destruction 20) – This perk drains too much extra magicka to be super useful, while providing not enough damage and less versatility (you have to have the same spell in both hands). It does looks cool, though.
- Master Locks (Lockpicking 100) – Most of the lockpicking skill tree is actually completely unnecessary. Locks in this game are very easy to pick compared to the Fallout games. I’ve picked many Expert locks in Skyrim and I haven’t put a single point into the skill tree. The only point to investing into them is to get Treasure Hunter (50% greater chance of finding special treasure) and Unbreakable (Lockpicks don’t break). If you aren’t ever short on lockpicks and don’t find most of the lockpicking perks attractive, just skip the skill altogether.
- Catpurse (Pickpocket 40) – Pickpocketing gold is already very easy, why do you need to spend a whole perk point on increasing it? Pickpocketing is capped at 90%, and if you invest into Light Fingers, many things, including gold, should already be at that cap. It does lead to Misdirection and Perfect Touch (pickpocket equipped weapons and items), but they’re only marginally useful perks.
- Light Foot (Sneak 40) – Traps barely do any damage anyways, and if you’re at all perceptive, you’ll be able to avoid many of them.
- Intimidation (Speech 70) – Intimidation only being twice as successful for a level 70 perk… not worth it at all. Especially since there’s usually more ways to bypass the intimidation check, like using money or just beating up/killing the person.
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Sounds fun! Yeah, the dual casting CAN be decent with the stagger but is still impractical compared to other builds. I never found that kind of backward strafing away from enemies too fun, so I avoided the skill :\
respite and windwalker and even the redguards adrenaline rush usefulness is reduced when you just eat some soup. you wont run long but you can powerattack all the time.
green thumb? buy or explore!
merchant? i dont know with you but the other shops are just next door.
the whole lockpick tree is useless if you just practice, and lockpicks are all over the place.
dual cast destruction can get the stagger ability. but i dont know since i dont use destruction
but everything else is ok
Yeah, the "useful" perks are of course if you're already invested into the skill tree.
But for Merchant, I like the perk a lot because usually, towns only have 1 "buy/sell everything" shops, so they run out of gold quickly.
I have lockpicking under the "useless" side, by the way.
and thanks for the read.
I have never played this game, but I decided it looked really useful, so I sent it to my buddy here on Facebook, and he said it helped a LOT! Thank you for posting this, it has pushed my friend in the right direction!
Nashguy - wow, I appreciate that! And I'm glad your friend found it useful :)
No prob, bob!
fist of steel if good if you are a Khajiit and use the claw attack, and the damage stacks so say your gaunlets give 100 armour rating you're looking at 150 damage and fists are very fast so you can down enemies very fast
Connor - Yeah, I actually have that in my "4 Fun and Unique Character Builds" article. The point, though, is that unless you're using that specific build, THEN it's useless. If you're just a regular player, then the Perk would either waste other offensive perks or be wasted itself.
The thing that's fun about the unarmed thing is when you end up fighting in taverns xD
I didn't think of that! Very true haha
Catpurse is useful for pickpocket the money back from trainer, when high level training, and some of the skill are very hard/long to train without trainer.
Destruction Dual Casting is very useful with impact, even dragon can't use ANY attack when you keep casting spell on it.
Light Foot is useless, even more useless when you got a follower, they step into the trap anyways... but you need to level it in order to get the best perk for sneak at level 100
Fists of Steel can be good for brawling but well it fits the most useless perk.
Green Thumb need to go to the "poison" side of the perk tree, and poison isn't good, on higher difficulty it only deal little damage, so it wasted a few perk for extra herb isn't that good, as you can always buy herb off merchants.
Merchant is not as good as most useful one, as you can just either visit more towns, or do thieves' guild quest to have 4000 gold with 3 easy to access npc buy both stolen and all items type.
other of the perks I agree with you
i like fists of steel but i spose thats cuz i use 2 handed swords instead of 1 and sometimes having a healing spell in one hand is important.
i have noticed that 1 handed seems to be better than 2 but i prefer greatswords cuz theyr just fucking cool
rich - huh? fists of steel doesn't have anything to do with swords or healing haha.
the dual casting is useless cause it seems like it does less damage than just 2 at the same time
To the guy who mentioned using cutpurse to pickpocket money back from trainers: putting a paralysis potion in their pocket and pickpocketing them as they stand back up is much easier. And I get a good laugh out of it when they fall over like a stiff board! I'm pretty sure you have to get the poisoned perk for this to work, but I'd much rather have that than cutpurse.
I don't see how the Light Foot perk is useless since I was almost killed by some of those traps. Especially in a Dwemer city when I accidentally triggered a plate and was knocked off a cliff by a thing in the wall. Plus, I always have my character in 3rd person so a lot of times she's in my line of vision for tripwires and plates. I do pay attention but it gets kind of irritating having to stare at the ground all of the time :( I was so happy getting that perk since I could start paying attention to my enemies in front of me instead of the ground below me. But that's just my opinion on the perk, if it doesn't have a lot of worth to you then, by all means, don't waste your perk. =]
Some of the Useful perks really didn't help me though since I never use Alchemy or Restoration. Especially Respite since I hardly ever sprint or use my Stamina for anything. Really my only sprint is from my Solitude Mansion to the City Gates, and my best friend is Fast Travel and Shadowmere to take me anywhere I haven't been to yet. In the beginning I can see where it comes in handy if you don't have Shadowmere and no money for a horse. But why buy one when you can just steal it? Of course if you get off it'll walk away but that's why I spend a bit of time using the horse to get to some of the cities the carriage won't take me to or if I don't want to spend the gold for a ride. That way I can just Fast Travel to the places and sprint as little as possible (in the lower levels when Stamina is pretty much non-existent).
I believe "Keymaster" is the most useless perk in the game. It gives you a 90% chance to steal any key, but by level 60 in pickpocketing you alreayd have a 90% chance to do that anyway. I could be wrong though. There might be more harder to grab keys further into the game but I have yet to see one and I've been playing for a reasonale amount of time.
Cutpurse is not at all a useless perk. Even at pickpocket level 100, stealing over 1,000 gold is not a 90% chance. Being only a level 40 skill(which is easy to get in pickpocketing) and taking only 3 perks to attain, Cutpurse makes stealing large amounts of gold (1000+) always at least a 50/50 percent chance and it's probably. You wouln't be stealing lofty chunks of change without it.
It's funny to buy all that high level, expensive training(which can easily cost over $5,000) just to have it all over again because the poor fool made the mistake of turning his back to you. It's basically free high level training lmao.
Sorry for all those typos up there ^^.
I forgot to doublecheck.
Hey guys... is it worth getting lvl 5 of light fingers??
Catpurse can be very useful, especially in large quantities of gold. For example: On my first thief, I encountered the thieves guild in which you can train archery, pickpocketing, you know, the general thief talents. The way this perk came into play was training a skill, then pick pocketing the gold back from who trained you, once you get to about level 60-70, the gold is 1000+ per level, so if you want to pick pocket it you have to train it once, pick pocket, and repeat. However with the perk you may get 2-3 in. In other cases, without good enough pick pocketing you may not even be able to pickpocket it back after training it just once.
Me 5 months ago
The destruction dual casting is very useful only when mixed with impact since it makes the enemies stagger. My pure mage is level 49, and the only way I reached that was running backwards away from enemies and making them stagger. But now that I'm level 100 in enchanting, I don't even use magicka for casting spells- because my ring, headgear, amulet, and body armor all give me -25% magicka use for destruction, so basically I just shoot at everyone. haha.