You should go for some Conjuration this time around. Then you can tell me whether I'm nuts or doing something wrong or if the mechanics seem off to you, too. ;-)

Glad it's not just me. I hate to recommend this, because it sucks you out of the game a bit, but if you need to increase Conjuration, just buy and cast Bound Sword a few times (during combat for the spell to progress the skill). Your Conjuration skill will rocket up. Then buy the next summoning spell when your skill is high enough to cast it. That's what I'm planning for the time being. You could also reanimate every dead creature, but even that raises Conjuration much slower than conjuring bound weapons. I reanimate wolves when I'm forced to kill them, and let them have a last run down the roads or thru the wilds at my side (only works on one at a time, tho).

I think I may already have a bound weapon spell, I'll give it a go. Over all it will probbaly take me out of the game less than being frustrated at it not leveling up at the same pace as some of my other skills. My single-handed weapon skill has well over taken it by now.

chcek your PM, dont want to spoil

Level 37 in 74 hours? What the... What is the level limit?

I think there's kind of a cap at level 50, that may be when you stop getting points for perks but you can keep leveling all your skills till they reach 100.

Edit: Ok reading around it seems level 50 is only a soft cap and it will be slow going after that but you can keep gaining levels and perk points until you have maxed out all the skills.

Leveling is different than other RPGs, most enemies will scale with you so level mainly affect perks and details like this. You could finish the game without leveling.
I will confirm this within the next two days, I am level 45 right now. I just slowed down a bit in order to catch up enchanting and smithing (85 points in each). I need the dragon armor and 2x enchant perks so did not want to reach 50 before they are both at 100.

This game makes me want to replay Morrowind. I just miss so many elements in Skyrim: the amazing feeling of finding a really good item somewhere in a dungeon (compared to loot levelling with you, which sucks) or the much tougher way of stealing (it's piss easy in Oblivion and Skyrim), or bartering which saw prices fluctuate and let you trade between vendors to make money (completely gone in Oblivion & Skyrim).

Bartering will probably be modded very shortly I suspect

Curse you all!

The more I read about Skyrim, the more I want to play Oblivion with MMM or FCOM / or Skyrim. Too bad I don't have either right now. Grrrrrrrrr! :(

whaaaaa...?


that's...stupid. What's the point, then?

The point is so even dumb derp duuuuh console gamers could play the game without hurting their scarce braincells over such things as "stats". When you play Morrowind after playing Skyrim, you can't help but notice that anything that was a bit hard has been completely removed:

- stealing and breaking in is piss easy now
- much easier to make money
- no stats at all except for health, mana and stamina.
- increasing skills is a lot easier in most cases
- Skyrim is a lot more forgiving
- every dungeon you enter has enemies you can easily defeat. In Morrowind, it was a gamble whether you'd get your ass handed to you or not and if you were clever, you could defeat much tougher enemies and get rewarded with amazing loot.
etc. etc. etc.

Seriously, I miss the game being hard. Even at the hardest difficulty, it still scales everything to your level except animals.

I find the game increasingly challenging, though i maxed out smiting prior to anything else.. mages give me a lot of trouble if there tossing fireballs... im pure melee no enchants no potions just good ol'fashioned 2 hander...

min maxers will be the whiners that dont like "Skyrim" i usually am one but i decided im not going to exploit the game by making uber level poisons and getting my Armor to 400+ before im lvl 3 ((which you can)) and also enchants that effectively nullify the need for mana...

its possible to make the entire game a cake walk... or you can play it and have fun... in fact im having more fun in Skyrim then i ever did in MW or Oblivion, each of which Ive invested 100+ hours...

on a side note you can beat MW at without leveling if you know the ins and outs, theres plenty of speed runs out there on the fact...

Well, not everything scales with you, the animals just out in the over world don't they have a max and min level cap and you sometimes need to get past them to get into the level scaled quest areas/dungeons. Other than that it;s not really viable to be a magic user if your not going to level and certain quests don't open up till you get past a particular level. Not that you would notice the quests opening up to you, the only reason I know is because I happened upon the information. That's Skyrim anyway, Oblivion made leveling pretty much totally redundant, or you could level to far and make it unbeatable.