Skills That Are Good to Train

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While it is obviously different on a character-by-character basis, there are some skills that I feel should be priorities for training and others which shouldn't be. (I'm assuming you're actually paying for the training here - not training for free with the use of a follower.)

In general I find that skills fall into one of three classifications - skills that should never be trained, skills that you would consider training based on your character type, and skills that training is a very good idea of you plan on using that skill for your character a lot.

The first class, where you would never train would include things like lockpicking, pickpocket, and all the crafting skills. The reason for this is fairly obvious. In the case of the crafting skills, it's cheaper to just buy the stuff you need and train yourself than paying for it - especially once you hit level 50 and the cost of training triples. In the case of lockpicking, there's no point in training because there's no such thing as an unpickable lock regardless of how bad your lockpicking skill happens to be. Granted, you may go through quite a bit of lockpicks on expert and master locks, but you can pretty much buy a lifetime supply of lockpicks for the cost of one training session. Same thing with pickpocketing - so long as you start with low-value items, this skill levels so quickly that you'll have a 90% chance of success with just about everything in no time.

Next up are skills that are class dependent. If, for example, you're playing either a fighter-thief, or a mage-thief styled character. In these cases, since you can only pick one stone, one of these skills is going to lag behind. (Yes, I know about the Lover Stone, but that's quite the hike early on in the game. Plus, if you plan on getting married at some point, the benefits of Lover's Comfort through resting and the Lover Stone don't stack.) So whichever you pick, you may want to spend some points in training up the skills for the stone you don't have. My current character is a fighter-thief, and is training archery. I can certainly see a mage thief shelling out for some training in whatever school of magic he wants to use (although destruction and restoration seem to level much more slowly than other schools of magic for whatever reason).

Finally, there are some skills that I think you most certainly SHOULD train if you plan on using them. The two that immediately spring to mind are light armor and blocking, and the reasons for both are pretty similar. Especially when these skills are fairly low in level, it's really dangerous to level them through conventional means, because both skills reduce damage, but at low levels they aren't particularly effective in reducing damage. With my first fighter, blocking was the only skill I trained. Once it got to level 50 and I got Quick Reflexes and Deadly Bash, I didn't need to train it anymore, as it was easier to execute the skill, but it was hard going at first. Same thing with Light Armor on my current character. Seems like a particularly dangerous method to level that through conventional combat. There's also another one that I'd consider - one handed weapons of you weren't playing a fighter type character. I was a melee specialist with my first character - I killed everything with a one handed weapon, and even then my pure fighter leveled quite slowly past level 70 even with the warrior stone activated. I can only guess it would be an even slower process without the warrior stone, and/or not using one handed weapons exclusively in combat.

 

Yes, skills are vastly different in how easy they are to level yourself. Combined with the type of character you want to play, you pretty much end up with the analysis above.

Worth noting: This is relevant ONLY if you care about maximizing your personal, IRL time/value ratio *AND* have some sort of an advanced long-time plan for your character. In most other cases, I wouldn't bother.

 

Sneak is one skill that I never really used until I made a character in Oblivion that was primarily sneak/archery, and holy crap if I haven't gone that route for most of my chars since then. There's just something about being able to pick of enemies one at a time from a mile away that is so satisfying.

Honestly though, if you aren't planning on sneaking a lot, there really isn't much of a reason to put any effort into it.

 

I don't know about one-shotting enemies, but all my characters except the ones which rely heavily on destruction regularly use sneak to launch preemptive strikes with a bow. The result is that their sneak skill is ever slowly, but steadily increasing. It's usually 40-ish around the time I hit 30-40. I don't actually use it for sneaking past enemies, but backstab damage is always welcome.

There should be a fourth class I think - skills that should not be trained because they are ridiculously easy to level. The list would include Conjuration (Soul Trap on corpses, repeatedly casting summoning spells in battle), Illusion (Muffle) and Alteration (Detect Life, Paralyze on followers).

 

Same here. Even my heavily armored fighter was a decent sneak once he got it to level 40 or so. And any character can become a fairly proficient sneak character - even heavily armored ones - with just two perks spent. One in Stealth and one in Muffled Movement. And just about any character can afford two extra perks for this benefit.

Well, that's still the first group - it also includes the examples I listed like pickpocket - it's ridiculous to level through use, so no point in training it.