Best Skills Tier List for Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion Remastered
In essence, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion revamps its predecessor’s leveling system to a degree that it makes categorizing them into “tiers” less necessary. This is because raising any attribute will influence your overall character level progress. Nevertheless, certain attributes might still prove more effective for swiftly boosting your character’s level, and there remains the factor of specific perks you earn upon reaching milestones in each category.
Considering all these factors, let’s categorize them into different levels, taking into account various views from the gaming community. We don’t engage in complex mathematical analysis; instead, this approach is more suited for the casual player’s viewpoint.
Best Skills Tier List for Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion Remastered
In the updated version of Oblivion, alterations have been made to the process of improving your character’s levels, and certain skills now have adjusted perks as well.
The wiki provides an extensive inventory of all modifications made in the updated version, along with a list of what was altered. It’s important to note that many of these changes are highly subjective and significantly influenced by your gaming style.
As a devotee of magical combat, if I’m wielding Conjuration spells, it’s clear that they reign supreme in my book. However, if I were an elusive archer focused on stealth and one-shotting targets undetected, those Conjuration spells would be less indispensable to me.
In essence, this rank order aims to cater to both players seeking a relaxed, role-playing experience in this classic RPG game and those desiring a challenging playthrough. It’s essential to note that these ranks are entirely subjective, meaning they don’t set any hard and fast rules for how you should engage with the game.
S Tier
In the top category, there are several abilities that have been enhanced or simply prove advantageous for players tackling increased difficulty levels. These skills are valuable regardless of your objective, as they either significantly boost convenience or help endure challenging encounters.
- Armorer – Now that an apprentice armorer can repair magic items, this skill has become much better at a lower level. They essentially swapped this and the journeyman perk, which is a pretty decent trade off considering how much more important the former is.
- Alchemy – They added additional perks that make alchemy so much more satisfying in this version of the game. At higher levels, you can have potions that have a ton of effects, and it can lead to hilariously powerful results.
- Conjuration – Conjuration is just a really strong school of magic in any difficulty level, but this is especially the case in higher tiers. This is because minions can help you tank and deal so much damage, which is a major pain point in high difficulty levels.
- Restoration – This school of magic is just hilariously good at everything it tries to achieve. With the ability to cure ailments, restore various things, or fortify other skills, it is such a versatile skill. Need to convince somebody? Fortify your speechcraft for a second. On the road to developing vampirism? Nope, cure disease.
- Sneak – Sneak is a favorite of many, and with the massive buff to dagger sneak attacks, this one can sit at the top tier mainly due to an exploit that you can take advantage of. Basically, if you fire an arrow with your bow and immediately swap to any dagger, your arrow will use the dagger’s multiplier for sneak attacks instead.
- Destruction – Destruction has always been powerful, and it continues to be this way in the remaster. There is not really much else to note here. Everybody knows what you can do with destruction magic. Check out our guide on how to play as a spellsword for a build you can try.
A Tier
As a gamer, I’d put it this way: In the realm of skills, there’s an A Tier that’s not exactly top-notch but still packs a solid punch. To be frank, the gap between these and the S-tier skills isn’t massive when you get down to it. The reason being, these choices are often more about personal combat preferences than objective superiority.
- Blade – Once you unlock higher mastery perks, this weapon type becomes so much more powerful in terms of raw damage. However, those who have played the original version might notice that certain effects with power attacks have been completely replaced.
- Blunt – This skill is on the same boat as Blade in that higher masteries slightly boost your damage. The main difference is that it is more centered around a defensive playstyle, as the perks give you bonus shield after a power attack.
- Marksman – Because of how they added the ability to sprint in the remastered version of the game, marksman can actually be comically good if you just want to kite enemies around. It also goes alongside sneak most of the time, and the only reason it is not up there is due to how it really only becomes broken due to other skills. On its own, it is just fine.
- Block – With its perks in this version of the game, this skill has become much more valuable than before. As you approach the high end of levels, you hardly lose fatigue while blocking, and your shield bash becomes so much more potent.
B Tier
In the B Tier, you’ll find abilities that are quite beneficial, yet not necessarily worth exerting significant effort to master actively. Many of these skills offer valuable utility, but since they’re often honed incidentally while playing conventionally, there’s no pressing need to deliberately train them intensely.
- Alteration – Alteration provides a lot of useful utilities, including feather, water walking or breathing, and open locks. These are particularly great whenever needed, especially feather, but it definitely is not something you need to be grinding too hard for.
- Heavy Armor – Heavy armor is still the same as in the original game, and there really is not much to note here. It has some decent perks that are mainly just quality of life upgrades, but that is pretty much it for the most part.
- Light Armor – It has the same problems that its heavier counterpart has, but with the downside of being weaker in terms of protection until you reach the maximum level mastery perk.
- Athletics – With the ability to sprint in this remastered version, athletics is not only something that you can train quickly without thinking about it, but it also helps you speed through content if you like playing that way. At max mastery, you just never lose fatigue while sprinting too.
- Acrobatics – Acrobatics, despite being just tied to jumping for the most part, does have some pretty handy use cases. For example, a higher acrobatics level will let you scale mountains by simply hopping around. It also works great alongside Marksman due to how you can easily reach vantage points with it.
- Illusion – Illusion magic is actually pretty strong in certain use cases, such as if you like using chameleon or invisibility. Paralyze can be a huge tide turner in combat too, or just an amusing spell to use on random people.
C Tier
In the C Tier, some abilities might find occasional use, yet they aren’t indispensable and could even be overly specialized for many users. On the other hand, skills like security generally prove to be less beneficial as one becomes proficient with the game’s fundamentals.
- Security – Again, security is just a useless skill to actively “train” since you can just unlock anything with ease once you learn how to properly do the lockpicking mechanic. You can pick even the hardest locks without much issue when you figure out the basics.
- Mercantile – This one actually does have its uses, as the new perks make it so that you can potentially get really good gear way too early in the game. However, this is still a pretty niche pick since you can always just grind other skills and loot the same stuff from enemies.
- Speechcraft – Well… it is just speechcraft. The entire skill is negated by the fact that you can just easily raise disposition with the persuasion mechanic, which is far from difficult. In fact, even illusion can achieve the same things this does, but with much little effort.
- Hand-to-Hand – This seems to really benefit NPCs more than the player, since barely anyone would bother using this combat style anyway. On the flip side, NPCs who use it can absolutely destroy you if you underestimate them. There is also a very niche use case in that you can disarm summoned creatures and keep their weapon, if you want to be silly like that.
- Mysticism – This school of magic is way too niche for how most people play, and it is likely that you are only using soul trap out of the other spells that fall into this category.
In addition, those are all the skills available in the updated version of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. If you’re considering starting a new character, you might be interested in exploring different origins or rethinking your primary and secondary skill selections. Here’s a helpful guide on the top-tier birthsigns that could assist with your decisions.
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2025-04-30 09:40