UESP Forums

A couple years ago I started a topic like this for Morrowind. I tried searching for a similar topic for Oblivion, but again I only found topics on specific skills. When I was first starting out in the game, I referred to this page a lot. During my last game of Oblivion, I took the time to max out my character, and found that certain strategies work better than others. I prefer to raise skills while out adventuring, rather than standing at home and practicing them for hours, so I would prefer tips geared towards this end.


The Easiest:

Alchemy - Once again, Alchemy takes the top spot. It requires the fewest actions of all the skills, except Conjuration, to fully max out. However, it's still faster than Conjuration because you can tap the Create button faster than you can cast any spell. The only real obstacle to raising this skill is that it's very tedious to go out and spend the whole day picking ingredients (which can be mitigated by using an Auto Harvest mod). The problem I ran into with raising Alchemy was that it was hard to avoid raising it too high, and thus being forced to level up, if it's one of your major skills. The solution is simple: keep it as a minor skill.

Conjuration - As mentioned above, one of the fastest skills to raise. The wiki has a couple of methods for training it that work pretty well, but they're not your only options. You can also create a custom spell that has Fire Damage in a 10 ft radius + Turn Undead lvl 25 in 10 ft. The duration of the Turn Undead should be high enough so that the spell counts as Conjuration rather than Destruction. Go to any undead dungeon and just keep splashing undead creatures with this.


The Moderate, which require more preparation:

All Other Spell Skills - If you don't like standing around casting a minimum cost custom spell to train a skill, here's an alternative. Create a custom Destruction spell that can be chain-cast indefinitely. You can do this by using Fortify Magicka 100 pts for 2 sec on self and keeping the spell's total cost under 50. Now go out and kill stuff with it. If you wish to use a spell like this to train Illusion, Calm 25 is a good choice. For Mysticism, add a Soul Trap with a long duration. For Alteration, use Burden 100 pts on target. If you wish to train Restoration, add an Absorb Health effect that's high enough so that the spell counts as Restoration. Note that although Restoration takes the longest to raise of any spell skill, you'll barely notice it when you're using it offensively while out adventuring.

Armor Skills, Armorer - The obvious way to do this is to collect a full suit of heavy or light armor (minus the shield) and go get hit by swarms of rats. If you're just starting out, Arvena Thelas's rats are ideal, as they inflict 1 pt of damage instead of 2 and they don't carry diseases. If you're not worried about that, there are a few other places with clusters of rats. Fort Carmala has 5 just inside the entrance, though you have to get past a vampire and an undead enemy. The following goblin dungeons will also work: Haunted Mine has 6 in a pen in the second area, Cracked Wood Cave has 5 in a pen, and Fort Ash has 4 penned in the second area. Then when you've had enough, retreat and repair your armor to raise Armorer.

Block - Like the above. Block with your fists instead of a shield, as this doesn't cause enemies to recoil, so they can hit you faster. Once your Block skill hits 50, it will start to cause a significant enemy recoil, which will delay their next hit on you, so it might be faster to train it separately at that point. One way to train Block later in the game is to acquire 100% Reflect Damage and go to any dungeon with lots of melee enemies. Kill all the spellcasters (unless you have 100% Resist Magic or Spell Absorption as well) and disintegrate the weapons of any bow users you see. Crouch and block in a corner, and let the melee enemies hit you. The reflected damage will eventually kill them, but until then, they can raise your Block skill.

Melee Skills - Get yourself an unenchanted silver weapon, since silver is a good compromise between light weight and high durability, and can strike any kind of enemy. While you could go beat up on Peryite's followers, I don't recommend this due to the unreported crime glitch. The Deepscorn Hollow prisoner is another option, but requires the Vile-Lair DLC and an upgrade that costs 1750 gold. I recommend creating your own practice dummies out of enemies, and to do that, you're going to use Alchemy. Make a bunch of Damage Fatigue poisons and hit enemies with these until they fall down. Do not add any Damage Health effects, since the point is to keep them alive. Goblin Warlords work well for this, as they have the most HP of any enemy.

Security - In addition to the tip on the Increasing Skills page, the wiki also suggests that you cast a custom Drain Security 100% on Self spell, and then use a very hard lock by hitting auto-attempt repeatedly. To do this though, you either need the Skeleton Key, or to have stocked up on a lot of lockpicks (you'll need at least 6,000). What I prefer to do is get the Skeleton Key first, and while I'm playing through the game, purchase as many lockpicks as possible. This makes it easier to accumulate them, and then when my base skill reaches 60, I stash the Skeleton Key at home and start using up my lockpicks.

Sneak - Who wants to run into a wall for hours on end? Instead, I recommend creating a spell that gives you 100% Chameleon, even for a very short duration. At Journeyman Illusion, you can give it a duration of 6 sec. Go up to one of the NPCs who doesn't mind being pickpocketed, cast the spell, enter sneak mode, and tap the "use" key on them as fast as you can. This is much faster than walking into a wall.


The Hardest:

Athletics - I still hate manually training this skill, because who wants to leave the game running for hours on end while swimming into a corner? I always use trainers for this, and it's typically the first skill I train from the beginning of the game.

Acrobatics - A bigger pain in the ass to train than it was in Morrowind, since there are no longer any Jump spells. The wiki suggests going to a high point like Dive Rock and taking small jumps down the side so that you take a little damage each time. Damaging falls give you 10x the experience of a regular jump, and are less likely to break your keyboard / controller than tapping jump repeatedly under a dock. This is another skill for which I always use trainers.

Marksman - The reason I put this here is that bows have a slower attack rate than melee weapons, and are much more likely to miss. Even if your target is lying on the ground, it's very easy to miss, since you have to aim at their center of gravity or else the game won't count it as a hit. Therefore I recommend using poisons that damage strength or speed, so that your enemy is rendered immobile but remains standing upright. Turn an enemy into a target dummy and fire away. I recommend using a daedric bow, since it's not that heavy, can hit any enemy, and has high durability. You'll need over 12,000 arrows in total to max out this skill, so buy up as much ammo as possible and collect every arrow off of enemy archers. Iron or steel arrows are your best bet, because they're the lightest and cheapest. Note that if you want to recover your arrows, but aren't ready to kill your target dummy, then use an NPC enemy. Paralyze or render them unconscious and you can swipe your arrows off their body.

Mercantile - Selling items one at a time is a time-consuming and frustrating process, since you have to click the item, move the slider, and then confirm the transaction for each one. If you're playing on a PC, I recommend using the Toggleable Quantity Prompt mod, or a similar mod, which lets you sell items one at a time by holding down Ctrl and clicking the stack repeatedly. Otherwise, this will have to be another trainer skill. No, the Fortify Mercantile trick from Morrowind does not work, and you no longer get tons of exp. for making a vendor accept an unfair deal.

Speechcraft - One of the most tedious skills to raise, and also one of the most useless. I only ever use it in the early game before I can create a custom Charm 100% spell. Still, if you want to max it out, I suggest using trainers.


Those latter 5 are the ones that always give me the most trouble. Does anyone have any tips for how to train them, or any of the other skills, more efficiently?

With an archer, I would opt for a much weaker bow. Every skill is raised by the sheer number of hits inflicted, regardless of how powerful or weak it may be. Using a bow that needs more hits to kill a target does a few things: it aids in leveling your skill by increasing the number of shots per target; compels you as a player to adopt particular tactics and a mindset to operate as an archer; and shooting things is ever so much fun.

By the way, I hate that paralyze perk that comes with mastering the Markmsan skill, for a reason you brought up: it's much harder to hit a prone target at long range. It makes me actually dread the moment my character gets 100 in the skill.

I tried that, and was originally going to go with that strategy, except for one problem. Weaker bows would always break on me in the middle of the fight, usually around the time my opponent starts looking like a pincushion. I noticed this problem with iron bows, grummite bows, and everything up to silver. This would force me to run back home to get another bow, or carry multiple copies of the weak bow. Or I would have to kill my opponent to end the fight, or run far enough away to disengage combat so that I could repair my bow.

It's much less of a hassle for me to use a high end bow. That way, I can just keep healing my practice dummy and keep training until I run out of arrows. The base damage difference between iron and daedric is 12 pts, which is only 2 pts on max difficulty, so it doesn't make that much of a difference to me.

Damage Speed poisons are available at apprentice level, and they tend to work better/safer than Damage Strength against many things because they slow before they stop.

For marksmanship w/o alchemy there are a few ways to go.

While out playing normally, find a zombie and simply tap the fire button to lob a 1/3 power arrows at it again and again, do the same with skeletons. You can really boost your skill right away in Vilverin. You can also do this this with painted trolls, the Ahzklan trolls outside of Veyond, and the Horror of Dive Rock, if you can find safe boulders to stand on in each case. Trolls regenerate health, so take 300+ arrows to dive rock or the painted lands (seriously.) Weak bows (e.g.rusty iron) help lower damage, but they may break, esp against the Horror, so carry a back up.

A good place for training bow and melee is Benirus Manor. The ghosts respawn if you walk out into the street and wait an hour. Arrows will start to dissolve after about 13 shots, so stop shooting then and pick up your arrows for 100% recovery. Use either silver or a depleted iron or steel magic bow. This might also work at the ship in the Mouth of the Panther, but I don't know what the reset time is on that one.

You can also train against trolls using Damage Speed poison to stop one, and then tap arrows into it. You have three days before the troll resets (I think) so you can go buy more arrows if you run out. Turn up the difficulty if your bow is doing too much damage. Arrow recovery rate is 50%.

Redguard valley ogres are good for training melee skills, when using damage fatigue poisons to knock them out.

Collecting for alchemy isn't so bad if you concentrate on Shardrock, Shetcomb, Skingrad tomato, Skingrad grape, and Odiil farms, add wild Viper Bugloss to use with carrots and it is quick and easy to collect what you need.

For destruction + armorer, cast corrosion spells against dead guys in milkrock cave.

Always, always, every level, buy lessons for the crap hard skills if you are trying to max out everything.

At Fort Carmala, lure the rats to the door and when you need repair and health, step outside, fix yourself, and go back in. BTW, vamp vs undead is a probability function, so you often get two vamps at the start. You can do the same doorthing with the one rat at Fort Ash. Arvena doesn't like you sneaking around her house.

True. I did a lot of testing with Damage Speed poisons, and discovered a few things. The advantage is that they completely pacify enemies. You'll see enemies put away their weapons and cease all hostility, allowing you to take free shots without being blocked or facing retaliation. The disadvantage is that enemies can still move around, even at zero Speed. They can't run, but they will slowly wander off and make their way back to their starting positions. This may make it harder to find them if you need to leave and come back later. Also, on more than one occasion, I've had an enemy with zero speed draw their weapon, hit me, and then put their weapon away, in retaliation for my hitting them.

Edit: Since damaging the base stats doesn't affect the derived stats of an NPC, there's no need for the other effects. Damage Fatigue alone will suffice.

Another disabler poison I tend to use is Drain Fatigue. At Master Alchemy, use unrefined greenmote to make it. Keep hitting an enemy with this and they'll slump to the ground for about 3 minutes.

I don't think that willpower, agility, and endurance affecty NPCs the same way they do players (i.e. npcs use different equations). You might want to check on that.

According to this page, Fatigue is calculated the same way as for the player character.

Edit: I can confirm now that damaging these statistics alone will not affect the derived attributes, such as fatigue. I tested this by damaging the four attributes, plus fatigue, until the NPC fell down. Then I left and rested for 8 hours. When I came back, the NPC was back up and attacking like normal. Using the console, I checked her stats and her fatigue had come back. Also, strangely enough, she was able to move around like before, despite her strength still being zero.

Now, it's true that damaging an NPC's intelligence will not reduce their magicka, and damaging their strength or endurance will not reduce their HP. You have to attack these derived statistics directly. This does make me wonder if using Damage Intelligence AND Damage Magicka will permanently remove their spellcasting abilities, so I'll have to test it.

Update: No, this doesn't work. I used a poison of Damage Intelligence and Damage Magicka on an enemy conjurer until she could no longer cast spells. Then I ran away to a safe location, waited 4 hours, and came back. She could once again cast spells at me. I used the console to check her stats, and while her intelligence remained at zero, her magicka regenerated normally.

I've edited my previous posts to correct the errors.

Found a quickish way to work on raising restoration. Since you have to actually change the character value of the stat - ie you have to actually heal something, I started trying to harm myself then heal. It's complicated. So I tried this:
1. Remove all your restoration enhancing gear to find out your true stat, then put it back on.
2. Go stand somewhere close to water where you can walk in and back out quickly. I chose the boat launch at A Strange Door.
3. Walk in and drown yourself but don't let yourself die. It took four clicks for me at level 29 to almost die after I ran out of air.
4. Back out quick using keys for me it's S
5. Use Heal Minor wounds repeatedly with block key and cast key pushed simultaneously (for me its alt-c until full health. I didn't run out of Magic.
6. Rinse /repeat

It took me 104 casts to gain each point in restoration but it's the most automated I could get. Hope it helps you.

As mentioned on the wiki, you gain experience in Restoration regardless of whether the spell you cast has any effect on the target or not. You don't need to be injured in order to gain experience from casting Heal Minor Wounds on yourself; you can simply spam-cast the spell on yourself at full health and your Restoration will increase. Saves you from having to repeat steps 1-4 over and over.