The thing is that you don't have to be skilled at everything in the perk tree to reach the top end stuff..

For light, Dragon scale is best and to get there you need only require skill 100 and glass or daedric

For glass you need skill 70 and advanced
For advanced you need skill 50 and Elven
For Elven you need skill 40 and steel
Steel simply needs a skill of 20

That is basically the light path

For the heavy path it's

Steel -> Dwarven -> Orcish -> Ebony -> Daedric -> Dragon
Skill 20..Skill 30......skill 50....skill 80.....skill 90.....skill 100

But as you can see, it has the potential to (but not requirement to) alternate if you wish.

Steel -> Dwarven -> Elven -> Orcish <-> Advanced -> Glass -> Ebony -> Daedric -> Dragon
skill 20...skill 30.....skill 40...skill 50.........skill 50......skill 70....skill 80.....skill 90....skill 100

The 'skill 60' perk is Arcane Blacksmith. So that is something you would have to wait for later or delay the perk progression by 10 skill points.

Things that don't make sense to me is....

Studded leather seems inferior to regular leather.
Even though Dragon armor requires skill 100 and glass or daedric, the daedric armor is higher rated.
Advanced is required to get steel plate (heavy armor) but is on the light side and requires elven (a light armor) to obtain.
We start knowing how to make hide, leather and iron. What's the point of hide?

I think the Smithing perk tree is just fine... It gives you a choice on what to pick. I mean Smithing is already OP as it is, if it were any easier than that would just be stupid. I on the other hand has chosen not to invest in any Smithing on my 2nd or 3rd char because I realize how overpowered my first char was with Smithing.

I think Skyrim has the best skill and character development system in an Elder Scrolls game yet.

Morrowind and Oblivion were great, because you could select the skills that you wanted to define your character, and you could select any combination. However, eventually the skill selection and classes became nothing more than "labeling" a group of skills.

Skyrim, you actually put an -investment- into a certain number of skills. Those skills can be any in number and combination that you choose, but as is realistic, the more skills you choose, the less you'll actually be a master of. While you -can- level any and every skill up to 100, the perks you choose are what really define your character, because that's where the power is.

Yup, completely agree OP. Once again, Bethesda favors heavy armor users. They only have to go up one side & get the benefits of daedric weapons & armor. In addition once they get the perk which makes heavy armor weightless it becomes better than the entire light armor tree.

Its not really going backwards i had smithing level 100 up to dragon armor and you cant go from 100 to 90 i already have it full so why not

Yep, exactly.

I think it's partly to encourage away from powergaming the whole thing like you could before, becoming uber-powerful in any and every skill at your whim.

Granted, you can still become pretty powerful in all skills, but it's the ones where you've invested in the perks that will truly be your character's strengths. I really like how you can feel like you're properly specializing your character around how you play, now.

Of course, "Dragon" includes both light and heavy versions. Which means that someone who's progressed up the Light side of the tree, can suddenly be able to make the strongest Heavy armor, while not having any ability to make Dwarven/Orcish/Ebony/etc.

"Dragon" could easily have been split into Dragonscale and Dragonbone, each one being at the top of their respective paths. Of course, then they wouldn't have as nice an anvil shape for their constellation. :shrug:
(of course, there still wouldn't be parity in weaponsmithing. But at least the whole "why can't I wrap around back down the other side" thing wouldn't be an issue.)

The same reason why you can't perk backwards in any other skill tree that has multiple paths to one perk.

Well considering you started at the "bottom" it shouldn't be too hard to deduce the location of the "top".

Because it's divided up by materials. There are light armor and heavy armor items that can be made from dragon materials, thus one perk that allows for both light and heavy.

I don't mean to be rude, but it's quite foolish to just choose perks without reading what they are. If you had read the perks at all, you should have been able to deduce that one side is light armor and the other is heavy, and that the armor quality increases as you go up the circle. The perks are arranged in a circle because Dragon Armor comes in both light and heavy variants.

So I gotta ask, do you think the same thing about the Block skill tree? What about Enchanting? Illusion? Archery?

I would say what is actually foolish is having the best armour and weapons not at the top of the tree.

I mean, it's hardly unreasonable to look at the tree and think "hey, either route gives access to the top perk, that's well thought out". Only to discover that actually if you wanted the best weapons, you should have gone the heavy route.

What the hell kind of perk tree has the best stuff not at the top?

It does when you realize that Daedric weapons are Ebony with an infused Daedra soul or something along those lines. You simply can't fashion Daedric without first learning Ebony.

Also what are you talking about? Archery, Block, Light Armor, Alchemy, Illusion, Conjuration, and Enchanting are all shaped the exact same way. Why would you ever say Smithing is the only one shaped like that? Are you dense?

http://skyrimcalculator.com/ Take a look. A lot of them are shaped in a circular fashion. Do you have these problems on all of them?

It's like I said: People would not have this issue if the top tier perk was actually better than the one below it.

As this is my first TES game, I had no idea which side of the smithing tree was for light armor, if they could all be light armor, or what. Yea, "glass armor" sounds light, but then, perhaps ebony or daedric could've been too.

Obviously, I was ignorant. My point is, in games like this, the player is expected to have a modicum of relevant knowledge beforehand.


I ordered the guide, but freaking Amazon is on back-order by like two weeks.

Then you are spending twice the number of perks. MAYBE, just MAYBE Daedric should have been joined to both trees like Dragonbone...?

But then I'll wager there would have been cries of "WHY SHOULD I HAVE TO SPUNK A POINT ON DAEDRIC, WHEN ALL I WANT IS DRAGONSCALE?!?!?! CRUDDY DESIGN, SCREW YOU TREYAR...I mean BETHESDAAAAAA!!!!!11!11"

Cant please everyone. ^^that way would probably have been the lesser of two evils, but theres so much in this game it doesn't surprise me that oversights were made. Howsabout a beta next time? That seems to be all the rage atm...

You have Steel to one side, Elven to the other.

Now, if the first set of 'heavy' armour is Iron, what out of the two above would logically follow on from that?

This is false, there is no difference in weapon speed. Daedric weapons are better in every way.

ill agree as a real world person u should be able to go around but as game immersion no cuz the daedric armor is modified version of ebony can u honestly say if u modify a honda civic ud be able to modify a racing corvette cuz thats what the theme is going as what type of car u wanna specialise in ff or fr different mechanical knowledge required 4 each

Don't know if this has been mentioned before, but it's late and I'm tired.

Conjuration also has alternate ways to the Twin Souls perk, Summoning and Necromancy.

Except your player only has to make iron daggers to get his smithing skill that high, completely invalidating the so called progression people are talking about. When they make it so that you can only level smithing by making your most advanced armour sets, then I'll accept this line of reasoning.

For now, I just console-commanded my way to the daedric weapon perk. I worked my way to 100 smithing skill, I don't see why I should be precluded from having the most powerful weapons simply because my character uses light armour. It's not like any sword capable of being wielded one-handed would be heavy anyway.

Sounds to me that they need to change the prerequisite for Daedric from Smithing 90 and Ebony to Smithing 90 and Ebony or Glass. Since Glass requires Smithing 70, it would be easy to make Daedric the next step before getting Dragon. Granting those that use light armor a way to make the best weapons in a way that makes sense.

I'm pretty sure it is. If you have the glass and dragon perks you can only make dragonscale armor, if you have the daedric and dragon perks you can only make dragonbone armor.

But that is not true.
You cannot make dragonbone armour if you have only gone up the light side, and you cannot craft scale if you went via the heavy.
To do them both, you need both paths.