Skyrim- On Legendary Skills (Part Two)

In order to make a Legendary skill truly useful again, you will have to train it all over from the lowest strength up to the higher tiers.  This makes crafting skills adequate but very time-consuming choices for Legendary skills- you have to go back to more basic levels of crafting and weaker results and craft your way up through the ranks and talents all over again. 

In the case of Smithing, this means crafting literal tonnes of armor that you simply have no use for whatsoever and then selling it or tossing it off of a cliff or something.  For Alchemy, this means crafting hundreds upon hundreds of basically useless potions and poisons until you have the ranks and talents to produce usable ones again, and trying to sell them to the underfunded potion and miscellany merchants or drinking them for no real reason.  For Enchantment, this means gathering hundreds of souls from all over Skyrim over and over to enchant otherwise meaningless items into slightly more sellable but still meaningless items until you are once more competent.

For all of the crafting skills, you will have to spend hours upon hours gathering materials to craft with again, revisiting mines and wandering aimlessly through environments you plundered a month of game time ago just to scrounge up the necessary materials.  Enchanting is particularly tough here, as it will eat through your wallet like you wouldn’t believe to be buying soul gems (since finding them is infinitely more slow).

Support skills are slightly better choices for applying the Legendary status to.  As long as you keep buying and selling things, your Speechcraft will continue to rise.  Working up a higher rank in your Sneak skill is as simple as hiding and then repeatedly almost getting spotted by wild animals or guards.  Improving your pickpocketing is as simple as sneaking up to someone and then saving your game before emptying their pockets, then repeating this (while reloading your save each time you get caught at it).

There are two particular skills that stand out as excellent choices to make Legendary, though: Restoration, and Blocking.

While reducing your armor skill to 15 and losing all the talents you put into it will often guarantee your death, reducing your Blocking skill by making it Legendary has a much less powerful impact on your defenses.  Once your armor skill is capped out and you have enough durability, you can easily rank up your Blocking skill at a fairly ridiculous clip by drawing the attention of something melee-inclined and then standing there and taking a beating from it over an extended period of time.  Giants in particular are great for this.  Since wearing heavy armor with a lot of perks will reduce the damage from melee attacks to a huge degree, this can be an excellent and fairly amusing way to regain your Block ranks and thus gain more experience towards your character level.