Anybody trying to find that "right fit" character? Not so easy if you're obsessive-compulsive and hyped up on caffeine, like I am.

After hours of nail-biting deliberation, beer-drinking, about seventeen bags of double-stuffed Oreos, beating up a few old people at Wal-Mart, and a few really nasty bodily functions, here's my take on the whole damn situation.

How to address the http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Efficient_Leveling? (the theory that your character will become less powerful compared to high-leveled monsters if you don't get those +5 attribute bonuses from training the right skills).

Ultimately, I decided that it's not worth the extra time to worry about it. Why?

1) Elder Scrolls games are only fun if they're a challenge, especially Oblivion. You don't really need to level efficiently. Unless you have this crazy craving for that perfect character, it's just not practical. In my opinion, the game's way too easy out of the box, and the "difficulty slider" is anti-effective. So I'm using http://www.oscurogamedesign.com/oscurosoblivionoverhaul-high.html and loving the realism. You gotta be careful and pay attention, to win with this difficulty. No more "awww, it's just a wolf on the road, how cute..." instead... "he's gnawing my reproducer!"

2) An ?ber character's not challenging, other than the time spent clicking a button to train a skill. No one character should have the ability to handle every situation. Hell, if an ogre runs up to my Endurance-low mage and shows me his armpits, I'm running my bare-ass out of there, because it makes more sense that way. I guess I enjoy that bit of roleplaying.

3) I'll spend more time worrying about Efficient Leveling than I will enjoying the game. I found myself sitting in a room clicking "cast" for hours, thinking oh man that +5 is gonna be sweet, while not taking that call from my boss who probably wonders where I am.

So if that's not enough self-justification for ya, let me go further into detail for anybody who's not in a coma by now.

People usually do Efficient Leveling to counter the crappy vanilla Leveling Scale Oblivion suffer from.

As for me. I just use a Leveling Mod like http://www.irisgames.com/KCAS/KCAS%20Manual.html and just play the game, not giving a dam about the +5 Multipliers.

And I use a leveled-list rebalancing mod such as http://www.oscurogamedesign.com/oscurosoblivionoverhaul-high.html and just play the game, not caring in the slightest about +5 multipliers either. If I get them, I get them. If not, then not.

Props for your list of poll choices.

I tried efficient leveling in the beginning. Now I play the way I want to play and don't sweat the multipliers.

What leveling problem?

Level the wrong way ( not getting +5 all the time or leveling up the wrong/passive skill all the time to level up ), the player tend to be underpower compare to the level creatures that spawn in the game as the game progress. Lovely example, Kvatch.

I can't manage to get above 2 or 3 skill points per level, I have been playing this game for a year now. Help please.

Hmm, my rather inefficiently leveled characters have all been handling Kvatch just fine, past level 20.

I can help you, Seti. Send me a PM with the troubles you're having.

Oy, I've had the same problem. What you gotta do is make a carbon-list of what you're planning on doing each level.

I tried using a piece of paper (it's this stuff old people used to use to text each other in real life or something) to keep track of how many I've gotten, so I can get +10 skill increases to get that +5 attribute increase.

Level: __

Attribute to +:_____________

Skills that will increase this Attribute:
____________________
____________________
____________________

Tally of how many I've increased/trained:
______
______
______


....use this for each attribute you want +5 in, then begin the long struggle of increasing Minor attributes to get +10 in each.

It's..........not really worth it, 'swhat I've found out. Matter of fact, you're better off spending the time melting candle wax to make statues of former presidents.

{Edit: Oh, yeah, some people in the Internets aren't from America. You could alternatively create statues of former...uh...Emperors or whatever it is you foreigners do. With your strange ways and your...fornicational deviance.}

What attribute are you trying to get a +5 for? If it's an attribute whose related skills are all in your major 7, then the only way to get a +5 for that attribute is to increase those skills exclusively to get the 10 skill increases to advance a level.

If you've got at least one of the related skills in your misc section, then you can train or manually raise those skills along with your major skill to get a +5. In example, let's say you want to level up endurance. You've got heavy armor as one of your majors. Block and armorer are in your minors. Since you've got two endurance-governed skills in your minors, you can raise whatever majors you want, raise a combination of armorer and/or block by 10 points, and then not only will you likely get some +2 or +3 multipliers (depending on the major skills you leveled), you'll also get a +5 multiplier to endurance by leveling it 10 times, even though you leveled misc skills.

Practically how one play and knowing what skill to use to level up. From what I understated, I do not know how ya play, but what I saying level up the skill wrongly, or too fast for that matter, the game difficulty get a bit ichy and the PC run into much harder foes.

I know. I have done much in this game and have gotten to level 42 on my last character.

<-------this is why it's bad to have three skills that are governed by the same Attribute as Major skills. If you want +5 in that Attribute, you have to level up 10 times with those skills, savvy?

But if you level up 10 times with those skills, you'll level up because they're all Major. You have less control of the situation.

And unfortunately, most of the generic classes you can choose from are like this.



The only Attribute I'd really focus on leveling up is Endurance. I try to get +5 in that every level, just so I've got enough health later on. To do this, just train 10 times with Heavy Armor, Armorer, or Block. Easily done: either find a rat or summon a skeleton to let pound on ya for a while. To train Armorer, I've heard you can create a spell that will ruin your own armor so you can practice repairing it.

Still, as I said before...it doesn't make much sense to have a buff-ass mage anyway, part of the fun is figuring out how to survive *without* those attributes because it's your playstyle.

The problem is, at early levels you don't have enough gold to train these skills from NPC's, and you don't have access to the Arcane University (spell-making, enchanting).

It's really a mess to try and level efficiently. It's...pretty confusing. I recommend giving up.

Mmmmm, beer!

But seriously, I tend to powerlevel endurance pretty religiously due to the wonderful HP gain 'feature' and let the others fall into place. Except for armor/heavy armor I rarely have more than one of each attribute's governed skill set as major so the problem mostly resolves itself. For instance, if I have Mysticism and Conjuration both as minor skills I can get 20 points of intelligence just by bumping them up to Apprentice level (which I need to anyway for soultrap and summoned pets). I just have a focus to my activities for each level, i.e. for one level I mostly cast spells and the next maybe I bash stuff in the face a lot.

Too many polls at one time.