Skyrim 13 Best Perks For All Classes Guide

All skills are available to the player from the start of the game, but perks need to be earned. Every time you use your preferred weapon or do a skill-related act like opening chests, enchanting your equipment, and buying from merchants, you gain skill experience.

Max out your experience bar, and you level up. You level up, and you can enhance a stat and gain one perk point. The perk point is what you need to improve your skill.

You can max all skills to 100, but you cannot invest more points in perks. This means that you cannot get all perks in the game. Patch 1.9 allows players to reroll the player’s level to allow more perk points, but this process will require investing hundreds of hours of playing and grinding to max out all perks.

This guide will highlight some of the most useful skills to get in the game, so you invest your perk points in all right perks.

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Enchantment/Smithing Tree

Enchantment and smithing are both a must-have skill-tree, regardless of which class or setup you are playing. It can make your character much stronger, especially if playing on a higher level of difficulty.

Here are the best perks for enchantment and smithing

Soul Siphon

Skill Tree: Enchanting (40)

Soul Siphon requires a minimum of 40 levels in the Enchanting skill tree. This skill is invaluable in fighting with weapons. It recharges your enchanted weapon by 5% for each death blow you make, making it more deadly. This perk only activates with deathblows dealt on creature mobs and not on human or humanoid mobs.

Arcane Blacksmith

Arcane Blacksmith: Magical armors and weapons can now be improved

Skill Tree: Smithing (60)

Extra Effect

Extra effect: Can put two enchantments on the same item

Skill Tree: Enchanting (100)

Extra Effect will allow you to put two enchantments on an item. Use this combined with Arcane Blacksmith, and you can create your armor with the enchantment of your choosing, and then you can upgrade the item to make it more powerful.

These two perks are a must-have for any adventurer. Gain access to Arcane Blacksmith first by unlocking it at level 60 Smithing and then leveling up your Enchanting skill to its maximum (100) to get Extra Effect.

Sneak Tree – Backstab/Assassin’s Blade

Skill Tree: Sneak (50)

Backstab

Sneak attacks with one-handed weapons now do 6x damage.

Assassin’s Blade

Assassin’s Blade requires 50 levels of Sneak. Sneak attacks now do a total of 15x normal damage. Combine this with the gauntlets from the dark brotherhood for 30x damage.

If you want to be impressed, use a charged attack using two enchanted daggers on a dragon, and you will see it fall with only one hit. Getting this perk also affects other weapons’ damage output since you need to unlock perks that add Sneak-related damages to your bows and one-handed weapons.

Silent Roll

Skill Tree: Sneak (50)

To unlock this skill, you need to have at least 50 levels of Sneak. This perk will allow you to move around by doing a barrel roll. You can close short distances in a dungeon with this skill.

Also, since it’s under the Sneak skill tree, you can accomplish this without alerting nearby enemies of your presence.

Silent Roll will afford you the chance of avoiding combat until you want to so you can continue exploring the dungeon.

The more you do this skill, the more it improves and the harder you will be to detect. Get this skill together with the next on the list, Assassin’s Blade, and you will be a deadly undetectable force.

Magic Resistance

Skill Tree: Alteration (30)

As you journey around Tamriel, expect your enemies to pelt you with different types of attacks, and nothing is more annoying than magic attacks.

Magic Resistance will allow you to block a percentage of a spell’s effect on you. This perk requires at least 30 skill levels in Alteration and getting the Apprentice Alteration perk.

This particular perk has three levels. At level one, you can block 10% of a spell’s effects. Level two requires at least 50 Alteration skill level to block 20% of a spell’s effects.

And level three requires at least 70 Alteration skill levels to block 30% of a spell’s effects. If you are playing as a Breton, you have an additional, character-specific 25% magic resistance for a total ranging from 35-55% with the perk.

Quiet Casting

Skill Tree: Illusion (50)

If you are playing as a mage, there is a way to be sneaky and the Quiet Casting perk. This perk requires a minimum of 50 levels in the Illusion skill.

This perk will drop the volume of your spell casting to zero so you can sneak up on opponents without them noticing you. This perk affects not only Illusion spells but all spells from any school of magic. Now, if only you can remove that glowing aura around your hands.

Extra Pockets

Skill Tree: Pickpocket (50)

You can find this perk in the Pickpocket skill tree at skill level 50. This perk will allow you to carry more items before getting encumbered. More specifically, it adds 100 points to your carry weight, which is crucial if you love going into dungeons and just taking everything you can get your hands into.

Combine with perk with another item, the Steed Stone, which also gives you an additional 100 points of carrying weight, and you can pretty much take all junks from a dungeon with you. The only way to increase your carry weight is to put points into your stamina outside these two methods.

If you are wondering how to reach level 50 in Pickpocket skill, the easier way is to put on enchanted gears. Wear either a Ring of Major Deft Hands or a Thieves’ Guild Armor, which increases your pickpocketing chances, walk up to an unsuspecting citizen of Tamriel, and steal away. Every item you steal adds to your level in the first 30 levels, so you can quickly rack up the experience points and even gain levels as you go.

Atronach

Skill Tree: Alteration (100)

Those pesky mages are often tiresome to fight. They may have low defenses, but they can quickly wilt your HP, especially if several of them are barrelling down on you. To fight against such opponents, you need the perk called Atronach. Found at the top of the Alteration skill tree with a requirement of 100 skill levels, this perk will let you absorb 30% of the Magicka of the spells your enemies are using on you.

This will allow you to fight fire with fire and win because you are using what your enemies are losing against them. Combine this perk with the standing stone called Atronach stone, and you are looking at a whopping 80% Magicka absorption because the standing stone increases it by 50%.

Master Trader

Skill Tree: Speech (100)

At the top of the Speech skill tree with 100 levels needed to unlock is the Master Trader perk. Skyrim’s realism is obvious whenever you interact with merchants. If you ever find yourself selling many expensive items to a merchant, you will see that the merchant limits how much money they have.

Thankfully, you have the Master Trader skill, which will permanently (and magically) increase the money merchants have on hand. This will allow you to sell more junks to merchants before finding another merchant to dump your items.

Getting Master Trader also means that you have already increased the cash stash of merchants by 500 with the Investor perk so getting both somewhat doubles their available cash. Getting Master Trader likewise means that you already have the Fence perk, which allows you to sell the items you have stolen, intentionally or unintentionally, to any merchant. These perks are invaluable in helping you deal with your hoarding and pickpocketing problems.

Twin Souls

Skill Tree: Conjuration (100)

For those who are going for a Summoner build, you should get Twin Souls. This requires a maxed out Conjuration level, which you can quickly get by summoning dremoras and atronachs and resurrecting your fallen foes.

This Conjuration perk will allow you to simultaneously have two conjured creatures at your behest. This will effectively double your firepower when fighting, especially in more severe difficulties because summoned creatures are not affected by difficulty level based damage modifiers.

Unbreakable

Skill Tree: Lockpicking (100)

Unlocking Unbreakable requires 100 levels in Lockpicking, but that is all that you will ever need to open all chests in Tamriel with ease. Unbreakable makes it so that your lockpicks will never break, no matter how hard you try.

This skill essentially makes other Lockpicking perks unnecessary and redundant. You can now unlock Master chests in high-level dungeons with just a single lockpick. This skill makes even an ordinary lockpick as good as the Thieve’s Guild’s Skeleton Key. No chest in Tamriel is now safe from being looted.

Various Dual Casting Perks

Skill Tree: Alteration (20) Conjuration (20) Destruction (20) Illusion (20) Restoration (20)

Within the five skill trees of magic in Skyrim are dual casting perks that will let you improve your magic spells’ proficiency and effectiveness. You can, of course, put a spell on both hands but the effectiveness of each spell is its normal effect. However, with the perk, you can overcharge the effect by using both hands simultaneously to get a more powerful, more effective spell.

There is a downside to these spells, and that is expending more Magicka. Dual casting requires 2.8 times the spell cost to get increased spell effectiveness of 2.2 times.

Dual casting affects the different magic schools in different ways.

The Illusion Dual Casting perk, together with other perks like Animage or Kindred Mage, will increase the maximum possible level of creatures that Illusion spells can affect.

The Conjuration Dual Casting will likewise affect higher-level summons when using spells like Command Daedra and Banish Daedra.

Conjuration Dual Casting also increases the duration of your summons. Alteration Dual Casting also increased time.

For Restoration Dual Casting, protective spells gain duration, and healing spells heal you faster but at the cost of 40% additional Magicka than when using the healing spell on its own.

Destruction Dual Casting likewise increases your magic potency by 10% but increases 40% more Magicka than normal.

Destruction Dual Casting will also let you stagger your opponent, which gives you an opening. The biggest drawback to dual casting would have to be experience gained. Dual casting a spell yields the same experience as casting a spell on one hand.