Skyrim: Legendary Skills Guide

Players have 18 skills to level up in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and each skill can be raised to level 100 normally, though it can be increased due to legendary skills. Legendary skills allow players to continue leveling a skill even if they have maxed it out. For example, if a player makes potions a lot, they will naturally get a lot of skill points in Alchemy. Eventually, they will get to level 100 in the Alchemy skill tree, which is the maximum level that players can get in a particular skill.

Normally, this would mean that at a certain point, players would have to radically alter their playstyles to continue leveling, and this could be a severe disadvantage. Someone who has been an archer for the entire game finds themselves needing to do close combat with a two-handed weapon against high-level enemies, and they don’t have much skill in wielding two-handed weapons, meaning they will likely die a lot. Or a beefy warrior clad in heavy armor finds themselves needing to sneak and pickpockets.

This is where Skyrim‘s legendary skills come in, when players reach level 100 in a skill, they have the choice to make it legendary. What this does is resets the skill level to 15 as well as refunds perk points spent in that skill tree. The dragon symbol appears under the skill as well. A skill can be made legendary multiple times. While it doesn’t make the skill any more powerful, it does mean that players can keep leveling up that skill, which counts towards their character level. It operates similarly to Prestige Mode in the Call of Duty series, for example.

Making Skills Legendary In Skyrim

There are pros and cons to using legendary skills in Skyrim, and players may want to make some skills legendary but not others. For instance, it might be a bad idea to make combat skills legendary, especially skills that players use frequently. If someone spends their entire time in Skyrim as a stealth archer and gets their archery skill up to level 100, they are going to have a difficult time killing anything if they make the archery skill legendary. This would mean that the skill resets to level 15, and all the perks they invested in the tree that do extra damage, critical damage, or even slow time are gone.

However, non-combat skills are likely fine for making legendary in Skyrim. Alchemy is a great example, even if the perks in the tree are gone upon making it legendary, players still retain the knowledge of what the properties of each ingredient are. Meaning they can still know the best Skyrim alchemy recipes and can make potions that sell for a lot of gold, and are worth a fair bit of XP.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is available on PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and PC.

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