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I recently got my Blacksmithing skill to 100. Now in the skills menu I can press space to make it Legendary, which will put it back to a skill level of 15 and reset my perks.

I am wondering: What benefit is there from making a skill Legendary apart from being able to level up the skill more thus having infinite levels?

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2 Answers 2

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There are a few perks to making a skill legendary:

  1. Since your perk points reset within that skill tree, you can reallocate those points within the tree or place them into another tree

  2. Resetting the skill back to 15 allows you to continue levelling using a tree that you actually use in the style you play the game with instead of forcing you to max a tree that is not within your playstyle. For example, I prefer to play a stealth/ranged damage character, so don't particularly care for tanking so I could use the legendary skill feature to remove the need to max the block and heavy armor trees.

  3. As you stated, the legendary skill feature effectively removes the level 81 level cap, so that you can attain ridiculous levels. A side effect of the level cap removal is that you continue to gain a perk point each level. You could theoretically get to a high enough level to have enough perk points to get every perk from every tree.

Source: http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Skills_(Skyrim)

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    So when you make a skill legendary you get the perk points back you spent in it but do you lose the perks themselves? That seems like a bad thing... Not sure I understand.
    – Jake Wilson
    Commented Jan 2, 2016 at 5:06
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    Yes, you lose the effects of the perks as well. The point is that if you make a skill legendary, you still have the same amount of perk points as before, but now that the skill is set to 15 again, you can level it up once more and gain more perk points. For instance: if you have invested in getting all the perks in Smithing (10 in total), when you make Smithing legendary, you get to level up by doing more Smithing. Getting Smithing back to 100 from 15 gains you about three more level ups, so when you hit 100 again, you have now total of 13 perk points, instead of the 10 you started from.
    – synchronos
    Commented Mar 2, 2016 at 17:25
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    In addition, you now get to spend the perk points in different ways, so you may e.g. want to spend only 3 points to Smithing, and the rest of the 10 to something else. But even if you decide to reinvest them again to complete Smithing tree, you still have three extra points.
    – synchronos
    Commented Mar 2, 2016 at 17:27
  • Note that the amount of level ups gained by getting a skill from 15 to 100 depends on your level. Higher the level, fewer level-ups you get.
    – synchronos
    Commented Mar 2, 2016 at 17:29
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    @Chris Paton: You can make a particular skill legendary multiple times and you can make any number of skills legendary. Prior to the legendary skill mechanic, the only way to hit the level 81 cap was to level every skill up to 100. This means that on a mage, you had to level things like Heavy Armor and Block. With the legendary mechanic in play, you can forget about those skills and level up Alchemy and/or Smithing and/or Conjuration multiple times instead. It also effectively removed the level 81 cap as once you hit 81, you can keep making skills legendary and level up even further.
    – Tom
    Commented Dec 15, 2016 at 3:20
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In short, not a whole lot. The only reason is to allow your character level to continue to rise (again, no benefit for this either).

Taken from the wiki

Legendary skills level up normally, and have no added benefits compared with non-Legendary skills. The purpose of making a skill Legendary is to allow it to contribute to increasing character level again. In Skyrim, character levels are gained by leveling up one's Skills. When all skills reach 100, the character can no longer gain character levels (this occurs at level 81). Making skills Legendary allows skill leveling to continue, which in turn allows character level to continue to rise.

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    I read this a bit differently for some reason, I was answering a "Is there any benefit", even though that was never said haha
    – Ben
    Commented Jul 14, 2014 at 6:35
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    Well, though I am late, this will help you get higher HP, MP, and SP with leveling.
    – The Mattbat999
    Commented Oct 25, 2017 at 0:17
  • If it doesn't help a skill to get legendary, then it sounds like it is smartest to leave your most important ones at 100, and 'make legendary' ones you don't care about so you can use their points for other things. Sounds kind of funny that way. More like it should be calling things 'disposable' instead of legendary though.
    – Jeff Clayton
    Commented Apr 17 at 17:24

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