Im a new player and have a quick question about how skill, class etc work. My question regards to archery. I decided to play an Imperial and choose a custom class with strength and Intellect and did not take marksmanship as a major. After about 15 hrs or so I finally tried archery and decided It could suit me seeing in all rpgs, mmo, and such I always play a warrior type and would like to change it up some. My question is can this player still excell at archery if they put the time in to build up marksmanship. As I understand it any race and class can eventually learn to do any combat well correct? Or should I call it a loss on the 15hrs and reroll? I know 15 hrs isnt much to redo but as a 35 year old father thats about 2 weeks for me. Any help would be appreciated. Also by no means do I need to be the absolute most powerfull archer, but as I sit now hitting them with an arrow just pisses them off at best.

The short answer is yes - that character can still excell at marksmanship.

The long answer......

The two significant things about major skills is that they increase more quickly than minor skills and when you get a total of 10 major skill increases (in any combination), you level up. The significant things about leveling up are that you get access to better equipment, but the rest of the world levels up with you, so you face tougher enemies.

Skill is more important than anything else, so if you level up too quickly and your skills lag behind, you'll probably start dying a lot, even with better equipment. You're generally better off to level up relatively slowly, so you've got plenty of time to increase your skills.

Now - since marksman is a minor skill for your character, that means that you can increase it as many times as you like without leveling up. And at this point, you're going to want to do that, since the skill's already lagging behind and if you level up, you're just going to be facing even tougher enemies. Aside from that though, you're actually in a pretty good position, just because you can increase the skill as much as you want without leveling up.

Take a weak bow and weak arrows - iron's probably best - and do a lap of City Isle. If you follow the shore, you'll encounter lots of mudcrabs and not much else. For the time being, don't sneak - you don't want to get a sneak bonus and kill them even faster - the key is to take as much time as you can killing them (you gain experience for each arrow that hits, so the more arrows you can hit with, the more experience you get). If you have other minor skills you want to practice while you're doing it, go ahead, but try not to do anything that will gain experience for any of your major skills, just so that you don't level up - just play pincushion with mudcrabs until you run out of mudcrabs. Then go to the far shore of Lake Rumare and do a lap there, doing the same thing. That should gain you lots of marksman experience with very little risk.

Note though that it will take quite a while to gain experience for marksman as a minor - especially if your specialization isn't stealth. The fastest increasing skills are specialization majors and the slowest are non-specialization minors. So it can be done, and it can be done relatively easily, but it can't be done quickly.

Yes your character can still be an effective Marksman. Here are some ideas:

1. Enchant your bow
2. Use Alchemical Poisons
3. Use Conjuration to summon low-level creatures and shoot them


For other questions about character building and skills, please see the guide in my signature.

You could also look for a Marksman trainer. You can train 5 times every level so if you have the gold that's 5 easy skill increases every level.