Time and time again I see people argue about game balance in Skyrim. Time and time again Enchanting is used as either part or basis of the argument.

What I hope to show with this post is that Enchanting is a broken skill that, largely on its own, is responsible for most of inbalances in Skyrim gameplay.

1. The basics

Some basic information for people who don't know it.

Identical effects that come from the same source are cumulative; identical effects that come from different sources are multiplicative. This is best explained with an example of a warrior holding a Legendary Dwarven Sword with 50 One-handed skill and 3/5 Armsman. The damage would be: ( 10 [sword] + 10 [Legendary] ) * 1.25 [skill level bonus] * 1.6 [Armsman bonus] = 40 damage.

The maximum possible enchanting multiplier, with 100 Enchanting, 5/5 Enchanter, appropiate "+25%" perk(Fire/Frost/Shock/Insightful/Corpus Enchanter) and Grand Soul gem is 3.1075. For easier calculations I'm going to assume it's 3.1.

2. Game balance - no enchanting

Let's assume for the sake of the experiment that Enchanting, as a skill, doesn't exist.

- Highest possible DPS with a sword is 72. Legendary Daedric Sword does 24 base damage. This is tripled by having 100 one-handed and 5/5 Armsman(1.5 * 2.0). All swords attack once every second. Since swords do most DPS of all weapons at Dwarven base damage or higher, it's pointless to even consider War Axes and Maces.


- Assuming that two-handed weapons follow the same pattern of attack speeds(I'm getting some conflicting info on this), maximum possible DPS with a Legendary Daedric Greatsword is 33 * 1.5 * 2.0 * 0.9(0.9 attacks per second) = 89.1.

- Archery: ( [28 (Legendary Daedric Bow) + 24(Daedric arrow)] * 1.5 * 2.0 ) / 1.86 = 83.87. The reason for the massive penalty of 1.86 is because of the bow's slow continuous attack speed(even though I included Quick Shot perk in the calculation). All bows have a nock stage(arrow placed on the bow) which takes 0.4 seconds and recoil stage(after the arrow has been fired, before you can nock another arrow) of 0.6 seconds. So the "base" attack speed of a bow is at least one second. Hovewer bow's weight plays a significant role in the time it takes you to fully draw a bow - and better bows(that is bows with more base damage) weight more.

So even though the Daedric Bow does massive 156 damage per shot, the fact that it shoots every 1.86 seconds dramatically decreses its actual in-combat performance(almost halves it).


- Incinerate is an Expert level Destruction spell. To keep in line with previous examples we should anolyze a Master level spell, but Master level spells are all unique/special so they're not very good when comparing actual dungeon-to-dungeon combat performance.

Incinerate does 60 * 1.5(Augmented Flames) = 90 damage per cast. I'm assuming that the Aspect of Terror perk from Illusion tree affecting Fire Destruction spells is a glitch and so I'm not counting it. I'm also not counting double-cast as I didn't count power attacks in Melee.

Incinerate takes a second to prepare. You can cast it every second for 90 DPS. So it does 25% more DPS than melee attacks, and 7% more DPS than bow attacks.

And let's not forget that you can cast it with both hands and double that value. Hardly the horrible, broken, unviable Destruction that doesn't scale well, now is it?

3. Game balance - no enchanting - anolysis

I'd say it's pretty even all things considered.

Archery does average DPS and it has over twice the burst damage of melee. Power Shot allows you to easily keep enemies away while you plink them with arrows. It is, of course, ranged. Hovewer it requires quality arrows for quality damage(the difference in damage between arrows is large) and occupies both hands, which means less protection.

Melee does below average DPS and has no range, but its DPS is completely free and doesn't require any resource whatsoever. Other free hand can be used for wielding a bigger weapon/dual wielding(more DPS), shield(protection) or even a spell(shenanigans).

Destruction does most DPS and you can still double that amount, spells are ranged attacks, and Impact lets you stagger anything, anytime. The downside is, of course, Magicka - once you run out, you can't attack at all, which is a pretty reasonable trade-off for such a strong skill.

4. Enter Enchanting

So now that we have a pretty nice, even balance between the three combat skills let's completely ruin it, shall we?

Four pieces of equipment can be enchanted with +% Melee bonuses. The base +% melee bonus is +13%. We multiply it by four and get 52. But because of our Master level Enchanting, we get the full 3.1x multiplier, so we multiply that by another 3.1 for a total of +161% damage.

Note: This isn't 161% damage. This is plus 161% damage. And since it's a separate effect, we multiply, not add. So remember the 72 DPS sword we had? Now it does 72 * 2.61 = 187.92 DPS. Now we do as much DPS as two Incinerates without spending any Magicka. Yay!

Archery works exactly the same. 218.9 DPS with our bow. Yay!

Destruction, of course, cannot be enchanted with +% damage, which now leads everyone to believe it's a [censored] skill. Yay!

But wait, because the base bonus for reducing casting cost is -8%, we can enchant four pieces of our gear with 8*3.1 = -24.8% casting cost. And because that's an effect coming from the same source, it adds up to 4 * 24.8 = 99.2% casting cost reduction, letting us cast spells (almost) for free, making one of three stats in the game absolutely worthless. Yay!

This is all without enchanting increasing gear and potions which could boost the effects to even more fidiculous levels. Yay!

5. Conclusion

Enchanting is completely broken. I would assume Bethesda did the combat style balance first and Enchanting later, hoping it won't affect the outcome much. Or maybe they haven't considered it at all. Either way, as it is, it completely breaks the game. It's by far not the only balance problem in Skyrim, and I'm not saying that by fixing it you will get a perfectly balanced game, but it's definitely the biggest turd on the road there.