Seriously, once your able to craft the strongest armor/weapons(dragon/daedric/ebony) and upgrade it to legendary and have all the proper perks, it makes your character superman. My light armor character has over 700 armor, cant even imagine how high heavy can get.
Enchanting makes things even more ludicrous. I enchanted all my equipment for plus 1 handed dmg, now my daedric sword hits for almost 200 dmg a swing. Dual wield 2 of those babies and i can pretty much kill anything on master difficulty instantly with power attacks and dragon shout buffs.

Is there any reason to forgo smithing and enchanting? Seems to be mandatory for any character you hope to get the most out of.

for some people, getting the "most" out of their character does not involve one-shotting dragons

Yeah, for anyone wanting to make the most powerful character they can maxed Smithing and Enchanting are mandatory. They do seem way too powerful at the moment, and way too easy to level.

Put it this way. All the guys posting Master difficulty is too easy have abused Crafting in one way or the other.

i like it when there are ways to get your character up to super human status, but not easily. and based on how easy i can level up the armor skill by making leather helms from wolf hides perhaps its too easy.

although can't confirm what the op says as i have yet to do any thing with enchanting and have yet to get my smithing skill past 50

Its not really a problem for me, when I make a character I do so from an RP standpoint and there aren't many situations where I would take both smithing and enchanting on the same character.

When improving your weapons and then enchanting them, are you also taking potions and elixirs for both enchanting and smithing? It packs and even more powerful punch, along with perks in the enchanting tree, if you want the damage or armor rating even higher. I see your point of being able to do more damage than possibly intended, but remember leveling up these types of skills also levels your character, which is a good thing. You can level up all the way to 100 smithing just by making leather bracers and iron daggers. You can then also enchant those items with basic petty soul gems to increase your enchanting, and therefor character level, rather quickly. Enchant a bow with the soul trap enchantment, carry plenty of petty soul gems with you and kill mudcrabs and wolves until you're full. Then, enchant those daggers and sell for around 600 gold each to a vendor Levels up skills, your character and also adds a good amount of gold too. Not sure if this entire post is completely relevant to your original post, but hope it helps some.

If you play the game normally and not try to max your crafting skils out of the gate you will have a more challenging experience. Normal playing will get your smithing and enchanting to max by the time you are in mid lvl 40 range. The problem is that everyone is maxing those skills first because they feel they need to and you really don`t. Spending your first 20-30 lvls of the game worried about crafting takes away the whole fun experience of getting stronger, you are just dropped in the world wearing the best stuff and you have nothing to work towards but finishing quests and starting over.

My advice would be to craft when you are in towns between quests with whatever you picked up along the way. But maxxing them from the start kills the challenge and makes it pointless to progress if you allready have the best gear. This game is meant to be played slowly and give well over 200 hours of content in a playthrough. Rushing through crafting will decrease those 200 hours of content very much to where you don`t even want to bother.

Exploiting the crafting is indeed easy-mode. However, I don't understand why people would do this.

i was thinking the same..... u can one shot anything and dont get hurt on even Master mode...


[censored] this iam gonna skip ench/smit completely

The problem is using it at all is also easy mode.

Both crafting professions are fine if you use them sensibly. There's a difference between upgrading your gear as you play, and spending a few hours on making 500 iron dagger while waiting 48 game hours in between buying iron ingots. You can either use or abuse these skills, depending on what you want to get from the game. Personally, I don't deliberately trivialize the game for myself, but I don't have a problem with people who want to play invincible characters who one-hit everything. It doesn't impact my game experience.

I feel like I've read this topic somehwere before...
Nah, must have been a coincidence, because this just made the 11 o'clock news!

TES games have always had a 'God' mode that you could use to become a... God. In Oblivion you could enchant your clothing to 100% chameleon, which effectively made you invulnerable as enemies couldn't see or hear you as you punch them to death. It's not a bug, it's not an exploit, it's a feature. Do it if you want, or don't use it if you don't like it.

Smithing and Enchanting are there to be used. They have been in the Elder Scrolls game at least since Morrowind. If you feel that these skills are being "abused" I suggest you blame the developers and not the players. How is a player supposed to know that maxing out these skills makes you almost godlike unless they have put in dozens if not hundreds of hours of gameplay? Your rant of abuse is off target. It should be a rant of incompetance by the team of developers who were responsible for keeping the gameing balanced.

For some people they want to use these skills without the game becoming so easy it's boring.

OK, I understand the "balancing" issue, that it should be more difficult to do that. But, given that you know that, it can be avoided right? If you choose to put in the hours upping your smithing to absurd levels, knowing that it will force your game into an easy mode, why would you continue to do it?

If you roleplay the role of a super smith with invulnerable armour, why be surprised if you achieve it? That's basically what's happening here. Until the smithing is fixed, either officially or by mod, simply do what a patch/mod will force you to do, which is smith up slower.

If you abuse them, yes. You don't HAVE to upgrade/enchant every wep/armour.

The only reason to forgo smithing and enchanting is if you want the game to be challenging. There is not a single character build that doesn't become stronger by maxing both.

It can be considered easy mode. So is abusing full perk trees in one-handed and sneak. Or zero cost dual casting destruction spells that stagger lock anything till death.

Go play with the Foresworn. You'll run into a Briarheart that'll two shot you through your 700 armor soon enough.

Well I do like a previous poster said, never buy materials only craft with what i find, and don't go to town specifically to craft, just when you're passing the blacksmith etc. I am only level 12 or so but if anything it has made the game harder by leveling smithing and enchanting this way, as my character has levelled from it but the things i can make are still worse than what i find.

Nope, I use smithing on my melee character and I find expert reasonably challenging against higher level enemies like the Draugr Death Overlord or Ancient Dragon. I also have unperked enchntments and it makes little differense.

I didn't mean to really mean to complain about the smithing/enchanting system. If you really don't want to abuse it you don't have too. I find it fun powering up your character like that and shouldnt be changed

No, I'm purposefully avoiding both (no perks in enchanting at all, 1 perk in smithing). Master is too easy (for master) 95% of the time, spotted with brief moments of insane difficulty (usually boss type enemies).

This isn't much to do with the end user (ie, I'm not particuarly amazing at games), more the slightly bizarre results of Bethesdas skill/perk/scaling system playing havoc with balance.

Until the modders are let loose I can't really see a solution to it.