I ended up having a really fun time last weekend after I announced (to stupidmonkey, who is the only other person ever on
) that I was going to play it like Skyrim instead of an MMO. Which meant I'd have no concerns about my viability to others, or feel obligated to level up the skills I "should" level, or be organized in any way in how I spend skill points/craft/quest/anything and just be guided by whim and do whatever completely dumb stuff I felt like doing. (Um, I play Skyrim on like 2 difficulty so I can be dumb there too.)
This led me, in the end, to the dreaded STAMINA BUILD. Dual wield, medium armor, sneak attacks, all that jazz. Was a really fun change. Plus it gave me a chance to start leveling some of the weapon skills I hadn't leveled yet.
First let me say, I love the flexibility. I love that I can level up all the weapon skills and armor skills I want, so when I want to change from a fire mage to a sneaky-stabby thief to a healer, it's as easy as a respec and a gear change. Bored with dual wield? Fire staff. Fire staff just got nerfed to the ground? Two-hander. Bored with the two-hander? Archer. No need to bench your character ever. Unless you just really miss Stibbons and want to level an alt to revisit all those good times.
That said, I agree with everyone else that stamina builds are a mess. The shared resource with your dodge/block/interrupt is annoying but I think for me the larger problem -- which is highly fixable so I hope they'll actually, yanno, fix it -- is that the weapon skills suck compared to the class skills. When you're using a staff this doesn't matter, because you can stack your bar with 4 class skills + Impulse (or a heal for resto staff) and it's all using the same resource so it's all good. But use anything else and you'll most likely only want 1-2 weapon skills on your bar, and you still need magicka for everything else, so setting up a stamina build just so you can use that one skill feels stupid. But you need stamina for your weapon damage too, so you go ahead and stack stamina, but now your class skills are weaker because less magicka and it doesn't feel worth it.
And on top of having the advantage of being the magicka armor, the light armor bonuses are so far superior to the other armor types it's stilly. In my current dumb-Skyrim build I've got on 4 medium and 3 light and no 5 piece bonus, because the 5 piece bonus for medium isn't so great anyway. But for the min-maxer or anyone who wants to be competitive in some way? Here's your dress, enjoy.
None of this matters much if you're just running around solo. In fact at level forty... two? I think I am? I'm actually killing stuff faster this way, because ambush two-shot FTW. But that only works if you don't want to play it like an MMO. If you want to work and play well with others, they don't want you without a stick and a dress, and who can blame them? Things just go more smoothly that way.
So that's my story. I don't game much during the week anyway (apart from a frenzy when a game first comes out in which I neglect my responsibilities, but we're way past that with this game), but I imagine I'll have fun again this weekend with my stabby-stealthy-thief. I seem to have finished all my alliance's zones and it looks like I'll be going the rest of the way to 50 with Dumbledore and friends.
And come on. Everybody loves Dumbledore.