I made a dagger that I want to be more effective against mammoths. My first notion was to make an Enchantment that has a condition if the race being attacked was a mammoth the dagger would do an additional 10 points of damage. Long story short,something went wrong and I started looking into making a magic effect that was basically a silent and invisible damage health effect. I figured having this magic effect would be helpful so that I could reuse the effect in potions or on enchantments for other items. Anyway, I never ended up making the magic effect because I decided to take a look at how Bethesda had handled the Silver Sword damage effect which does essentially the same thing that I am trying to do.

I ended up making a perk, a script on a weapon that added the perk to the player on equip, and then having the perk be responsible for checking the race of the thing being attacked.

Now heres my quandry, are these just simply two different ways of achieving the same affect? Which way is better? I could see using the magic effect and enchantment route if I wanted the increased damage against mammoth effect to be limited to a certain period of usage. Ie, I could say that its actually a blade coated with a special poison that runs out and then the blade no longer has the same effect. Thats a possible way of forcing the player to repeat the hunting quest which the dagger is a part of the random reward list. Or, am I just misunderstanding the purpose of enchantments and magical effects and what I want to do can only be achieved through the script?

I just want to make sure a script is neccesary, I have other plans for the mods that involve plenty of scripts already and honestly if i can work around using one for something trivial like this I will do it.