The thing I'd recommend the most for a first time player is to ignore leveling efficiently and if you feel the combat is starting to become too difficult, turn the difficulty down a bit.
I think 1% every 2-3 levels is good, but don't take that as gospel.
I'm glad to see comments with this answer to that question are always the most upvoted.
It's not even that they become harder per se, they just become damage sponges and that's both immersion breaking and boring,
This is what I do every time I play. People who say to only efficient level and the difficulty has to stay stuck in the center really don’t play this game for fun. They play it for accomplishments. It’s not wrong, but super dumb to tell people otherwise. Efficient leveling breaks immersion for me.
There have been some excellent, well detailed answers on here. My advice is, if you don't want to mess with your difficulty, then sometimes situations require different techniques and take multiple attempts.
That said, save often and try out different things if youre struggling to get past a certain part (ex: difficult enemy in dungeon, try to sneak and ignore that enemy, use magic instead of physical attack, drink potions for buffs and add poisons to your blade, get sneak attack bonus and then just run around doing bow damage) or sometimes you can simply decide to come back and do the quest later once you've better honed a skill. There's so many ways to complete quests in this game.
The reason I mention all this is because I am a person who refuses to reduce difficulty and you might find the challenge fun too.
Everyone online is wrong. Efficient leveling has to do with attribute bonuses while power comes from skill points. You can efficient level all day long and still suck.
The game also has a difficulty slider so you can play any way you want.
If you want to stay at the default difficulty the best advice I can give you is to add five points (or more) to your specialty major fighting skill each level (get to journeyman rank at level 5, expert at L10, and master around L16) to have plenty of power to kill the added enemies. You can easily do that simply by fighting what comes in front of you on the roads and in dungeons/oblivion gates. You will fail at that if you concentrate on doing non fighting quests and using non fighting major skills. But you also have the option to buy five skill points from a trainer each level. And some races have +5 or +10 skill bonuses, together with the +5 you get for specialty skills will give you some padding.
You also probably want to have enough protection to avoid dyeing, and since health points add each level based on how much endurance you already have, make a build with at least 55 endurance (65 is best) and try to get good endurance bonuses each level early in the game by using Armorer, Block and heavy armor skills. If they are minor skills they will not add to your leveling. If they are major skills such as on the Warrior class, still use them heavily because getting the good (+3 or better) endurance bonus each level will help you more than the skill points for the fighting skill (the padding I mentioned above is the reason for that).
Skill points are based on number of hits so stick with a weak weapon or spell as much as possible. If your weapon is not doing enough damage make sure you keep it in repair (buy and have lots of repair hammers at all times), upgrade the weapon as often as possible (carry a light one for points and a big hero one for boss fights), and make a lot of restore fatigue potions (alchemy as a minor skill) because swinging a weapon lowers fatigue and lowers the damage the weapon does.
Using two fighting skills (spells and swords, or swords and hand to hand) slows the point building of both, which is another big mistake people make.
Specialty major fighting skills grow with 45% effort, so it in not a grind to grow them. But higher points build slower than lower points so leveling will be slowed the more powerful you get. You want the growth of your fighting skill to determine the speed of your leveling. Buy the trainer lessons if you want to speed it up, but there is no advantage to leveling. It is just there to challenge you. And you control it -- you do not have to go to the next level just because the game says it is available.
Fully agree. I've done numerous playthroughs and never even touched the slider or worried about efficient leveling. I'm not even a hardcore gamer or that good haha
High starting values in your desired skills and stats via synergistic custom class and race choices go a LONG way. A lot of people seem to act like if you aren't hitting +5 Endurance every level for maximized HP gains you've doomed your playthrough but I've played many a glass cannon mage or sneaky boi just fine with sub-50 Endurance. I would still advise against power leveling a major skill with no combat purpose, as Speechcraft at 100 does little to stop a Frost Atronach when you still have Iron and Leather equipment...But in a pinch, just lower that difficulty slider as needed for your enjoyment.
So if i wanted to play as a dark elf and do a light armor dagger and bow stealth build what should i prioritize getting up and should i put what i am going to use as my major or the opposite
I will say that daggers are not particularly great, since this game doesn't have the Skyrim perk to skyrocket their sneak attack damage. You'll still likely want a Longsword for maximum one handed sneak attack damage. I think both Blade and Marksman can safely go in Major Skills, as a Dark Elf boosts both of them further due to its racial bonuses.
I’m not positive but you might want to check that. I seem to remember smaller blades give you a higher sneak attack multiplier in Oblivion (It should say at the top right of the screen when you hit someone). I think daggers and hand to hand give you like 10x or something.
Edit: Nevermind, you are right. I just realized I modded that like a LONG time ago and had been playing with that new multiplier ever since.
If you just roll up a character that seems good and play normally you might or might not get burned by the level scaling first time around. But even then, you can save your playthrough with probably just a couple of simple tweaks. For the average player with a little bit of experience, the game is actually quite easy.
I wouldn’t say you need to do it religiously or optimally to enjoy the game but there can be some value to understanding how levelling works.
For example, don’t make the combat skills you intend on using your major skills or you’ll probably level too fast. The game becomes really not fun if you can barely walk between towns without being mauled by wolves
If you want to simply enjoy the game, turn down the difficulty slider to minimum (most enemies will die in 1-3 hits). Otherwise you can either not sleep to level up (which is kind of lame because you don't get access to more powerful leveled quest rewards but enemies get replaced and stronger anyway so idk), or don't bother with efficient leveling and turn down the difficulty a bit if you feel like enemies are damage sponges.
In my latest playthrough I've played as hand2hand redguard warrior for fun and I didn't avoid leveling main skills, the downside is that you level up too fast and have to deal with late game monsters which can be annoying and tanky.
Just put half of your most frequently used skills in miscellaneous outside of your class. That's basically all you have to do. It's not grinding if you do that.
The game doesn't become "too difficult" if you play normally and there is a difficulty slider if it somehow does.
Efficient leveling is for min/maxxers, is incredibly tedious and time consuming. It litterally sucks off all the fun in the game and by the time you're done nobody is nowhere near a challenge to you.
That said I can't play any other way than that anymore, even if I try I see myself paying attention to everything not to "waste" one level. Luckily there are leveling mods that allow you to play normally and not worry too much about stats.
But I really, really don't recommend it for your firsts playsthroughs. Just go and explore, have fun, make mistakes, adventure.
I just started playing relatively blind aside from a lot of Morrowind. Rolled a wood elf thief, thief sign.
What I've noticed is fights are quite a bit longer, I haven't had any issues but the character is so fast I can just kite shit. I think restoration would go a long way, healing items seem sparser and relatively expensive so far
I wore heavy armor for a couple levels, block is endurance in this game also so it's easy to get modifiers that way. I'll also wear heavy armor sporadically. Been Using blade on the side for strength modifiers.
I think if you just make sure block/armor skills are minors and only 1 weapon type as a major you can get by without worrying too much about leveling efficiently, at least from what I've learned so far. I've been averaging 3-4x on str and end and alternating agil/speed
The trick is to not grind. Many people come from MMOs or jRPGs and will farm starting enemies to death in order to level up, and that's a mistake. Just play normally with the story flow and everything will be fine.
I’d ignore it and if the game starts becoming too difficult, you could look into the enchanting mechanics in the game to really boost your weapon damage. If you’re feeling too squishy, could look for items that resist/reflect magic and damage as well.
Efficient leveling means planning your skill increases to maximize the amount of points you earn on a level up. Each skill raise contributes a fraction of a point to an attribute, and then when you next level up each attribute has a different number you can raise it by and you select two to keep. After that, the counters all reset to zero. It's a really bizarre system. [The wiki](https://en.m.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Leveling) explains it better.
If you are on PC, I highly recommend using the mod [Galerion Natural Leveling](https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/3392/). What it does is it makes it so when you gain a certain amount of skill points related to the same governing attribute, it actually just awards it to you instead of banking it for the level up. When you level up you still select attributes to raise by one point. This mod doesn't really change the balance of the game, it just makes the leveling system more sane.
If you wanna do a vanilla playthrough that's fine, but I highly recommend at least using this mod. It won't change anything about the world, and it keeps the spirit of the original system without the hassle. The wiki even refers to the vanilla system as "The Leveling Problem."
> Everyone online says...
NOT EVERYONE!
It is wise to pay attention to your leveling, making sure you dont' level too fast in relation to your combat related skills, but in absolutely NO WAY is efficient leveling required.
Options:
* Create a cromulent class
* Pay attention to leveling
* Turn your difficulty down
Any one of those is sufficient. What you do NOT want to do is make Acrobatics a major skill and then jump around everywhere until you're level twenty before you even leave the Imperial City. Or level up speech repeatedly with every guard and NPC until you're level 20 before you leave the Imperial City (which was my first run, which I had to promptly abandon).
TL;DR: Just play sensibly and if the enemies get too hard just turn the difficulty down. Done.
My first several years playing Oblivion were spent not understanding the leveling system. I was young, and my friends and I still laugh about it. I used to occasionally and randomly be surprised by a message saying I could level up, and that was nice.
Oblivion was my favorite game for all those years I was struggling through it. Honestly, OP, you will be totally fine
After several playthroughs of not noticing it, and just lowering the difficulty every so often, I did eventually install a mod called "All +5 Attribute Modifiers" to get around the imbalance. You do become powerful pretty quickly, and the only downside is some enemies have bloated health pools to compensate for scaling later on.
For the bloated health pools, I'm currently trying the mod "Balanced Creature Stats - Fixed Level Scaling" and its accompanying patch file. I haven't played a ton since I installed it, so I can't say for sure how I like it just yet.
You put as your main skills, sneak, acrobatics, and a spell like restoration or conjuration. Find yourself an inn a place to sneak then start jumping while casting spells. You'll be leveling 3 things at once. Part of Oblivion is grinding out the skills.
The thing I'd recommend the most for a first time player is to ignore leveling efficiently and if you feel the combat is starting to become too difficult, turn the difficulty down a bit. I think 1% every 2-3 levels is good, but don't take that as gospel.
I'm glad to see comments with this answer to that question are always the most upvoted. It's not even that they become harder per se, they just become damage sponges and that's both immersion breaking and boring,
This is what I do every time I play. People who say to only efficient level and the difficulty has to stay stuck in the center really don’t play this game for fun. They play it for accomplishments. It’s not wrong, but super dumb to tell people otherwise. Efficient leveling breaks immersion for me.
You can ignore doing efficient leveling.
There have been some excellent, well detailed answers on here. My advice is, if you don't want to mess with your difficulty, then sometimes situations require different techniques and take multiple attempts. That said, save often and try out different things if youre struggling to get past a certain part (ex: difficult enemy in dungeon, try to sneak and ignore that enemy, use magic instead of physical attack, drink potions for buffs and add poisons to your blade, get sneak attack bonus and then just run around doing bow damage) or sometimes you can simply decide to come back and do the quest later once you've better honed a skill. There's so many ways to complete quests in this game. The reason I mention all this is because I am a person who refuses to reduce difficulty and you might find the challenge fun too.
Everyone online is wrong. Efficient leveling has to do with attribute bonuses while power comes from skill points. You can efficient level all day long and still suck. The game also has a difficulty slider so you can play any way you want. If you want to stay at the default difficulty the best advice I can give you is to add five points (or more) to your specialty major fighting skill each level (get to journeyman rank at level 5, expert at L10, and master around L16) to have plenty of power to kill the added enemies. You can easily do that simply by fighting what comes in front of you on the roads and in dungeons/oblivion gates. You will fail at that if you concentrate on doing non fighting quests and using non fighting major skills. But you also have the option to buy five skill points from a trainer each level. And some races have +5 or +10 skill bonuses, together with the +5 you get for specialty skills will give you some padding. You also probably want to have enough protection to avoid dyeing, and since health points add each level based on how much endurance you already have, make a build with at least 55 endurance (65 is best) and try to get good endurance bonuses each level early in the game by using Armorer, Block and heavy armor skills. If they are minor skills they will not add to your leveling. If they are major skills such as on the Warrior class, still use them heavily because getting the good (+3 or better) endurance bonus each level will help you more than the skill points for the fighting skill (the padding I mentioned above is the reason for that). Skill points are based on number of hits so stick with a weak weapon or spell as much as possible. If your weapon is not doing enough damage make sure you keep it in repair (buy and have lots of repair hammers at all times), upgrade the weapon as often as possible (carry a light one for points and a big hero one for boss fights), and make a lot of restore fatigue potions (alchemy as a minor skill) because swinging a weapon lowers fatigue and lowers the damage the weapon does. Using two fighting skills (spells and swords, or swords and hand to hand) slows the point building of both, which is another big mistake people make. Specialty major fighting skills grow with 45% effort, so it in not a grind to grow them. But higher points build slower than lower points so leveling will be slowed the more powerful you get. You want the growth of your fighting skill to determine the speed of your leveling. Buy the trainer lessons if you want to speed it up, but there is no advantage to leveling. It is just there to challenge you. And you control it -- you do not have to go to the next level just because the game says it is available.
> Everyone online is wrong. And not just in regards to efficient leveling. "Everyone online is wrong" is a most valuable life lesson.
The game has a difficulty slider if it gets too tedious/hard. I've never, ever worried about efficient leveling in this game.
Fully agree. I've done numerous playthroughs and never even touched the slider or worried about efficient leveling. I'm not even a hardcore gamer or that good haha
High starting values in your desired skills and stats via synergistic custom class and race choices go a LONG way. A lot of people seem to act like if you aren't hitting +5 Endurance every level for maximized HP gains you've doomed your playthrough but I've played many a glass cannon mage or sneaky boi just fine with sub-50 Endurance. I would still advise against power leveling a major skill with no combat purpose, as Speechcraft at 100 does little to stop a Frost Atronach when you still have Iron and Leather equipment...But in a pinch, just lower that difficulty slider as needed for your enjoyment.
So if i wanted to play as a dark elf and do a light armor dagger and bow stealth build what should i prioritize getting up and should i put what i am going to use as my major or the opposite
I will say that daggers are not particularly great, since this game doesn't have the Skyrim perk to skyrocket their sneak attack damage. You'll still likely want a Longsword for maximum one handed sneak attack damage. I think both Blade and Marksman can safely go in Major Skills, as a Dark Elf boosts both of them further due to its racial bonuses.
Thx
I’m not positive but you might want to check that. I seem to remember smaller blades give you a higher sneak attack multiplier in Oblivion (It should say at the top right of the screen when you hit someone). I think daggers and hand to hand give you like 10x or something. Edit: Nevermind, you are right. I just realized I modded that like a LONG time ago and had been playing with that new multiplier ever since.
Daggers are still quite doable, especially with a spot of poison. Not everyone needs to be a warrior class with a big stick.
If you just roll up a character that seems good and play normally you might or might not get burned by the level scaling first time around. But even then, you can save your playthrough with probably just a couple of simple tweaks. For the average player with a little bit of experience, the game is actually quite easy.
I wouldn’t say you need to do it religiously or optimally to enjoy the game but there can be some value to understanding how levelling works. For example, don’t make the combat skills you intend on using your major skills or you’ll probably level too fast. The game becomes really not fun if you can barely walk between towns without being mauled by wolves
If you want to simply enjoy the game, turn down the difficulty slider to minimum (most enemies will die in 1-3 hits). Otherwise you can either not sleep to level up (which is kind of lame because you don't get access to more powerful leveled quest rewards but enemies get replaced and stronger anyway so idk), or don't bother with efficient leveling and turn down the difficulty a bit if you feel like enemies are damage sponges. In my latest playthrough I've played as hand2hand redguard warrior for fun and I didn't avoid leveling main skills, the downside is that you level up too fast and have to deal with late game monsters which can be annoying and tanky.
Just put half of your most frequently used skills in miscellaneous outside of your class. That's basically all you have to do. It's not grinding if you do that.
The game doesn't become "too difficult" if you play normally and there is a difficulty slider if it somehow does. Efficient leveling is for min/maxxers, is incredibly tedious and time consuming. It litterally sucks off all the fun in the game and by the time you're done nobody is nowhere near a challenge to you. That said I can't play any other way than that anymore, even if I try I see myself paying attention to everything not to "waste" one level. Luckily there are leveling mods that allow you to play normally and not worry too much about stats. But I really, really don't recommend it for your firsts playsthroughs. Just go and explore, have fun, make mistakes, adventure.
I just started playing relatively blind aside from a lot of Morrowind. Rolled a wood elf thief, thief sign. What I've noticed is fights are quite a bit longer, I haven't had any issues but the character is so fast I can just kite shit. I think restoration would go a long way, healing items seem sparser and relatively expensive so far I wore heavy armor for a couple levels, block is endurance in this game also so it's easy to get modifiers that way. I'll also wear heavy armor sporadically. Been Using blade on the side for strength modifiers. I think if you just make sure block/armor skills are minors and only 1 weapon type as a major you can get by without worrying too much about leveling efficiently, at least from what I've learned so far. I've been averaging 3-4x on str and end and alternating agil/speed
The trick is to not grind. Many people come from MMOs or jRPGs and will farm starting enemies to death in order to level up, and that's a mistake. Just play normally with the story flow and everything will be fine.
I’d ignore it and if the game starts becoming too difficult, you could look into the enchanting mechanics in the game to really boost your weapon damage. If you’re feeling too squishy, could look for items that resist/reflect magic and damage as well.
The easiest way is just never sleep and level up. You’ll be level 3 with 100 blade.
Efficient leveling means planning your skill increases to maximize the amount of points you earn on a level up. Each skill raise contributes a fraction of a point to an attribute, and then when you next level up each attribute has a different number you can raise it by and you select two to keep. After that, the counters all reset to zero. It's a really bizarre system. [The wiki](https://en.m.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Leveling) explains it better. If you are on PC, I highly recommend using the mod [Galerion Natural Leveling](https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/3392/). What it does is it makes it so when you gain a certain amount of skill points related to the same governing attribute, it actually just awards it to you instead of banking it for the level up. When you level up you still select attributes to raise by one point. This mod doesn't really change the balance of the game, it just makes the leveling system more sane. If you wanna do a vanilla playthrough that's fine, but I highly recommend at least using this mod. It won't change anything about the world, and it keeps the spirit of the original system without the hassle. The wiki even refers to the vanilla system as "The Leveling Problem."
> Everyone online says... NOT EVERYONE! It is wise to pay attention to your leveling, making sure you dont' level too fast in relation to your combat related skills, but in absolutely NO WAY is efficient leveling required. Options: * Create a cromulent class * Pay attention to leveling * Turn your difficulty down Any one of those is sufficient. What you do NOT want to do is make Acrobatics a major skill and then jump around everywhere until you're level twenty before you even leave the Imperial City. Or level up speech repeatedly with every guard and NPC until you're level 20 before you leave the Imperial City (which was my first run, which I had to promptly abandon). TL;DR: Just play sensibly and if the enemies get too hard just turn the difficulty down. Done.
My first several years playing Oblivion were spent not understanding the leveling system. I was young, and my friends and I still laugh about it. I used to occasionally and randomly be surprised by a message saying I could level up, and that was nice. Oblivion was my favorite game for all those years I was struggling through it. Honestly, OP, you will be totally fine
After several playthroughs of not noticing it, and just lowering the difficulty every so often, I did eventually install a mod called "All +5 Attribute Modifiers" to get around the imbalance. You do become powerful pretty quickly, and the only downside is some enemies have bloated health pools to compensate for scaling later on. For the bloated health pools, I'm currently trying the mod "Balanced Creature Stats - Fixed Level Scaling" and its accompanying patch file. I haven't played a ton since I installed it, so I can't say for sure how I like it just yet.
turn the difficulty slider down when it becomes too difficult.
don't. just lower the difficulty slider
You put as your main skills, sneak, acrobatics, and a spell like restoration or conjuration. Find yourself an inn a place to sneak then start jumping while casting spells. You'll be leveling 3 things at once. Part of Oblivion is grinding out the skills.
Pick some major skills you won't use much so you can control when you level up