You can attack your Atronach, raising both your weapon and conjuration skill (I assume this would also work for Destruction spells) This is a broken relic from Oblivion. The player should not be able to level this way. I love Skyrim but just the knowledge that you can do it cheapens the experience.

Conjuration never levels up outside combat situations. Meaning you will never level up your Conjuration that way, only whatever skill you use to attack it.

There are cheap ways to level many of the skills, it doesn't mean you have to use them.

Yes it does, just nowhere near as fast as the combat skill you use to kill the Atronach.

Messing about, I tried this with my cast familar spell after rolling a Breton Mage in the intro area. In 30 minutes, I got my Destruction, and One-handed up to 50 or so, and my conjuration to 35 doing it. It's a well-known exploit that has been around in previous games... I actually thought it had been 'fixed' but obviously not.

Why though? It's like training you would do in real life. You get better by practising.


In Oblivion I used to use the everscamps for this purpose.

I killed a bandit, looted his body, used raise dead on him and attacked him 3 times with a punch, causing him to turn against me. Each time he hits me my conjuration and heavy armor raises a bit. Affer he turns to dust i raise another nvde bandit and repeat. I went from conjuration level 25 to 41 in a few minutes this way, but my armor raised much slower.

My mistake then. Still, seems negligible if you ask me. Skyrim is big and VAST enough to offer you all the grinding your heart desires. I see no point in that arbitrary 'training' but I do make use of some trainers to gain that extra level here and there.

It might not be necessary, but it sure doesn't hurt. With Oblivion I'd spend time conjuring and whatnot just for the practice.

Yeah and doesn't it spoil your game? You should gain skill levels by effecting change on the world, not repetitive casting. Conjuration was changed to only increase in combat, so surely this is unintended/oversight... Bethesda???

You can also soul trap dead bodies for easy leveling.

Your pet goes hostile after a few hits and you are "in combat". You can level both conjuration and a weapon skill with this approach. You guys are also using the wrong conjuration skill. Try using bound weapons if you want to do it this way. As others have said though, the fastest way to level conjuration is just casting soul trap again and again on a corpse. A stupid exploit, but it's there.

Not true. You can spam soul trap on a corpse to get to 100 conjuring in 10 minutes.

how would it spoil the game? to train a skill you have to use it (summoning deadra), training by summoning deadra over and over was in all the past games, the only thing that is different is you get experiance by having it fight (which is much closer to ruining the game imo, since conjuration is the act of pulling a deadra from oblivion, not sending it into battle)

In real life if you could summon monsters and you attacked them you would be training when you think about it. So I don't think it's broken, but realistic

Why wouldn't you gain experience from beating the beast? Where it came from is irrelevant as long as it fights back. Fights back is the key. Never tried this so I don't know.

i have to agree with the voice of reason conjuration is about summoning something not killing things with monsters you summoned, otherwise you should get xp for scrolls that summon monsters, if you dont like getting xp for summoning something outside of combat dont summon something outside of combat
you should get xp for summoning something for no reason, maybe not xp for killing it, but just spam summoning you should still get xp, so no combat xp for summoned monsters but xp just for summoning

Here is another boring way:

Find a master trainer, train, pickpocket, train, pickpocket, fail, reload, pickpocket, train etc... AND HERE I AM IN WHITERUN WITH 90 IN PICKPOCKET AND 50 IN ONE HANDED... and still cant fight due to zero armor... unless i hype it too

works even better if it's a companion (not the guild some1 who follows you)
like Aela can teach archery and you can just take the money back by trading with her XD

not sure the pickpocketing would be a bug though (or the trading, though it makes it a bit too easy)
makes sense you can steal back money after giving it

I don't mind leveling skills that way. It makes sense, no? Summon a practice monster that you can banish. Same experience as fighting a real monster, but with the ability to banish it.