Incresing Hand to hand, Blade and Archery

[carol1988]

Can I increase these using the practice dummies in the fighters guild or is there a cap to how much you can increase them there?

Also what about Armorer? What is the best way to increase that?

[Lord Timster]

The practice dummies don't give you any skill XP at all I'm afraid.
You have to hit actual real opponents.

The wiki page has a few ideas about Armorer:
http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Armore ... _Increases

The way I like to do it is to make myself a spell like '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 is great because I don't mind buying 100s of Repair Hammers but finding loads and loads of damaged armour to repair can be a real pain.

[Squalor]

For Armorer, I like to go through a door that leads to outside and auto-saves,,, such as the White Stallion Lodge. Have a bunch of bows and as many arrows as you have bows. Fire a arrow into the ground from each bow, taking them from 100 to 99 (as the link Lord Timster posted said). Go through the door and use the hammer 4 times. If it breaks, reload. If it don't, go through the door again. You can actually go from 5 to 100 Armorer with 1 hammer.

For Blade and Archery, the game counts the number of hits on a living thing, not how much base damage you do like in Skyrim. Use iron daggers, a pocket full so you can work on armorer too. Use iron bow and iron arrows. Conjure a Lvl 25 skeleton and attack that.

[Golden Sinner]

Summon a skeleton warrior and then you can fight it normally. After three hits, it becomes aggressive. Just summon another skeleton and repeat.

[Dark Spark]

Ogres have a weakness to poison and are slow to begin with, so even a weak Damage Speed poison will immobilze one and turn him into an archery target.

[Chicken Slayer]

Some easy ways to raise Marksman
1) Go to Vilverine and work your way up the coast starting at the dock. Turn the difficulty to maximum, hop on a rock, and lob arrows at crabs with partial string draws =1/3 power.
2) Use the ghosts in Benirus mannor. It is the only place where enemies respawn in one day (one hour?) instead of three days so after killing them all, just go out into the street and hit the rest button. Arrows pass through ghosts so you do not lose any arrows if you pick them up after about 13 shots or less--any longer and the arrows start to disolve and disappear.
3) Zombie tapping--This is a way to get high shot counts during natural play. Find a zombie and set up a rhythm darting in and out while plucking the string to lob arrows into it. Some of the dungeons in the Collector quest have several zombies even at level 1. At level 4 and 5, zombies show up in undead dungeons. I can max out Marksman as a major skill by level 8 by doing zombies, and then quest trolls. I train Armorer every level until it hits 75.
4) The Horror of Dive Rock and the Painted Trolls can take as amany arrows as you want to bring, but also bring extra bows because you can shoot the bows to death. You do need Acrobatics skill of at least 25 to hop up on the rocks
5) Two trolls in the Vindasel "pit" will run into a corner below you trying to get you. Shoot at will.
6) Everscamps in Lewawiin.

A good way to raise Armorer in natural play is to visit bandit dungeons and use a weak weapon so each peice of their gear gets damaged in a fight (3-4 hits). Also let each bandit strike you once so their weapon is damaged. And buy lessons every level to get high Endurance bonus and the the damage boost at 75.
You can find on average 25 free hammers in the Iimperial city, Prison, and Waterfront, plus ten hammers at Fort Chalman every three days.

[SeaGtGruff]

You can actually go from 5 to 100 Armorer with 1 hammer.

I, too, like to save and reload when repairing armor or weapons-- as well as when picking locks. It's tedious as heck, but it gets less tedious as your skill improves and you break repair hammers or lockpicks less often. (Yes, I know about The Magic Lockpick That Never Breaks, but what to do before that?)

As far as Hand-to-Hand and Unarmored, in Morrowind and Oblivion I like to remove all of my armor and weapons and go looking for mudcrabs to punch. They can be quite deadly if you're low-level and unskilled, so you do need to be careful at first. But you can also work on Blocking and Restoration at the same time. And once you've mastered Unarmored, you can work on improving Light Armor, Medium Armor, and Heavy Armor the same way, but eventually you'll want to graduate to enemies which are more fierce than the lowly mudcrab. In Morrowind, I like to use cliffracers as punching bags, too-- except that's a really good way to die if your level and skill aren't up to it yet. But there can be immense satisfaction in having a swarm of cliffracers descend upon you and then punching them to death one by one. In Oblivion, ogres can be good punching bags once you're good enough to survive them-- I like to be near a lake so I can run into the water and regenerate while they stand on the shore doing their little finger crooking taunts. You want a piece of me? Then come into this lake and get me! What's that? You're afraid of the water?

[Chicken Slayer]

The tower stone by Pells Gate gives you an open hard lock spell. I have played games without opening 1-3 pin locked treasure chests until I got the skeleton kjey at level 10 and gotten everything I needed.