Draqed in steel plate armor, sporting a magical orcish shield with shock resistance and an ebony war axe. Brought to her knees within seconds by a god damned mud crab. A MUD CRAB! Honestly, she didn't use to svck this bad, what happened? I'm level 25ish now, has she stayed at level 3ish?

Check out this UESP blurb on Follower Stats: http://uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Followers#Follower_Stats

Hopefully you're on PC so you can use the console to level her up with you.

In default progression she's mostly just there to shieldbash.

hopefully they fix it in the patch. My Lydia is in full ebony gear and cant handle much at all. Most the time i just leave her in whiterun so i dont have to worry about her when i am giant/mammoth hunting to raise my archery.

Dismiss her.

Open Console.

Target Lydia.

Write 'disable'

then 'enable'


She will now be leveled up to your level.


Only works on PC.

That is good to know. Thanks.

Cheers guys!

Good to know, thanks.

Why are my followers so effective if they don't level up? While I've had several partners fall in the 33 levels I've gone through, mostly they seem more than capable of standing with me in any encounter. When Lydia died, it wasn't until deep in the dwemer dungeon Alftand. Both of us were loaded to the brim with gear, out of healing potions and swarmed by one of the really big dwemer guardians and a gang of the under-elves.
Do the followers perhaps have some kind of hack on them? Set to take less damage or mabye deal more, or both? If they don't level up, they shouldn't last through far more encounters at the high levels. Some kind of developer hack might explain why they seem (at least to me) to be verging on over-powered at the low levels (even Sven was stealing kills from me when I was somewhere around 10th level. ??

If their skills don't level up with them you can change them by typing 'modav xxx y' without quotes. xxx=skill and y=number of points you want to raise it.