Most Difficult Skills to Level up

I personally love leveling Smithing, I don't know why; I just do

For me it would probably be smithing. There is just too much effort for me to put into smithing. I usually just let my skills level up naturally for the most part.

For some reason I always have trouble leveling up Block. I think that I tend to attack more often than I block and I've yet to find a Block trainer outside the Companions, of which I am not a part. I also prefer to let my skills level naturally, rather than pester mudcrabs or low-level bandits into giving me experience. But damn, when I get into a bad situation with a massive foe bearing down on top of me, that skill ends up being real useful.

LongestSkies said:

I agree with you that speech is like GAAAAH!!! But for me pickpocketing is also bad. Basically you have to take until you get caught at lower levels and since you get caught alot you have to keep getting into trouble...

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Pickpocket is real easy.
You should activate the Thief Stone first, then put one point in the Pickpocket tree. Then go to a town, sneak behind someone so the person you want to pickpocket doesn't see you. Then save and steal the gold and other objects that have a 50% or higher chance. Though when you do this at the start of your game, like I did on my Thief, you'll have big problems when fighting.

Eury said:

Pickpocket is real easy.
Though when you do this at the start of your game, like I did on my Thief, you'll have big problems when fighting.

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Thats the thing you have to save more than ever and its not even from combat. I play assassins and not being able to kill is inconvient. I just feel the work to reward is way to steep.

Block is pretty excruciatingly slow. Even if I Block, and bash between every strike, which gets old quick, 2H levels about twice as fast. Fortunately, the perks I like most are 50, and below.

Question for the OP, if LA levels so slow, because you don't get hit often enough, what do you need the LA for? You can save yourself a lot of trouble, and frustration just wearing the armor for the enchantments, and not worry about AR. Wind Walker is kind of nice, that's about it.

I just dont perk my Light Armor skill unless its my skirmisher... then its when im inbetween levels for Archery or 1handed

Pickpocketing. Even on a thief based character you will probably rarely steal items out of someones inventory. Without simply stealing everything from everyone in a major city it seems to crawl. -_-

Smithing

Do you think it is worth spending skill points in smithing to open up Glass (even though I am rockin heavy armor) to help advance smithing ??

why whould you do that?
just focus on the right side of the skill tree

Kobal said:

Smithing

Do you think it is worth spending skill points in smithing to open up Glass (even though I am rockin heavy armor) to help advance smithing ??

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why whould you do that?
just focus on the right side of the skill tree

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The Glass arrows are nice. Also the greatsword is a bit of an upgrade. And forging glass stuff gives much better exp. then say steel or leather. Is kind of a means to open up Ebony.

It's interesting how in this game what one player finds easy to level (skill wise) another player finds impossible. Smithing for me was never a problem on my last character. I had maxed the level out by the time I was about level thirty (although I didn't take every single perk as my char was a heavy armor class). By level 32 I was swimming in riches because Dragons kept attacking nearly every I ventured into; the bones and scales were so abundant that I could have practically ran my own business in crafting and selling Dragon armors.

I never bought any ore (too expensive in early stages and the payout was more or less half of what I paid in). Instead, I hit the mines (always minding to travel with a bare minimum inventory so I didn't get over-encumbered) everywhere. One of my favourites was Kolskegger...my god, SO much gold ore. There's also a few smithys who leave their ingots outside ripe for plucking with no theft penalty.

Anyway, instead of gradually building the skill up, instead, I would dump all the ore into a chest at Breezehome in Whiterun (conveniently next to the Smithy!) and wait until I had a really good abundance of ore, ingots, leathers, etc, then would just drag everything to Warmaidens and run through it all in a few mins. My smithing level went through the roof very quickly (selling the crap off was a different matter, alot of waiting, etc). It was actually the first skill my character maxed out, and this was without a stone to boost the skill gain.

As for the skills I find hard levelling, I'd have to say Pickpocket is one of them. I've tried the 'cheat' of saving game before making the pickpocket attempt, then reloading if I don't quite succeed but it got tedious and boring (I was seeing more loading screen time than game!). 4/5 attempts usually end up in me getting caught and having to reload - I suck as a pickpocket.

Speechcraft is also a fairly boring and tedious skill to level as you can't really track it unless you go to your skill menu (for example, you're talking to NPCs but there isn't an indication bar of the speech skill going up bit by bit the same way you see it going up with alchemy, or smithing, etc). It's also quite tedious on a console selling off stacked items seperately (especially if you've just made a bunch of potions for example, and you have up to 30 in one stack).

Sneak is easy to max if you want to cheat and auto-walk backwards in sneak mode in the room with the kid performing the black sacriment for example. If you're a PS3 user, a hair tie around the left stick and the handle of the control pad works fine to do this (the kid won't notice you and won't catch you as long as you never try to talk to him; after you've spoken to him and taken his contract, he'll go about living, and noticing you again, etc).

I think restoration or speech. I know there is a very easy exploit to level restoration but I still find it takes a very long time to level up even with the exploit. I tried going AFK whilst doing the resto exploit and always ended up coming back to a corpse because the tape kept coming off my trigger! Standing there healing constantly is so incredibly boring and getting resto up without exploits is even more harrowing, it just takes so long, even when you heal after and during every fight.

As for speech, you'll have hard time getting it past 30 without using the exploit even in a 100 hour play through. There simply aren't that many speech checks out there and buying and selling doesn't seem to give much xp at all. If there wasn't an exploit I think many players would complain that the speech skill is quite literally impossible to level to 100!

I love smithing and enchanting, because they seem to be the most useful for my present characters. Alchemy, I find a little boring, but haven't explored it very much; I only just realized if you eat an ingredient, it reveals the magical properties.