Oblivion:The Great Skill Grind

Overview

For 100% Completion, the Master Skills stat needs to be at 21, indicating that all 21 skills have reached a base value of 100 or greater. The Great Skill Grind has historically been one of the most tedious and time-consuming portions of the 100% speedrun, requiring an extensive variety of tech and strategies to tackle it correctly.

There are several options for reaching 100+ in a skill:

• Manually farming a skill — This is the most obvious option. This is the most time-consuming option, with some skills taking several hours to grind. Each skill grind method also requires a different setup, which adds additional time and route logic complexity to acquire the necessary items.
• Buying training — This option is faster than manually farming, but slower than other options. By utilizing the Infinite Level-Up Glitch, the player can repeatedly buy training until they have max Attributes. Each skill takes approximately 15-20 minutes to train this way, depending on starting values.
• Glitching skill values — This is the current fastest strategy, albeit with a few setbacks that make route logic much more complex. Glitches like Class Reset and Underflowing allow the player to reach high skill levels without having to grind or buy training, opting instead to use complex setups that glitch the skill value to 100+.

In addition to the grinding/training/glitching of each skill, timing when to activate certain free skill boosts such as the Oghma Infinium has been a crucial aspect to optimizing this section.

The Great Skill Grind specifically refers to the section of the run where all remaining skills are farmed up to 100+, but there is another element of the skill grind that occurs throughout the entire run. In current route logic, we have skills that can be passively farmed while playing the rest of the route. These are Acrobatics and the six Magic spell skills. New glitches that have been discovered may make this aspect of the grind obsolete.

Previous Methods

Version 1

In V1, there were no known glitches to affect skill values, so a combination of training and manually farming was done. The original system was to take advantage of the character build, passive skill farming, and training based on a tier list of the most tedious skills to manually farm. The original tier list is lost, but this is an approximation:

Tier	Skills
High Tedium	Athletics, Marksman, Mercantile, Speechcraft
Medium Tedium	Armorer, Blade, Blunt, Block, Hand to Hand, Restoration
Low Tedium	Alchemy, Alteration, Conjuration, Destruction, Illusion, Mysticism, Acrobatics, Light Armor, Heavy Armor, Security, Sneak

High tedium skills were determined to have too long of manual skill grinds to ever be worth doing. Training was allocated to these skills first. Leftover training was put into Medium tedium skills, which had fairly long manual grinds, but were still bearable. Low tedium skills were short grinds or grinds that were passively farmed throughout the run. Restoration is the only passive skill that was considered a Medium tedium due to it taking 17,000 casts to max out vs the other magic skills that each took ~1,700-8,500 casts.

Using this tier list, the "optimal" character build was selected as follows:

• Race — Imperial was selected due to him having +10 to Mercantile and Speechcraft (two high tedium skills), as well as +5 to Blade, Blunt, Hand to Hand, and Heavy Armor, most of which were medium tedium skills. This makes Imperial the race with the most bonuses to the most tedious skills.
• Gender — Make Imperial has 10 more Speed than Female Imperial, so Male was chosen.
• Birthsign — The Steed was chosen for additional movement speed.
• Class — A custom class was created with the following:
  • Specialization — Combat was chosen since it would give a bonus to one high tedium skill, and five medium tedium skills. Since specialization makes the grind for those skills faster, this was determined to be best since it would make all of the weapon/armor grinds much shorter.
  • Favored Attributes — Strength and Speed were chosen to speed up combat and movement throughout the run.
  • Major Skills — Armorer, Athletics, Blade, Blunt, Marksman, Mercantile, and Speechcraft were chosen. These are the four high tedium skills, and several of the worst medium tedium skills. Getting +20 bonuses to each of these made the amount of training required for each much lower, making it possible to never have to grind any of the high tedium skills, with stats left over to put into medium tedium skills.

At the time, it was not known that glitches could be used to increase the player's level higher than normal, resulting in a max player level of 42 with the character build. Each level, the player gets 5 levels of training for a total of 210 training purchases in V1, and the rest manually farmed.

The methods for farming each skill were very basic in the original run:

• For passive farming, Magic spells were single effect spells with minimum magnitude/duration on self that were farmed repeatedly. It was brought to our attention mid-run that Animation Cancelling could be used to speed this up further, at which point it was implemented.
• Armorer was farmed by repeatly hotkeying enchanted Wrist Irons that had a Disintegrate Armor effect on them to drain armor health. Repair hammers were duped and used each cycle. The Broken Ayleid Crown of Lindai was exploited at 75+ Armorer.
• Shadowmere was attacked repeatedly for increasing Blade/Blunt/Hand to Hand. Due to a routing error, the Club was used for Blunt despite it having a slower attack speed than a War Axe.
• Block/Light Armor/Heavy Armor were farmed in Haunted Mine by letting Rats attack the player repeatedly.
• Sneak was farmed off of a Khajiit in the Skooma Den, spawning the running joke of "Petting the Cat" in reference to grinding Sneak.

The Great Skill Grind took 17:51:30 in the V1 run.