Best Skyrim SSE Warrior Sword and Shield Build

The best Skyrim Special Edition Warrior Sword and Shield Build give you comprehensive tips, tricks, and strategies to apply when playing a warrior character build. This guide is built for a fully immersed warrior, ensuring that the player the best choices.

Skyrim has always leaned towards a battle mage system or stealth archer; this guide will help you have a solid plan from the start, providing you with a guide on the best type of warrior you want to make.

With this warrior guide, it’s highly assumed that you as a player want to use heavy armor instead of light armor; however, if you prefer light armor, you can still use it to make a more agile character; the choice is yours.

Contents show

Skills

The warrior’s skills will incorporate one-handed, two-handed, block, heavy armor, and smithing. I also highly recommend you ad enchanting to the mix. Furthermore, if you want to use archery, combine archery with the tips demonstrated in this article.

As a warrior, it’s not recommended to use every one of these skills; choose between two-handed and one-handed, with one-handed use incorporating the block skill and a shield. If you prefer using two-handed, don’t use the block skill unless you want the quick reflexes to perk.

The two skill setups recommended in this guide are one-handed smithing block, heavy armor, and enchanting or smithing two-handed, heavy armor and enchanting.

Best Setups

Here are some advantages and drawbacks of each setup; it also includes a character that uses dual-wielding, a single one-handed weapon in each hand. Dual Wielding is governed by the one-handed skill even though you are using both of your hands in combat.

One-handed warrior with shield

With one-handed and block, you’ll use a sword, war axe, or mace in one hand with a shield in the other hand. This setup makes for a tank character with tons of health, heavy armor, and a shield to minimize damage.

Shields can be used to bash enemies to stagger them; this allows the player to strike with your one-handed weapon. Playing with a shield enables the player to use long shield charges, which involves sprinting with your shield raised to knock enemies down, which is excellent for crowd control.

Disadvantage

A shield keeps the player alive and gives a great advantage to control the enemy. The drawbacks are less damage than the two-handed weapon, although it increases the speed. There are severe damage one-handed weapons out there if the player looks hard enough, ones that could suggest this being the most potent way of playing a warrior.

Another disadvantage to this setup is that using a shield is so fantastic that you might invest most of the block perks; this spreads your perks thinly at the start. As such, there’s an opportunity cost. For example, two-handed characters that don’t use perks in the block can use heavy armor bonuses early on in the game.

Two-handed warrior

As a two-handed warrior, you are embodied with heaps of damage. While two-handed weapons might be slower, they are more powerful.

The two-handed warrior will have less capability of defending compared to the one-handed warrior with a shield. Still, the player can use defense perks for enchanting the armor to make the character sturdier.

Two-handed weapons can still block. These weapons go from greatswords, battle axes to war hammers; the slower they are, the more damage is done.

Two-handed weapons are great for barbarian roleplaying characters. They can hit multiple enemies in one strike once the player gets the sweep perk.

Dual Wielding

Dual wielding is another playstyle; this involves a sword in each hand, a mace, a war axe, or a dagger.

Daggers aren’t the best for dual-wielding, even if they have the game’s best attack powers. This power is triggered by merely holding down both attack buttons at the same time to perform a dual-wielding power attack; this power is essential for Dual-Wielding characters.

Dual-wield’s warrior needs to use power attacks as much as possible, ending up with High damage per second. However, using this playstyle limits the player to have offensive capabilities without a chance of blocking.

The weight of the weapon also determines these power attacks. For maximum speed, it’s highly suggested the player uses a light weapon on the left side and a heavy weapon on the right; this allows for high speed and damage.

Races

Races are an essential part of being a highly skilled warrior. There are various choices to become an excellent warrior. While I recommend playing whatever race brings the player the most fun, for a statistical perception, some of the best warrior races are Arnaud’s, Orcs Bratton’s, Red Guards, and Argonians.

Red Guards

While many players have a negative view towards Red Guards, these characters have an Adrenaline Rush power, which can be used once a day. Andrenaline Rush is perfect for a Dual-Wielding warrior; this lasts for 60 seconds and dramatically speeds up your stamina regeneration. The power allows launching powerful attacks constantly. The advantage of this power is that the player can only use it once per day.

Red Guards also get 10+ to the one-handed skill and 5 to block, smithing, alteration, archery, and destruction; this concludes a healthy amount of warrior skills. However, these bonuses become out-of-date later on in the game.

Nord

Playing as a Nord is another advantaged option. Nords have 50% resistance to frost, making the character much sturdier as many enemies use frost.

Nords start with +10 for two-handed and +5 to block light armor, one-handed, smithing, and speech. Like the Red Guard, there are some fantastic bonuses with the Nord race, which will benefit the player early on.

Nords also have a Battlecry ability that the player can use once a day to make enemies flee for 30 seconds; this is an incredible power ability if you want to roleplay as an intimidating warrior. However, Battlecry doesn’t work the more you level up as enemies become higher levels.

Argonians

Argoinians have incredible racial power; this is called Hiss Skin and allows them to recover health once a day ten times faster for 60 seconds. The Hiss Skin is extremely powerful and will keep the warrior alive in tough battles.

The one-day limitation is an extreme drawback to this power, as are the starting bonuses of this race that aren’t suitable for a warrior.

Argonians also comes with the ability to breathe underwater and a 50% resistance to disease.

Bratton’s

A Bratton doesn’t start with warrior skill bonuses, but they have a permanent 25% resistance to magic, which is extremely powerful. The 25% resistance to magic means that frost, shock, and fire will do 25% less damage to the warrior.

Furthermore, Bratton’s have a dragon skin ability, which can be used once a day for a minute to have 50% spell absorption. The dragon skin ability gives the player a 50% chance to absorb all of the magic from a spell that hits the warrior, and in return, no damage was affected.

The Atronach Stone gives Bratton’s 50% more spell absorption, making the warrior character temporarily invulnerable to magic.

Orc

The Orcs are the best races to play like warriors. This race gets a 10+ to heavy armor and 5+ to block, one-handed, smithing, two-handed and enchanting. These skills are highly recommended using as a warrior.

Orcs also have a remarkable ability known as a Berserker; this racial power causes the player to take 50% less damage from all attacks and dealing 100% damage for 60 seconds. The Berserker is one of the most powerful perks in the game, although limited by once a day use.

Standing Stones

The standing stones that are highly useful for a warriors character are;

The Warrior Stone
The Atronach Stone
The Steed Stone

The Warrior Stone makes the warrior based skills progress 20% faster.

The Atronach Stone gives the player plus 50 Magica, minus 50% magical regen, and 50% spell absorption. The spell absorption makes this stone so effective for a warrior, with a 50% chance of taking no damage from a spell.

The Steed Stone will make your armor weigh light and much more maneuvrable. With this stone, the player will also carry more, but with a conditioning perk in the heavy armor tree, it mainly becomes obsolete.

Stats, Stamina and Health

The last on this guide is the player’s stats; the Magica option is useless here, so it won’t be mentioned.

Health will always be the bigger priority; as a warrior, the two main focuses are to stay alive and killing. Staying alive is governed by health, and weapons and perks control killing.

In conclusion, for the warriors’ overwhelming majority, the player should focus on 70% health and 30% stamina.