Combat
Combat
If under 30 health (can be negated by wearing a disease resistance enchantment)
20% speed reduction
If under 30 stamina (can be mitigated by having an undying breath enchantment)
70% attack speed reduction
40% speed reduction
30% stamina regeneration reduction
If you have a summon out (can be negated by having the "binding contract" perk)
-0.4 base magicka regen (roughly 40-45% reduction based on race, does not stack)
Weapons/shields now block virtually all melee poisons.
Blocking will now also protect you from many common knockdown effects. You can now safely engage giant frostbite spiders in melee without having to spam bashes, though “safe” might be a bit of an exaggeration
Blocking with a shield decreases incoming ranged damage by an extra 15% and spell and shout magnitude by 40%
All NPCs block a significantly more amount of damage while blocking if you attack with normal attacks. Strategies to overcome this include: attacking them when not blocking, attacking their sides or back to avoid the areas that they are blocking, bullrush, parry and using power attacks.
Invisibility now grants 15% extra damage (but not to sneak attacks), 15% physical damage resistance, and 20% arrow resistance (stacks with physical). This is to simulate your opponent not knowing where to aim or where to defend against your attacks, giving in-combat invisibility a bit of usefulness.
It’s especially helpful for charging archers in light armor/clothes. The 15% boons are ignored when the opponent is already blind or is a vampire, and blind opponents suffer no arrow damage penalty against invisible actors (since if you’re blind, your foe being invisible doesn’t really matter-- and vampires can sense you by your blood in melee).
Introduced the ranged damage falloff mechanic, where you lose multiplicative 10% of your archery damage over long distance if you don’t have 10 archery skill for each segment of distance (so if you don’t have 10 archery skill, all shots over ~1300 units do 10% less damage. If you don’t have 20 archery skill, all shots over ~1800 units do 10% less damage, and so on)
The player is now protected from enemy archers at range in a similar fashion. You’re now less likely to be sniped and oneshot approaching a bandit location like Valtheim or Silent Moons. It’s not a huge boost, though, only around ~10-20% damage reduction in most cases.
Crossbows are still vital for warriors and mages early game, but they are less amazing now.
Stamina is a hugely important resource that you need to manage. Every action will use some stamina; running, sprinting, jumping, attacking, etc.
Having low stamina means you will move more slowly, be much less effective with your weapons, and have much higher spell costs. Stamina isn’t just something you can forget about, it’s just as important as health.
There are many ways to make managing stamina much easier.
Enemy Regeneration
Some types of enemy have regeneration effects. Using an element they are weak to will either stop the regeneration completely, or lower it significantly.
The stronger the elemental effect, the longer the regen is mitigated. For example, a novice destruction spell will continue the effect for 3 seconds after the damage of the spell ends, while a master destruction spell will continue the effect for 7 seconds.
Magicka spell cost reduction is now capped at 75% for some effects, mostly enchantments. All other effects are multiplicative, such as those from perks or the apprentice/atronach stone. You cannot reduce spell costs to 0.
Specifically, this is for effects that use the vanilla Actor Value, e.g. "Conjuration Modifier". This applies to all enchantment effects and some blessings.
Magical (magic, poison, fire, etc) resistance caps lowered to 75%
Poison resistance caps at 75%, but 90% poison resistance will offer immunity to many poisons
Getting hit drains your health, but also drains stamina and magicka slightly. There are several ways to mitigate this effect, but keep this in mind when fighting in melee range!