Anyone who's spent time in Skyrim communities knows the memes about stealth archers. But I've actually never fallen for the "temptation" other players experience towards stealth archery. In fact, I've never felt it at all!

My first Skyrim character was a spellsword who mained the Mace of Molag Bal and various spells in the offhand. That's the playstyle I naturally gravitate to. I've also played a few pure mages, especially focusing on conjuration. I once downloaded a mod to run a shop, and became a pacifistic travelling merchant. And I played a Skyrim VR game where I discovered the awesome power of swords in VR, but then quit when Winterhold was all fucked up by a broken mod.

And any time I try to use stealth archery, I just get frustrated. The bow is so annoying and clunky to use, and sneaking is slow and annoying. I usually get one shot off from stealth, and then the enemies rush Me and I switch back to good old one handed and flames. Flames, always tempting Me with that easy easy damage when I'm in a pickle.

But this time, I'm committed! I want to play a thief and do the Thieves Guild and the Dark Brotherhood. I'll use sneak, pickpocket, archery, light armour, illusion, smithing, enchanting, and alchemy. And maybe a little conjuration and destruction as a treat.

So I made a Dunmer and escaped Helgen with Ralof. I usually go with Hadvar, but I think My dark elf is a bit more selfish and less big-picture than My usual characters. She doesn't care about fighting the Dominion, she's mad at the Empire for trying to execute her!

I went to Riverwood, picked up Faendal as a follower, and used the archery training exploit. I decided to skip Whiterun for now, and agreed to go get the golden claw. I'm currently deep inside Bleak Falls Barrow, and

guys

I'm actually doing it! I'm not falling for the temptation to go spellsword! I still have flames and an iron dagger favourited, but I only used them once, against the big spider. I'm headshotting bandits and draugur and even shooting skeevers! It would be so much easier to burn or stab them, but I'm shooting em, and getting a lot of levels in archery!

Once I get paid by Lucan, My plan is to go to Whiterun, absorb Mirmulnir's soul, and then head off to Riften to join the Thieves Guild.

I'm actually fucking doing it!

A stealth archer!

It can become very boring because of the pace and ease of killing, but you figure out different things to keep it interesting. Try to clear dungeons without ever being detected. Also, going for stupidly long-range kills is a hoot. Just striving to make it like Skyrim itself doesn't know you exist unless you want it to. As far as people know, Skyrim has some weird curse on it where arrows spawn in people's heads at random.

Don't feel bad if you secondary a blade or something. Sometimes things just get unavoidably close.

Yeah, I'll admit stealth archer was one of my first playstyles when the game first released. I didn't even entertain other options. Years later and I can't. It's too slow and it's really prevalent to savescum abuse. It's one of those theoretical builds that can do incredible damage, but once you know the game you can kill everything so easily it doesn't matter. It's good to experience it once, as with all the other mechanics out there, but it's not necessarily the most fun.

I would never save scum in Skyrim unless I were doing something risky and non-deterministic like pickpocketing. Save scumming in Skyrim combat makes no sense because the only variable you're optimising for is your time as a player. And when you savescum, you go back in time and throw away the time you already spent for very little benefit.

Save scumming stealth archery is like drinking frostbite poison. You're actively destroying your player resources.

The only stealth build I really enjoyed was a stealthy Orc using daggers. Sneaking up on a dragon and one-shotting them is wildly satisfying.
The cool thing about any stealth build though is that it slows your pace and makes you interact with enemies in a different way. They have full conversations that I'd never heard just sprinting in and leveling the place at mach 5.

My favourite build was a stealth illusion Archer. You can specialise so spells don't reveal your location. The Best spell made the target attack its allies. I could wipe out while villages with a couple of casts then wait for the last wounded survivor and take him down with an arrow.

Dark brotherhood quests were so easy, usually a local Guardsman would kill my target for me when he got attacked for no reason by my victim!

Just sitting in the shadows watching the world turn to chaos and emerge to clean up and loot. What? All this? Me? No, I just got here, such a shame all the death though! Skyrim had gotten really unsafe these days!