Summary
Skyrim’s Legendary Difficulty will push all but the most seasoned adventurers near to their breaking point. Whereas many foes on lower challenge settings offer mere token resistance to your blades, spells, and shouts, Legendary ups the ante such that even common bandits fight like they mean it.
To prepare for your epic quest to topple suitably tough foes, we’ve compiled plenty of builds to bear in mind while you’re creating your character and leveling up their skills. But we’ve done so with a twist: these are all just as savvy for role-playing as for “min-maxing.” You’re embodying an archetype with these builds.
9The Engineer
With your unmatched intellect and unparalleled firepower, no obstacle can impede your victorious path as you engineer your way to triumph. Your fearsome legion of automatons will engage the enemy at your command.
By harnessing the power of ancient Dwemer technology, you’ll bring the full force of a bygone people to bear upon the surface world. Your mind will be teeming with ingenuity, and you’ll put it to work constructing complex and deadly traps to ensnare your adversaries.
8The Witch Hunter
Step into the captivating role of the Witch Hunter, a figure both feared and revered for their unparalleled prowess in hunting down supernatural entities that lurk within the realm. Equipped with a deadly combination of archery, restoration magic, and alchemy, your arsenal is as versatile as it is lethal.
Feared and revered, you’ll hunt the realm’s supernatural entities with a deadly combination of Archery, Restoration Magic, and Alchemy. By forging enchanted arrows brimming with eldritch energy, you can pierce even those foes that an “ordinary” archer could never dream of hitting.
7The Assassin
Stealth, Illusion, and One-Handed are your best friends with the Assassin build. A phantom of the shadows, you’ll strike swiftly and silently.
Harness the fabric of reality itself, employing spells to confound and disable your adversaries. Muffle your footsteps, cast Invisiblity to bypass stalwart sentries, spread Mayhem so that crowds of enemies will kill each other instead of you, and slice the survivors with critical hits galore.
6The Bard
Crafting enthralling melodies, you’ll be nimble in your Light Armor while broadcasting your persuasive Speechcraft skills to verbally evade your would-be nemeses with clever words and a smile.
With Alchemy and Enchanting, you’re able to bolster your power (and that of your potential allies') without relying too heavily on the magical arts. Tell a tale worth singing by choosing Breton during character creation and choosing the Atronach so that elemental dragon breath doesn’t faze you in the least.
Oh, and Shouts? Those are absolutely up your alley. Disarm, Kyne’s Peace, Throw Voice, Battle Fury. It’s all very bard.
5The Spellscribe
So named in honor of the Ordinator mod’s Spellscribe ability, which permits you to store a spell during dual casting to imbue upon your power attacks and power bashes, the Spellscribe can be thought of as more of a fantasy-archetypal spellblade.
You’re not content with just magic, nor do you feel at home with only a sword. Instead, you’ll cast one spell, save the other, and bust out a weapon to bring the saved spell to bear upon the enemywithyour physical prowess not going to waste in the meantime.
You’ll need the Ordinator mod for this to work, but it ought to be available on all platforms.
4The Elemental Sorcerer
For the most part, full-blown mages have it a bit rough in Skyrim. The gameplay mechanics for them are perfectly acceptable, but the raw damage output is seldom going to stand on-par with stealth archers and such.
The Elemental Sorcerer doesn’t let this get them down.Fire Storm alone can wipe out whole groups of foes in only five seconds,and if you’re worried about the relatively intense charge time leaving you open to assault, bring an ally who fights up close and personally to keep ‘em occupied.
3The Plague Doctor
Another mod-based build, the Plague Doctor,owes its rad particularsto an Elder Scrolls fan with the appropriately fitting pen name of “morrowindnostalgia.”
With Ordinator and (especially) Apocalypse, you’ll have what’s necessary to unleash marvelously macabre Disease Magic. You’ll tap into Alchemy as well, as befits any self-respecting plague doctor.
Best yet, the Plague Doctor build is quite malleable; the author has ideas for those interested in pure mages, assassins, and spellswords.
2The Mystic Warrior
Start a transformational adventure as a Mystic Warrior, transcending the boundaries of conventional combat by melding the formidable might of Heavy Armor with the ethereal forces of Restoration Magic.
You shall be a noble guardian whose mastery over protection and healing is unparalleled… and whose skill with a colossal warhammer is terrifying.
The Mystic Warrior is hardly the most complex build idea - simply invest heavily in any spells and skills that keep you hale and hearty while cleaving through the competition. But it’s plenty effective on Skyrim’s laborious Legendary difficulty setting.
For a more spectacle-inducing twist, use Bound Weapons to conjure up weightless, ethereal versions of deadly Daedric weapons.
1The Stealth Archer
Now, here’s the classic. The Stealth Archer is so well-tuned, so famous to the point of arguable infamy, because it isthemethod by which to reduce the challenge of not just Legendary difficulty, but darn near every pain-inflicting challenge-centric mod the community has ever thrown into the mix.
Archery, Sneak, Illusion, and Conjuration come together to forge what is, essentially, a better version of the Assassin. The high damage of bows meets frankly outrageous stealth damage modifiers here, and with enough Sneak and Illusion, your enemies truly won’t know what hit them.
