Are there any disadvantages to leveling too fast in skyrim?

I play a warrior dual welding two axes and some heavy armour with a dash of conjuration. I have some skills I want to level like smithing that can be power leveled but I am worried this will cause me to gain too many levels too fast.

The leveling in Skyrim feels fast in general, is it ok to power level up a skill or two or do I risk throwing the game off balance?


Absolutely, leveling up faster has these disadvantages:

  • You lose the ability to take advantage of the 5 training attempts per level (though this further increases your leveling speed). You should use this in a hard to level category, such as armor, restoration, lock picking, etc.
  • Your equipment will fall behind compared to the increased difficulties of monsters you face. (This is a major issue as facing high level enemies and dragons wearing hide armor is typically not a good idea). Taking it slow gives you plenty of opportunities to hoard up gold and valuable loot for better gear and spells.
  • You may not have enough helpful secondary skills, such as alchemy, restoration, etc to make adventuring easier.
  • Power leveling a none combat related skill (such as smithing) means you won't be as effective in killing those enemies who will be using better gear than you.

The best approach (though time consuming) is to try to maintain a constant level across all your skills. Even though you don't plan to put any perks into most skills it's still beneficial to be able to do some things (such as enchanting, lock picking, or improving gear through smithing).


Playing a dual-wielding, heavy armored orc warrior on master difficulty. The game was difficult when I was level 15. Like really difficult at some points. Then I power-leveled smithing and made a full set of Daedric armor and two weapons.

Now I feel ridiculously over-powered, even though I gained a ton of levels.

Edit: Oh, and I have not even enchanted my gear yet, although my enchanting skill is at 65, adding quite a few more levels. I even have six perks yet to spend.


leveling up a skill or two should be fine. in your case, smithing is an excellent choice as you will be able to make really good equipment, and then improve it to be even better.

the game starts getting hard as you level up though, so make sure to increase smithing after adventuring for a while to make sure your other skills arent left behind