By ‘stealth archer equivalent’ I mean the stereotypical easy/newbie or basic bitch way to play the game. It may be easy to pivot to and get stuck in a rut of playing that way.
I thought about this while playing Balatro. I kept trying to do creative combinations like Stone Joker and Marble Joker to see how far I could go with stone cards and pairs but pretty much always end up doing 8 Ball flushes.
yeah, it’s not as effective or cheesy as stealth archer early. like, your can’t hide on a cliff and slowly plink someone down from just outside their perception, but it’s way stronger overall. once you get the levels and skills to be able to sneak up and get the 30x dagger crit there’s nothing thatcan challenge you. it’s always funny sneaking up on a dragon on its word wall to get the one shot from behind.
I think it was Oblivion rather than Skyrim, but I remember one character I had whose stealth was so high guards would lose track of me if I entered a slightly shaded area. Archery would only improve things because then I wouldn’t have to walk up to them to kill them.
Petty sure that character could just shoot whatever I wanted and just sit there, not even that far away, and anyone who noticed the shot would give up looking pretty quickly. Don’t think it was any different for walking up to them and stabbing.
There might have been some stealth fortification involved.
That sounds a lot like chameleon, the spell/enchantment in Oblivion that reduced the ability of enemies to spot you. It was basically a second layer of sneaking that stacked with regular stealth.
There was a famous exploit where if you managed to reach 100% chameleon effect strength, you could literally stand there wailing on NPCs with a greatsword and they wouldn’t even notice. The AI simply wasn’t allowed to know you were there.
There’s a reason the spell was removed in Skyrim. Stealth archers could have been even more broken!
Don’t forget Morrowind where you could enchant your gear to give you a permanent 100% chameleon. Good times.
I was using a spell from a common magic expansion mod, that will cast any 3 buff spells upon entering combat; i set Invisibility to one of them, so i could stab something (breaking invisibility), it’d die, id be noticed (triggering combat) and immediately be invisible again.