Hey,

I've been looking up topics for oblivion recently, and I cam across some statements saying that picking skills that don't have much to do with my class (e.g. Combat major skills for a mage) helps.

I'm curious: Aside from starting at lvl 0 instead of 25 for the skill, (and not leveling from it of course) is there any other disadvantage to minor skills? Do you miss out on, let's say, some certain action in armourer if you do not select it as a major and make it expert as a minor?

Thanks alot.

No matter what level a particular skill starts at, you will get the related perks from it when you get it up to the appropriate level. The main reason for setting some of your most used skills as minors (and some of your least used as majors) is efficient leveling. If you put all of your most used skills as majors, you can level up too quickly. You could end up with e level 20 character that can't take on a simple Bandit, let alone something nasty like a Will-O-The-Wisp or Daedroth.

Or you can avoid all that nonsense and get yourself a leveling mod that allows you to play from a role playing perspective, and not simply by wasting time with some min/max system. It's really counter intuitive to have to resort to making all your most used skills minors, and is an clear indication of a really bad leveling system. Of course you need to play the game on a PC in order to use a mod.

Well thank you!

I don't intend to use the efficient leveling system, doesn't seem fun. I also don't have this game on PC.

thanks for the insight, I guess I'll do the minor thing, only to be able to focus on unlocking spells before I level to fast and as stated: not be able to defeat a bandit.

Thanks!!

There is another thing to be aware of regarding minor skills.

The game treats experience differently for minors and majors (and for specialization skills-- combat, magic or stealth).

The base amount of experience you need to gain a skill level is for a non-specialization minor.
If the skill is a specialization skill, then you only need 75% as much experience.
If it's a major, then you only need 60% as much experience.
And if it's both a specialization and a major, then you only need 45% as much experience.

So if you drop a skill down to a minor, it'll increase more slowly. That can be a good thing with some skills, but not so good with others, just depending on what your character needs to survive. You can make up for some of that slowing though by choosing the specialization that goes with your important minors, just so that they aren't slowed down too much. And particularly with a hybrid character, if you make most of the skills of one specialization majors and most of the skills of the other minors and choose that specialization, that helps to balance the character out. For instance, for a fighter and thief, you can make the stealth skills majors and the combat skills minors, then pick a combat specialization, and his stealth skills will increase at the 60% rate and his combat skills at the 75% rate, so they'll tend to stay more balanced than they would if some of them were increasing at 45% and the rest at 100%.

The biggest advantage to making most-used skills minors and little-used skills majors is that it slows leveling down enough that you get plenty of opportunity to gain skills at each level, which means that you don't have to mess with efficient leveling at all. Once you get the character set up, you can just go play the game and everything else takes care of itself. There are two disadvantages though-- first, you end up with a set of majors that might have very little to do with the character-- a pure swordsman in heavy armor, for instance, with majors of acrobatics, armorer, destruction, restoration, mysticism, marksman and mercantile. Second, it takes a lot of thought and a lot of trial and error to figure out what works and what doesn't. To me though, it's worth it. At this point, once I get a character set up, I can just play the game and not pay any attention at all to skills increases and they just take care of themselves. There's never any chance that the character's going to find himself gimped at higher levels, just because he's always gotten all the skill increases he'd ever need, all along the way.

One thing that handicaping your majors can work for on vanilla, is that many spells effects are based on levels.
The best example is the command / turn undead effect, and they tend to be capped quite low especially on self made spells.
So putting all the skills you plan on using as minors to keep your level below 30 at level 25 is the best target.
Actually helps you to keep using abillities that would otherwise get nerfed on a character that maxed out his level at over 40, as those spells no longer work.
But truely just play however you want to as its a game open to all play styles, non is better than another imo.

just wanted to point out that if you do use Illusion Command spells, you can make them with short durations, like 4-5 secs, and they work fine. An enemy will continue to fight until it is killed or kills another enemy once it has engaged it. This behavior continues even after the regular duration of spell elapses.
However, with the shorter duration you can increase your level effect much higher and save magicka while also requiring less skill to cast.

Minor skills are not gimped in any way, except that they take longer to skill up.

Mara