Gamers unanimously consider the lockpicking skill tree in Skyrim to be the most useless, while the final archery skill is simply broken

Skyrim has a special category of perks that seem designed to waste precious perk points. These are abilities that either duplicate each other or become pointless right around the time a player finally reaches them. And the undisputed champion here is the entire lockpicking tree.

A classic example of the absurdity hides at level 100 lockpicking. There is a perk that makes master locks easier, but sitting right next to it is another one that turns lockpicks unbreakable. With unbreakable picks, lock difficulty stops mattering at all, since players can fiddle with it forever until it opens. One perk essentially cancels out the point of the other.

The problem runs deeper than a couple of conflicting abilities. The entire tree tries to simplify a minigame that already depends entirely on player skill. In practice no perk points are needed at all, since understanding how to turn the lockpick once is enough. On Nintendo Switch the mechanic falls apart completely, since Joy-Con vibration tells players exactly where to stop.

The perk that copies keys from unlocked doors deserves special mention too. The obvious question is: how often do people actually go back to the same lock? Some keep it for collecting keys, others point to Thieves Guild radiant quests where players hit the same location twice, but even there the perk only saves a couple of seconds at most.

Lockpicking is at least harmless, but the final archery perk sometimes works against players. It grants a chance to paralyze an enemy, but under the hood, firing a shot triggers an invisible paralysis spell that travels along the arrow trajectory. That spell moves slightly faster than the arrow itself, so at long range the target can drop from paralysis before the arrow even arrives, sending the shot wide. One gamer put it bluntly:

Maybe the only, or one of the few perks that's not just useless, but actually worse than not having it.

Bethesda apparently split the effect into a separate projectile for a reason, since attaching it directly to the weapon broke the enchantment system, similar to how Elemental Fury works. Skyrim has been held together by duct tape and prayers for fifteen years now, and players keep arguing just as eagerly about what could still be fixed.