A steel sword does 8 damage. A deadric sword does 14...

At a very low level you can enchant with 10 points of frost or fire or lightning damage. With a petty gem, it says it gives about 10 charges. It's actually at least double that (might be a bug). So now I'm doing 18 points of damage with the weakest enchantment when a deadric sword is 14 damage.

Currently I'm level 40 enchanting and I can enchant for 20 frost damage and have tons of charges. It was really easy to level this all I had to do was enchant a whole bunch of iron daggers with drain stamina using petty gems. This also gave me a lot of money from selling them.

Later on when you can double enchant weapons for 60 damage total, enchanting beats anything else for melee. So enchanting is actually the best skill to get for physical fighting, not black smith. Each upgrade with a blacksmith only gives +1 to weapon damage but I can just get 60 with enchanting. So the worst weapon in the game would be better than a deadric sword but maximum weapon upgrade.

Enchant the deadric weapons then and get even more damage. Difference is still there

why not get both?

Yeh but my point is that the difference is really small. The difference in early and end game weapon is only double. With max enchants its like 8%.

it can be a big difference if it is enchanted and crafted plus the damage comes from the person wielding it ever notice how not only does you skill increase damage but so do the perks, think about it if you max out your weapon perks your doing double the base damage plus your skill thats a ton

Interesting post, I think you make a good point.

It really depends on how the damage raises with skill in that weapon.

Case A
If its the same for all weapons, it wouldnt matter, it would just prove my point even more that there is not enough difference between the lowest and highest tier of each weapon.
For example: If max 1 hander adds 20 damage than a steel sword will have 28 damage and a deadric sword will have 34, which is pretty small. With enchants, the steel sword will have 88 and the deadric will have 94. The difference in % is even smaller.

Case B
If the damage is raised by %, like 100% at level 100 in the skill (not including the perks), it would make the higher tier weapons a bit better vs the lower tier ones. They would still do double the damage of the lowest tier.

As you can see, in case A the damage difference is 28 vs 34 and 88 vs 94. In case B, it would be 28 vs 16. Does anyone know which case it is?


Another point that would make or break my point:
How the weapon perk is applied. At max level it adds 100% to damage. If it does it only to base damage, that would make a deadric sword do 28 and a steel sword do 16, which is a pretty good. If it does it to damage after enchantment, then the difference would be pretty minor in using low tier vs high tier weapons.

Last thing is about blacksmithing: Yes its better to have both enchantments and upgrades on the weapon, but is it worth all the extra points? You need a lot of perk points to add 11 damage to a weapon with blacksmith vs adding like 60 with enchantment. Is it worth spending all these perk points to raise a weapons damage to 68 instead of 60?

The answer would be more clearer if we find out how the double damage perk and skill level is applied to damage of weapon. If they take enchantments into account, I say its not worth to spend all those perk points on blacksmithing.

It goes up by %

Does anyone know how the improvements work with the perks? The perks mention that you can improve the weapons "twice as much." I know that the level of improvement is based on your smithing level. So how does this work?

enchanting was always a MUST for nice performance especially for those using primarily melee. we know this from morrowind and oblivion.

to OP: there are enchantments that gives % boost to weapon damage. apparently this enchantment doesn't negate the initial difference btw iron and daedric weapon. Also it is more likely that this % boost enchantment is more effective than absolute damage enhancements like '+30 frost damage'

also every weapon skill seems to be useless unless we invest in perks. so 20 one hand and 40 one hand skill damage is same unless they invest in perks. it is the damage perks that actually enhance damage by certain percentage.

However, you can purchase dragon or daedric armors

So you have found 2 pieces of armor and you are wasting an armor perk cause it requires a set and you just cant find that last few pieces

or you could craft it with Smithing, and get exactly the pieces you need

Some other interesting things I found:

Having the Steel Smithing perk did not make a difference on how much damage I got out of improvements.

My steel sword went up by 5 from 13 to 18.
Steel dagger went up by 5 from 8 to 13.
Steel mace went up by 4 from 17 to 21. Now that is a bit weird.
Orckish waraxe went up by 4 from 17 to 21.

Steel greatsword went up by 3 from 18 to 21

My smithing is 36 without any perks.
My one-handed is 38 with the 40% damage perk. That would explain why my one hander weapons went up by 4 and 5 and two hander only by 3.

Odd things:

1. The two heavier hitting 1 handers only went up by 4 instead of 5.
2. Having the Steel smithing perk did not affect anything.

So what does it mean in the perk description that improvements are twice as much?

Its talking about when you use a grind stone to boost the weapons/armour I'm pretty sure.

I think this is working as intended. You get better damage through enchantments, the blacksmith gets better damage through better equipment.

But what if you face a frost-immune creature? Or a creature that can reflect your magic back at you, including your weapon enchants? Ahhh, now all your fancy enchantments are useless.

Then you just use a regular sword.