If you want to level Destruction get a CORRODE ARMOR or CORRODE WEAPON effect on self, instead of self damage.
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You don’t die.
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You also get to level up Armorer at the same time. Combo’s great with your “Fortify Armorer” spell to minimize the hammers you break along the way.
If you just want to level up Armorer, you can enchant some apparel (a ring, for example) with the Disintegrate Weapon/Armor effect, and it will damage your gear every time you equip this ring… so just spam equipping/removing the ring in your inventory until all your gear breaks for optimal Armorer EXP gains.
Spell casting hints: Weakness to Magic 100% for 6 seconds, and a Absorb Fatigue 5 pts for 6 seconds. When you spam it, it will trigger the weakness and double it to 10 pts.
It’s a style of casting that works better the more you cast then on the enemy.
I find these simple exploits of game mechanics funny. Do you have any others (in Oblivion or other RPGs)?
In morrowind, you would gain athletics experience for swimming, even if you weren’t moving. So an easy way to powerlevel was to jump into a canal in balmora, wrap a rubber band around your controller stick, and walk away for a few hours whole your character endlessly swam into a wall leveling up.
I know there were also several broken spell combinations, but my favorite was using a custom fortify jump 100 for 3 seconds and then a fortify jump 200 for 1 second and leaping across the map (because fast travel was transit style between fixed points).
Oh and summons disappear when they die, but if you looted one the same instant you killed it, you could get its gear. So you could create a cheap summon golden saint spell for a few seconds, kill and loot it and repeat for unlimited ebony and glass shields and weapons.
In skyrim, there are enchantments that enhance alchemy, and potions that enhance enchanting, so by alternating between the two, you could create gear with RIDICULOUS enchantments. Like the numbers on them would be in the hundreds of thousands.
In Oblivion you can sneak into a wall endlessly next to some NPC and get to level 100 pretty well. Bethesda knew what they where doing.
I recently did a Morrowind playthrough where I trained sneak by crouching on the roof of the Balmora building with 2 dudes by the Silt Strider, then I went and had dinner.
Sneak is basically useless with the code patch though. Even with max sneak, iirc the max chances of pickpocketing even like a spoon is ~30%.