Skyrim 100% Maximized Legendary Playthrough - 273. Time to Get Our Grind On
2I have good news and bad news. The good news: it's time at last to dive into Thieves Guild content! The bad news: we're starting with the worst part of it.
As discussed previously, in our overarching quest to complete No Stone Unturned (which is actually a Thieves Guild quest itself), we now turn to the Thieves Guild in order to obtain the three Stones tied to its quests. While one is obtained during the main questline, the other two are tied to city reputation quests you get from Delvin once you've done enough of Delvin and Vex's side jobs. If you've been here before, you know that the side jobs are the worst part of the Thieves Guild, and one of the worst parts of the entire game. It's not that the quests themselves are hard - you'll witness today how fast we can speedrun them - it's the fact that in order to max out the rewards and get the safe next to the Guildmaster's desk you need to complete *125* of them.
Someone at Bethesda seriously miscalculated when coming up with this number. I would personally argue that this comes in a close second behind No Stone Unturned as the most tedious objective to complete in the game. Personally I feel it should have been 50 - possibly 75 if they still wanted to make it ludicrously hard. But 125? At least with No Stone Unturned you're visiting interesting locations and doing interesting quests you probably would have done anyway.
Anyway, we're going to start off by doing side jobs until we can complete all four city reputation quests. We need two of them for Stones of Barenziah of course, but completing all four is also a prerequisite for doing the last quest in the TG main questline - Under New Management - where we become the new Guildmaster.
We've completed a couple of side jobs in the past already since we happened to be able to do so while passing through cities. We have another two in our journal right now, both of them fortuitously in Windhelm, so we start by heading there, taking care of them, then heading back to Riften. Our goal is to do one of each kind of job for both Vex and Delvin (100% playthrough, remember), then afterwards we'll optimize our choice of quests to be able to do them quickly.
After turning in these two quests, we have one more order of business before starting in earnest on our grind. As we complete reputation quests the Ragged Flagon starts getting upgraded. Thus we need to go ahead and loot it now in its present state before certain items disappear as part of the changes.
Once that's done, it's time for the next couple of quests. This time both are in Markarth - and in fact we have the most remarkable luck in this video with getting both Vex's and Delvin's quests in the same city, to the extent that I suspect one of my mods has something to do with it. We get even luckier in that completing a Sweep job in the Treasury House in Markarth completes the Bedlam job at the same time, since apparently the items you steal for the Sweep job still have an assigned gold value.
Turning those in, we get a couple of quests in Whiterun this time. Once we arrive there, we decide it behooves us to send Serana home, for multiple reasons. It's time now to turn on speedrun mode for these side jobs since, as mentioned, we have to get through 125 of the buggers eventually. We don't want to have to deal with telling Serana to wait every time we need to break into a house, then pick her back up again when we're done. In addition, many of the TG quests really are not companion-appropriate, and we'll need to go solo for them. The main quest we're currently on - Loud and Clear - is a good example of this. So all in all this is a good time to send her on vacation while we take care of business.
From here we really do speedrun these quests as fast as possible. If it weren't for having to do so many of them I would be motivated to roleplay them more - waiting until nightfall, trying to be seen in a city as little as possible, etc - but at that rate it would take us 50 videos or more to get through all of these. We also optimize our choice of quest. My personal favorites are the Numbers job and the Burglary job.
For Delvin's jobs, the Numbers job is super easy. If the store is open you can just waltz in, interact with the ledger, and be done. If it's at night, interacting with the ledger doesn't even break Invisibility.
As for Vex, Burglary and Heist are the same quest, just one is from a store and one is from a house; Sweep is identical to Burglary except there are three items to get instead of one; and Shill is basically Burglary in reverse.
We continue doing jobs until we get our first city quest - Imitation Amnesty in Whiterun. We've now done 18 jobs in total - just 107 to go! [weeps quietly]
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