This must be a mod, right?

When I Legendary, I go the opposite way. My "combat skills" remain and I legendary my crafting skills. The jump in challenge by "Legendary-ing" my combat skills is to great for me to enjoy the game.

Also, by the time I can Legendary my crafting skills, I'm pretty much done with the game. I find that once I can craft my own armor/weapon and enchant them with 2 enchantments, I don't play much longer.

I agree with many that this is possibly one of the worst the implementations Bethesda has done yet. I can see it for non-moddable consoles, but PCs have access to Mods that someone, somewhere, will take care of if the player wants that feature.

Then again, like many aspects, it is there and no one is not "forced" to use it But it does send messages to players where Bethesda is going wit the series.

Yep, I use Ars Metallica and I always use that mod. Although, I know you can do almost the same thing in vanilla, but it will take a longer time to get the smithing back up to 100.

The jump in combat difficulty after resetting combat skills is, in my eyes, how to keep the game interesting on my way to demi-godhood. My current character is level 56 and has some skills in the 90's. I'm getting close to the point where resets are going to happen. I also have ~460 health and legendary quality glass armor, a life stealing obsidian blade, and over 90 skill in destruction magic. Things are, for the most part, getting easy. If I was playing DiD this character would've died at level 53 to a storm dragon, something added by mods. Mods aside, this character has basically been immortal. Resetting combat skills makes the game very dangerous again, and for me, this keeps things exciting. I know many people hate this system because it can be abused, but for myself who plays legit, I love it.

I made one skill legendary one time... I hated the results, and I would only do it again if the skill in question was lockpicking. Then I could redistribute all the perks (none) that I never put into lockpicking so I could level lockpicking up all over again, and still without perks...

I had to go look, to see what the locksmithing perks are. I don't believe I've ever perked that skill.

The problem with that is that locks only grant xp the first time they are picked. If the area respawns and you go back and pick the lock again, you get no xp. As far as I know there is no fix for this. I've never added up all the locks in the game to find out what the total lockpicking xp is in game, but it is a finite resource. So, it may be very hard, if not impossible to raise your lockpicking skill more than once because you can ruin out of locks to pick. You still get a small amount of xp for breaking a pick, but that would be a sloooow way to level the skill.

The chests in the thieves guild respawn fairly regularly (I don't know if it's based on time or character level), but that's another source of XP.

So even if slow, you can always keep leveling up your lockpicking, though there are much better skills to take that route.

Btw, I usually take the perk for better treasure. Not sure how much of a difference it makes, but I generally have more perks than I really need after a while.

From my point of view, it comes down to a skill in which I don't need perks. Lockpicking is perfect in that regard.Picketpoceting might work nearly as well, as most of the perks are kinda so-so. Once you have some enchanted help, picking pockets requires no skill.

The one skill I always like to make legendary is blocking, because I find it very easy to get back to 100, however it's only really practical to do once my character is a decent level, and has super-awesome-brilliant-ZomG armor, such as Daedric. Basically I just stand in front of a giant and let it hit me... again, and again, and again, and again. The perk points come pretty fast, and if it ever looks as thought the giant is in danger of actually hurting me, a quick Unrelenting Force sends it reeling away, giving me time to heal.

Needless to say this is done in an entirely 'out of character' (OOC) context, and it probably is not a very practical method for non-Warrior-type characters.

That's actually incorrect. Those chests respawn but you don't get any xp for picking them a second time after they have respawned. As stated in the http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Lockpicking:

I would have to dust off my xbox 360 and plug it back in to check but I'm pretty sure there's enough locks to legendary lockpicking once and nearly max the skill again. I know I've done it once with no real negative impact but that was a character I played for a very long time.

That's good to know. I don't make skills legendary, but I do use a mod with a lock bashing script that also makes locks impossible to pick without perks. The bashing script opens the lock so when they respawn, you don't get xp for subsequently picking them. Sometimes I have characters who bash locks but at some point may want to learn to pick them and I would hate to run out of locks because I bashed open too many and be unable to advance the skill.

I might also mention that one caveat to that is having all the dlc's, especially Dragonborn. The quest to recover East Empire Company amulets has a lot of expert locks to open. I'm also pretty thorough when exploring ruins of any kind. It takes a ton of lockpicking to get the skill back up to high levels a second time.

The only reason i use the Legendary system is to access some parts of the game available only for high level characters

I use the Alteration skill as it's really easy to get it back to 100.

That's a good point. However, I usually set my character's stats at 150 Health, 150 Stamina, and the rest in Magicka. Going over 200 health makes the combat boring for me.

What really bugs me is that I can't, for the life of me, max out ANY defensive skills (light or heavy armor or the school with the "skins" in it). I have yet to get an armor skill above 60-ish! I've even tried standing in front of mudcrabs with my healing spell in hand and just letting them whack at me!

These steps work for all skills:

1. Avoid skill books for a skill until it's at 90.

2. Get Scholars's Insight from the black book 'The Winds of Change'.

3. Use trainers to get a skill to 90.

4. Get the five skill books for a skill to get it to 100.

It depends on the skill.


I made one handed legendary, as it was my character's main skill, and I had really strong smithed weapons so I put the first two perks back into it for increased damage, and because I had strong weapons and still did good damage, it took me about half an hour to get one handed back to 60, and then started to slow up after that.


I imagine something like alchemy would be a major pain to get to 100again because of how slow it is to increase (I've never got alchemy to 100 in my over 2500 hours playing skyrim and my 30+ different characters, because to me it's way too much grinding).

Alchemy skill rise is dependent on the value of the potion you make. Make very expensive multi-function potions, and the skill rises very quickly.