AtPhantom

@Floopay said:

Forcing an immortal being to feel something entirely incomprehensible by it's own mind seems a bit more potent than a simple Jedi mind trick, I think you are drastically underestimating that ability.

Not to mention at this point in the game the Dovahkiin has to absorb something like 6 or 7 dragon souls? I mean, Alduin gets slain by a dragon slayer who absorbs dragon souls. I think you are drastically understating Alduin.

Thanks for reading,

Floopay

It's still just a mental attack. It should make no difference on the effectiveness of mortal weapons on his skin.

What do Dragon Souls give you besides more shouting? Hell does anything in the gameplay indicate that your status as dragonborn gives you any tangible benefits beyond the ability speak the dragon's language on the fly? I don't think so. I mean, yeah, I may be understating Alduin, but you have to admit he never actually does anything impressive in the whole damn game. Compare him to Mehrunes Dagon in Oblivion. That guy was obviously powerful. Alduin seems less like a destroyer of worlds and more like a mildly threatening dragon with a damn good PR team.

@InnerVenom123 said:

@BiteMe-Fanboy said:

This new pope seems to be a good man. He use kiss the feet of children with AIDS

That's just creepy.

It makes sense in context. I think.

@Floopay said:

He wasn't defeated by mortal weapons, he was defeated by Dragonrend, and then he was finally retreated back into Sovengarde, where he could truly be killed, which was a metaphysical plane of existence that required the assistence of several legendary warriors who could all wield dragon shouts.

And the person who slays him, by canon, is a mortal man with the blood and soul of a dragon in a world where it is perfectly accepted, and canon to wield magic and powerful magical shouts (one specifically designed to weaken dragons).

Thanks for reading,

Floopay

But dragonrend canonically does nothing except force him to land. Even in lore its basically a mental attack which confronts the dragon with his own mortality, disorienting him and making him unable to concentrate on flying. That's it. That's not a terrible, soul rending spell capable of bringing down gods, that's a freaking Jedi mind trick.

@Floopay: Huh, fair enough, I forgot about the opening town. Still, IIRC no one actually attacks him in the opening town. He just stands on the top of the tower dispensing his wrath with impunity. Whenever someone actually manages to engage him, he backs down. Now unless you can quantify "immense destiny" I'm gonna stand by the fact that Alduin was beaten with regular mortal weapons.

@Floopay said:

I still think the impact force of one arrow is far less than the impact force of a meteor or any of his physical attacks.

Plus he can breathe frost and fire to incredible degrees. He's also immune to both frost and fire, which would make Smaug have to resort to physical means of attack only, and in a battlefield where meteors are raining from the sky.

I don't see why those gemstones would be so embedded that they can't fall off. It's not like dragons produce magic gemstone-adhering adhesive from their pores...

Thanks for reading,

Floopay

I don't think those meteors can kill normal humans, let alone a giant dragon. Not to mention that they'll be falling on his top, where he's especially invulnerable.

The book is pretty clear that laying on the treasure for over two hundred years has basically fused the gems to his body. To the point where it literally describes it as an armor or a mail shirt of gems. I mean remember he thrashes around the mountain enough to cause a minor cave in. That's like a dozen or two tons of dragon slamming into the walls. Later on he goes loop-de-looping over the laketown. If all that force didn't shake the gems out, I doubt anything Alduin does will.

@Floopay said:

Him conquering was prior to the events of Skyrim, back when the dragons had enslaved humans.

He had an army of dragons at that point though. And we don't really have any straightforward evidence from that period to judge his power then.

@Floopay said:

And the gems aren't exactly embedded in him, nor were they really suggested to be. And it was described as "gemstones" not "diamonds", meaning gems of all shapes, sizes, colors, and varieties. The gemstones aren't solid in his body, one attack would likely blow most of them off, especially if he were to use a dragon shout of any sort.

...No, they're pretty much embedded in there. I mean the entire point of the book is that he has one little weak spot left on his entire body. I don't know how else you can interpret that.

Gemstones/diamonds was my bad.

@Floopay said:

It wasn't exactly a little weakspot.... His underbelly is his weakness, that is, the entire underside of his body.

Er... He fixed that. You know, that whole lying on diamonds for hundreds of years? I mean you could take that away from him, but they're as much a part of him now as anything else.

@Floopay said:

Why is Smaug likely bigger? He fits within the dwarven caves inside the mountain....

Yeah, but those caverns are huuuge. Smaug is described as the greatest living dragon in Middle Earth, and Middle Earth dragons can reach some truly ludicrous sizes. Alduin, by comparison, is the same size as any other dragon in Skyrim, and that's not terribly much.

@Floopay said:

Alduin pretty much conquered an entire nation, and no dragon dared oppose him. He only gets killed once, and it's by the souls of some of the greatest fighters in history as well as the Dovahkiin.

Alduin didn't conquer anything. Skyrim still functioned and engaged in their little civil war while he strutted about. Notably the dragons themselves began doubting Alduin's power over the course of the game, believing him to be weak and unfit to rule them, and not just because the Dragonborn is around. Odavhiing has his doubts in Alduin before he meets the Dragonborn, and the reason he comes to see Dragonborn is because he was amused by his insolence, indicating that he did not have a terribly high opinion of him beforehand.

@TheSecondOpinion said:

It was the Orthodox Church back in 33 AD. So the Catholics are Orthodox Christians that believed they needed a central Leader chosen by the Clergy, which the Orthodox did not want. A handful of Bishops left the Orthodox Church in 1050AD and created the Catholic Church in Rome.

...That's completely NOT what happened.

@TheSecondOpinion said:

The Crusades for example, all the Christians were being slaughtered by the Eastern beliefs. They were being slaughtered because they would not fight back. But the Kings of Europe did not want to go down without a fight, so the Kings broke out of the fundamental pacifistic humble belief of Christianity and created armies of warriors whom also believed that their faith fight back to preserve their religion and their people and country. Thus the Crusader Knight was born. The Pope didn't create the Crusader Warriors. The Kings did. And the Crusades itself was not initiated through Europe by the Catholics.... It already had been going 600 years before the Catholic Church was even established.

That's also completely not how it happened. Jesus, I was thinking of singling out all the wrong things in this post, but I'm having a hard time finding anything right in it.

Sheogorath isn't a god. He's a Daedra.

@Floopay said:

@AtPhantom said:

Alduin is the least impressive dragon ever.

Smaug was killed by a single black arrow being fired into a large weak point in his body (his underbelly). To be honest, as much as I loved the Hobbit, it was the least climactic part of the entire book. There was all this hype on Smaug, and then it felt like he flew out of his lair and got shot almost instantaneously.

At least Alduin devoured some souls and rained some fire, and raised some dragons.

Thanks for reading,

Floopay

Sure, but that's not something Alduin can replicate or anything. Note that when people don't know about his tiny little weak spot... He lays waste to two kingdoms before breakfast. Alduin seems invulnerable until he's actually forced to land and fight, at which point he gets killed by regular old weapons despite all that soul eating business.

Not to mention that Smaug is likely several times bigger than Alduin.