I read how crafting basicallhy turns on god mode for your character. I remember alchemy doing that in one of the previous TES games due to stacking and it seems like a constant with most TES games is you turn into a god at level x or after doing x. Will patches include any form of balancing or their purpose only bug fixing?

Eh, the only real problem with smithing in itself is it can let you get armor earlier than you should have been able to, but even that can be balanced by making you weaker than you would have been if you had put those perks/skill points in other more useful skills.

Just how exactly does crafting turn on god mode?

Just don't do it and then you won't turn to god mode and the game will stay balanced

Yeah...it'll turn you to god mode....IF YOU SPEND HOURS MAKING IRON DAGGERS. You are purposely unbalancing the game.

By doing over 2K in damage per hit and having thousands of armor rating. Although I believe you need enchanting as well to get the full 'god mode' effect. Ive never done it personally,. but that's apparanlty how they are doing it.

How does crafting accomplish this?

Just don't use +alchemy/+smithing/+enchant potions/gear to stack your skills and it won't be an issue.

Well, crafting by itself will potentially give you access to goods you would normally not be able to find early on and will basically double the power of your attacks with those weapons. Hence, at basically level 10 or so, you can out-damage a level 30 warrior without it.

Then, you can enchant for making that functionally octuple damage.

Then, you can basically infinitely power up using a loop of alchemy and enchantment buffing abilities, and create equipment that lets you one-hit everything in the game with stats like 10,000 damage per swing.

What above poster said.

All Bethesda games I've played have been seriously imbalanced so it's no surprise. I doubt they'll patch any of the balance issues, they didn't bother fixing potion stacking in Morrowind, 100% reflect or chameleon in Oblivion, etc. etc.

Unfortunately the broken mechanic is part of both enchant and alchemy perks(fortify skill) and I have a feeling they won't touch them. Plus, they'd have to go through and replace all fortify skill items in the game with something else. And redo all ingredients with them on it. Don't see it happening sadly.

Takes less than 10 minutes if you know how to do it. They're not purposefully unbalancing the game, the game is just innately unbalanced. Where do we draw the line? Is it okay to use +smithing enchants and a +smithing potion without stacking +alchemy enchants to make a superior +smithing potion? Is it okay to use the vendor bought +smithing potion? Is it okay to use vendor bought +enchant to make better +smithing gear? Do we avoid using any fortify skill gear or potions at all? Etc. etc.

Specializing in one school of crafting isn't gamebreaking, it's when you start mixing them to stack combat bonuses. I dearly hope it gets balanced in a patch or mods. Something!

However, that's pretty much the only way to use smithing at all. If using smithing at all is unbalancing, there is a legitimate complaint that Bethesda didn't quite properly balance the game.

The power gaming could also have been stopped if Bethesda had simply put in some reasonable diminishing returns that made power-leveling and abuse of the mechanics not quite as powerful. That's not even hard to do - you just need to rewrite the mathematic formula that determines the resultant quality of the crafted item. That's something like 5 minutes of work to rebalance the game.

More or less this. I am going to try it for kicks later, but I will keep my current gear that was made without the buffs. I want to try god mode, but I do not want to stay in it.

Doesn't take near that long.

What does it matter? If players choose to exploit the game let them. If you don't get satisfaction out of it, then don't do it.

I agree. Do what you want to do, and know what you are doing before doing it.

Perhaps, but players should also be free to discuss clearly broken game mechanics, and how it can be fixed, as well.

Again, this one doesn't take very much effort, as all it really takes is rewriting a small handful of formulas, and can be done in minutes.

Oops - accidentally double clicked the submit button.

For some people its fun to mix and match professions to get a powerful outcome. The fun of it is trying things until you get a nice combination and make some sort of cool item, just if it's ridiculously unbalanced it takes the fun out of that. I don't mind having the profession % bonuses, I just think they should diminish or be reworked somehow

There's a difference between sitting in town and using Wait to keep restocking the vendors with iron bars, and powerleveling your Smithing to 100 before you even do anything around Whiterun; and leveling Smithing at a more "natural" rate.... like, I've been doing Smithing as I've found the materials. I'm a bit above 50 Smithing at level 30.

I also haven't done multiple rounds of recursive Alchemy bonus->Enchanting bonus->Smithing bonus, to build up sets of 100%+ to the effect of each craft, then combining all of those to make god-level gear.

Just like making 100% chameleon suits in Oblivion - nothing's forcing you to take excessive advantage of the extremes of the skills and their combinations. If your personality "forces" you to constantly min-max in the extreme, even when you don't enjoy it? That's your problem, not the game's.

I love TES games but they all seem to have this thing in common. I hope Bethesda realizes this if they ever think of making a MMO.

I have no interest in exploiting it if i'm playing a Warrior i won't be useing Enchanting, and Alchemy really isn't my cup of tea either. Seems to me the only reason to do it is if your playing on max difficulty.

Ummm it's a single player game the only unbalancing is done by yourself.

But not to come off like an ash. I understand what the op is saying. Lucky for me I'm never going to unbalance my own game.

I find the whole argument for imbalance, in a single player game, astonishingly [censored].

The pacing is what matters in a SP experience, and TES has always had great pacing; it is 100% dependent on each individual player.

As for being too hard or too easy... That, I find, is also 100% dependent on the player. Personally, I have been playing at the default difficulty. It's fairly easy going, yes; but when I do encounter the higher level guys-which DO appear, just not in the same en masse forces I hear about in people playing on Master-they give me a bit of a challenge. This could be because, unlike many people who describe how they play here and elsewhere, I have not been going out of my way to min/max my character. I've simply been playing the damn game.

Maybe this is why the younger generation are so hard to please; they simply don't know how to just play a game. They take all this time to research every enemy, every item, every mechanic, and then play the game like a chore to just be completely and totally maxed out as much as they can... Only to complain that the game is too easy for them. I can understand looking up a hint or solution to something you've encountered and have been stuck on for hours, but when you know every little detail of a game before even seeing the main menu it just makes me wonder why you even bother to play.