It took me 430. But I had well-rested bonus and warrior stone.

There's nothing inherently wrong with grinding. But if you grind one skill and become underpowered because of it, that isn't because the game is broken, it's because you committed an action or a series of actions of your own will that left you weak. The game can't (and should not) be built to make up for grinders.

Harsh words. Using a console command to give your char things or using a duplication glitch to mass produce an item is cheating. Repetition training is nothing new to this game or real life. Uma Thurman spent a year on that mountain punching a post before she killed Bill.

What is the difference in a character spending 50 hrs doing nothing but killing rabbits and deer and a character spending 5 hrs killing a Conjured Flame Atro over and over. I take nothing away from either player. Neither is cheating anything or anybody. One is just more time efficient than the other. They both started at level 10 and both raised the same skill and both reached level 20.

Nothing is different. To me, neither one is playing the game - both are grinding.

And to me, grinding is not playing.

I agree. And it is most of the people complaining that have either surpassed or underscored the leveling system. If they have built their char wrong, then they have no one to blame but themselves. But just because someone maxes out their char and THEN plays the game...well I see no fault in that.



A player that is RPing a hunter, killing and skinning animals is playing the game TJ.

Sure, I get that, and didn't meant to say they weren't playing the game.

But why is that hunter invading ruined forts and killing forsworn, or exploring mines? There seems to be an RP-disconnect to me. Maybe it works for some people, but maybe what I meant to say is, they seem to be playing only part of the wider game.

Maybe I'm just not explaining myself well. You can play Skyrim and just complete the dragonborn quests, nothing else. Or just play an assasin, do the DB quest, and run around killing random people. Sure, you played the game, but you left out so much.

I'm on the side of this is not cheating. (I will state though that I haven't and won't do this iron dagger smithing, my blacksmith character preferred dwarven bows the best as they gave him profit rather than losses on materials.)

If someone wants to get good at touch typing, they sit down and do touch typing as much as they feel neccesary to get good at it, eventually they will master it. Likewise any kind of skill i existence, If you want to be the best at it, you need to do it as much as you possibly can.

It is completely in sticking with any RP-ing to practice what you want your char wants to be good at.

And it is completely RP-destroying to think that every character should partake in the entire game. I prefer to leave out as much as possible with my characters so that when I get bored of that one, I can start a new char and have something new to do. None of my 7 characters have progressed further than the first dragon battle in MQ, only 1 has chosen a side in the civil war and barely done any quests, none have joined Companions and only 1 has done the first Dark brotherhood quest.. Why would I use my lvl 50 characters to go finish a whole questline in 20 mins when I can start a new character and have a challenge doing the quests and level him specifically to what he wants to do for certain quest-lines.

I have to agree with power leveling trade skills and over-gaming. On this current playthrough ive commited myself to completely ignoring the smithing and alchemy tree and using enchanting only slightly.
this isnt an issue of role playing, i couldnt care less if someone wants to grind their skills. its an issue of enjoyment lost because yo can kill everything by sneezing lightly. the game should have been designed to accomdate power gamers as well as role players.

17 levels is kind of impressive and would generally hurt you if only enemies scaled more viciously insteaqd of having hard caps.

I did not mean to come across too sharp, with my reply. I think what it comes down to is this. People play different ways and with different goals in mind. Some find enjoyment in letting a character just evolve into what ever and go through the game that way. With no real plan or intention. Others don't really start enjoying the game until they have a fully built character.

If you are on the PC, you can easily produce a maxed character and play from that. Console users don't have that option. They can in turn "grind" for lack of a better word to achieve the same thing. There are a ton of players that put off doing quests until they are high levels, just because of the item scaling issue. In the mean time they are still doing something to increase their level. That is still playing.

I personally do all kind of stuff. I am on the 360 so i am limited to what I can do. Using the duplication scroll glitch to get rich in Oblivion was cheating. Casting a custom spell on self to raise a skill is not. IMO.

If a player sets down at level 20 with 450 ingots and raises the Blaky Skill from 15 to 100 in 5 minutes, then so what? Kick ass and good luck, I say.

Rp a 40year old blacksmith who sold his forge and goods after his wife of 25 years dies,gave myself 25,000 gold and ran my smithing up to 100. I would get bored so i made it to whiterun and then would teleport back and forth between the two towns,buying supplies. Sure you maybe able to make those higher armor's but the stores don't carry the ingredients. Think i ended up around 19 or 20 level when i hit 100. I did limit myself by not using enchanting for the next 15 levels,and basicly limiting the type of armor i would use untill i reached a certain level.Now i am level 42,smithing is still the only thing that is 100,and have just made my first suit of dragon armor....lol won't enchant it untill i get enchanting to level 100. Each character i make will be a different age and experiences...with skills equal to their age, and all thanks to console commands.

As they say, cool info bro.

I think that you can add another line to the chart to make it complete:

L-1, SL-15, DM-0

I didn't mean to say that Skyrim is comparable to WoW or any MMO, I was simply saying I like the way they do crafting because it actually prevents grinding because you shouldn't be able to smith iron daggers and become a master.

After a while of smithing Iron, it gives you less and less exp, so it forces you to move on to higher tier materials if you want to keep gaining exp.

I can not thank you enough for posting this. It really helps me out and it is nice to know that I am not the only one that uses cheat codes in a game.

Don't stack AFAIK.

I'm still not exactly clear on what the 'non-cheating' way to level smithing is supposed to be if simply using the skill isn't 'as the designers intended it'.
I mean, having the experience gained go down for lower quality items as you improve the skill would be an improvement, but aside from the fact that that means the skill is broken as it is now it also means it's still intended to be increased by crafting whatever junk you can. The problem is simply that the smithing skill is useless most of the time.

Personally, my rule is that I don't buy any primary raw materials for leveling up smithing: so, if crafting an iron dagger, I can buy the leather strip, but not the iron. When crafting a dwarven bow, I can but the iron, but not the dwemer metal.

My tactic for leveling up the skill is usually to make leather bracers from the animals I kill until I can get the transmute spell, when I start turning mined more into gold, and the gold into jewelery. When I hit level 30, I get the dwarven smithing perk (even on a light-armor focused character) and melt down the metric ton of dwemer scrap metal I've pulled from the ruins and stolen from that one museum. I then become a dwarven bow salesman, taking my 300+ dwarven bows from city to city selling them all for nice profits.

It's not as mindless as just buying ore and making daggers, and by the time you get to level 90 or whatever, you have plenty of cash to buy the materials you need for your full suit of daedric, or whatever your end goal is.

Any word on whether making jewelry is any better at leveling your skill than making weapons? I feel like my Smithing went up dramatically after I cleaned out Kolskeggr Mine and used all the gold to make a ton of necklaces…

Roleplaying means playing a given kind of character, in the case of Skyrim, not self-imposition of an arbitrary set of rules. It's like a given book in which your player is the main protagonist in the whole plot for the given book, but it's how you play that determines the order of its plot. And how you play that character out per your desires as akin to how good a given author can write a book. Some are the experience of majesty and some are lunatics given too much license with ink and paper.

That's the kind of thing that usually happens with my characters. I set out to head to Riften, and I somehow wind up meandering over to Morthal, and I started in Falkreath. Upon following my apparent path as shown by what sites were discovered on my map, I somehow did a reverse 7 in the Tundra region.

Try being a character who gathers lots of alchemy ingredients as you roam the land. You will likely be very busy!

This is why I love Bethesda games. You can play them anyway you want. Im gonna do this on my next character.

Jewelry does give you a higher skillup than daggers, but it's not competitive for cost or time invested. The materials costs on a single dagger is at most 30 gold, and in practice a lot, lot cheaper.



The amulet of Dibella says hi. Also, you can buy raw ore for like 5 or 6 gold a piece, and last I checked I NEVER had problems collecting hides off dead critters. So while it may seem at first blush to be expensive to power smithing with daggers, in point of fact it's incredibly cheap, because once you have a method of trapping souls, enchanted daggers will sell for well over 200 gold, even for meager enchants at low skill.

It's a single player game. You can tune it for whatever level of challenge or tedium you see fit. Enjoy.

I'm not sure how you can say it's useless when you can create and improve nearly every weapon and armor in the game with it. I wasn't trying to say using the skill was cheating. The main purpose of this experiment was to show that it is in fact NOT broken, and works just as intended. I've grown tired of all the people railing that Smithing was overpowered and that they could basically craft Ebony weapons from the start of the game without power leveling the skill. In other words, I am of the opinion that for someone to get Smithing to 80 (Ebony gear level) it requires quite a bit of raw materials to use and a decent amount of practice to get to that skill level. In my opinion, the experiment shows that you can reach that level quickly if you want to, but it certainly won't happen by accident. In other words, if they break their own game (in their opinion) it's their fault – NOT a fault of the balancing in the game.

However, we CAN have a great discussion as to how many points you actually gain by crafting Iron Daggers as compared to something more complex like Steel Plate or whatever.

LOL, this was not one of my serious characters. I always save like a madman, and I have multiple saves at level 1 I can pull up, rename and start a new character and not have to slog through the Helgen sequence again. And yes, the console is my friend right now since we don't have the CK yet. I've modded both my Breezehome and Proudspire manor totaly with the console. (It's VERY tedious, but at least I have plenty of storage now, lol.

With warrior's stone and well rested it only takes 433 iron daggers to get from 15 to 100 smithing.

I didn't mean 'useless' as in 'it doesn't have any use whatsoever', but 'useless' in the sense that most of the time there is no way to use the skill constructively. Unlike the vast majority of skills, reaping the benefits of smithing does not actually improve your smithing skill. The exception is Alchemy, and it gets around it by dealing with consumables.
So given that there's absolutely no way to naturally increase the skill, the distinction between raising the skill as it's supposed to and deliberatly breaking the skill (both done by crafting stuff you don't need) is entirely arbitrary. To put it bluntly: how much junk did the designers expect the player to craft per day and how is the player supposed to know?

Not sure they had a set amount in mind, although I'd be surprised if they didn't at least know the formulas and what not. At the end of the day, all I can truly gauge anything by is my own experience while playing the game. And that has been that it has taken a fair bit of effort on my part to get the skill to where I wanted it (level 60 to get the Arcane perk.) Now, one thing I did that actually contributed a LOT to the time it took to raise the skill was assume that higher value stuff gave you more skill points than lower value stuff like the infamous Iron Daggers. And I actually agree wholeheartedly with those who think it should be this way. So I mostly crafted steel & iron armor instead of daggers, so it's very likely that certainly contributed to my slower pace of leveling. I was in it for the gold you might say!

Anyway, each to their own, and in a week or two I'm sure there will be numerous mods released to allow folks to tweak the skill in their liking.