I tend to do whatever forging and improving I can do with whatever looted gear and raw materials I come home with after an adventure. But many times I would have to buy stuff from the smith so he would have enough money to purchase what I was trying to get rid of. Naturally I bought more stuff to smith with unless he had a particular item I needed or wanted. So I always ended up with raw materials and it was stupid not to use them so I did.

Generally if I "spam" gear it's to use up an overabundance of whatever raw materials I have, or to make stuff to sell because I need the money. My characters always smith, it's part of who I imagine them to be, so using that craft as a way of earning money seems perfectly natural especially when they are constantly coming home with raw materials and gear they don't need and will sell but can improve in order to turn a bigger profit. I don't consider that spamming even though on some level I know I'm leveilng out the skill a lot faster by doing it.

The thing is, though, I will continue to smith on a regular basis even after I'm at 100 Smithing with all the perks and have more cash on hand than I could ever spend. Because I enjoy it so my characters enjoy it. If I made a pure mage, he would be a pure mage who smithed in his spare time.

A much easier method I've found is to only take the first enchanting perk once/twice, then the other 3 in the middle path.

For smithing I only take the steel and arcane smithing perks, so I can't craft daedric armor (it's ridiculous that you can IMO) and I can't improve to x2.

Then it actually matters what items I come across, items of peerless enchantments are better than mine, but I can have 2 weaker enchantments.

Then again I don't ever make characters that use all the crafting skills, and don't power level skills, I can't see how my character could justify using all three.

See? Player choice. Doesn't mean any part of the game is broken.

I won't smith with every character like this, but my Orc whose smithing is 100 still smiths all the materials he finds in the world and actively pursues ore veins in the world.

He also has both sides of the perk tree even though he wears heavy armor, just so I can have a variety of things to make.

+as for actually being able to sell everything I have given up!

Whatever town I'm in I just go to the smith and sell everything even if at the end I'm giving items away. I think I have around 60k in gold and that is with routinely buying completely frivolous gifts just to make Borgakh feel special.

Thus you can role play and make a living for your character. Plus, if it's something you find enjoyable, then you should be able to do it ad infinium.

absolutely, it is supposed to be 'fun' right?

Exactly. It's a game. It's all about what is fun for the player being able to do most anything that you want to do.

Nah. Enchanting is broken. It needs a smithing-like fix. I made a spellshield and did not use a soul trap weapon or cast soul trap even once and enchanting, just by me finding gems and making a few crafted pieces of armor was still outpacing my other casting skills.

What I would do is slow enchanting down (especially at lower levels it goes lightning quick) but raise the minimum of most of the enchantments a bit. That way the difference between a low enchanting and 100% enchanting is less. People often feel they need to grind enchanting because having an item that gives you "+4% to one-handed weapons" or "sneaking is 2% easier" is considered not worth having, but something that gives a 10% bonus to archery damage, or having an additional +35-45% to magicka regen (instead of lame +20%) would make people feel less like they need to "grind it up".

You completely missed the point.

You aren't being forced to use it like that. It's your choice to grind it out to a level way beyond the games advance. It's your choice that makes it seem broken. It's called 'exploiting' the Skill.

No, I didn't miss your point, I just don't agree with you.

Sure, I can play completely without enchanting, thats always an option, but when my enchanting goes up two levels by disenchanting one item, and my enchantment skill is my highest skill without me even trying, I think it needs to be balanced. I believe I should be able to use it like any other skill and have it increase at a rate competitive with my other skills.

There are two camps: The people who like enchanting how it is, and the people who think it needs to be fixed. I will never convince you enchanting is an unbalanced skill, and you'll never convince me that I can always just gimp myself if I think its too powerful.

I barely ever use it, even with my Mages, but it isn't broken. It's simply either grinding, or you use it sparingly and let it level naturally. I never even came close to suggesting that you just simply not use it. But I fully expect it to go up a ton if I bring 10-20 items to disenchant...

I have to agree with the fellow you quoted.
You don't have to try and grind enchanting to have it fly up like no ones business.

It could do with just a bit of slowing the progress.

I mean from your initial level to about say, 30-40, every enchantment you make nets you a skill level.
That is just a little much.

This is some testing I done on the subject a while back. These numbers show that there is not that much of an issue, if you stop at Legendary which is where a cap should be set.

You are still leveling, no matter what you do.

So, I say..Craft till your hart's content, when ever you want to. It's your game anyway.

Great job, OP.
It looks like some thought and testing went into your post.
It's nice to have a guide in mind to go by.

hey... hey Hey HEY NOW!

There will be NO sense making on this forum, you hear me! NONE!

Played with leather until I got the Nightingale Armor and then used that for the rest of the game until now (level 62). Didn't upgrade the NG armor until 53, mainly because I had trouble getting all the void salts to do it.

Weapons, 62 and still using Ebony.

Bit annoyed on my last character that, even with 100 smithing and all perks done, plus top enchants for smithing bonus, I was still unable to get the NG armor upgrade above Flawless. No Epic or Legendary NG armor.

except that........ you CAN always do just that.

I'm actually trying to level my enchanting on my mage primarily through using staves and refilling charges. I'll enchant a few looted items I pick up that I don't want to increase sell value (wtf else am I supposed to do with petty gems?) but I never enchant smithed items. I only have 1 item currently that I use that I enchanted, and have only enchanted a couple other pieces.

I don't buy soul gems, further restricting my leveling speed potential. (There is an item that makes it so you never need to, but restricting yourself to that 1 item instead of an inventory brimming with grand gems is a MASSIVE bane to leveling speed. You get ONE item enchanted between runs, rather than 5-10)

My first char.... I grinded smithing and enchanting and totally broke my game. I actually went back and swapped out a lot of his gear, forcing myself into cloth (and he's a duelist) using mage armor to back me up, and spreading out my enchantments so I don't have ridiculous modifiers to damage (instead grabbing stam regen, +HP since my armor is so weak, some resistances, etc... I placed every +1hand dmg enchant I could and... well... it was kinda funny but not fun lol)

So I learned from that experience. I simply don't GRIND my levels. I just craft/enchant to pick up levels here and there and manually keep it in line with my other skills.

You need better + Smithing enchant then.....

My broken character (noted above) has no problem making EVERYTHING legendary with only steel smithing (prereq for Arcane smithing)

I stack up to like +120% or something.

Thanks for the responses. Like I've said, this is something I came up for my most recent character, enjoyed it tons and just thought I'd share. There are no obligations to use these guidelines. These aren't guidelines on how not to be broken; they are guidelines on how I limited myself by choice to have fun.

I've tried out using only Steel/Arcane smitihing and the middle line of enchanting without taking all enchanter perks, but the only reason I restricted myself completely from perks was because I didn't trust myself to instinctively stay in check. If I had known which levels were 'safe' for me to raise my enchanting/smithing up, I would have done so. I don't think any one crafting tree can make you ruinously powerful even if you take all the perks..... IF you don't overlevel too early, AND don't combine crafting skills to a ridiculous degree. (imo)

@ Uriel Nocturne - I understand what you mean by playing how you want and letting the game take care of the rest. Like I said at the beginning of my OP, I find that works well with all non-crafting skills because in order to grind them you have to go somewhat out of your way (e.g using Destruction spells on Shadowmere, casting Soul Trap on a dead body many times, etc). With the crafting skills, I find having a bit of guidance is helpful because of two reasons:

• one, the skills don't involve combat and are quite easy to repeat (you're almost encouraged to do so), and you can raise them to your hearts content sitting in the middle of a town;
  
• two, because the immediate effect of having a higher tier weapon or enchantment isn't immediately discernible, it can sometimes be hard to know how high you should let your skill get up to at your current level.

Because of these points I decided to try and offer some guidance for players looking to keep looting exciting, and hoped my experience could help them. This is by no means saying that crafting is broken or any form of complaint thread

I take both sides of the tree because I often use followers and I like to put them in stuff I've made, and some of them are more skilled in light armor. Or they're not really skilled more in one than the other, so I'm just giving them some extra protection while not taking up too much of their carry weight allowance. Especially for hirelings, I will sometimes have them with me for a good long time and some of them I can dismiss and they will join up again for free... after some of the things we go through, the initial one-time payment I gave them doesn't seem adequate. At least when all is said and done I can send them off with a really nice set of custom gear in appreciation of everything they've done for me.

Plus if you are trying to earn cash through smithing, it kinda svcks to get home with a bunch of stuff and then realize you can't make anything with it because it's all Moonstone and Quicksilver and Malachite, lol. Yeah you could just sell the ore or ingots, but it's not quite the profit-turner that armor or a nice weapon would be.

You can make a fortune on steel or Dwarven gear with high enchants on them. It's not hard to get enough Dwemer scrap to make ingots, it's probably the easiest metal to get in the game. I had well over 250 ingots at one time just from scraps collected from two Dwarven ruins alone. I had to endure slow walking to get it all out of the riuns and then stashed it and moved it in several fast travels back and forth to smelt it all. Make a weapon or armor, a nice high level enchant and it goes for well over 1K gold.

After doing several Dwarven ruins, I am now running around with over a million gold.

1K for a horse? Are you toying with me? I'm here to buy the entire stables off you.

Like I said earlier, I made pretty much no real effort to level enchanting and it was still outpacing my other magic skills I was using, which were Alteration, Destruction, and Restoration. Keep in mind that I casted Alteration every time before I entered combat. My enchanting skill was still outpacing it.

I shouldn't have to go out of my way to not level a skill in order to keep it in check. Smithing was fixed, and if you just craft basic Alchemy potions like Restore Health/Stamina/Magicka for regular use, it stays in line as well. With Alchemy, you have to craft a potion that is a poison that reduces mana regen 100% for 30 secs, drains 45 pts of magicka, increases the targets poison res 30% for secs, and increases the targets stamina regen 50% for 30 secs all in one potion to get your Alchemy to skyrocket.

With enchantment, all you have to do is disenchant a destruction robe and you gain 2 levels in it. Yeah, that makes sense.

Personally, I have a much easier method. I go by two rules:

• Never forge any material I haven't already found in the game.
  
• Never allow my smithing/enchanting skills to surpass my combat skills.

It's amazing how well that works. Items usually don't start appearing into the game until the game thinks you're ready for them. You know, the whole leveled loot lists and all. So, I typically will never forge a steel item until after I have found a steel weapon or piece of armor. I will never forge elven or glass until I have found elven or glass. It paces you pretty well.

Now the purpose of the second rule has to do with game balance and scaling. It helps to keep me from throwing my game out of whack and being faced with mobs I'm not actually ready to fight.

Now for the first time i've used enchanting and smithing with the same character, and with my Legendary Dragonscale (first time i have that armor too ) enchanted with benefitting a spellsword (fortify alteration+destruction+magicka regen, fortify stamina+regen, fortify one-handed+unarmed, fortify magicka+regen), i can clear whole dungeons by just walking around with a cloak spell equipped. On Master difficulty (also the first time using, it got boring to hit kill everything, no i need to hit them twice ). Only thing i need to run away from are dual-wielding Briarhearts

I need a NES-style masochisitic difficulty mod

Put a shield in your hand and briarhearts aren't much of a problem either. Shield-bash, attack, shield-bash, attack, kill.

I did it with a dragr deathlord or something, the ones that have that disarming shout. I hate the disarming shout, my current character is a 1hand sword, empty hand left character. I had to pop a few stamina potions (no stam regen at the time) but I think he hit me twice with his sword. He wanted to keep using that annoying shout and he got the hilt of my sword in his throat every time he tried. I was like "Wow, I just really pushed his [censored] in deep"