Posted July 3, 2015 at 1:01 am

Firstly, a quick note about Bethesda games like Skyrim and Fallout 3: These games can be notorious for freezing, especially on the PS3. They seem to stabilize, however, by turning off most, if not all, autosave options. This can add to the difficulty, but better to lose some progress to a monster than sudden game freeze.

This was originally simply going to be a continuation of the "Grace is capable of evil in video games" angle from the previous comic, but that was before I actually tried doing this in the game.

I loaded up my old character (who I left basically as Grace described her character), went somewhere I knew a bandit would mug me, and proceeded to fling ice and healing magic at them with the healing magic healing slightly more than the ice magic was damaging.

The net result was, as planned, skill XP for both restoration and destruction while the bandit effectively remained unharmed. It was a bit hectic at first, with skill increasing fairly rapidly as I kept having to backpedal away from the bandit. Eventually, however, I decided to take a few hits in order to level up my light armor, too, and wound up with my back to a steep mountainside.

It was moments later when a series of attacks from the frosty bandit somehow pushed me up the mountainside to a point both out of their reach and inaccessible by regular means. The bandit could no longer touch me, but refused to give up their pursuit. They just kept attacking the air and spouting threats while I continued to unleash simultaneous life and death upon them.

And it. Was. BORING. It was the most boring thing EVER. I was leveling, and I could've conceivably done so until the batteries in my controller died, but it was horribly slow AND DID I MENTION BORING?

That's the problem with most risk free methods of power leveling. They'll level you, but they're not fun, and it's more like wasting time than saving it.

That said, I wanted to try something else out. At some point, the ability to reset skills that had reached 100 back to 15 was added to Skyrim, and I'd never done anything with it. This made me curious how quickly I could level Alteration to 100 by going to the busiest part of Whiterun and just using Detect Life and Telekinesis with magicka cost reduced to zero. So I reset Alteration (AKA made it "Legendary") and timed how long it took.

It took a little over 8 minutes to re-reach 100 Alteration and I went from lvl 50 to 54 in the process. This was something one could do with the TV turned off and one hand holding down two buttons on the controller. It wasn't any less boring, but if one really wanted to use a leveling shortcut, that one works without even needing your full attention.

Granted, I'm talking about a game that came out in 2011, here. This PROBABLY isn't news to hardcore enthusiasts. Nonetheless, I enjoyed testing it, and I FINALLY get why the heck they included that "Legendary" feature.