Skyrim Character Building » Discussions


Character Build: The Decaying Lord

Tags: #Character Build Mage  #Character Build Bound Weapons  #Character Build Vampire  #Rank:Recognized  #Race:Altmer 
  • Member
    September 20, 2012

    Hi all, I just dicovered this site and I must say that it's awesome. I started playing Skyrim again a few weeks ago and thought I would share my build with you. This is my first "real build" so it might not be the best one, but I have a lot of fun playing it! Well, here it goes...

     

    The Decaying Lord

    In an old and forgotten temple of Skyrim, a creature of pure evil awake from its slumber. Once a great archmage of Winterhold, this ancient being is ready to resume its quest for power and magical knowledge. Prowling in the night, using magic subterfuges to conceal its desiccated body, the Lich will stop at nothing to achieve its goal: reclaiming its former place as Archmage and raise an army of undead minions to take over Skyrim.

    Centuries of practicing all forms of magic have granted the Decaying Lord an impressive array of abilities. The dreaded creature won’t hesitate to use all of them on any creatures stupid enough to stand in its path, without any trace of emotions…

    Race :  Altmer for the extra magicka and starting skills

    Vampire: You have to become a vampire to be tagged as undead and get the full benefits of perks and spells.

    Stone : Mage at first to increase magic skills faster, then Atronach or Lord

    Major Skills : Destruction – Conjuration – Alteration – Illusion

    Minor Skills : Restoration – Smithing – Enchantment – Light Armor – One handed

    Weapons : Spells – Staves – Bound Sword

    Shouts : Becoming ethereal – Dismay – Drain Vitality – Frost Breath – Ice Form (I chose those shouts mainly for RP reasons as I think they are ones who fits better with the undead wizard background)

    Essential Quests: College of Winterhold – The Black Star (to use enchanting more easily)

     

     PERKS AND ATTRIBUTES (lvl 46)

    Major Skills

    Destruction: Novice to master - Dual casting - Impact - Augmented shock (2) - Augmented Frost (2) - Deep freeze - Disentegrate.

    Alteration : Novice to Master – Dual Casting – Atronach

    Conjuration : Novice – Necromancy – Dark Souls – Twin Souls

    Illusion: Novice to Master – Hypnotic gaze – Aspect of Terror – Dual Casting

     

    Minor Skills

    Enchanting: Enchanter (5) – Insightful Enchanter – Corpus Enchanter – Extra Effect

    Restoration: Novice – Regeneration – Necromage –Recovery (2) - Avoid death

     

    Icing on cake skills (lvl 60 build)

    Smithing: Steel – Elven – Advanced – Glass – Arcane

    Light Armor: Agile Defender (5)

    Conjuration : Mystic binding

    One handed: Armsman (3)

    * NOTE : I consider some of these perks to be icing on the cake and are not completly necessary. Many of those skills were added because I played this char for a loooong time. I added smithing because I loved the glass armor look on my wizard but you could chose to use anything else or even clothes and get rid of all thses perks (5). I also put points in light armor very lately in my playthrough. With undead minions between you and your foes, fear spells and impact, beeing hit is not really a big concern. Concerning One handed and the mystic binding, I just felt that from time to time it's was fun to simply finish my enemies with an etheral sword!

     

    Attributes

    Health : 300  - Magicka : 500 – Stamina : 100

     

    BUILD, GAMEPLAY, ROLEPLAY

    One of the cool thing with this build is that you can tweak it a bit to suit your preferences (see below).

    • The Decaying Lord is mostly a pure wizard. Conjure some undead minions as bodyguards and then unleash hell on your helpless opponents. This is especially fun when you get the Dead Thrall spell.
    • Conjuration spells will be a pain at first since they require a lot of magicka and you got no perks to reduce the spell cost. Altmer + 50 magicka helps a lot in the beginning. The Necromancer Amulet will help a lot. However, once you have conjuration equipment or the Dead Thrall spell, it won’t bother you at all.
    • Having all the Perks to reduce Destruction spells cost combined with a high magicka pool and fast magicka recovery (from restoration and items) give you the ability to cast A LOT of spells before you run out of magicka.
    • Illusion : The Decaying Lord is a frightening being. This allow you to toy with your enemies and allows crowd control to a point. In addition, being a vampire makes your illusion spells 25% more powerful.
    • Defense : Beeing tagged as undead amplifies all spells effects on the character. That makes the “Flesh” line of spells more powerful. In addition, the Dragon hide spell will last a long time when dual casted. Adding the light armor perks and the ability to create and improve your own gear, you are well protected. There’s even more : with the Atronach Stone and the Atronach perk you reach 80% spells absorption. (I think you even reach 1--% due to necromage, but I was using Lord Stone for the Extra armor and didn’t test it).
    • Weapons : You will mostly use spells. However I added 2 points in armsman and took the Mystic Binding Perks for the following reasons: 1) You can still dish out damage if you are out of magicka and your undead minions are dead (bound sword don’t cost a lot of magick). 2) Bound sword is quite powerful at low level. 3) Let’s face it : Bound weapons are just cool and fits the character better than a real weapon. Conjuring an ethereal sword in the face a man stupid enough to approach you and hacking him to death is just great.
    • Armor : I chose glass armor, mostly for aesthetic reasons. I hate the robes and heavy armor just didn’t feel right. However some other armors look cool IMO : elven, falmer and ancient ancient falmer, ebony. For the head, I use either cowls, circlets or crowns.
    • Avoid death will save you if a few occasion and is quite useful. Also the Decaying Lord is an undead, seems legit that he should be hard to "kill".
    • Alchemy : For obvious reasons, alchemy is a good skill for this character. However, I hate mixing potions so I don’t use it… Feel free to get rid of some perks to add alchemy to your arsenal.

     

    Items and Perks/levels

    I added this section since I realised than many of the builds included them, but it will be brief. As for gears, I strongly suggest Light Armor for increased mobility. Using your enchantment you can add magicka regain and spell cost reduction to your gear, wich is what I recommend. Since the build doesn't use conjuration perks, having gears that reduce spell cost in that school is a must have but it's up to you if you want to put the enchantment on your main gear or just swap equipement when you're about to conjure something.

    Concerning the perks you should take at each level, I always felt that you should follow a bit of instinct. What I personnaly do is creating a builds in advance to see wich perks will be needed to create the character I want. However, I don't plan in wich order I will take them. I think the way you play, what you need at an exact moment and your own instinct is what you should use to chose wich perks to take at every levels.

    Tweaking

    As I said, you can tweak the character to suit your preferences. You can go with heavy armor instead of light, let go of the one handed perks and mystical binding if you don’t intend to use weapons, etc. This can free up a lot of perks to let you chose something else, like alchemy.

     Roleplay

    You are evil. You hate everything that breathes. Worst, you are a conceited bastard. That means that you can utterly destroy anyone that annoys you. Here’s a few restrictions though (You don’t have to follow them but that is what I had in mind when I started playing him: :

    1. No followers. Your undead allies are your only friends.
    2. No fire spells. The lich mastered the art of frost magick as well as the power of thunder. However, its old and decaying body is very vulnerable to fire, so the Lich don’t use them.
    3. The lich embodies death itself : an aura of cold surrounds it at all time (Frost cloak)
    4. You never help anyone unless you get benefits in doing so. The Decaying Lords doesn’t care about mortals…
    5. You are undead. Your skin should be as pale as possible, with either black or white eyes.
    6. Not helmet : only circlets, cowls, etc.
    7. Finally: You’re a lich, not a vampire. The vampire status is used only to get the benefits of necromage and adding some weaknesses to the character (like sun) that fits the undead background. That means that using the Vampire Lord form is a no no…

     That’s about it. Hope you enjoy it!

  • September 20, 2012

    You underestimate our power, Ben *Evil laugh*

  • Member
    September 21, 2012

    Haha Thx guys, I studied english a lot lately since I'm doing a communication degree I guess that helped! In fact I have more problems with syntax than with spelling. I also feel that my stories are less fleshed out when I write in english. I write a lot of stories in french but I have a hard time translating them in english. I don't know enough words and synonyms to make them sound great and truly epic! 

    That beeing said, thanks for the comments!

    Also I realised that a lot of you includes equipement suggestions as well as Perks per level so I added a little section concerning those points.

  • Member
    September 22, 2012

    Gotta love these undead bastards +1    

  • Member
    October 4, 2012

    I deleted a saved game by accident and restarted this character with an older save. This made me realise that some perks were not really necessary ( on my older save this char was lvl 61) so I changed the build to fit that new reality.

  • October 31, 2012

    and Another Lich? i just comented on our other brother's build. Soon this site will be our dead kingdom!! WHAAHAHAHAHAHAAH

  • Member
    November 1, 2012

    Lol Of all the undead found in folklore, books and RPGs, the lich has always been my favorite, along with vampires. 

    I'm a big fan of the Strahd and Azalin rivalry!

  • May 14, 2013

    Wow, I couldn't tell about the english until I read the comments. But anyway, the build itself is nearly perfect  from concept to execution. My only little problem is using alteration and also agile defender. With that much, you will be wasting perks/spells when you have already hit the armor cap (567). Other then that, great build. +1

    P.S. Inform someone on the build advancement thread. I am this builds 21st liker, and you need 20 to move up a category. Congrats!

  • May 15, 2013

    Spelling, and grammar fascists are annoying on FB, Twitter, and Texts, it's become a minor form of Trolling, but in the comments of the builds, I actually like people pointing out little things we might have missed.  That may just be me, though.

    @JoDK, you describe him as a "Pure Mage" then added Light Armor, 1H, and Smithing.  4/7 skills ain't bad, but not what I call Pure Mage, either.  If he can't survive on Magic alone, and maybe a backup dagger, or sword, then just don't call him that. 

    This reads more like a Spellsword, or Vampire Lord than a wizard to me.

  • July 25, 2013

    For a first build, this is good. I enjoy the concept and the skills make sense. +1