Some players regard the stock classes as garbage. It's true that many of the standard classes seem terribly built. But nonetheless there is something there for everybody. After playing a custom built character, a stock Assassin and a stock Thief, I find I actually like the stock classes very well.

So what is your favorite stock class, and why?

I use the Assassin Class whenever I play an evil character. It just has all of the skills I use.

Same deal with Mage class. I just use Alchemy sparingly so as not to level up too fast.

I need to create a custom class whenever I play a fighter-based character though. None of the combat classes really fit my needs.

I generally enjoy the stock classes more than custom classes. Agent, Mage, Bard and Nightblade are all pretty awesome in my opinion.

I want to try out Healer and Pilgrim soon, they look interesting.

I had an idea for a stock Healer who completes the Dark Brotherhood questline with a poison dagger. Both the Healer and Pilgrim have their possibilities to be sure.

The stock classes are only bad if you want a very specific set of skills that none of them provides or if you want to engage in efficient leveling. But efficient leveling is actually much less effective than many people believe because high skills are much more important than high attributes. And any class can be good if you simply strongly focus on developing 2-3 of it's major skills (I like to call these your primary skills) and only use the remaining 4-5 major skills as backup.

There are a few classes that have weird skill selections though. For example why the bloody hell do Healers have Destruction as a major skill? Destruction is the very anti-thesis of healing, which judging by the name is what this class should be all about. It's not like they actually need it either since they already have both Restoration (Absorb Health) and Illusion (mind control, stealthy spells). And Nightblades are supposed to combine magic with stealth, but they have neither Illusion nor Sneak as a major skill.

Those two are the worst (they feel so wrong I couldn't play them) but there are a few more that strike me as odd. I don't understand why Knights have Illusion as a major skill. If they must have a magic skill Restoration would have been more fitting. I would have also considered Restoration to be more fitting for a Monk than Marksman and I wonder why Acrobats don't have Athletics. But these are just a little weird and I find the classes still fit their theme well enough.

I've only played one character with a standard class until so far and that way my first character ever. He was a Breton Spellsword with the Mage birthsign and he rocked. I orignaly intended to play a custom knightly class but then I discovered that Spellsword had almost exactly the same skill (the only difference was Destruction instead of Marksman) so I decided to go with that instead. It proved to be a good choice because Destruction is a much more powerful skill than Marksman and it was I think the second skill I maxed (the first was of course Alchemy).

I never play stock classes, i don't know why, but i like fiddling around with my major skills. I am not doing efficient leveling; at least not on purpose.

Spellsword. My first and favorite character is an Imperial Spellsword. She did level up very quickly, but being born under the sign of the Warrior helped with staying alive. Looking at her stats, I see that many of her minor skills are nearly untouched.

Assassin, Bard, and Spellsword are all decent builds. The mage classes (Mage, Sorcerer) are imbalanced for leveling, but that's okay because mages tend to get overpowered anyway.

All of the fighter builds share a fatal flaw, which is probably the main reason Oblivion's leveling system comes under so much criticism: All three Strength skills (Blade, Bunt, Hand-to-Hand) are majors, which means that the primary fighter attribute, Strength, will not level well. You can get around this with suitable applications of Alchemy, but it is a kind of strange thing that all of those classes (Warrior, Archer, Barbarian, Knight, Crusader) share that same characteristic. It's as if Bethesda had intentionally sabotaged those classes.

The Agent is the closest stock class to my mystic archer, but would be a mess to level as far as I'm concerned. Sneak as a major skill is just the first showstopper with that class for me.

Yes, Sneak levels very fast if you use it all the time. Most of my characters (before I went to an alternate start mod) managed to level Sneak to Apprentice in the tutorial dungeon, just by sneaking up on rats. Two of the rats you meet near the beginning are non-aggressive, and if you "herd" them ahead of you, while sneaking, they train your sneak skill for you.

Yes, I've found that once the royal party leaves your cell, you can train sneak to your heart's content right in your cell against that nasty Dunmer across the passageway. :foodndrink: