This is why destruction is underpowered in this game. Either that, or crafting skills + physical damage is overpowered -- depending on your perspective. I have all three crafting skills on my character too, and it's hard to imagine playing at master difficulty without them.

I'll test multiple gears stacking again when I get home. I seem to remember forgetting my helmet one time and getting a weaker potion. The strategy guild also says they stack. Maybe only player made enchants stack?

Diminishing returns from the % means the fraction never gets big enough to increment from one integer to the next. I theory anyway. You could test it and find out, but I'm not certain 100 potions and Grand Soul gems are worth an extra 1-2%.

the question, that comes to my mind is

why the hell daedric armor? with 100 smithing you can craft dragon armor, wich is: 1. better 2. way more easy to obtain (dragon bones/scales everytime, deadric hearts lvl 40+ with luck)

and i found one other interesting thing, my daedric mace, does the same dmg than my ebony mace

Its a waste that you only stack 100% fortify alchemy on step 2)
You can aquire a unique mask that has +20% to lockpick,alchemy,archery and stack it together on your alchemy gear. This might get you to 200% more alchemy on your gea, making the potions INT cap bigger and the enchants better.

In betwen point 1) and 2) you should add "craft 4 bottles of fortify enchant potions"


You are correct. All the values used in the calculations are INT (intiger) so the end value gets converted from a FLOAT to INT missing the values past the dot.

dragon armor is NOT BETTER than deadric. its only better if you skill light armor. then its the strongest light armor. but if you go heavy deadric beats dragonplate. so please stop talking nonsense.

deadric armor has the highest armor value of ANY armor out there. including dragonscale and plate. plus deadric looks 100% more badass

You can craft the best weapons with it too because Dragon smithing dosnt produce weapons.

This is as broken as the potion stacking in Morrowind. :/

Really wish they had done away with skill modifiers entirely.

It's weird it takes less than a month for players to find these kind of problems, but they somehow didn't figure it out during the years of making the game.

Not disagreeing entirely, but this is a ton different than a 100% reflect damage/100% spell absorb or a 100% cham toon from Oblivion. All of those are fairly easily achieved, and don't require much effort... This exploit not only REQUIRES 100 in three different skills, but also to have those skills heavily perked. Almost half your total perks go into pulling this off. So far, I haven't found something as easily exploitable as those Oblivion examples, and restricting various enchants to certain pieces of armor helped a TON.

Of course, if you have it on the computer and know the right item IDs, you can achieve all this in like 10 minutes, but in that case you're cheating to start with. No one should care if cheaters unbalance their game.

I don't think it's a big deal... I think it's a good thing actually... let the power gamers be innovative... it doesn't hurt the casual gamers... not all of us want to take up alchemy. I think they did a pretty good job balancing difficulty in this game actually. I can still find mobs that tear me apart in this game on adept difficulty... in oblivion I could powerlevel without much thought involved and tear everything apart. Doesn't work so well in this game.

Dare I say, on expert and master difficulty, not even 100 smithing alone is enough... one could argue that both enchanting and smithing are a requirement to get by at the very least, especially without summons and companions to take off the aggro.

While the Mask won't work (you'll notice his enchant gear already includes a Helm with +25%), the additional potions may be effective.

Getting 100 in smithing/enchanting/alchemy isn't that difficult, it's just tedious. The process of raising them will get you the levels to get the perks. Leveling enchanting gets you the money easily, since enchanted items sell for a ton and can basically pay for your materials.

I really just don't understand why they brought back skill modifiers when they broke Morrowind so horribly. 100 smithing with no boosts should've been the absolute cap for improvements, same goes for 100 enchanting and 100 alchemy. Should've been obvious that letting them all boost eachother could cause serious balancing issues.

"Don't use it if it's OP" is what many people will say, but the faulty mechanics shouldn't be there in the first place. I didn't really expect Bethesda to perfect combat balance all of the sudden since all their games have had serious problems in that area, but I was hoping for better than we got. This isn't the only issue with the combat either.

I agree with above poster. They need to CAP these skills and not allow multiple enchants to stack.

Also...fix daggers to be affected by damage %...

They did make it so this requires quite a bit of work, and a deep understanding of the mechanics of the game. If the player wants to dedicate their time to mastering all 3 crafting professions in the game, as well as spending most of their perks to maximize the effectiveness of those skills, they may have the right to becoming powerful. I almost wonder if Beth left this in intentionally, so the minmaxers were rewarded too, given their prevalence in the TES community.

Min/maxing shouldnt degrade the game into a one shot fest. Thats not fun.

IMO they should just limit the effects in alchemy/enchanting to -


Enchanting -
+ spell damage
+ weapon damage
+ healing
+ armor

Alchemy -
+ health / health regen
+ stamina / stamina regen
+ magicka / magicka regen

All they have to do is balance simple numbers for each, instead of the mess they've made with +skill increases. None of the above can be exploited with stacking. Could of course add some effects like water breathing and other such things to the list as well of course, as such obviously aren't going to cause balance issues.

I am a min/maxer, and I hate this. I like trying to create a well designed character and take the best possible perks and so on for my playstyle. I do not like when doing so means I completely trivialize the game.

I think you dont get it. All his gear has only 1 enchant on it (pure fortify alchemy), but the enchant tree maxed gives you 2 enchant on 1 gear.
That means you can have stacking enchants on the same item. You cant stack the same class (fure fortify alchemy) on the same gear but you can place two separate classes on the same gear and they both can up the same value as long as they have one thing that isnt the same on them.

So a pure fortify stamina can not stack with another fortify stamina
but
A pure fortify stamina can stack with an fortify stamina + fortify health

There are even some special unique item that have 3 or 4 different skill boosts in one class enchant. So you can enchant one gear with like 6-8 different boosts.

P.S There is a black gem that can trap human souls from a quest that can store GRAND souls and never gets destroyed.
It is 10% more powerfull than the best normal stone so it could give a bit of a boost to the enchants too.

Bethesda please fix this.

Can't really argue with the Straw Man. This still seems like a very extreme corner case. I'm skeptical that your 'well designer character' requires you to use the exact same build as the OP. Also, you still have to sacrifice hundreds of points in Armor to keep yourself from getting one-shot by a decent Frost Mage.

But I'll bite, and discuss rebalancing a bit.

I doubt they will completely remove certain enchants from the game. They did implement a soft cap using diminishing returns, but I guess they could nerf the power of enchants using a patch?

What is the highest damage a player could expect to receive in a single blow? I'm seeing Ancient Dragon Bites at about 300 damage. So assuming Morrowind-style damage reductions calcs, it takes 1500 armor to reduce that to 50 points of damage? 2500 points of armor reduces it to 32 points. What would you consider is the lowest a player should be allowed to reduce an incoming 300 point attack? Or would you prefer to rebalance weapon damage too, so it became an even trade of blow vs blow? Ancient Dragon has 3100 hp, we max out at 800, so if we traded blows only, we'd both die at the same time? What would you call balance here, assuming we can't retcon the enchantment tree?

You're right, I had forgotten that. So it sounds like there is actually room for even more improvement by optimizing the process further. Also, regarding Azuras Star.. is the Black version more powerful than the normal version?

I didnt get it yet, but probably no. The only difference is that the black gem traps human souls while the white one traps animals but not dragons. So its easier to get a Grand souls from a human than one from a mammoth.

Even though non casters can deal tons of damage that way, remember that you can poison your arrows and shoot on hard enemies for magic weakness debuff, so Alchemy is an awesome profession even for casters without wasting perks in weapon skills.

Hope for Overhaul mod soon, combat and level scaling are not as bad as in Oblivion but there are tons of things that need to be remade and rebalanced.

So you can buff to get skill level above 100? and alchemy is used in this purely to buff enchanting and smithing, right? are all your damage/armour values perminant passive, or are some from temporay buffs/potions?

Can I get your formula's? interested in things like how much skill level effects damage/out comes etc.

also do you know how armour works in skyrim? cant be same as oblivion but maybe there is again a 85% hard cap. which might mean all this is a complete waste of time for armour if you cap armour values normally.

PS: I agree with old hermit, but OP is awesome for finding this exploit. I want Bethesda to fix it but cant see it being on their priority list.

after reading the first post again i think something here seems not right atleast some values are strange to me.

for example AFTER you reach 100 heavy armor with all perks and deadric smithing with 100 smithing AND improve ALL four armor parts you will NOT have 1020 armor even with all items on legendary quality(without pots or entchants only the skill). is this value with a shield inside the number? can that be? if so you should mention it since you geht the 25% bonus perks without shield too.