Gimpus Maximus

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What would you consider as best enchants for such a character?

Naturally it depends a whole lot if you want to tilt the balance of the build a little more towards rogue, fighter or mage or just keep them about equal, but some of the equipment slots seem to have quite natural "best in slot" regardless. Here's my rough order of priority:

1) Anything that can be enchanted with Magic Resistance should get exactly that. That's 1/2 of Neck and 1/2 Finger reserved. (I'm assuming no shield for this build as it precludes dual-casting, and Magic Resist perks from Alteration tree together with two enchants is enough in my book).
2) Destruction is by far the most important magic school to cut down in mana usage, both for spells themselves and for most weapon enchants, but the whole 100% requires four enchant slots. However, with a bit of extra push from Alchemy, you could combine one from Helm with two different ones (straight reduction and the one that gives +10% mana regen as well) in Chest for about 80% reduction in total while still leaving both Neck and Finger slots available for...
3) Archery. Although it kinda conflicts with spells (ranged damage), it's used for other purposes. Namely, you can't sneak attack with spells and single target dps is much higher with a bow backed with damage enchants. For large crowds of lesser enemies, Fire Storm from stealth ought to be the preferred alternative anyway.
4) One-handed would be the obvious #2 for Gloves (after Archery) but since it doesn't work with Daggers, might as well go with Sneak, same as for Boots. Speaking of Boots, since Muffle enchant is redundant with the spell, there's kinda few really good alternatives remaining. Any single resistance is situational, while Carry Weight at least has 24/7 utility.

Of course, Archery could be traded for a secondary magic school. For example, while Alteration surely ain't no major dps contender, the Master level spell Mass Paralyze could be a total game-changer on its own. And since you're going to want at least Magic Resistance from its perk tree (see #1 above), Stability and Atronach are kinda close picks already for some seriously useful effects for this kind of a character.

Edit: I'm also assuming that Conjuration is a big-time fail for a primarily STEALTH character, more suited as a meat-shield for your average keep-them-at-a-distance mage. Similarly, Illusion is mostly about crowd control, which is why you have Sneak to begin with, and most definitely obsolete if you can Paralyze them? Also, Illusion perks lack the general usefullness that Alteration ones have.

 

First of all, I grossly over-estimated the cost of training - and the need for multiple 4K gold supply fences - at least in the short term. Yes, five high level training sessions set you back 20K gold, but I forgot that I now have the merchant perk. Since all the Winterhold trainers are also merchants, and since when you train, the gold gets added to the trainers gold supply, and since a single mass potion brewing session can EASILY net me 15K gold, all I got to do is buy my training back. I'm still happy I got the fences, as I won't be training from merchants forever, but there is less of a need for them at the moment.

So now I'm moving to the optimization part of this character build, namely getting my 3 crafting skills to 100, and then I unleash this character on Tameriel. My guestimate of my character level after maxing these skills is ~50, which is more than adequate to have both Conjuration and Destruction at least 90, more if I happen to level them in the meantime.

Here's the breakdown of the enchantments I picked out, and I'll give the explanation a little later on in response to your comments. The weapons will get priority of being Daedric crafts, for the added damage, although Enthir seems to have a daedric heart in his inventory every time I talk to him, so maybe all of it will be daedric. But high smithing skill + improved ebony armor will be more than adequate to reach the cap. It's simply an aesthetic choice at this point.

Armor, helm, ring, and amulet - Fortify Conjuration and Destruction. The armor specific one that gives magicka regeneration will be added for ease of use of spells not in the conjuration or destruction school, but it's largely superfluous. So yes, I will be going for free spells in two schools, with further explanation below.

The problem with that theory is I haven't sunk a whole lot of perk points into archery, nor do I use or train my bow enough to have it be a solid damage dealer. I stopped training archery as soon as I got to Whiterun, and it's only 40-something. I got the three overdraw perks in it, but the only time I really use it is for knocking dragons out of the sky. Or occasionally to start a fight against a distant target.

The plan was to sort of get away from using bows once I got destruction firing on all cylinders, and so I broke from my original character plan. (It wasn't a conscious decision on my part, the character just kind of evolved that way over time.) I found I was far more effective in melee combat than I anticipated. This guy is a BATTLEMAGE. Or a FMT if you prefer. Or, perhaps most appropriately, a FIGHTER-MAGE-thief. Like 45% fighter, 45% mage, 10% thief.

Daggers?!?! I don't need no stinkin' daggers! He is a battlemage, damnit! And he is NOT primarily a stealth character - he only uses it as it serves his purposes for fulfilling his Thieves' Guild and Dark Brotherhood responsibilities. Granted his sneak is rather high - in the 60s - but that's because it's always useful to start the battle on your terms. I don't even HAVE the assassin's blade perk, as I discovered on my way to 50 stealth it was unnecessary.

With the right damage enhancements, sneak power attacks with one handed weapons with the backstab perk and the Dark Brotherhood gloves are more than adequate to take out most any opponent. I concede that I haven't tried the tactic against giants, mammoths, or dragons up to this point, so I can't say it's good enough for ALL enemies. (Yes, my pure stealth character could - and did - one-shot dragons. The dragon was dead before it hit the ground, without ever knowing it was under attack.)

This guy is a sword and shield character in melee! And a specialist in incapacitation with Soul trap and Paralyze on his sword, and gratuitous use of Deadly Bash.

Other equipment:

Gloves - Fortify One-Handed, Fortify Block (the choices are now obvious)
Boots - Fortify One-Handed, Fortify Stamina (probably). Haven't completely decided on the second enchantment, but with the extra pockets perk, I have a current carry capacity of 505, so I doubt I'll need more Carry Weight. Also not sure if Fortify Stamina Regeneration would be better, or just having more of it to begin with.
Shield - Fortify Block, Resist Magic (which is an enchantment I don't have yet - I'll have to start shopping.)

The issue is I probably won't have enough character levels to train Alteration to level 90. Leveling it to 90 through use is a fool's errand. While I have surely transmuted hundreds of units of iron ore with this character, the level progression of Alteration slows to a crawl after level 40. I would have to train 40+ points in Alteration to even be able to purchase such a spell, and I'm more inclined to sink those points into block and one-handed.

 

Ok, I just assumed you're going for assassin with a little mage and fighter sprinkled around.. Yea, that changes the game plan quite a bit. Ain't it strange how it's possible to turn the F/M/T archetype into two so diametrically opposing builds.

I find alteration easy to level as you go by using nothing but Waterbreathing, and starting out as either mage or rogue type will basically throw the spell book at you. Also, even the lowly Oakflesh with its +40 armor is quite a bit when you're decked in your starter armor, barely scratching the 100 armor mark. However, you don't really need (or even want) mana cost reduction for Alteration until you actually can cast those Master spells - ie. about the same time when you can expect to be able to craft double enchants.

I am planning to try daggers so that I can skip One-handed enchants this time. Or more specifically, I want to try a mostly ranged assassin character with bow and spells, and triple crafted dagger is all the melee I'll ever need without becoming stupendously overpowered by design. My early sources of damage will be Bound Bow (now that's a nice starter weapon if I ever saw one) and Destruction in general while I slowly learn how to make daggers worth mentioning in melee combat. Once I do, I should be mostly done with Destruction, using it for nothing more than the occasional well placed major AoE.

Training should be enough to cover the very few skills I don't actively use myself, ie. Heavy Armor, Block and Two-handed even if I'm inclined to drop in a few mid-game points into Destruction so that I can skip at least some of the extremely slow levels in the 70-90 skill range. While I won't be using Conjuration for the summons, I find that I want to be able to choose my Soul Trap targets proactively rather than filling up every stone in my inventory with the 3972 Petty Souls from as many Mudcrabs I happened to stumble across by having Soul Trap on my weapon.

 

Yes. I was reading your post, and thinking, WHAT? No, that's not the game plan at all!

You mean you can level waterbreathing by casting it whenever you feel like? Even if you don't plan on going for a swim? Truth be told I have never purchased, and thus never used that spell. On the rare occasions where I wanted to dive under water and find something, I just drank a potion. I never saw drowning as a major risk. The only time it ever happened is the first time I did the thieves guild mission and the room fills with water after killing Mercer. (Didn't notice the head falling off the statue somehow.)

And what about that - does it work all the time or only when you get hit in combat? Spells that work all the time are easily exploited. Muffle is the perfect example too. You can just cast that repeatedly while walking around town and it would level. I use muffle a lot, but only during break-ins and while in dungeons. It still levels crazy fast. Detect Life too. It just seems too cheesy to me though. I justify transmute because its uses the spell as intended, it saves you a ton of money on smithing supplies, and crafting gold rings gives a ton more smithing experience when compared to something like iron daggers.

How early can you get your hands on Bound Bow? Probably not in Riverwood, but does the mage in Dragonsreach have the spell available? Plus, isn't Bound Bow an adept level spell, meaning it won't be available for purchase immediately? Not that it's particularly hard to level conjuration. So long as your summons enters combat, it levels the skill, even if he doesn't do much in combat. I remember leveling conjuration by summoning a familiar against the first dragon you fight. I was yelling "Sick 'em wolfie!"

I would advocate splitting the training between block and two-handed. Until your pickpocket skill gets very high, you will probably get bored reloading the game constantly by trying to pickpocket back 500 gold with a 40 pickpocket skill. Much better to alternate between the two so you're pickpocketing smaller amounts. Your chance of success is higher, and you'll still level up in pickpocket for every successful attempt stealing back 200 gold until you hit around level 60 or 70.

If you plan on continuing to pickpocket during the game, I would also advocate picking up a few perks in pickpocket - light fingers, night thief, and cutpurse. I never regretted those spent points. And it greatly increases your chance of success in your early going for getting your money back from training. I like taking fishing missions from Delvin, as the target typically is carrying around more than just the item you're sent to steal. A lot of times they have a decent amount of gold and magical jewelry, so it's a perk investment that sees quite a bit of use. If you plan to go thief crazy like I did with my all-thief character, sinking the full five points in light fingers will allow you to steal back your training all the way to level 75. (You'll need an item or two to raise your pickpocket to get it all the way to 90% though. The Thieves' Guild boots and a ring and/or an amulet that you equip only when training does the trick.) However, now you're looking at 7 perks, which is a lot to ask for this type of character, especially when 3 perks would prove adequate.

The main reason I would hesitate training heavy armor is because I received a ton of armor levels with my character. In fact, because I was using light gloves (Dark Brotherhood) and light boots (Thieves Guild), I leveled both heavy and light armor. It appears the game doesn't differentiate based on how much of each type of armor you're wearing. Both skills leveled about equally, suggesting that so long as you're wearing at least one piece of heavy and light armor, every time you get hit it adds experience to both skills. The other reason I wouldn't spend too much training on heavy armor is because even with a decent heavy armor rating you'll easily hit the cap.

If you do it the way I did it, you can skip a TON of perks in destruction. Namely, you can skip the entirety of apprentice-master destruction perks. You can't skip novice, and you want dual casting, and up until around character level 15, casting flames/sparks/frostbite in both hands levels destruction quite well. After that, you start running into stuff that just has too much health. My metric for stopping destruction leveling on my own was when I reached the point where I couldn't kill something using destruction spell without drinking a magicka potion. At that point, I deemed it had become unsustainable. You can get away with two out of the three "augment element" perks (although I took all three), and Intense Flames, Deep Freeze, and Disintegrate seem largely optional (arguably, in the case of Intense Flames, counterproductive)

While I did level summoning through summons, I also have limited use in casting soul trap. I think it shouldn't be too hard to level conjuration this way. Plus, you're using bound weapons, which also seems like a big plus (especially because I assume by using the bound weapon you'll level the corresponding weapon skill as well. Depending on how well that works, you may want to prioritize block for training.

From my own experience of mega training, the best piece of advice I can give you is to prioritize skills that fall into one of the following categories listed by priority:

1. Skills that take a while to level on your own, and that you'll need to use soon. Examples: One-Handed, Block, Two-Handed, Archery. If you plan on using any of them, you can get all of them close to 50 by the time you leave Whiterun. You don't need to train them all out to 75 right away, but shooting for 40 to get 3 perks in overdraw/armsman/etc is advisable.

2. Skills that you're going to want to have a very high level in, but you don't/can't/won't be able to effectively use until they reach that higher level. Examples: Any of the mage skills except enchanting, but especially destruction. I tried to minimize my magicka pool, which as you can imagine makes leveling destruction past level 40 on your own problematic (I could dual cast ice spike twice, or chain lightning once, and then I was tapped.). I eventually stopped using destruction outright, and just trained it 5 times every level, all the way to 90. (Recommend you start working on these by level 30 or so, so that they are ready to go when you hit the optimization stage.)

3. Spells that are extremely useful to have, that you can level on your own, but the sooner you get them to a target level to unlock particular perks, the better. Examples: Sneak and Speech (50 in each). I was reading up on Skyrim USEP, and discovered that Merchant is arguably the most important perk in the game, because it does more than just allow you to sell to everybody. It also increases the number of items all merchants have for sale, in both quantity and quality. This is especially important regarding alchemy merchants. There are several alchemy reagents that will never be offered until you get merchant: Bear Claws, Dwarven Oil, Wisp Wrappings, Powdered Mammoth Tusk are a few examples. It also greatly increases the possibility of finding a daedra heart for sale. I liked the Merchant perk before, I love it now.

One other note that I decided on - I think I will go up the right hand side (heavy armor) of the smithing tree forever more. If I'm wearing light armor, I'll probably be using some combination of the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild set until I can make my own armor. By spending one more perk point by going up the right hand side of the tree, I get access to the superior weapon choices along the way (there's a huge gap between elven and glass weapons on the light armor side, and nothing as good as daedric weapons), and once I get the dragon armor perk, I can use it to make dragon scale armor instead of dragon plate armor.

 

It only gives exp when you're at least about thigh-deep in water. So, it becomes "just in case it's deeper than I thought" kind of spell preparation, rather than stupidly spamming it while standing in a fountain in Whiterun.

You only get exp when cast in combat. The buff works everywhere, any time, and the base buff amount is cumulative with worn armor. The Mage Armor perk only helps if you have no armor whatsoever.

As soon as you can get to and clear Fort Amol prison, as you get it as a guaranteed drop there. It's kinda halfways between Riften and Winterhold, both of which should be early visits for both mages and rogues.. and F/M/T is both.

I'm going primarily Light Armors, but thanks for the tip. It might be a good idea to have at least one Heavy piece somewhere then, as I don't need Matched Set bonus later on to reach cap anyway.

I'm only planning to (ever?) use Soul Trap and Bound bow, both of which are just fine without any perks whatsoever. I do, however, need a magicka pool of about 180 to be able to cast it without any reductions, which is about as high as I ever need for other purposes. Remember, I'm not planning to totally remove the mana cost component of spells, just make it minimal. That ought to keep Destruction going for quite a while longer even if I don't get full mana reduction for it until I reach 100 Enchanting. The early pickpocket-train routine ought to give me enough levels to divert the points into Magicka without leaving me all too fragile when the real fun starts.

Archery will the first one to be trained for two reasons: That's the earliest trainer you can get to, and I will be using Archery as my primary sneak attack so I want it maxed fairly fast.

Yes, that a deceptively powerful perk there. Being able to cash in your excess potions as training and/or soul gems is no small luxury.

I'm planning to try something seriously different: Only go as far as Elven and Arcane Smithing. Elven is the lightest armor in the game, and since the materials are cheap, I can make dozens of complete new sets as I go whenever I feel like I need an upgrade. There's only a three damage points difference between Elven and Daedric daggers, and totally pales in comparison to the +46 damage bonus available from triple craft smithing.

 

I guess it had to be implemented that way, as you can't cast spells underwater. You'd have to be able to cast it beforehand.

I honestly don't think I've been there. (Although there a still a LOT of places I haven't been. I don't think I've done more than 4 or 5 of deadric artifact quests, and there are definitely dragon masks which I haven't discovered.)

What schools of magic are you planning on focusing on? Obviously you're using both conjuration and destruction, but if you are planning on using conjuration just for soul trap and bound weapons, I'm assuming that you're picking up at least one more school.

Well, provided you have the coin to spend, you certainly can work on it early. Not only is Faendal the first trainer you meet, but by the time he takes you to 50, you'll probably be in Whiterun, and can switch over to Aela. After that, Riften is just a carriage ride away to get to Niruin who could take you all the way to 90.

Of course, there is the caveat of having enough money to train, and money is a bit more problematic in this regard, because you cannot do a lot of the things you'd typically do to raise the cash, namely crafting, because you run the risk of gaining too much experience. As you're aware, the higher the level of a skill, the more character experience you receive for advancing it to the next level. If you're only level 20-something, simply training a skill that is already in the 60s or 70s five times will give you most of the experience you need to gain the next level. While there's no penalty for over-shooting the experience required to level up - you're never forced to hit the level up key - if you gain enough experience to level up twice, you'll have to advance two levels as soon as you hit the level up key.

Say you're level 25, and you have enough experience to level up to 26, but you haven't done your five training sessions yet because you don't have enough money. So you don't push the level up key yet. If you then go on a potion brewing spree (leveling alchemy a few times) and then train a skill that is already fairly high 5 times, you'll likely gain enough experience to reach level 27. As soon as you hit level up, you can't just go to level 26. You can't exit the screen after selecting just one level up. You must take two levels (you get the magicka/health/stamina choice twice) and you go right to level 27, thus losing out on the opportunity for training during level 26.

So even though I agree that it makes sense to work on archery early, you may not be able to raise it to a very high level until you're a higher level. There's obviously no limitation in getting it to 50, as you'll likely train the full five times as soon as you get a new level, every level. But once you have to start paying for it yourself, you might have some problems raising enough cash without also gaining too much experience. That's why I did so many Vex and Delvin missions - it's not that I really wanted to do so many, but you get up to 500 gp for each mission, and the only experience you gain is from picking a lock or two.

The good news is that the problem takes care of itself as you advance in levels. Gimpus is now level 48, and requires enough experience to reach the next level that you'd really have to overshoot your goal to risk gaining two levels. But up until you're about level 30, I'd advocate training anything that you'll want to have up to level 50 before delving hard core into paying for things out of your own pocket.

I can't get over the expansion in alchemy reagents for sale. I listed several of them, but there are probably close to 10 different ingredients that you see for sale after getting merchant that you won't ever see before that. The most useful is probably bear claws, just because there's a few high value potions with that as a required ingredient. While bears in skyrim aren't exactly rare, I still have no desire to go out and actively hunt them for their claws.

But the merchant perk is so useful that it may be worth training speech in the early going (only to level 50 of course). There are trainers at the Bards College, and from the bard in the inn at Markarth, both easy to reach, and require no quest performed before offering training. There really is little downside to doing this, as speech is a skill that will keep paying you pack all game, with better prices for every transaction.

You won't miss the difference in the eventual end-game damage, but I'm wondering how you hope to get to the end game wearing only elven armor. You won't be able to craft much early on, and the base armor of a full set of elven armor (without a shield) is just 61. Comparatively, the Thieves Guild armor offers a base defense of 68, and the Dark Brotherhood set can get you to 72 base defense. (But only if you pick up the shrouded cowl on the shelf instead of using the shrouded hood Astrid gives you. You'd want to cowl anyway, as the cowl gives +20% bow damage, whereas the hood gives +25% chance to sneak - nothing to sneeze at either way, but damage is king.) In fact, you can mix and match the two sets to get the better attributes from each of them, which would probably be far more useful to this stealth build far into the game until you get that enchanting quite high. I'd take the body armor and the boots from the Thieves Guild set, and the cowl and the gloves from the Dark Brotherhood set (base defense 64 - nearly identical to elven). So the only reason to pick up elven smithing at all in the early going would be for the weapon, which you'll admittedly need as you don't want to be stuck with an iron dagger.

One other thing about a character you plan to train a lot - you pick your race based on whichever one has the best special abilities for your play style. There's no reason to pick a bosmer just to get archery at 25 to start. You're going to level the crap out of it anyway, and it will be 50 before you know it. You'd be much better off picking an Altmer, to get the free +50 magicka, and save yourself 5 attribute increases while leveling up.

EDIT: one other concern for the elven armor is if you want your base defense to reach 567. Each point in light armor gives a cumulative 0.5% bonus to armor rating, meaning even at level 100, you'd only get to 91. Are you willing to spend (a lot of) perks to raise it futher?

 

All of the magic schools will get their fair share of using, but only Destruction will see a significant and very early perk investment to be able to use it as you main source of dps early on. I'm assuming Alteration as the second once dual enchants come into play, but that largely depends whether Mass Paralyze is worth its name or not. Conjuration gets a fat zero perks as you don't really want to deal with the extra hassle of summons when using stealth, really.

Work on it early until it reaches level 50, that is. Actually maxing it comes a distant second as Destruction is most likely more effective early on for anything that doesn't involve sniping targets from afar.

Thanks for the tip, I'll certainly pay a visit to at least one of them early on - not only for the speech training but so that I'll have more fast travel targets to shuffle between when doing the pickpocket train routine combined with a frenzied leveling of all the three crafting skills with store-bought ingredients.

How come? The base stats of the armor and weapons are largely irrelevant once you reach a decent level in smithing. The catch is that you need to be able to improve items with perk for it to really kick in. Already 60 Smithing, the difference between Flawless (+7/+13) with perk and Superior (+3/+6) without is larger than the difference between Elven and Daedric items. Add in an extremely modest +50% smithing enchanted apparel and another +33% from a self-made potion, both available at very modest skill and perk levels, and you're looking at double boost from Smithing already.

With the four non-shield armor locations available, that's +104 armor for an Elven set (at 60 Smithing) vs. +48 armor for anything else. Except for Steel, of course, since you need the perk in it to get Elven, but there's no Light version of Steel armor. Hence, the perk in Elven smithing. Which, coincidentally, happens to have the second best quality of them all: Extremely low weight. And cost ain't bad either. So what's not to like?

Edit: Of course, if any of the quest reward/looted items can be upgraded with either Steel or Elven smithing, even better. But at the very least, you'll need Arcane Smithing to be able to improve something that's already enchanted.

 

Sadly, I can be of no help in that regard as I've never cast that spell. Of course you could buy a scroll, make a set of armor which lowers the magicka cost of Alteration magic (because I think the magicka requirement on it is about 1000), and at that point decide whether or not you want to perk up in the Alteratoin tree. As a sneak character, the possibility of making Illusion your second school has a lot of appeal as well.

I don't remember either of their names, but the one in the Markarth Inn is quite obvious, as he's the guy singing. The one at the Bard's College may take a bit of looking for. It's the guy with the fur hat that you bring the drum to. Again, no idea what his name is. (I know it's Rjorn's Drum, but the guy you return it to is NOT named Rjorn.)

Now this I find curious and it's definitely a difference between our characters. As I said, in the early going I trained mostly my warrior skills. Once I hit around level 30, I had to limit my crafting not because I didn't want to do it, but because after I got all of the skills I wanted to train for free, the crafting skills were yielding way too much experience. Crafting is profitable, but there's no way when you're level 30 that you can craft 10,000 gold worth of potions and enchanted gear and not level your crafting skills several times. When you're level 50, and you need so much more experience to reach the next level, crafting is an excellent means of raising the funds. My character is now level 51, and he's raising pretty much all the money he needs through crafting. (He still has a ways to go. All 3 crafting skills are in the 60s and 70s.)

Sorry - I worded my statement terribly. I wasn't suggesting that you couldn't make it through the game using exclusively elven armor. Heck, even without triple crafting, a set of elven armor made with a set of smithing gear and a regular potion, can certainly get to high defense levels.

My point was twofold. 1.) I erroneously assumed that hyper-leveling your crafting skills early in the game would be difficult, for reasons I stated above (I still don't know how you managed). Meaning you wouldn't be able to get the most out of elven armor early on. It was quite some time before I got my crafting skills up to level 60. 2.) Due to that, I assumed that sticking with one of the set armors from the Thieves' Guild or the Dark Brotherhood, (and later on the Guild Master's and Nightingale Sets) would provide a better mix of bonuses than elven armor. The Nightingale Set would also give a boost to Illusions spells while you were leveling to boot.

Hope you didn't mind that I piggy-backed onto your FMT thread. (And I was planning on expanding it with my build today.) I figured that since we conversed at length about this build, and yet were taking our characters in very different directions, it was a means of showing that you can do just about anything with this type of character.

 

I haven't actually tried hyper-leveling, but I'm aware that you can't go full bore in both triple crafting skills AND pick pocket training at the same time without risking missing levels as you go.

Rather, I see that pickpocket training will only fuel itself so far. (Unless you do some adventuring of your own in between, of course.) And crafting is rather nice thing to fill the gaps with, as it generates gold that you're going to need later on to be able to keep training at every level.

I created the new thread so that we don't have to confuse readers in which one of the builds - Gimpus or FMT - we're talking about. Let's keep this thread about Gimpus, shall we?

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Oh, I didn't quite get why you wouldn't be able to continue pick pocket training for quite a while?

As I see it, you'll have at least a few skills you'll never train yourself, so those are a-okay to train to 50 at any time, ie. you are good for at least 20+ levels right there and then. You have at least 50 points you can use early on to train stuff you actually need to survive so add ten more. I wouldn't be surprised if you maxed your pick pocket a long way before reaching that so you stop leveling by using it, and that's exactly the gap most suited to be filled with more crafting.