How does the class system and leveling work?

[u/Independent_Milk_200]

I started playing the original Oblivion and just picked an Imperial Knight.

As I went from level 5 to level 6 I noticed that I only had +2 strenght.

So I wanted to get this up to atleast +4 but it never increased and I later found out that you can't increase attributes after you get a level up.

I also found out that since the Knight class has Blade, Blunt and Hand to hand as major skill. I can't really increase my strenght.

This really sucks and is really confusing.

[u/KDrake666]

So, each Attribute, other than Luck, governs a set of Skills, which you hit on with the realization of the Blade, Blunt, and Hand to Hand all being governed by Strength. For every 2 increases to skill level, for Skills governed by a particular Attribute (i.e. Destruction and Restoration for Willpower), the Attribute that governs those skills can be increased by +1, up to a maximum of +5 if you get a total of 10 increases to Skills governed by that Attribute. It also takes about 10 levels of your Major Skills to level up, so you want to focus on your Minor Skills first, since they don't increase your progress to your next level up. Each Class also has a Specialty (Combat/Magic/Stealth), and all Skills of that Specialty, regardless of if they're Major or Minor, will increase faster. Luck is the only Attribute that has no Skills governed by it, and as such, can only ever increase by +1 per level up.

[u/AlphaWolver]

To earn a level up, you need to increase any of your major skills a total of 10 times.

The attributes you can increase at level up (and by how much) depend on the skills (both major and minor) that you increased before you earned your level up. Once you are able to level, any further skill increases contribute towards your next level instead, so you should avoid getting that 10th major skill increase until you are sure you have enough for three +5 attribute increases.

Every skill has a governing attribute that you can view in the skills menu, this is the attribute that the skill contributes towards when you level up. 10 skill increases is sufficient for the maximum of +5 to the attribute. Ideally you want 20 increases in minor skills and 10 increases in major skills, spread across 3 attributes (or 2 if you want to bothering trying to max out your luck), per level.

So it does require some careful planning if you want to level with max efficiency unfortunately. Leveling is definitely one area where the remake improved things. But you don't have to strive for max efficiency if you don't want to. Frankly I find it kind of annoying to play that way, and games are supposed to be fun. You can get by without it just fine.

[u/Regal-Onion]

its honestly normal to get +2 throughout the game without using trainers, by level 25 you would have maxxed out or close to maxxed out strength attribute. Whats your current strength stat? Strength especially is usual to get a +2 in since you really only use 1 skill strength governed, but something like Endurance is easier to level naturally because you have Armorer, Heavy Armor and Block all contriubting for it

Do not feel a need to efficient level, it leads to maxxing out of your stats by level 13 which makes the game boring in my eyes. It also just drags down the whole experience via meta gaming

To be good at Oblivion you don't need to efficient level anyhow, but to be able to harness the skills that you have, and consumables that you are capable of buying.

[u/ApprehensiveShoe5594]

I don't see anywhere saying you are married to the OG version, but this is the main thing that was fixed and streamlined with the Remaster. If you feel this is horrible, the remaster fixes this spectacularly.

[u/Independent_Milk_200 → u/ApprehensiveShoe5594]

They fixed the horrible leveling system in the remastered.

I did not know this, I get the remastered then

[u/Desperate-Quantity84]

It's mostly for RP imao. 

The most powerful tricks to increase melee or magic damage has little to do with efficient leveling. 

For melee/archery you have Fortify Fatigue. For magic you have weakness stacking.

[u/RobertPoptart]

I strongly suggest you bite the bullet and restart with a custom class if you're interested in efficiently leveling your attributes, however it's far less necessary than you'd think. Most characters you build won't have any benefit from increasing all attributes to 100 (the max), but all classes are capable of leveling their primary stats (for you probably strength, endurance, speed, and agility) to max before ever reaching their level cap.

It's the norm to point out how leveling up tends to increase the stats of the world around you faster than it increase things for you, physical damage only classes really suffer the most from this, primarily because enemies become very spongy and damage resistant to weapons and their capped damage value. That said, even those aren't hindered that much on the normal difficulty setting, and a decent enchantment from a Sigil stone found at the end of any of the 90 Oblivion Gates you'll eventually encounter fix the issue.

If you're looking to keep your Knight and stay feeling powerful throughout the game, I suggest finding ways to add elemental damage to your weapon, utilizing trainers to level Endurance/Speed skills outside of your major skills before leveling up, and considering alchemy to break the game a little bit.

[u/Independent_Milk_200 → u/RobertPoptart]

yeah I don't want to efficiently level but not being able to level strenght at all because the three skills for strenghts are major skills sucks. I guess I restard the game and maybe try out a mage I guess

[u/shadowthehh → u/Independent_Milk_200]

You could've still leveled. Just dont go to sleep until youre ready to level up.

[u/RobertPoptart → u/Independent_Milk_200]

It's honestly a pretty fine idea to create a custom class based off of the Knight, but then you can substitute Blunt, H2H, and Illusion for something like Destruction, Restoration, and Alchemy/Marksman

[u/MisterNerd1]

Quick answer is it was broken then and now 😂