» Tue Dec 06, 2011 2:37 pm
Actually you level faster if you Don't use Fast Travel. Why? Because then you don't get into all those odd situations where you increase your skills. Besides I found that you level very rapidly in the beginning, as then all the skills you use often added by all the random skills you gain from skill books and the like add up to levels with disturbing pace if you have an appropriate stone activated that fits your play-style. So being level 25 by 40 hours? No prob. Especially if you have skills like Smithing, Enchanting or Alchemy which are in a sense not combat-oriented at all and can be skilled ad infinitum in theory. This of course poses a great danger, but since the practical approach is usually that say around 3 skill gains per level are based on these skills while your main combat skills make up around 5 with another 2 for random skill gains, from skill books and/or Speech which is doomed to be leveled if you want it or not. Add to this the existence of the three speed-skill-stones and the extremely potent Lover's Stone(which works as all three together if I have understood it correctly) and you'll pass level 25 before hitting hour 25 if you are rather effective, so to speak.
But this is not a problem that lingers for long past that. And that's for two reasons: Less reason to not use Fast Travel as you start to explore all the convenient places, and when your main skills reach their top. I easily reached level 25 by the 40 hours mark due to such heavy use of skills and because I found the world too interesting to fast travel through. But not long after level 25, I think it was around level 27, my leveling speed almost flatlined. Why? Because by then my Smithing reached 100, my Two-Hand reached around 90 where it gets slow as hell and my other main skills; Heavy Armor, Restoration & Lockpicking, reached a point where they started to slow in gain. Add to this that I explored so much of what you might call the "common" areas, that is the stretches of land between the larger cities, that my reasons for not using Fast Travel began to diminish as I became more interested in the quests themselves. Now I'm reaching the 80 hours mark, and I'm just level 35. And more than a few of those levels came rather recently as I decided to take up Enchanting which levels with dangerous speed to a maxed-out Smither who no longer need regular armor upgrades(Full Daedric).
Also to disperse the potential comments, I played on Expert until level 25+ where I went over to Master. So maybe I would have been slightly off track with Master as it can be rather difficult, but I would probably still have leveled in a similar fashion. Although I do wonder, wouldn't the higher difficulties mean more skill gains as you need more hits, more tactics through additional skills and most likely healing to defeat your opponents - and so level faster than one playing on Adept or even Novice, where I assume that everything must be relatively one-shotted? After all, I do recall a rather... prolonged... fight with a certain "Elder Dragon" that might have in itself given me almost an entire level up.
