Levelling Guide

By shallowgreen

Vanilla Skyrim levels your character based off their skills levels. Forge 100 iron daggers and cast muffle a few hundred times and all of sudden your level 10 despite having never left the city you started in. In Lorerim, your level is now determined through actually playing the game and carefully selecting the skills you want to improve.

Builds

Rather than copy-pasting a bunch of successful builds, here’s some general ideas:

  • Focus on one skill to be your “main” offensive tool, be that Two-Handed, One-Handed, Marksman, Destruction, etc
  • Do not neglect your defense, be that Heavy Armor, Evasion, Finesse/Unarmored, or various magic schools - all of the spell lines in Lorerim have some defensive capability:
  • Alteration features magic resistance, the various flesh spells which can be perked into, transmutations to raise & regenerate your HP and further buff physical resistances.
  • Restoration features strong health buffs and heals.
  • Conjuration has bound armor, which can give you arrow resistance (think of it like a flesh spell, does not replace your robes or armor).
  • Illusion also comes with armor rating enhancements and arrow resistance.
  • Even destruction has a simple armor spell and tools like draining cloaks and elemental resistances.
  • If you want to combine armor and magic, the Agile Spellcasting perk from Evasion will significantly reduce spell costs in light armor, while for heavy armor the entire left side of its skilltree is dedicated to lowering casting cost QoL and crafting skills can be a bit of a trap early on, don’t expect to fare well in battle if you spend your first 10 levels on alchemy, blacksmithing and picking pockets
  • Stealth is viable in Lorerim, but works very differently from vanilla. It takes a pretty strong investment in Sneak, and benefits greatly from Illusion. Stick to the shadows, move slowly, and absolutely do not wear heavy armor. For all aspiring stealth-archers: projectile impacts are loud.

Leveling up

Whenever you level up, you gain 30 skillpoints to increase skills of your choice by up to 5 levels each. Selecting Health/Magicka/Stamina confirms this choice, and unspent skillpoints are banked and carry over into your next levelup(s). Skill point costs depend on your level in that skill:

  • 1 point per skill level, up to skill 25
  • 2 points up to 50
  • 3 points up to 75
  • 6 points up to 100

Skills Cap

As you level, you’ll notice you’re closing in on the skill cap pretty quick - this is by design, it stretches out the midgame and allows you to spread your build out a little earlier. The skillcap is simply [50 + playerlevel], which means the earliest level you can get to skill level 75 would be level 25 - if you do one training session or read a skillbook after leveling, that is. You’ll have to already be lvl 25 and level into 26 to allocate up to 75 into a skill “naturally”. Note: you can’t overcap skills through training or reading skillbooks, not even the mighty Hermaeus Mora will allow you to go beyond your mortal limits.

Level Cap

The level cap in Lorerim is technically 100. I say technically because getting there would take absolute ages - for reference, i believe most players “finish” their playthroughs somewhere in their late 40s to early 60s, depending on their goals and their builds.

Additional Perks & Respeccing

There are additional ways of gaining perk points in Lorerim:

Gaining Perks Clavicus Vile worship OR Obtaining the Oghma Infinium will give you 7 perk points, plus your choice of +200 H/M/S

Respeccing is only available via the vanilla method of finishing the Dragonborn DLC, at which point your run is most likely on the finishing line already. Think carefully about where you put your perks!