I need help choosing my second major attribute. I'm torn between speed and intelligence. I already have agility down as my other major attribute. Anyways, I'm a wood elf, stealth based, and my birthsign is the lover. My major skills are sneak, security, shortblade, marksman, and light armor. My minor skills are alchemy, speechcraft, acrobatics, athletics, and illusion. I also use GCD if that matters.

Or maybe I should choose Luck as my other favorite attribute... I'm opened to any other suggestions as well.

why you don't take INT as a major and the steed as birthsign?

It matters a lot that you have GCD. With those skills as majors/minors you won't get much intelligence even if you select it as your 2nd attribute. With GCD you should really focus your skills into 3 attributes at most if you want any of those attributes to reach a decent level.

Obviously agility is your #1 attribute, but you'll have to decide on the 2nd (and 3rd if you really want to but that's hard) and pick skills that govern those stats. Personally I'd give up some speed and get enchant in for more intelligence, and have illusion as a major.

Hm, off the top of my head I think I'd go with the following:
Majors: Marksman, Sneak, Illusion, Alchemy, Security
Minors: Enchant, Acrobatics, Athletics, Speechcraft, Light Armor

Actually I might take intelligence and speed as my 2 chosen attributes and let the Lover take care of the agility.
Now the problem would be to get Illusion high because it's limited by how much personality you have. So you almost have to focus on that too. In that case you should probably drop speed entirely.

There's an Excel sheet with GCD where you can enter your start values and nex to that the future values so you can see how it turns out.

Thanks! But giving up shortblade seems tough.

And also, can't I just take steed as my birthsign, like mutmekep suggested, and keep my agility? Does it matter which attribute I choose first?

It's always tough to design a character with GCD. It's mostly useful to use with specialist characters rather than with hybrids.

The Steed is fine too, but it really depends on which attributes you want to increase the most. If you want high agility as well then the skills will have to focus on that - by putting them as majors. No it doesn't matter which attribute you choose first.

Then there's Illusion; governed by personality but you want the intelligence instead. Do you want to cast high level spells? If not then your original build is possibly good enough. You just won't be able to train when the skill is as high as or higher than its governing attribute (around 40 I guess). You can level it further simply by using the skill of course.

I can suggest another build in which you keep shortblade and are able to get illusion a bit higher:

Attributes: Agility, Personality
Birthsign: Steed
Majors: Illusion, Speechcraft, Short Blade, Marksman, Security
Minors: Alchemy, Light Armor, Acrobatics, Athletics, Sneak

If you try that excel sheet tha comes with GCD (stat calculator) then you can move everything around a bit. Because after all I don't know which parts of your build you really want to keep.

If you have a chargen mod, it's just as fast to actually build a test character to see what happens; I don't bother with the spreadsheet anymore.

Well anyway, I made the character from my previous post, assuming stealth specialization. And well, it's a good build regarding being able to train to a decent level (maxing out the agility and speed skills and you'll get illusion and speechcraft in the 70s), but magicka is very low (<50 throughout the game I think). Of course there's alchemy to help you out with fortify intelligence potions.

I think this will work for you but it requires some effort in training everything.