Leveling certain stats

[Chocoroom]

How are you able to efficiently level magic skills, security, sneak, alchemy, mercantile, speechcraft, and block without using trainers?

[The Great Cornholio]

magic skills - cast cheap spells

sneak - autorun into a corner somewhere and put something on your sneak key, if someone is kinda sorta nearby you should eventually get a skill up. let it run overnight. i do this on every skyrim character. cant be bothered in morrowind.

alchemy - extremely easily abused. some merchants restock ingredients every time you talk to them, you can also sell them the ingredients you just bought and now they restock twice as much. repeat. you can max out in 5 minutes.

mercantile - sell the thousand potions you just made and who cares about mercantile. Or sell them one at a time to raise the skill if you dont value your time at all.

block - let the wolf packs in solstheim beat on you

speechcraft - use the skills on guards. bribe up rep, taunt it down until they attack you, kill them and sell their stuff. admire instead of bribe when its high enough to work.

[󰀉tempeh󰀉]

security - enchant a common ring or two with a weak lock effect and collect a whole lot of cheap lockpicks. Fortify luck effects can improve efficiency by reducing or eliminating failed attempts.

speechcraft - strong fortify luck for one second and admire everyone, prioritizing merchants because you want their dispositions high anyway. Try with savants if you want extra challenge.

destruction - cheap spells with On Self cast type, something harmless or temporary like drain health works best. I use disintegrate so I can practice armorer at the same time.

[slayor3000]

Originally posted by Chocoroom:

How are you able to efficiently level magic skills, security, sneak, alchemy, mercantile, speechcraft, and block without using trainers?

If your talking 5/5/5, answer is No you cannot.
If you want to get even close without trainers/grinding you have to spend a long time not only pre-planning the build but determining i.e even how far you can walk or run before athletics goes up, you have to keep checking each skill to see how close you are to levelling up and then change your game to suit the skill you want to level up in. You are no longer playing the game you start playing "level-up". Have tried it twice in 20 years of playing - both times I tried it, it was attempts to get 100 in each skill at the lowest level.

If you want to spend hours grinding, i.e throwing a destruction spell against a tree, well then there are lots of grinding ways to level up. What is the difference?
Trainers were put into the game to allow a player to level skills. Use skills to make money, use money to train.

Grinding is a way players have found to use "glitches" to level up. It can be extremely boring, break the immersion of the game, ruin a playthrough.
Play the game and at times check how many levels you have gone up.
(there are mods which will give a breakdown of what has been levelled) When you see 8 or 9 level ups go and train a few skills in the misc pile you will find useful later (otherwise its a waste). You do not need to get 5/5/5 to get a strong build.

[Chocoroom]

Yeah I feel like it's what happens in Oblivion since enemies scale with your level. However in Morrowind there are set enemies that do not scale to your level (right?). I'm just asking since I have leveled up on accident a couple of times and only get something like *2 attribute bonuses.

[The Great Cornholio]

You dont need a x5 every time. You get way more than enough levels to max everything but luck, dont sweat it too much.

[󰀉tempeh󰀉]

Originally posted by slayor3000:

Originally posted by Chocoroom:

How are you able to efficiently level magic skills, security, sneak, alchemy, mercantile, speechcraft, and block without using trainers?

If your talking 5/5/5, answer is No you cannot.
If you want to get even close without trainers/grinding you have to spend a long time not only pre-planning the build but determining i.e even how far you can walk or run before athletics goes up, you have to keep checking each skill to see how close you are to levelling up and then change your game to suit the skill you want to level up in. You are no longer playing the game you start playing "level-up". Have tried it twice in 20 years of playing - both times I tried it, it was attempts to get 100 in each skill at the lowest level.

If you want to spend hours grinding, i.e throwing a destruction spell against a tree, well then there are lots of grinding ways to level up. What is the difference?
Trainers were put into the game to allow a player to level skills. Use skills to make money, use money to train.

Grinding is a way players have found to use "glitches" to level up. It can be extremely boring, break the immersion of the game, ruin a playthrough.
Play the game and at times check how many levels you have gone up.
(there are mods which will give a breakdown of what has been levelled) When you see 8 or 9 level ups go and train a few skills in the misc pile you will find useful later (otherwise its a waste). You do not need to get 5/5/5 to get a strong build.

Uh, throwing destruction spells at trees won't do anything because they need to affect a valid target to grant experience? With a mostly-harmless on-self training spell for destruction, and with non-hostile spell options in every other school, it's pretty easy to practice magic while running errands.

The only tricky skill to practice without trainers is enchant, to the point I gave up and hired trainers after making hundreds of cure disease rings. I've previously found athletics tricky to level naturally, but this go around I decided to thoroughly explore the Inner Sea and the Sea of Ghosts and athletics reached 100 long before the exploration was done, even with the boots of speed and 179 point swift swim potions.

Also, your advice to play the game and occasionally check how many skill levels you've gone up is precisely how I got my 5/5/5s. There's no need to micromanage every athletics point, there's lots of speed skills to spare. I did grind my armor skills with mudcrabs and things, though; in hindsight that probably would have been faster with trainers.

[slayor3000]

Originally posted by 󰀉tempeh󰀉:

Uh, throwing destruction spells at trees won't do anything because they need to affect a valid target to grant experience?

No, you do not need a valid target.
Make Fire damage for 1 point on touch spell and try it.
Just click away at the floor or wall.

Originally posted by 󰀉tempeh󰀉:

Also, your advice to play the game and occasionally check how many skill levels you've gone up is precisely how I got my 5/5/5s.

Depends on how "occasionally" your "occasionally" is? I get carried away sometimes.

Originally posted by 󰀉tempeh󰀉:

There's no need to micromanage every athletics point, there's lots of speed skills to spare.

You want "perfect efficient" levelling, which I did try twice to see how many levels it takes to reach 100 in each skill.

Originally posted by 󰀉tempeh󰀉:

I did grind my armor skills with mudcrabs and things, though; in hindsight that probably would have been faster with trainers.

Should have used Cliff Racers.

My answer to OP's question is still No.

[The Great Cornholio]

You dont need to hit something with a destruction spell to level it in this game. Just cast away.

[Innocent]

The drawback of 5/5/5 levelling not often mentioned is that your character will reach 100 attributes very quickly. At this point, you char is no longer a mage, thief or warrior since he is not specialised in anything. You're just a bored god wasting your time killing quest rats...

Not worth it imo.

[slayor3000]

Originally posted by Innocent:

The drawback of 5/5/5 levelling not often mentioned is that your character will reach 100 attributes very quickly. At this point, you char is no longer a mage, thief or warrior since he is not specialised in anything. You're just a bored god wasting your time killing quest rats...

Not worth it imo.

Very true.

Plus makes using certain skills almost not worth levelling up if you think a certain way.
Just Level 14 and have 100 in Willpower which means levelling up 3 of my major skills will no longer have an impact on them stats.
But I am still going to level them as I want my skills higher, that means a definite no to 5/5/5.