Oblivion levels

[Piano Dave]

Hi had a quick question for experienced Oblivion players. My character is level 23 and I've been playing for some time. At the moment it's a Mage class and nearly all of the magic skills have been increased to a high level including 100 in conjuration. What I have not done however is get training for other minor skills eg. light armour going through the game. I feel I have missed out and I'm thinking of restarting to get these skills higher. Do you think this is necessary? Should I frustrate myself by having to start again or just go on as I am and hope for the best? Thanks for all your advice!

Dave.

[legoless]

You can train them on your old character, it just might be a little grind-intensive if you don't want to suck.

[Dark Spark]

My prescription for skill choice and leveling style is to choose major skills that define the character, but to spend the early stages of the game pushing the minor skills more than the majors, sort of dabbling around with "cross training". Later, as levelling up kind of slows along the minor skills, you advance in level by playing your character according to their true nature by focusing on the major skills.

[Chicken Slayer]

If you aren't going to wear light armor (or fight with a mace, or block with a shield, etc.) it doesn't matter to your game unless you want to build the associated Attributes. If you do want to build the associated attributes look into the information on efficient leveling. There is no reason to start over to do this unless you find yourself in a hole, so to speak, limited by your weaknesses. There are a lot of pseudo-cheats to help. You can knock out an ogre with damage fatigue potions and then wail away on it with some weak weapons and hand to hand to build up 10 pts in strength for several levels; go into Fort Carmala with armor suits and a shield and let rats attack you to build up Speed (light armor), and Endurance (Heavy Armor and Block); jump down Dive Rock repeatedly to build Acrobatics; pick pocket the CHUDS in Anga at high speed to build up Sneak, etc.

[Piano Dave]

Thanks for your advice. I am actually wearing light armour but every time I get attacked the skill level goes up. I'm at the point in the game to get glass armour (light armour) and this is found on most enemies in dungeons if I kill them so there's no need to worry about forking out thousands to have the armour repaired. I'm going very well with my magic skills and finding it easy to kill enemies. Also I've done so many quests and gone so far in the game it would be a shame to have to restart. So what I'm thinking here is I won't need these minor skills apart from security which is up a fair bit and light armour. All my magic skills are up quite high. Do you think I do need to restart with the intention of seeing a trainer five times for every level that you are or just leave it knowing I'm going well and able to defeat enemies? Thanks.

[Cassandra]

As long as you have the skills you need to get through the game, I don't see why you'd need to restart. I mean, in my opinion, there's no point in leveling up skills that you aren't going to use. And if you've got high levels in your magic skills, you can always use spells where you minor skills don't cut it (unlock instead of security, charm instead of speechcraft, shield instead of armor, etc.).

If you feel like you're missing out by not using all the skills, once you're done with this character, you could always start another playthrough with a different playstyle.

[legoless]

Security shouldn't be a problem if you get the Skeleton Key.

[Chicken Slayer]

Trainers are only really useful for certain hard to build skills. I use them first for Armorer to get it to 50-75 a.s.a.p. and to help build Endurance and let me repair magical equipment, and then I use trainers for whatever skill or attribute I am building up that is tedious. Light armor is easy to build using the rats in Fort Carmala (get attacked, step out the front door, repair, rest, and reenter). You should never need to use a trainer for light or heavy armor.

A mage should prefer shield-enchanted clothing, since it doesn't need to be repaired, and lets you cast spells at 100% effectiveness. Transcendant sigil stones with Shock shield, Fire shield and Frost shield, each at 25% are better than using grand soul gems at an altar. A mage also has the ability to cast shield spells and drink powerful shield potions.

Here is my trainer schedule for playing a custom stealth archer. A mage is not much different (ranged arrows vs ranged spells)

Make money during level 1, earn sleep icon, do not sleep>>>fix all collected armor and then pay for Armorer lessons--minor skill (this gets me most or all of by +5 Endurance bonus)
repeat for level 2,3,4,5,6,7 until Armorer is at 75 to give my bow a power boost. I wear some heavy armor or do some Blocking to make up the rest of my Endurance points. A mage may only want to take Armorer to 50. Hint: by using Conjuration insted of Destruction you can get enough damaged armor off of enemies to get Armoerer to 50.

Also during those levels I spam minor weapon skills to build Strength (hit weak enemies with weak weapons a lot of times). The skills get tedious to build around the time I have Armorer to 75 and so I start buying lessons for the skill with highest points and playing/spamming the skills with the lowest points.

Lessons during mid and upper levels usually go towards topping off some major skills that are getting tedious to build.

If you work on the Collector quest at the start of the game, the Varla and Welkynd stones plus the statues will pay for all lessons until valuable elven weapons show up on enemies. Also, concentrate on bandit caves early on, followed by Marauder caves, to get plenty of damaged armor to repair for your Armorer skill and Endurance.

[Golden Sinner]

People have played the game with very low skills, so I wouldn't start over just to redo that. With 100 in Conjuration, just summon a Skeleton and use it as a punching bag. That way, you don't have to go anywhere special. Iron weapons should allow you to max all of those skills. Let the skeleton beat on you to max your Armor skills. Then use Restoration and Armorer to set up the next lesson. You can also make your character invisible and Sneak around the skeleton. Summon a lich or skeleton champion and then disintegrate their weapon while invisible. The creature will discard its ruined staff/claymore and these will remain for your use when the creature's spell duration expires. If you do this indoors, the weapons are marked as stolen, so you can fence them to gain credit as a thief. I use the sale of these to pay for training in Mercantile or Athletics. My current character has 8 Expert skills and the rest Master. Good luck!

[Piano Dave]

Thanks all for your valuable help with this problem. I will not start over would be quite frustrating as I've done this before. I'm sure with your tips I can get there but feeling very confident anyway as a mage class to have what I need to blast away the enemies and win the game. Must get the skeleton key though and I do find it frustrating having sneak so low because every time I try and pickpocket a sleeping person they wake up and I get caught. Any way of increasing sneak so you can pickpocket a bit easier?

[Golden Sinner]

Summon a skeleton.
Cast invisibility on self.
Enter sneak mode.
Sneak around the skeleton.

[Lord Timster]

Re: increasing sneak -

If you enjoy 'stealth' gameplay you could challenge yourself to clear* dungeons without being detected - perhaps even using 'Touch' spells only. This way you still get to actually play the game while boosting your skills. If your Destruction is maxed out and Magicka is high enough you can one-shot most enemies with Touch spells pretty easily (at least on level 20-30 you can). Personally I found this so much fun all my Oblivion characters since about the 3rd play-through have been 'Stealth Sorcerer' builds...
* either clear of enemies or just clear of loot.

If you just want to grind asap then I go up the stairs in some of the Inns in the Imperial City (so that you are out of sight but still within earshot of people downstairs) then go into stealth and just walk towards/at/into the door or wall for ten minutes. You can read a book or something while you're doing this.

tbh you could just play the game using sneak mode as much as possible, like to scope out the enemy or get into a good combat position - it'll go up by itself.

Cheers

[Chicken Slayer]

For Sneak, the denizens in Anga (Namira's shrine Quest) do not mind if you pickpocket them in the dark, so if you tap buttons as fast as you can you rack up sneak points more quickly than any other way.

[Piano Dave]

I have yet to find the invisibility spell. I guess if you explore all the towns and go to the mages guild you might learn it from somebody. Just wondering also the spells like "fortify magicka" or "drain skill - security" what do these actually do? There are so many different spells I would find most of them not of much use in comparison to the ones that do damage or heal or summon. Cheers.

[Cassandra]

The only place I remember getting an invisibility spell is from the Dark Brotherhood. Pretty sure that you can get them from the Bravil Mages Guild and Arcane University, too, though.

If you're ever wondering about spell effects, you can always look here.

[Chicken Slayer]

You can get an invisibility spell at the Bravil mage guild from Ita Rienus in the basement. She only comes upstairs around lunchtime for non members. You need 50 Illusion points to use the spell. This fits with my major-minor skill strategy for someone like a custom assassin. Fight everything with no sneak blade (major skill) in dungeons using starlight spell (illusion minor skill) until Blade is 100 (about 8 levels) and by then the enemies will start getting dangerous and you can start sneaking (major skill) and go invisible assassin (Illusion probably at 50 now from all the starlight) for repeated 6x sneak attacks with maximal blade damage.

[Lord Timster]

Fortify Magicka increases your maximum Magicka - I use that a lot with enchantments on clothing. Deck yourself out in a load of those and be prepared for Destruction 100 spells that do ridiculous amounts of damage.

Drain Skill temporarily lowers the skill on its target. Can be useful for grinding skills. iirc I use one that's Drain Skill: Armorer on Self 80 points for 3 seconds or something. That means I break Repair Hammers much more often and take much longer to repair things - which from a skill grinding perspective suits me fine because I don't mind buying 100s of Repair Hammers but finding loads and loads of damaged armour to repair is a real pain.

[Chicken Slayer]

Drain skill spells are also good for lowering the cost of trainer lessons