At level up, we have attributes and skills that can be increased varying amounts with or without bonuses.

Attributes can go up as much as five points per level, except for luck - which is quite limited.

Skills can go up as much as you want them to, but the smart method is to go in groups of ten total points for each group of three skills associated with a particular attribute.

The skills that drive leveling up are those selected as "MAJOR" skills, and so it is a good idea to spread out those skills through the range of various attributes. This is why there are three times as many skills as attributes, discounting LUCK.

Now, it may seem clear that this limits how many absolute levels you can raise a Player Character, but that isn't necessarily so....

Suppose I have a major skill of conjuration, and it isn't all the way up to 100% yet, but the attribute (Intelligence?) is at the max.

There are potions we can make that will DAMAGE INTELLIGENCE, and apparently this means we can develop the attribute further. When we go to a church or use a restoration potion or the like, if we have raised that attribute while it was damaged, we now have a skill that is ABOVE 100...

This idea fascinates me.

I'm looking for potion ingredients that also damage individual skills, not just attributes. A "DRAIN WHATEVER" potion will not work, the effect is temporary.

Something else I noted too is that you can't use a strictly "DAMAGE X ATTRIBUTE" potion on your char - the damage has to be a secondary effect, otherwise what you have made is a poison that can only be used on weapons.

This is all very puzzling and intrigueing...

AND THERE ARE ONLY SO MANY POTIONS you can use at once, but presumably the damage effect will last...

* You have to use something like this in order to do the Mephala shrine quest - I think it is - if your personality is higher than 20.

There are some creatures and enemies that will also effectively damage attributes and skills, but that isn't a "READY TO HAND" way of going about it.

I think it was Turija who once told me that "Yes, there is a way to do this" and if I wanted to know badly enough just ask...

Well now I'm asking!

It also seems to me that the absolute limit of level ups we can get in a game can also be tinkered with in this way - without installing any mods or console commands to it, which is admittedly the hard way...

But I like to use only what is in the game in its "Vanilla" version.

I noticed late yesterday that I had picked up "Swamp Fever" from a Mudcrab I used to raise light armor with.

It has a lasting effect also, and drains Strength and Endurance by 10

Since my PC is at 100 in all except Personality and luck, I'm working with that.

Whatever I can find, I want to try. This is another "Build Up Everything Before Most of the Quests" game

There is some good information about it on the UESP web site. http://uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Increasing_Attributes. Bottom of that page.

That's interesting...

At some point (I think it was caused by "The NIGHT MOTHERS BLESSING") I managed to raise my SNEAK skill to above 100, and it is permanent, it stays like that.

To take advantage of it though, it means already being at level 100 in sneak at the end of the Dark Brotherhood quest series.

It is a minor upward tweak, but still something.

I may find that I am bashing a brick wall with my skull, but I'm on the lookout for anything at all that goes further, especially if it seems repeatable.

Even small increases, two points or so, can accumulate into something that may turn out useful. But this also predicates building skills and attributes to the max level before such things as the Night mothers Blessing happen - and that means avoiding quests until the char is at full max.

Which is perfectly fine with me! I do a full char build up at the beginnings of games for many reasons, but this is one: If you gain bonuses thereafter as a result of various quests, they will make a skill or attribute more than they would have been elsewise...

If for example I got a bonus to a skill as in above at a lower skill or attrib level, that skill or attrib would (I think) hit 100 and that would be all.

*Not verified, I am not sure that is true

i think everything can be increased to around 255 with a save game editor. there is even one for the xbox 360. the point here is that there is a max to everything.

to help with reaching the normal game limits, going to jail may lower some skills. which means skills that reach 100 maybe lowered and than train again to raise attributes.

Data\OBSE\Plugins\obse_training_fix.dll

The UOP fix tons of bugs (some of them even cause CTD). Disabling it just for 5-10 more skill/attributes increases is a very bad idea. Also, near all attributes and skills above 100 are useless, because the formulas used in the game cap these values at 100. This way, 100 is the same as 255.

I suggest you use http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/34841/? instead, which unlock attributes and skills above 100, and also change the formulas so any value above 100 is meaningful.

I've put about 80 hours into this character over the last month and I've gotten him to 100 athletics by just running around, killing and looting. He is now ready to train athletics to 105 before leveling up to 2. He's gotten over three thousand kills so far and if any "mod" or "patch" thinks it's going to get in the way of him and 255 athletics, he'll kill it too, no problem.

I suppose it's all in the circumstances. I appreciate the advice, but I like to try to keep things as faithful to vanilla as possible (or all hell breaks loose, like it did here with drain and train).

The UOP doesn't block the attributes and skills from increasing and being meaningful above 100. Oblivion already do that by itself.

That UOP dll you removed only prevent the trainers from being tricked with a drain/fortify effect, nothing more. It is meant for you to advance your skill to 100 even with a fortify effect ability: if you have a skill at 95, and an ability gives you a +5 fortify effect, normally the trainers will refuse to train you, as they see a 95+5=100 and prevent your "base" skill from reaching 100+5=105 . As side effect, the drain effect doesn't work too.

What I mean is: you can use any trick you want to increase the skills above 100, but it will only be a waste of time: all values above 100 are only useless numbers for the game, which will still use "100", so increasing your (example) Light Armor from 100 to 255 won't increase your armor rating by a single point.

Athletics and Acrobatics are the only skills which are effective above 100, but I must warn you: having an high athletic and speed with the default Oblivion formula will turn your character into an uncontrollable and unplayable "Road Runner", which will sprint at the speed of light as you tap any movement key.

EVEN WORSE: A limitation in oblivion cause the attributes and skills to reset if they increase past 255 with abilities: if your skill/attributes is near or at 255, and you obtain an ability which increase it above 255 it will go overflow, and will reset to 0. You must either find a way to remove the ability (not possible in most cases, because abilities are permanent) to undo the bug, or rebuild that skill/attribute from scratch.

Installing AV Uncapper you get these:

- You can naturally increase all attributes and skills above 100 without tricks, drain effects and similar. Keep using the skills and keep clicking on the attributes on level up until you reach the limit (the limit is configurable up to 255, but I advise 200, because of the above bug which can't be fixed anyway).

- Fix all formulas used by the game, so increasing all skills above 100 is not a waste of time. 255 and 100 will be 2 different values for the game.

- Allow you to adjust the effectiveness for skills and attributes above 100.

It's from Kyoma's http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/43483/? mod.

Yep, you're right. I just downloaded the latest version of UOP. Sure enough: there it is. It wasn't in the version I had. My apologies for the confusion.

I'm limited to what an XBOX360 can do with the game.

It makes life a bit challenging in Cyrodiil)

I was using Toasters legendary mastery and Skills & Stats mods, I found they worked as advertised but caused the game to crash more often. Might be due to my oddball D2D version of the executable, version is listed as 1.2.0416. In any case the frequent CTD (even before any skills or attributes got up to 100, just having the mod active made the game unstable) made me decide it just wasn't worth the aggravation,

The drain and train is something I've used with my own mod that raises the training sessions per level from 5 to 50, I always thought a limit on training other than money was silly. It does get more expensive for a Breton tho - with 50% resistance to magika the drain skill 100 on self only drains 50 points on a Breton.

OT, Greywolf, love your siggy - I'm a moderator on a trainsim forum, and if people would just remember that not everyone has the same tastes and preferences there would be a lot less arguments on the internet.

Think of it as an opportunity to use your imagination to its fullest.