How are poisons useful? As I understand, a bottle of poison can be applied one time to one weapon, and that poison will affect that weapon's next target only once. In order to use a poison's affect multiple times, you need multiple bottles of the poison and must apply it to the weapon in between each strike against a target. This is too complicated compared to enchanting a weapon and getting its effect on every use. Also, it's unrealistic, for the role players among us.

I'm currently playing a Dark Elf mage. Since Dark Elves start with an alchemy bonus, I'm working on alchemy, thus making poisons. But as a mage, I'm limiting myself to using a dagger and a mace (because old school mages use maces, right?). Poisons seem useless for these melee weapons, thus useless for me.

But I've read people on the forums say that poisons can be very powerful. How is this possible? Thanks for your input.

**drinks some frostbite venom**

Poisons can be powerful in terms of how much damage they can do, and some can do a whole lot. Whether it damages health, magicka or stamina posions can be useful for many situations. Paralysis poisons have saved me on several occasions.

I only apply posions to my arrows and use them that way. I can see lacing my arrows with different poisons and knowing which arrows in my quiver hold what poisons. One arrow's tip is soaked in a paralysis poison, another in poison that damages magicka, etc.

poisons crafted can be extremely potent. particularly those involving nirnroot, river better, and crimson nirnroot as one of the ingredients as those three multiply the effects of the poison. nirnroot is 2x, river better i think is 2.5x, and crimson nirnroot is 3x i think. at level 19 in alchemy using river betty and one 20% better perk im making almost 30 damage potions. without any fortify alchemy gear. it doesnt sound like much, but add 105% that i dont have yet, then another 100% from enchantments and there's a poison dealing about a hundred damage with just one effect. if you add lingering damage onto it or paralysis, that would be a powerful poison in my eyes.

Human flesh, imp stool, slaughter fish eggs or scales. Paralyzed, lingering damage, and poison damage. Just one of many useful poisons. And a perk in alchemy lets you hit two times with a single poison.

Drink one of those potions that fortify all potions made by like 40-50% on top of all that. Now that would be one nasty poison. One I wouldn't even want to risk holding in my hands!

I'll second this post. Once you know what you are doing poisons are very useful.

I keep five bottles of an extremely powerful poison in my inventory that I made using the fortify restoration loop and crimson nirnroot, imp stool and mora tapinella.
For when a dragon decides to talk a town or city, I can kill it with one arrow and not lose any villagers.

Paralysis poisons are good for tight spots.

Damage magicka regen forces those pesky ice mages to switch to melee.

OP,
You are looking at it like using poison for a continuous effect. The weapon is just the applicator. I RPd an Alchemist that carried no weapons at all. He summoned a Bound Bow to act solely as a delivery system.

Poisons can be made to achieve devastating damage and effects.

If you know you are going to be using a lot of one type of poison in a battle, you can put that poison in your favourite menu then put it on a quick slot. Then all you have to do is press d-pad & A (360) in between strikes.

I did it with my 2-handed Orc and a load of frostbite venom when fighting a dragon http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWdCHlDTE_c

Ty has to try this, found poision in Skyrim to be weak compared with Oblivion.
Weapon damage is higher in Skyrim but enemies has more health to.

Only found use for it as an archer. They can make a huge difference at low levels. If you were able to make potions on the go I could see them being more useful but as they are now plus their weight I just don’t see them as effective. You can play around with some exploits and make uber poisons but you can play around with those same exploits and just make an uber bow. They are also very very expensive so selling them seems smarter than using them imo.