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Summary
Dive deep into the world of Skyrim with the dynamic and thrilling Nightblade build, showcased by ZEN. From mastering spell-assisted assassination techniques to harnessing the power of vampirism, this comprehensive guide provides step-by-step instructions for achieving one-shot boss capabilities. Follow along as ZEN navigates the intricate mod list to highlight the strategic interplay of stealth, destruction, and magical enhancements. Whether you're disengaging for stealth attacks or power leveling at the College of Winterhold, this tutorial ensures a unique gameplay experience for all seeking depth in their Skyrim journeys.
Highlights
Creating a Nightblade in Skyrim involves magic, stealth, and vampirism. ๐
Strategically level skills for maximum stealth and damage potential. ๐๐ฏ
Exploit Skyrim mods to enhance your build; loot wisely for powerful gear. ๐ก๏ธ๐
Use vampiric abilities and mana recovery strategies to maintain high damage output. ๐ฅโก
Navigate various Skyrim quests to unlock significant power boosts and unique rewards. ๐ช๐๏ธ
Key Takeaways
Embrace the Nightblade: A spell and stealth combo build utilizing vampirism for enhanced powers. ๐งโโ๏ธ
Master combat loops with Circle of Entropy for magic regen and Nightblade for damage. ๐โจ
Prioritize leveling destruction and sneak early for devastating attacks. ๐โก
Utilize powerful perks and traits like Arcane Assassin and Gambler for critical boosts. ๐ฒ๐ก๏ธ
Delve into the depths of Skyrim with quests and puzzles to enhance your gear and abilities. ๐๏ธ๐
Overview
In a riveting return to the immersive world of Skyrim, players are guided through the creation and mastery of the Nightblade build. This iconic playstyle blends magical prowess with stealthy precision, perfect for those looking to dominate the game with one-shot kills and impeccable strategy. With spell and shadow on their side, players can conquer every challenge looming in the vast lands of Skyrim.
Players are encouraged to delve deeply into the mechanics of vampirism, blending it seamlessly into the Nightblade build to unlock greater powers. Strategic engagement in Skyrimโs quests enhances the Nightbladeโs efficiency, offering both rich narrative and formidable gameplay advantages. The video details the need for careful selection of traits, perks, and gear, all crucial for effective progress in the game.
From the bustling halls of the College of Winterhold to the dark depths of Skyrimโs crypts, the journey is filled with adventure and discovery. With precise instruction on managing various combat situations, viewers gain insights into optimizing their gameplay. This engaging guide ensures that the path of a Nightblade is both rewarding and exhilarating, promising an unforgettable Skyrim experience.
Chapters
00:00 - 00:30: Introduction The introduction chapter welcomes viewers to a video about LURM, a massive mod list of 4,000 mods for Skyrim Anniversary Edition. The creator shares their interest in the mods and mentions that they chose a Nightblade build based on viewer feedback. The chapter highlights the fun experienced during the build, especially trying to one-shot major bosses in the game. The creator also invites viewers to join live streams for build testing and interaction.
00:30 - 01:30: Nightblade Basics The chapter titled 'Nightblade Basics' discusses the fundamentals of playing as a Nightblade in the game. It highlights the challenges of executing one-shot tactics, stressing the importance of mastering the ability to disengage and re-engage effectively. The chapter appeals to players who may be interested in stealth tactics or those who are dissatisfied with traditional playstyles dominated by Nords and other characters dismissive of stealth. It sets the stage for using stealthy tactics, with an emphasis on the satisfaction of executing successful critical hits with the aid of magical assistance.
01:30 - 03:30: Building the Nightblade This chapter discusses the construction of a 'Nightblade' character, focusing on the combination of assassination skills with magic, such as destruction and illusion, as well as stealth tactics. The addition of vampirism is explored as it enhances the character's existing strengths. The chapter cautions that developing this character to its full potential takes time, emphasizing the value of earned strength and providing guidance for early progress.
03:30 - 05:30: Leveling Focus and Perks The chapter discusses strategies for optimizing gameplay from a metagaming perspective. The author suggests choosing the Dunmer race for its fire resistance bonus and the Proud Spire Manor for its strategic location. Initial steps include looting the Proud Spire thoroughly to sell items and acquire essential gear such as a backpack and a basic camp. The focus is on efficiently starting the game by leveraging specific racial traits and strategic location choices.
05:30 - 09:30: Vampirism and Powers The chapter discusses strategies for acquiring skills and resources in a role-playing game. It suggests visiting White Run and Dragon's Reach to obtain the 'Absorb Knowledge' book for experience points. There's a note on potential challenges with accessing the book due to clipping through the floor. The protagonist is advised to join the Companions and undertake a few quests before promptly enrolling in a College. Enrolling provides spell vouchers crucial for acquiring spells like 'Blend' and 'Muffle,' which are vital for stealth. The chapter emphasizes leveling up by focusing on destruction, alteration, sneak, and illusion skills.
09:30 - 15:30: Combat Loop and Strategies The chapter discusses a strategy for leveling skills in a prioritized manner, focusing on the destruction skill to level 50 as the primary goal. Following this, the priorities move to reaching level 50 in sneak, alteration, one-handed, illusion, and finally evasion. Any additional skill points can be allocated to wayfarer or possibly speech skills. For perks, starting with novice destruction is recommended, and acquiring 'flames' and 'crackle' is suggested.
15:30 - 20:30: Advanced Abilities and Tactics This chapter covers the selection of advanced abilities and tactics for a particular build, emphasizing the importance of certain skills. It begins with an apprentice level of Destruction, highlighting the 'circle of entropy' for mana sustain and 'leech health' for offensive healing. Moving onto adept Destruction, 'flame sphere' is chosen for area of effect damage and 'absorbing cloak' for health sustenance. For alteration, the initial choices are flexible, primarily a means to reach apprentice Alteration, where 'featherfall' and 'aar's recital' are identified as crucial for the build.
20:30 - 25:30: Endgame Gear and Boss Battles This chapter focuses on the use of agility and agile spell casting to enhance evasion skills in gameplay. It emphasizes the importance of acquiring stealth abilities and the Arcane Assassin perk. It guides the player to acquire specific spells such as Draining Touch, Magika Bolt, and Night Blade, and to maintain the Gather Shadows spell active continuously, even outside of combat. The chapter also hints at strategies for choosing traits that complement the Night Blade setup.
25:30 - 31:30: Mastering the Build This chapter focuses on strategic choices in character building, with an emphasis on stealth and critical hits. The main character is designed to excel in stealth attacks, benefiting from the 20% damage boost when crouched, and the ability to pickpocket, hinting at a potential involvement with the Thieves Guild storyline. Additionally, the trait 'Gambler' is selected for its 50% increased critical hit chance, despite the trade-off of weaker non-critical hits, with the plan to enhance critical strike rates further with perks in the one-handed skill tree.
31:30 - 37:00: Endgame Challenges and Conclusion The chapter discusses recent updates to birth signs in laurum, focusing on changes to Mage birth signs. The Mage sign now provides a boost of 50 mana and stronger spells, though it is considered the weakest of the three options. The Apprentice sign offers significant mana regeneration at the cost of increased vulnerability to magic, which can be mitigated later. The Atono sign remains strong with 30% spell absorption and potential for up to 300 Mana once a school of magic is mastered, making it a very good choice overall.
Lorerim - How to Nightblade Transcription
00:00 - 00:30 ladies and gentlemen welcome to another bill video for lurm a rather large mod list 4,000 mods for Skyrim anniversary edition it's become somewhat of an obsession so I asked you guys what build we should do next and you chaps and chapet chose the night blade and oh boy did we have some fun with this one like trying to oneshot all the major bosses in the game and well that's exactly what I did live on stream by the way make sure that you pop in some time to say hello it's usually where we get all our testing done for up oncoming builds it's
00:30 - 01:00 often quite not as easy as it looks to get these kind of one shots as you need to figure out how to be able to disengage and re-engage but it is definitely satisfying so if that Pat your interest or you're just sick and tired of the Nords and furries telling you that stealth is trash in laim then buckle up Dober King as we bring out the cloak the dagger and some big damn juicy crits this is the night blade so what exactly is a Nightblade in the or they're magically assisted
01:00 - 01:30 assassins using spell and Shadow to thrive in conflict and Misfortune for this guide we'll be adding vampirism to the mix as it perfectly complements the build's strengths such as destruction illusion and stealth a disclaimer this build does take some time to reach its full potential but power is earned and taken in laim not given freely and that's a good thing I will however try to guide you as best as I can to give you a running Head Start or in our case
01:30 - 02:00 crouching please keep in mind that this is from a metagaming perspective I will not be role playing and of course play at your own pace but this is what I do to get started we're picking dunmer for our race for the Fire Res bonus and proud Spire Mana for a locational Choice I'll get to that later here's a starting gear I recommend make sure that you loot proud Spire clean and dry and then sell everything that you can while also buying yourself a backpack and a basic camp that should give you more than
02:00 - 02:30 enough chunk of change to get yourself over to White Run and head over to dragon's reach to pick up the absorb knowledge book which can sometimes be clipped into the floor or underneath the table and stuff just use it to get all the XP from the books join the companions and take a couple of quests but we're going to head straight over to the College enroll and then get yourself some spell vouchers and then pick up blend and muffle these are important for your stealth and boom it is time to level up our main goal is to get destruction alteration sneak illusion
02:30 - 03:00 one-handed and evasion as high as we can although we want to prioritize getting destruction to level 50 First over everything else I then think the priority should be getting your sneak to 50 alteration to 50 then one-handed then illusion and then finally evasion that's the priority order any excess points you can put into way fa farer is my recommendation at least or maybe speech um as for perks we're going to pick novice destruction first and pick up flames and Crackle
03:00 - 03:30 next we'll follow it up with Apprentice destruction a mandatory pick for the build is circle of entropy this is our mana syain and leech health for some offensive healing we're going straight in for adep Destruction next and we're picking up flame Sphere for some AOE and absorbing cloak for some more Health sustain next we're going to get novice alteration pick what you want it doesn't matter we're just traveling to get to Apprentice alteration and we're going to pick up featherfall and aar's recital both are essential for this build we
03:30 - 04:00 want to get agility and agile spell casting to avoid any penalties while using evasion and we're going to pick up our first stealth node and then get Arcane assassin now it's time to pick up some spells outside of just perks you're going to need to go to enia to pick up draining touch Magik abolt and night blade and lastly gather Shadows have this active at all times even when you're out of combat next let's discuss what traits that I take for the night blade which
04:00 - 04:30 will be taking bad natured for that 20% damage while crouched this pairs perfectly with our build's heavy hitting stealth attacks not to mention the pickpocketing might come in handy should you lean towards the Thieves Guild later in your playthrough for our second trait I'll take Gambler for the 50% additional crit chance at the cost of non crits being weaker this won't be too much of an issue as we will be critting consistently once we get started on boosting our crit with other perks in the one-handed tree and now for birth
04:30 - 05:00 signs the latest updates to laurum have seen some great changes to the Mage birth signs in general I can comfortably recommend all of them now Mage grants won 50 mana and some stronger spells which is nice however I do think this might be the weaker out of the three options still Apprentice now grants a ton of regen at the cost of being weaker to Magic but that is something that we can counter easily later on in the build as for atono this is still extremely strong with 30% spell absorption and up to 300 Mana ons mastering a school of magic it's still a very good pick and
05:00 - 05:30 I'm torn between apprentice and Atron for this build but I would recommend Apprentice just to keep things a little bit fresh if no regen from atono doesn't sell it to you just keep in mind that you can generate your own Mana using magika bolt and numerous other spells that are within this build and several others as well so Atron isn't really a bad pick and the spell absorption will save your ass a lot of the time uh when enemy Mages are firing at you because you just gain Mana back and can keep draining to get your health back now
05:30 - 06:00 that we're fully set up it's time for us to get our first major power Spike vampirism we want this for attribute stacking and for the powers that come with it along with vampi drain being scalable into the late game to get this we're going to go back to Proud Spire Manor and head down to The Cellar where there's a little trapo that leads to the sewers from here we're going to take this path as you can see and there will be some rats that you'll need to take care of once dispatched head through the door and across the bridge and up these
06:00 - 06:30 stairs here you're now going to be playing cat and mouse with a Vampire hoping that they will grant the curse of vampirism via their vampiric drain spell once you've acquired the curse head back up to Proud spy Mana press the home button on your keyboard to access dmenu and Advance time so that you can progress your vampirism disease to actually fully fledged vampirism I had forgotten to mention deities earlier but I recommend Molag ball for the drain to all attributes when you're close to enemies you can stay with M ball or by the end game game changed to hus more
06:30 - 07:00 for more utility let's talk about our combat Loop and spell rotation during the early game circle of entropy is how we're going to be able to cast our spells it works especially well outside of combat we use this to recover our Mana while casting heavier spells like muffle blend and night blade muffle and blend are there for our detection range and night Blade is to close the gap and deal some crazy damage I do want to show you here night blade not working correctly this is due to the Enemy being leaned against a wall
07:00 - 07:30 it struggles to have a pathing issue here but we recover after the guy gets alerted you might notice this giant obnoxious Red Cloud this is absorbing cloak this is triggered through aata's recital once we enter combat I don't use this long term but it is really helpful at this stage of the game thanks to the Arcane assassin perk while we're not in combat while stealthed we are able to cast spells silently so we can pre-buff again for our next Target holding shift and activate on the recently deceased can drain what little little bloodies
07:30 - 08:00 left of them keep your vampirism SED playing stealie is one thing and night blade will certainly do its job however sometimes you will alert enemies at lower levels here and when that happens you're best off falling back on vampiric drain this does incredible damage it keeps you healed and it scales with your vampiric progression too for in combat Mana sustain I'm using magika bolt which deals damage and provides Magicka in return it's a small amount but dual wielding this provides enough to get back to blasting with peric drain if the
08:00 - 08:30 bolts don't kill the enemy First Once you have this combat Loop down you should have no issues with highly populated Bandit camps so I recommend the companions radiant quests from farcus and Aela along with the major companions Quest proving honor this was my main source of XP to level feel free to do whatever you like I would recommend staying away from the main quest until after Dawn Guard as you'll be inefficient at fighting dragons at this stage so let's jump to level 20 and show what perks you should be taking
08:30 - 09:00 along your journey to get there for Destruction perks I added a point in blood magic just to give us a bit of a boost to our vampiric drain we finally taken some nodes in illusion pick whatever you like from novice and apprentice and then make sure that you pick from Adept chameleon and invisibility chameleon will give us some passive detection bonuses and invisibility to disengage with make sure that you take the extra point in stealth death strike and anatomical law the
09:00 - 09:30 damage Boost from stealth with this perk is just phenomenally good and is a must have muffled movement is nice for some quality of life as for one-handed the Mastery nodes for base damage penetrating strikes is a travel node to get to short blade for some juicy stealth multipliers and then puncture for the crit as for the destiny perk tree we are aiming for the Assassin node so we're going for endurance for stamina regen Thief for the detection adrenaline for even more stamina management Scout
09:30 - 10:00 for Power Attack cost and then we'll aim up towards Swift Shadow for movement while sneaking and then finally assassin for that juicy double damage with stealth attacks it's time to get vampire lord to do that we need to get the Dawn Guard quest line cooking head over to Day Spring Canyon here have way with the Dawn Guard and then set off to dim Hollow Crypt this dungeon's absolutely littered with Undead and vampires make sure that you prioritize the vampires first as they tend to be more of a
10:00 - 10:30 nuisance at this point your stealth should be pretty good enough to be able to systematically take down most enemies without them being aware of you vampires tend to have a much higher detection range than these Undead though so just keep that in mind there are also some really good notable mini bosses within this dungeon one of them being this vampire here fighting a spider try and get the jump on him if you can because the stealth multipliers will definitely help in taking this bad boy down he's pretty well geared and he drops some really nice stuff as well well it is random so what you're seeing here might
10:30 - 11:00 not be the same for you good luck with this one though if you've made it this far congratulations you found yourself a new useless companion with daddy issues she's going to get in the way waste your time with pointless dialogue disrupt your stealthiness and spend most of her time on the floor just drag her back to the castle and obtain your new vampiric power why is this important well there's several perks that translate to human form which we want access to and the transformation is great at clearing certain dungeons make sure you've picked up the quest to refill the blood chalice
11:00 - 11:30 and head out to get acquainted with your newly acquired power you can equip spells assigned to your wheeler menu while transformed just be careful to not do it to your right hand as there's no way to get the default spell back without reverting form and then transforming back again currently you'll only be able to use your Magicka bolt to regain Mana but we will fix this with the blood chalice a little bit later but let's go over the perks we want Scion hemomancer and blood from a stone first this is mandatory for this progression then we'll take unearthly will and then
11:30 - 12:00 finally bloodstorm everything else you can just expand as what you like but this is definitely mandatory bloodstorm changes your default right hand spell while transformed into an oppressive Powerhouse that's going to make farming the next few dungeons an absolute Breeze speaking of which we're going to over to our good friend Septimus and pick up his quest we're not actually going to go to Black reach or that dungeon in General yet but we're going to just pick it up so we have the items then it's back to Redwater Den to finish off off that quest line for the Chalice now there is
12:00 - 12:30 a room here just before the springs that has a really nasty boss with ebony armor you want to take the right here and try and stealth attack him if he gets wind of you and procs blood implosion a spell with a red circle around you you're basically toast cuz you'll never out heal it it's a long lingering effect persevere and once you've cleared the dungeon be sure to fill the chalice and drink from its spring to gain an active effect that grants magic back from your vampiric drain while you still have the effect active head straight over to aland dwma ruins via Septimus quest
12:30 - 13:00 which lead you onto black reach you'll have to fight your way through tons of dma constructs and fmer to get there if you've played this before in another character before you'll be amazed at how we handle this usually there's Terrors everywhere in the dark but this time we are the terror mainly because of this that we picked up and the fact that we can't get staggered by all these Dwarven constructs while transformed means that we're not hindered in any way so I recommend flying around the entire of the underd dark I mean uh black reach and then just wiping out everything that
13:00 - 13:30 you can in order to farm as much xp as possible there's also no worry with poison as we are immune thanks to being a vampire time to perk up more in the vamp tree first we travel to make them beautiful which instap poops enemies at 25% health or lower veil of the night can also proc this so we'll take this and along with Fountain of blood for even more sustain and then we're just going to go to the left side to get vampire seed or and vampire cloak oh and enchanting spheres
13:30 - 14:00 remember we picked up crackle cast one crackle and then just keep firing your main right hand spell with vampire lord to easily mince down this enemy once you've completed all of Seamus's quests the Orma Infinium will be yours read it to gain a huge boost to your chosen main stat we're going to go with the path of magic for this build this also grants you a bunch of perk points so I'm going to show you what you should be aiming for up to level 30
14:00 - 14:30 to get started we're taking Adept and expert alteration along with a magic res node our Adept spell picks are bounce on self and transmute muscles neither are essential and for our expert picks it's tumble magnet and deep storage onto illusion we're taking expert and Shadow shaping and master Shadows this improves our vanish spell we're also going to pick up mimics cloak and by fenri welcome as for stealth we're taking another point in Arcane assassin and advance atomical law and light steps for
14:30 - 15:00 evasion we're finally taking the Light Armor training and vexing flanker for better back attacks you might want to pick up Dodge if you play predominantly in third person as for one-handed we're finally taking arm spell casting and we're taking the other nodes in short blade focus and power strike it's time to get our endgame armor set the new dawn which is a Mythic Dawn set that we've got a replacer on for I'll leave a link in the description it's very plug andplay modify the list at your own risk even if it is just an armor replacer
15:00 - 15:30 anyway we're going to Red scar Cavern the Mythic Dawn are up to no good in here and we're going to take out as many as we can stealthily until we get to this section here with a large drop what we're going to do is pre-buff everything we can for our stealth and night blade and we're using featherfall to drop down here if you don't get the stealth kill on this trap he will just out heal everything you throw at him so make sure you prioritize him loot the key from the body and then head to this door there's
15:30 - 16:00 a knack to opening this door as you need to like look round into the keyhole there we are once through pre-buff all of your stealth Buffs and night blade and make sure that you have vampire Shadow ready to go as a power to cast be careful here there are invisible drora enemies and lots of Mythic Dawn around as well once you've taken him out use vampire Shadow to escape and then pick off the targets one by one if you can once's clear loot Vos to get a dri dagger and the new dawn armor set and
16:00 - 16:30 it's literally perfect for our build we get regen across the board spell cost reduction for all of the schools of magic that we use increase Magicka and 35% less damage when we absorb spells we get inherent fire damage and we take less fire damage and recover even more stamina on top of that as for your endgame weapon head to the museum in Dawnstar to start the quest to gather the pieces of Marin's razor and this little bad boy has a chance to instakill and is one of the highest base damage daggers in the game second to the blade
16:30 - 17:00 of wo from the Dark Brotherhood you can also explore Marin's Deon Shrine for some extra goodies I think it's time that we get our final pieces to our Nightblade puzzle and by that I mean taking the powers and forbidden blood magic from Lauren's hidden bosses so we progress the dong guard quest line to get to vard Courtyard which then we can face down with the night matron bit of an anticlimactic fight here as we can just one-hot him make sure you loot all the spell Toms we'll get to those in a minute as we head first on into the
17:00 - 17:30 soul this place has a ton of invisible drora so do be careful but head over to this location that I've marked here we're looking for this lovely chap called the Lord of Doom at least he was the Lord of Doom now he's just well dead make sure that you loot everything from him as well and then we will review all the spells that we've just acquired blood implosion applies a damage over time that will also absorb health and it's active for an extremely long time making this perfect for chip away at dragons that don't want to
17:30 - 18:00 land cascading torment is our new main heal and AD clear ability doing monstrous amounts of Health absorb and lightning damage if we need to gain some resources back Essence strain is our all-in-one sustainability combined with our region at this stage we should have no issues for movement we have bat form now which bursts us forward as a cloud of bats this prox invisibility and an ey frame which can be used to avoid heavy hits and reposition it's also fantastic to cross vast distances extremely fast
18:00 - 18:30 let's talk about bossing tactics how to play this build efficiently when facing foes such as Arch curate Vera this chap is one of the biggest skill checks in the game and Downing him can be really tricky even on this build if you don't know what you're doing at least for the one shot he's got a posy of atronox guarding him and his detection is pretty high so when SRA initiates combat disengage immediately by using bat form and cast muff and chameleon before then casting night
18:30 - 19:00 blade and getting ready to initiate combat then cast invisibility when you're ready to engage and start moving in for the kill if you see a health bar on your approach disengage immediately and rebuff if he's nice and settled make your way up to the stairs to position for a backstab you can even climb the railings if you need to just fingers crossed that the atronox aren't completely blocking his back if they are then bait him and then disengage again and just hope that your shots don't
19:00 - 19:30 whiff with night blade Haron is even easier as while he's doing his monologue with Sara just go straight in for the backstab he's already dead he just doesn't know it hon also drops his armor which is a really nice upgrade for your chest so where are we headed with this build well let's take a look at level 60 plus and the perks that I've chosen we're grabbing the Lone Wolf perk to get that extra
19:30 - 20:00 magic res sneak is completely maxed out because of course it is we want to lower our detection as much as possible as for evasion we've taken near enough everything except for the unarmored node and one point in athletics cuz it's just not necessary for one-handed we've taken the flurry crit nodes power charge and Relentless Onslaught as for alteration we've got the final nodes in magical resistance Master alteration magical absorption and these left nodes
20:00 - 20:30 for even more spell utility as for Destruction we finally taken that last node in the absorb tree consume life lastly illusion we've taken these nodes on the left to improve our invisibility camouflage Etc you're probably wondering what Master Spells I've taken and don't worry I'll show you in a minute there's just one enemy left one L foe to really fight a boss like none other and that's the warrior in order to effectively on-shot
20:30 - 21:00 him we're going to be using our master illusion spell and master alteration spell our pick is hidden Cobra now this is a 1 HP curse but we need to disengage and get out of combat but we can't actually proc it without s's melstrom because he has so much magic res that we need to remove it first Nightfall I purchased from drevis at the college after unlocking Master Spells with him which grants us all the shadow Mage Spells at once if you have learned the original spells and there we go he's
21:00 - 21:30 effectively ready to one shot it's worth noting that you can absolutely just go toe-to-toe with him if you'd like and fight him fair the build has no issue in surviving but it is just fun to flex and on that note I think it's about time for this video please if you haven't already like the video and comment below if you have any questions I hope you enjoy one-shotting the entire world after all that hard work it certainly pays off stay tuned for more builds and stop by the stream to check out our next character which will be a b
21:30 - 22:00 Barian I'm looking forward to doing a non-magical character just beer music shouts and two-handed Mayhem that's it from me now ciao for now [Music] [Music]