Originally Posted by zensheep

With how Oblivion attempts to equalize the difficulty of enemies in relation to your character level, it's common to fall behind in comparison to things you're fighting. I believe it's based solely on your characters level, and so for example if you have blunt and sneak as two major skills, getting 8 improvements in sneak and two in blunt would cause you to level up, so you're melee skills can easily lag behind. This creates a gap in melee proficiency between you and your enemies. It's kind of a skewed system that you can only really get around by setting non necessary skills as your major skills. My fighter character has all spell skills, alchemy, and hand to hand as his major skills as this lets me decide when I level up so that gives me a chance to make sure my melee skills raise at a decent rate in relation to enemies. Hope that made sense, it's a little tricky to explain hehe.