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The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Hints
Skill-Reducing Tricks
1 of 12: Spending time in jail will lower your skills, and you can use that fact to lower major skill levels so you can practice or train them again. (The exceptions to this are Security and Sneak, which always go up instead of down when they're randomly chosen during jail time.)
2 of 12: Be sure to quicksave right before you use the bedroll to serve your time, then quickrestore and try again if the random skill drains don't happen to the skills you want them to.
3 of 12: You could use the process described in the Drain Skill Trick to get five of the ten major skill increases you need, and only use jail time followed by practice for the other five.
4 of 12: If any of your attributes are less than 100, you can practice up some minor skills in order to boost your attribute multipliers. If all of your minor skills that are governed by a certain attribute are already 100, you can use the jail time trick on them. (Just be sure to do all of that before gaining the last major skill increase you need for level-up.)
5 of 12: Read on for a detailed example of how this process works.
6 of 12: Let's say your major skills are Blade, Block, Heavy Armor, Sneak, Armorer, Athletics, and Acrobatics, and they're all at 100. Your level-up progress meter is empty, so you'll need 10 major skill increases to level up again.
7 of 12: Start by committing some minor crimes and using jail time to get a total of five point reductions in those skills. It's probably easiest to commit one little crime, spend time in jail to get one major skill reduced, then repeat four times.
8 of 12: Let's say you randomly end up getting Blade -2, Heavy Armor -1, Armorer -1, and Acrobatics -1. Go practice those skills until you get them all back up to 100. That'll account for five of the major skill increases you need.
9 of 12: Now practice some minor skills up to give yourself better attribute multipliers, using jail time to reduce some minor skills first if necessary.
10 of 12: If you don't have a spell that drains one of your major skills, go make one. For this example, let's say that you make a Drain Athletics 100 points for 1 second on Self spell.
11 of 12: After the spell is made, go use it with Honditar in Chorrol (one of the most dependable, easy-to-find Athletics trainers) to get your Athletics skill trained up to 105.
12 of 12: You now have enough major skill increases to go rest in a bed and level up again, after which you can repeat the process for another level-up if you want to.
