Hello folks! Thanks for taking time to read this topic.
Got a question here, but here's a bit of a story first.

I got to a point in the game where you realize the difference the skills bring into the day-to-day basis. For instance, after getting my swords / bows / blocking over 50, I started to notice just how huge the difference is (especially, the latter, for me), compared to lower skill levels. Obviously, it takes quite some time to get there, but it's very rewarding once you do. The story so far is that I was returning back to my base after a pretty long adventure and got stuck in a texture between two trees. Silly me, I thought I could jump through them. While I was grabbing my axe, a troll came... So, I've managed to parry his first strike and while he was recoiling, I started chopping the wood, but then a 2nd troll came. Long story short, I got killed and lost quite a lot of skill points (that I spent hours farming for). Well, death's to be expected when you lose focus, so I just returned, gathered my stuff, took revenge upon the trolls and returned to the base. Fast forward around 15 or so minutes, a friend invited me to join him. So I joined and saw this "the forest is about to screw your stupid crap, moron"; in come the draugur, and then I get killed again (the immunity to skill drain buff was off already). So I've lost hours and hours of skill training in a manner of 30 or so minutes.

I understand that, according to the concept of this genre, death must be punishable in Valheim (sadly, this is my 1st and only survival game that I've ever played), but I cannot begin to express just how much I hate when the game forces you to play additional hours into it. It's like those mini-games in action games that have you hammering a button for 20 times in a quick succession to uhm... open a door or something. Whenever I feel that the game makes such artificial reasons to just return to mind-boggling farming, I... well, I don't think this is a good hallmark.

So, the question so far is: has anyone found a way to stall the skill drain? Maybe there's an item or a skill later in the game that does that? Any way at all? Because this de-incentivizes playes to actually spend time on leveling skills, knowing that the more time they spend on it, the more they will lose in an unfortunate event of their deaths.

Perhaps, it would be better in this case to remove skills from the game in the first place?




EDIT: As for 11th of March, 2021, there is no method to manage the skill drain in game, apart from mods and console commands. Thank you all for participating!