Skyrim interesting discovery...

Small, but interesting. Learned this from a friend.

If you have the Solstheim expansion, there's a location called Kohlbjorn Barrow a short distance SE of the dock you land at. There's guy there who needs help because draugr keep killing his archaeological dig crew.

It takes several rounds of dungeon delving to get this all resolved, but at the end is a "Black Book" in a greenish room on a pedestal in the center. You read the book, you are transported to wherever (Hermaeus Somebody's realm), you have to do a quick run to the far end, where there's another book you want to read. The Black Books have some options for a "power" that you can choose. Here you want to pick "Secrets of Arcana".

Why? The power is that once a day you get a 30-second window in which you can cast a spell and it costs zero Magicka.

Not actually that useful, unless you have a super-expensive spell you want to cast.

OR...

you can cast a spell that is a continuous spell rather than a point spell. i.e., a point spell is like Fireball and a continuous spell is like "Flames" where you hold down the key until the opponents are all dead or  you are.

OK, that's not actually useful here. What IS useful: there are a few, and only a few, spells that do not require actual targets in order for you to get skill point boost. Those spells include Telekinesis, Detect Life, Detect [Un]Dead. You just hold the "hit" key/button down and away they go. So with Secrets of Arcana, you can launch that power, then select Detect Life somewhere there are plenty of people (like Whiterun town square, or maybe Riften), and cast the spell. Keep holding down the cast button/key, and if there are plenty of Live or Dead things, Alteration will race to 100 pretty quick. (Later: I was hoping I could use "Clairvoyance" to boost Illusion, but no go; the spell has to have an actual target to act upon in any category to do any boosting. Detect Life doesn't have a "selected" target, just bodies in detection range.)

I did this by finding a skeleton that wouldn't see and therefore not attack me, telling my companion to go somewhere else and wait, then launching spell as above. I held it down for a bit, then I went and got a fat rubber-band to do that holding for me. Went from level 32 to level 90 on the rubber band.

Remember that I'm on an Xbox One here, so the controller is possible to do this way. Friend came back and said I could get Detect Life from Tolfdir so I did that...then I could go to Whiterun and do it again. I think that from 32-90 took about two hours on Detect Dead with just the one skeleton, but going from 90-100 on Detect Life took about 5 minutes because Whiterun town square has so many folks walking around.

The speed of level-up on these skills is based on how many creatures are in range. Same deal with Sneak--more people walking around nearby, the faster your sneak skill goes up. I suspect you could go from 30 to 100 in Alteration in 15 minutes, with those first ones going by ridiculous fast. Didn't occur to me to measure it, so I don't know.

The only flaw in here is that you will probably gain 4 overall levels at the same time, and you can't pause in the middle to go find someone to buy training from, so you lose that oppo.

You appear to only be able to do this in Alteration (grabbing and holding a something with TK works just as well, and you can do that anywhere), and Illusion, all the other spells/categories require targets of some kind and aren't continuous or they have "ends", like healing.

Same friend suggested that perhaps for Restoration if you could use Greater Ward in conjunction with one of those soul-gem-based lasers you occasionally find, if the laser is less powerful than the Ward that you could do Restoration too. But that requires finding a really weak one of those lasers, and I haven't seen one in quite a while...I tried this, with Steadfast Ward which is not strong enough, and when it has shield failure which is almost instantly you have to recast, which doesn't work with Arcana.

If you know of another spell this works with I'd like to find out.

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Later: OK, there's another way. You can boost Restoration interestingly to the top, and it doesn't involve the Solstheim thing above.

I'm sure there are some variations on this that will work.

Find the "Atronach Stone" and accept the blessing. This blessing is that magical attacks on you convert 50% of damage back into magicka. Then you want to find one of those bird-beak things that shoots fire continuously and stand in front of it. Note that I do NOT mean the soul-gem based things.

Now you are taking damage and gaining Magicka. You probably want to wear some enchanted armor pieces that do magic damage reduction, and maybe boost your magicka regeneration. Then, on top of all that, you want to choose "Healing" as your active spell and run it continuously. Healing takes a target, i.e., *you*, which means it works for skill-leveling. You want your magicka regen to be more or less the same rate as Healing uses it up, 8 pts/sec, and you want the actual fire damage to be about 8/second, so that these things balance. A little more complicated, but you can then run Restoration to 100. You might need to step out of the flame for a bit to heal full up on occasion, so it's not as easy as Alteration was. And you can do it without having to drink potions.

Watched someone do this for a couple minutes. Again here you'd want to stop when your character levels up so that you can go buy 5 training levels.

There's another blessing of Atronach you can get, worth about 20% attack=>recover_magicka that might help.

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So these things are of course a little bit game-destabilizing, when you combine them with the rollover you can do by claiming "Legendary" on, say, Alteration, resetting it back to 15, letting you take those skill points and apply them elsewhere, run the Detect Life routine again, all the way to 100, declare Legendary again, etc. If you have the $, you could train up along the way, etc.

Or at least train things that aren't, all the way to 50. That's reasonably inexpensive; after 50, the price is quadruple, so you probably don't have that much cash.

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A generically similar approach can be taken with Blocking, and Light/Heavy Armor. You want to let a rat bite on you, but not really take health damage. Rat continues to attack, you cast heal. I found that holding a shield in left hand and Healing in the right did well. Block can be run to 100; again, you want to stop for training oppos. But if you did this with the Atronach/Heal-Self combo, you could stand there forever letting the rat work on you until Light and Heavy Armor are at 100, Block is at 100...

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Back in Oblivion, you could run Sneak to 100 without even leaving the initial training area, same basic deal. There's that point where you are told to sneak behind that goblin. Turns out there's a location opposite where you enter his room where you can aim yourself at the wall, lean on the move-forward key, and go AFK. If you selected Sneak as a Major skill, you can level your character up to 10 after a while; this will actually take several hours, but does not involve any danger for you, the goblin will NOT look backwards. The only trick is getting yourself aimed properly, and then managing the 25/50/75 perk points.

You couldn't really do the rat-bite routine, because getting attacked damaged your armor, too, which meant you needed repair hammers or spare armor. I can't recall if you could do repairs while in combat...

Also possible: On the Xbox (finally!) that sneak boost above can be done unaided, you can put a rubber band on the the controller and walk away.