I was thinking a way to make smithing more interesting would be the more a weapon or armor is used, it would go from "fine" quality for example, back to normal. I think it would be even more interesting if other lower tiers were implemented such as "chipped" or "cracked" and your weapon or armor are worse off than originally. You could have smiths repair your equipment or you could do it yourself. Not sure how difficult it would be to pull something like this off, but I thought it would be an interesting feature. The way a weapon stays the same tier forever bothers me. Sorry if this has already been requested but I couldn't find anything when I searched.

Repairing is one of the things that needed to be reintroduced back into the game. It was a money sink and a necessary one. I think any item you reinforce should decay with time. After a week it should decay one level.

I don't know if a weapon would be worse off in a matter of a week but I get what you're saying, that would be an interesting idea to work with.

Shouldn't just degrade over time, should degrade with use. Degrading over time would mean you'd have to clear a dungeon and then definitely go to town to renew all your gear even if you didn't use any of it just from the pure travel times.

Yeah I agree, that's what I originally posted. That would not make much sense. If these weapons can chill in a dungeon for hundreds of years and still be great I don't think another day would make it that much worse.

I was going to respond with that too. However, now that they've removed it from the game's coding, I'm not sure how item "health" can be re-implemented, even with scripts. Seems like it would require some pretty complex scripts running all the time, and I doubt they'd be accurate. Some modder might prove me wrong however. From the heated debates in the months before release, I am absolutely certain this matters enough to so many people that several modders will be working on mods that reintroduce equipment wear.

Could do a Character ability (thats applied to everyone maybe) that affects handheld items matched against a list with an Activate effect for the actual decay (item type degrade or if the quality is a hidden enchant just reduce the power of the enchant).

@SysOpPsyche:

The problem is the only way I can see doing this would be to have either A) a script on every single piece of gear in the game, or have a master script that checks for every single item in the game in order to apply the desired effects.

Or I suppse C) implement with this mod an overhaul of all items in order to reduce the number of them.

Granted, what I'm saying is based off what I know would be required if this mod were being made for Morrowind, as that's the one I have the most experience with. There might be an easier way in this CS, or it might be even harder than it would've been in Morrowind. I can't really say for sure, and either way, any ideas I share are solely based off my Morrowind modding experience.