Anyone else notice this? At low sneak levels early in the game, you might as well not bother trying to get into melee range as you won't succeed very often.
You also get way more experience towards sneak skill from actually making sneak attacks. Sneaking around doesn't increase it that much.
With a dagger or melee weapon, generally you're going to get one sneak attack in before being seen. With archery, you can get several, often killing an enemy entirely with sneak attacks before spotted. It's also very easy to get sneak attacks with a bow, you don't even really have to spend much time or effort actually sneaking. It's often as simple as going into the sneaking position before shooting.

Not a major problem, although a little counter intuitive, but I figure this'd be useful information for anyone considering stealth characters.

I noticed this too. Not a big deal to me, though.

I'm a melee fighter but I use bow often to get the attention of my enemies.

Become a vampire. Early on the stealth bonus is useful, and when you bring your sneak skill high enough you can just cure yourself pretty easily.

It is much harder to pull off a Sneak Attack with a blade or melee weapon at lower levels. Archery makes it easier. Although I would have to say that I could only get off one arrow shot before they saw me, so all the Bow did was give me time to ready another weapon and stand up.

What I have found is Sneaking levels up just fine if you get in the habit of Sneaking through every dungeon. Your Sneak skill increase faster if you are in an area where an NPC could see you than it does if your in a cave off to the side or something. Thankfully, the game does not always take into account walls and such when factoring this. But, yes, a Sneak Kill or Attack gives a much bigger boost to the Sneak Skill than any other sneaking activity.

I haven't even tried to be a stealthy character and I have easily gotten sneak to level up by just using a bow like I feel it should be used. I would consider a stealthy character that does not use a bow and that would be a fun challenge.

The fastest way to actually level sneak is to cast calm on a target then backstab them. It is super easy to backstab a calmed target, you don't even have to have any sneak skill and successful backstabs give you the most sneak experience.

Unless you sneak up to sleeping Draugr. Works every time.

How much sneak XP does a single backstab vs. a single arrow give?


You're still probably technically correct that Illusion has the most potential for speedily leveling sneak(excluding backstabbing during the helgen part where you can get it to 100), if you can find an enemy that you can both charm and can survive a backstab you can heal them and rinse repeat.

Yeah, noticed that too and maximized sneak with ease. It makes much more sense this way and basically prevents the old technique of pressing Q, having some coffee and getting back to the game with an improved sneak level.

Don't look me that way, I know you guys did that at least once

I gained around ten ranks in my sneak skill in Bleak Falls Barrow. Not even kidding. Sneak attacks increase the skill insanely fast.