yea blacksmithing is pretty much overpowered, especially if youre dualwielding like i am and have 2x daedric legendary weapons, they each do about 65 damage and my one handed is not even fully maxed... i assume i can reach 150-200 damage each sword when i really get serious with crafting and all the way up and such. thats without power attacks

but in all honestly, lots of stuff is OP in the game, such as spells which dont cost any mana

Here's my only quibble with smithing: it isn't feasiblet to use it to make money. I understand the game isn't an MMORPG - I wouldn't play it if it were - but still, it would be nice to have some way to make a little cash by making things and selling them. I found out - the hard way - that you can actually lose significant amounts of $$$ by buying ingots, crafting armor, and selling it. According to http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Forge, some items are worth less than just the raw materials it takes to craft them, even before you take into account the retailer's markup on selling the raw materials and their mark-down when buying the finished items.

As somebody said to me on another forum, it isn't meant to be an economic model but rather a game mechanic. But yes, I understand that, but if a set of iron armor or whatever were worth less than the iron it took to make it, nobody would be in the business of making suits of iron armor. If they're going to include economic activities like crafting and trade in the game, it would be nice if they created a reasonable facsimile of an economic model so that people could actually engage in these activities for a profit.

Given the Norse feel of Skyrim, I suppose I could say it's sort of like the Norns said "Okay, this guy's gonna be real powerful, and he's Dragonborn - we have to give him some comparable weakness to compensate. I got it - let's make him unavoidably fated to be incapable of engaging in economic activity to put food on his table! He'll be the only person in the world that can buy raw materials, craft them into a value-added finished product, and have it sell for less money than the raw materials cost him!"

But more seriously, crafting is largely only feasible as an economic activity if you go and get the raw materials yourself by mining ore and hunting animals for their pelts. Apparently everybody in the weapons trade has to be entirely vertically integrated - they have to (1) obtain raw materials (2) refine those raw materials into partially-finished materials, (3) take those intermediate materials and craft a finished product, and (4) retail the finished product to the end user by having a store. It's like if the Gap could only turn a profit by owning cotton and dye farms, harvesting the material, owning textile factories and dye factories to turn those materials into fabric and dyes, owning clothing manufacturers who turn the cotton and dyes into clothes, and owning retail stores to sell the finished clothes. It's like if Boeing could only turn a profit by owning mines that mined iron (and the coal needed to produce steel) and electric plants and mines providing rare earth elements for electronics and titanium for compressor blades...oh you get the idea.

So am I just nitpicking here, to say the economic model needs some tweaking to allow people to make a profit while not being so profitable as to make you wonder why anybody would ever go into adventuring, or are there others that wish they could make a few bucks by buying ingots and leather, forging armor and selling it?

You couldn't be more wrong.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1266212-2469-armor-3199-damage-using-smithing-alchemy-enchanting-only-31-perks/

^ That being the extreme, but you can make armor and weapons so much stronger with smithing. Plus its very easy to level.

Wait, are you replying to me or the OP? I'm not at all saying smithing is useless - far from it! I can already make dwarven armor before I've ever seen dwarven armor in the game. I'm just saying it's not a feasible way to make money because of the economic system in the game.

The OP ha. I understand what you're saying, IMO they need to balance smithing and alchemy to the rate of enchanting. Smithing is very easy to level up, enchanting is average and alchemy is difficult, takes forever.

Smithing and Speech go good together. Good way to make money. I just bought a 12,000 dollar House in Winterhold with like 8,000 in upgrades for the house, and not to mention all the crap I'll be buying to collect to put in my house.

My dragon armor is better than 98 percent of everything I find over the game.

If you go mine the ingots and collect the hides for the leather yourself, you actually can turn quite the profit. This is as it should be. Why would a smith sell you raw materials at a lower price than the finished product? You really think they want to pay you to do their job?