Video Game / Ordinator — Perks of Skyrim

Ordinator — Perks of Skyrim is a The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim mod created by EnaiSiaion. Ordinator consists in a complete overhaul of the 18 skill trees (normal skills only, the werewolf and vampire lord perks are unaffected), changing the perks and allowing new playstyles. Ordinator works without any official DLC.

Ordinator is one of the base components of Vokriinator, a mod which combines several skill tree overhauls.

Ordinator — Perks of Skyrim can be found here (Legacy version) or here (Skyrim Special Edition).

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Ordinator Provides Examples Of:

• Annoying Arrows: With "Deflect Arrows" (Block), arrows blocked with a shield don't do any damage.
• Anti-Magic: "Antimagic Field" (Restoration) adds such an effect to wards, preventing nearby enemies from casting magic as long as the player is maintaining a ward. (Large enemies are immune, however.)
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: "Dead Tide" (Conjuration) alters its parent perk "Bone Collector" by allowing to summon more skeletons. Their number is based on your base mana meter (1 skeleton per 75 mana at perk's level 1 ; 1 skeleton per 50 mana at perk's level 2).
• Awesome, but Impractical: "Heart of Creation" (Smithing) grants a very interesting buff (increases attack damage and critical strike damage by 15% and reduces attack damage taken by 15%), which lasts for 1800 seconds (i.e. 30 minutes) once you craft something at a forge. What makes it impractical is that you must first select a single forge to grant this effect. To take advantage of it, you will have to go back and forth between the chosen forge and your destination, wasting some time to travel, and preventing you from benefiting from it inside large dungeons due to them taking longer to explore than the buff's duration.
• Bear Trap: "Bear Traps" (Lockpicking) allows you to pick up or craft bear traps to use them yourself. The initial perk only allows carrying up to two at the same time, but Bear Traps unlocks several other perks adding several effects (magic damage, sneak attacks, etc.) to the traps, as well as the ability to carry up to three of them.
• The Berserker: Available in both dual-wielding and two-handed flavours.
  • The One-Handed skill tree has a branch affecting dual-wielding, allowing this fighting style to attack faster ("Ravage"), adding a rage meter building up during attacks ("Man O'War"), and eventually adding a damage and critical damage buff which can randomly be triggered during combat while dual-wielding ("Unleash the Beast").^note This Berserker playstyle retains the Glass Cannon aspect of the Vanilla dual-wielding combat, because Ordinator doesn't allow you to block while dual-wielding
  • The Two-Handed skill tree has two perks ("Massacre" and "Enter the Arena") which can trigger a temporary attack speed buff.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • "Philosopher Stone" (Alteration) automatically gives free gold (4 times the Alteration skill's level) every 24-hours (as well as a tiny amount of Alteration experience each time). As the prerequisite Alteration level for the perk is 30, it means a daily gold gain ranging from 120 to 400 Septims. Much of the loot you may find is more valuable, but this daily gain greatly adds up in the long term.
  • "Blood Money" (Pickpocket) adds more gold on the corpses of NPCs killed with a killcam or with much more damage than their remaining hit points. As most fights end with the killcam death of the last standing enemy, it again adds up in the long term.
  • "Alter Self: Resistances" (Alteration) increases two of the five resistances (one of the elemental resistances, disease, or poison) by 25. Not flashy, but very useful.
  • The first level of "Quiet Before the Storm" (Illusion) allows you to cast any spell without attracting nearby hostiles, and its second level does the same with shouts. Obviously, being able to cast self-buff spells near enemies without risking aggroing them is very useful.
  • "Welloc's Dormant Arcana" (Alteration) lets you select a spell type (such as armor spells or conjuration spells) and add passive effects to it that affect you for as long as the spell itself does. One effect you can select is health regeneration. Not super useful mid-combat, but considering how many duration buffs you can pick up with all the new perks, it'll last you for well after that. Especially useful if you're playing on Survival mode, where the player doesn't have innate health regeneration.
• Crippling Overspecialization: The Vancian Magic perk can feel like this. You have a damage output most mages couldn't dream of and you can spam powerful spells with zero worries about magicka, but because you have a limited supply of spells, you need to be very particular with what you cast to avoid getting caught with your pants down at the worst possible moment. This means that a lot of great utility and other quality of life spells become much harder to justify the usage of as spells turn Too Awesome to Use. You can mitigate this problem by taking the followup perk to Vancian Magic, which gives you more spell slots. With the perk after that, you can alleviate it further... or choose to fall right back into it by reducing your spell slot number by a whopping half, but making your few remaining spells even stronger.
• Damage Over Time: "Bite Marks" (One-Handed) adds a bleeding effect to living targets hits by unblocked dagger attacks. The damage itself is fairly low (1/2/3 per second), but its duration is long (30 seconds at level 1, 45 seconds at level 2, 60 seconds at level 3).
• Death or Glory Attack: "Death or Glory" (Two-Handed) turns two-handed combat into this. Two-handed power attack receive a damage boost which increases the lower your health is.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • "Miracle" is the ultimate Enchanting perk, and allows you to put three enchantments (instead of the normal maximum of two) on an item, and makes those enchantments stronger than they normally would. The perk's description states in explicit terms that it only works once, and, indeed, turning the Enchanting skill legendary in order to train it again to 100 will fail, since the game will refuse to let you get the Miracle perk again.^note The game checks if the miracle has been used through a hidden perk. It's possible to use several miracles by using the console.
  • "Aurification" (Alteration) allows you to insta-kill a paralyzed target by turning it into gold. Characters flagged essential are immune to this, to prevent it from breaking the game (or to make sure smart players don't use this power on purpose to get rid of critical characters).
  • "That Which Does Not Kill You…" (Alchemy) gives three free perk points and a passive buff to crafted potions' potency if you survived a powerful poisoning effect granted when you take the perk. If you reset Alchemy's progression after already having taken "That Which Does Not Kill You…", you won't be able to gain the perk again, to prevent you from gaining unlimited free perk points this way. The few other "free perk points" perks have the same limitation.
• Difficult, but Awesome: "Spirit Tutors" adds two wandering NPCs to the world, and for each of them you find, you get a bonus to the potency of your Restoration spells, at a rate of 1% per 20 Magicka you have. Finding the tutors is the difficult part; the awesome part is that these bonuses stack, and said stacking is not additive, but multiplicative - not only relative with each other, but other bonuses that power up your Restoration spells (such as potions, or the Restoration tree's base perk). This can get even more ridiculous combined with False Light, which lets you cast healing spells on enemies to damage them.
• Discard and Draw: Various perks give you not only a power up, but some new weakness. For instance, "Vancian Magic" from the Alteration tree allows you to cast any 20 spells you want with double power, but only those 20 spells until you sleep and recharge them, and later on down the line "Dungeon Master" allows you to change if you have more or less spell charges for less or more power in exchange.
• Falling Damage: Averted if you take the second level of "Cushioned" (Heavy Armor), which negates falling damage (the first level just halves the damage) when wearing heavy armor.
• Friendly Fireproof: "Shocked to Life" makes your undead summons immune to your lightning damage, and instead allows it to buff them.
• Guide Dang It!: Some of the new perks spawn unique objects in the world without giving any clue of their location.
  • Don't bother taking "Game of Fate" (Lockpicking) unless you intend to scour each corner of the game world, including areas added by the official DLCs and any quest/new lands/new dungeons mods you're currently playing with. The perk adds five Rare Candy in randomly chosen containers which can be literally anywhere.
  • The wandering NPCs added by "Spirit Tutors" (Restoration) can be anywhere as well.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: "Keen Senses" (Light Armor) and "Face of Death" (Heavy Armor) allows you to invoke this by giving an armor rating bonus if you wear no helmet but all three other pieces of armor, as well as allowing full armor set perks to work without helmet. Besides purely cosmetic reasons, it also makes your build more viable if you decide to wear armor with jewelry or clothing such as an enchanted circlet/hood, or the Aetherial Crown.
• Lethal Joke Item: The Enchanting perk "Heart of the Sun" turns an otherwise unassuming quest item, the Staff of Tandil, into one of these. It has a very basic effect - calming down low-leveled enemies it's cast on - but has the unique attribute of being the staff with the highest amount of charge points in the game (10 000), which is twice as much as the closest competitors at 5000. This is normally a drawback, as the Staff's effect takes a proportionately high amount of charge to use, making it nothing but a lackluster staff that requires very high quality soul gems to recharge. "Heart of the Sun", meanwhile, is a perk that slowly drains the charge on a staff you're wielding to empower the enchantments on the weapon in your other hand, by an amount proportionate to the amount of charge left in the staff. The power increase is based on the actual amount of charge instead of the percentage, so as an enchantment-empowering battery, the Staff of Tandil is not only longer-lasting than any of its competition, but also twice as powerful when full.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: Referenced in the description of the Illusion perk "Neverworld" which mentions a "lotus dream" that characters can get trapped in if they're affected by your Calm spells.
• Menacing Stroll: The Heavy Armor perk Primal Fear gives living opponents a chance to flee in terror if you walk, rather than run, towards them.
• Minmaxer's Delight:
  • The Pickpocket perk "Dragon Hoard" is difficult to obtain (it requires skill level 100 and about four other perks as prerequisite) but it allows the player to buy perk points.
  • Vancian Magic and its followup perks are almost indispensable to anyone who wants to create the blastiest blaster mage to ever blast, especially since the base game does not contain many permanent ways to boost the damage of Destruction magic. Summermyst, Enai's enchantment overhaul, does add an "Amplify Destruction" enchantment, making Vancian Magic slightly less essential if you're using it in tandem with Ordinator. Combining the two, on a character well-versed in both Alchemy and Enchanting, can yield a spell damage output in the thousands. Note that boosts to the Destruction skill also apply to most weapon enchantments, meaning that even with piss-poor weapon skills, a Destruction wizard empowered by Vancian Magic can mow through Mooks easily with an enchanted weapon, only using their precious spell slots when a dragon or other boss-level enemy shows up.
    • This also synergizes very well with the Home Mythal perk, which makes Alteration spells cast within the vicinity of a specific location last 20 times longer. Why? Because this applies to Dragonhide, a normally Awesome, but Impractical spell that maximizes your physical defense, but lasts for a short period and takes too long to cast in combat. A dual-cast Dragonhide (as for some reason it can be dual-cast, despite being a Master-level spell) cast in the area of a Home Mythal and empowered by Vancian Magic can last for several hours (dozens of hours with the aforementioned Summermyst enchantments thrown in the mix). Suddenly, the formerly Squishy Wizard boasts damage reduction comparable to endgame heavy armor, while still being able to enjoy tasty perks (such as Robe of the Magi and Regalia) that rely on wearing no armor. And the followup perk, Dimension Door? Allows you to poof right back to the safety of your Home Mythal if you ever happen to run out of spell slots or if your Dragonhide expires in an unsafe location. And if you happen to have one of Enai's magic mods installed as well (Odin or Apocalypse) you can also hook up your Home Mythal to a network of Milestones to instantly jump to any of four other prepared locations in Skyrim which unlike standard fast-travel wont drain any duration off your precious Dragonhide or any other Alteration spells you want active for the day. You can even set up a Milestone deep inside a dungeon, teleport back to your Home Mythal to refresh spells, then teleport back into the dungeon and destroy the Milestone so you can set up another later (the Dimension Door option is preferable if you dont intend to immediately return to that location).
• Money Sink:
  • "Dragon Hoard" (Pickpocket) allows you to buy perk points for 50,000 Septims each time you sleep.
  • "Fuel the Inferno" (Smithing) allows you to get a tempering buff if you sacrifice a dragon soul at an advanced grindstone/workbench. Not exactly literal money but it's nevertheless a rare in-game currency with limited Vanilla use.
• More Dakka: "Dwemer Autocannon" (Smithing) has two sub-perks turning it into this, especially once you get both. "Firing Line" deploys two cannons at once, and "Spin Up" constantly increases the autocannon attack speed with each shot (capped at 200%).
• Necromancer: Beside the Vanilla reanimated NPCs, "Bone Collector" (Conjuration) allows you to summon skeleton followers at one of the four Bone Altars found on the map. These skeletons can't be permanently killed by enemies.
• Nerf: Ordinator makes several Skyrim features less broken.
  • Smithing and Enchanting results in crafted items which are more balanced than in Vanilla.
  • Zigzagged with "Trickster" (Pickpocket), which mixes "Misdirection" and "Perfect Touch". On the one hand, it now only allows stealing equipped pieces of armor if the target is sleeping (weapons of awake NPCs are still fair game). On the other hand, it's a single perk allowing you to do actions which were managed by two distinct Vanilla perks, and allows you to use a (nerfed) version of the level 100 perk Misdirection right at level 70.
  • In Vanilla, attaining the full potential of a dagger's backstab (x15 damage, not counting armor-based buffs) requires reaching level 50 in the Sneak skill and taking 4 perks. In Ordinator, this full potential requires reaching level 100 (the bonus damage is scaled with the skill's level) and spending 5 perk points. The sneak attack multiplier is also capped at x12 for daggers, and non-dagger sneak attacks are nerfed, too (e.g. bow sneak attack's multiplier is x2.5 with Ordinator and all the relevant perks, while it was at most x3 in Vanilla).
  • Vanilla Destruction's Perk "Impact" was an infamous gamebreaker, as it could easily trivialise combat due to stunlocking opponents with dual-casting spells. Despite all of the other powerful perks that Ordinator adds to Destruction, Impact is conspicuously absent.
• Not the Intended Use: You Saw Nothing is a pickpocketing perk power that is designed to make a stealthy robbery easier by inflicting everyone around your target with a special effect that prevents a bounty on you if they're the only witnesses. This can be augmented with a second perk that gives all people afflicted the Thieves' Eye effect, making them hold a far larger amount of items if they are interacted with. However, the power also works in battles against hostile NPCs, which allows to artificially get much better loot from open combat instead of its intended use for stealthy pickpocketing.
• Rare Candy:
  • "Game of Fate" (Lockpicking) adds 5 "Dragons of Fate" in randomly-selected containers. Taking each Dragon of Fate gives 15,000 Septims and a perk point.
  • "Spirit Tutors" (Restoration) adds two unique wandering NPCs who each grant a (stacking) permanent passive buff to Restoration spells.
• Shout-Out:
  • "You Shall Not Pass" (Enchanting) adds a magical offensive effect if you almost simultaneously attack with an enchanted staff and an enchanted weapon while wielding both.
  • An Alteration perk, Wild Shrines, adds five shrines to Skyrim's wilderness which permanently buff your spells of whichever school they're associated with. The Destruction shrine has a "Notice" sitting innocently atop it. It reads simply, "I prepared Explosive Runes this morning". And then you blow up.
• Theme Naming:
  • Most of the dagger-related perks (One-Handed) have snake-related names ("Bite Marks", "Twin Fang", "Swaying Cobra", "Death Adder", "Coiling Python").
  • Several Archery perks have raptor bird-related names ("Focus on the Prey", "Beak and Talon", "Hawkeye").
  • The "Vancian Magic" line of perks all have names related to Dungeons & Dragons concepts, starting from Vancian Magic itself, then "Quadratic Wizard", and finally "Dungeon Master".
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: "Blood Money" (Pickpocket) automatically adds gold on humanoid enemies' corpses whose killing blow dealt much more damage than there remaining health at the moment.
• The Turret Master: "Dwemer Autocannon" (Smithing) allows you to craft and deploy for 30s/60s (depending on the perk's level) a Dwemer Autocannon which automatically fires in your crosshair's approximate direction.
• Vancian Magic: A whole branch of the Alteration tree replaces your Mana Meter with a set number of spell charges that can be cast at no cost. Said charges must be replenished by sleeping, higher Magicka grants more charges (with the initial perk, you can only cast 20 spells), and you may trade charges for stronger spells. Since all spells consume a single charge no matter their level, things can get pretty ridiculous when you cast Master-level spells back-to-back when normally a single one would empty your bar.
• Violation of Common Sense: "Wandering Warrior" (One-Handed) adds a permanent +1% bonus to one-handed (capped at +20%) damage each time the Dragonborn defeats a party of at least four animals/humanoids with one-handed weapons. While the game is easier if using stealth and avoiding aggroing large groups of enemies, it may become difficult to encounter such pre-generated parties, which makes unsubtle frontal assaults a viable tactic to train the perk, by aggroing more enemies on purpose. Of course, it would result in harder fights, but that shouldn't be an impossible task since "Wandering Warrior" is level 100 in One-Handed and a lot of other One-Handed perks.