If you have a good computer, addons like deadly monsters, deadly dragons, and wars in skyrim will make all weapon and armor leveling easier, because, in the case of the first two, monsters and dragons will be more numerous and hit you much harder, which is good because all weapons and armor skills level faster with harder hits. Wars in skyrim adds large battlefields, and if you've got good sneaking skill and a bow, you can practice sneak attacks on over 30 targets at once, which will feel a lot less cheap than sneak attacking greybeards, and level your bow since you're actually doing damage.
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Leveling givesyou the raw data for every skill.
For sneak, ranged sneak attacks give you 4 seconds of sneaking around, melee attacks give you the equivalent of a whoping 48 seconds of sneaking! So maybe summoning a dremora and sneak attacking it with double daggers would be a good idea, then summon some more. It will raise both your conjuration and sneak fast.
pick pocket is childishly easy. run around town at night, suddenly sneak behind peaople, wait for the undetected icon, save game. steal the 100% shit and some riskier items, it's 1 xp per gold value of items, steal 88 thousand gold and you're 100 pick pocket. At higher skills with modest enchantments, several key people like all the black briars or silver hands or battle borns has nice stuff to steal. Personally, just hanging around riften/whiterun i've gone from 15 to 100 in under half an hour wth 100 sneak. Once you're good enough to steal from guards, it starts increasing ridiculously fast.
As for restoration, just go to a conjurer's den and double cast the ward, use lots of potions to replenish mana. Once you've spent 528k majicka you've gone from 15 to 100 resto. Or you can heal as many points of damage but it's more tedious.This means of course that you want a good boost in majicka and no casting cost reduction pieces either. Spend mana fast, make it back fast, you'll level fast.
For blacksmith, forget iron daggers. It's way too long since they revamped thing. Do iron daggers till you can use glass, then buy or find glass weapons and armor, then improve with bought ingots, every piece will be worth over 100 daggers at some point. Once you get into ebony and daedric, a single ebony battle axe from a dead draugr deathlord with full +smithing equipment and potion raises you a point or two in your 90's. So once you can do ebony at 80, go kill high level draugr, pickup their ebony shields and 2h weapons, it's more fun and less time consuming than daggers.
For alchemy, it really depends on if your version is unmodded. Rebalancing addons like skyrim redone have removed a lot of overpowered combinations. But with even modest +alchemy gear, buying cheap stuff and crafting with it will turn a heavy profit, and the higher the cost of the resulting potion, the more xp, so invest on good alchemy gear! You can also use this time to make the majicka potions you'll need while leveling some magic skills. If your version is unmodded, or console, then giant's toes, all butterfly wings, but especially blue and luna, a well as wheat and vampire's dust are great items. Anything with increase carry weight, damage xxxxx regen, invisibility, or slow is gonna be huge profit.
another thing that might be more fun than dragons for leveling blocking is to go fight chaurus in falmer levels, or forsword in the reach. The fights will be more dynamic and keep you on your toes, and the damage will raise your damage better than dragons or giants because of the multiple sources. I know this because the leveling is damage-based and dragons haven't managed to kill me in forever, but these 2 did, othen, when i was unaware. I wouldn't be surprised if chaurus spit attack bypassed armor.
Destruction, you get base xp both for damage and magicka, so pack on the mana potions, don't dual cast, use both hands with the same spell in their oen side like i showed you earlier. since there's also points for damage, use AOE spells, runes especially are kickass for that.
If you want to level both light and heavy armor, wear a shield of one and suit of armor of the other. when you block, ou'll level one. when you decide to just take the hits, you'll level the other and get to level restoration healing yourself.
Alteration go find a rat, let it beat on you while you keep casting twin wards. once you reach 65 alteration, go see tolfdir and buy the last ward, the detour is worth the xp.
As for speech, there's no easy way. Personally, i go find the trainer in the bard college, train one skill point at a time, then pick pocket back the money. 2 skills leveled at the same time for free. I like to go to him as i'm almost at the end of one level. Then it makes me levelup, I open the dialog after my 5 skills, then get 5 more immediately.
I also recommend doing this with archery, the master trainer is in the thieves guild. These 2 skills, especially at high levels, are absolute hell to level, yet they're some of the most useful. Melee weapon skills are not half, or even a quarter, as hard to level, because xp being damage driven, power attacks against multiple enemies levels them way faster than the bow or speech.
One last thing of notice. If you refuse to use the trainers trick, remember that higher skill in a kind of weapon and armor increases value of said item because their protection/damage gets higher. Abuse the hell out of that when leveling blacksmith (it's gold value-based) and speech. That also means a one/two handed weapon, archery, light/heavy armor potion will raise item prices when selling them, and item worth when improving them.
This post was edited by StephanePare on May 8 2014 02:38am