I find it kind of stupid that I can level up my smithing from like 65 to 66 by making 5 iron daggers. It seems like (I may be wrong) no matter what piece of equipment you make, you always get the same amount of "experience" towards your next level. Anybody else feel that leveling smithing is too easy?

Leveling smithing 'legit' is hard. Leveling smithing by abusing that smithing is badly designed, is easy.

The issue is that the way it -should- work, is that you get XP based on the cost of the materials you used to make the item (So making Glass Armor for instance gives lots of xp, while iron daggers give close to zilch). The way it does work, is that it gives a staticish amount of XP per item you make.

fewer ingots on the vendors would help....o look your going to sell me 30 iron ingots for 300g? thats like 2-3 skills for the price of one skill up at like lvl15 smithing... >_>

I think bethesda did the leveling of skills a bit reactively to what it was in oblivion. In oblivion alchemy leveled way too quickly and got everyone in trouble, while people had trouble raising the armorer skill. So now in skyrim it's the other way round.

This stuff really should've been balanced during testing.

I agree that smithing is leveling way too fast, but thats what mods are for!

I dont think Bethesda ever made balance patches for any of their games.

The problem with doing it legit is that i've put in 27 hours on my character and i still haven't found an ebony node, only 2 moonstone nodes, 1 malachite mine with several nodes, and like 2 quicksilver nodes. Countless iron nodes, and about 1/3rd as many corundum nodes. Its not like i just chill in cities or always fast travel either, i've been all over the eastern side of the map. Leveling smithing legit would be soul breaking. I don't find the current design of just make iron daggers to level good, but its preferable to the aforementioned. On that note, if i didn't deliberately go to Markarth knowing there was a dwemer excavation site there, i still wouldn't even have made dwemer armor at level 23.

I am level 15, have never been into a Dwemer ruin and have a full set of hand-crafted Dwemer armor. If you feel cheap making Iron Daggers make Iron Armor instead. That's what I do. I make Iron, Leather and Steel armor.

I know what you mean. There's not a whole lot of mines, and it's impossible to get directions to specific types of mines.

But I'm sorry to say you've probably missed an ebony mine in your travels. There's an orc camp on the eastern border of skyrim with an ebony mine. It's quite a bit to the south.

This, plus balancing the XP gained based on complexity of item being forged/upgraded.


I'm sure enjoying my epic level orchish armor though =P