Hello everyone.

I would like to apologize in advance if this has been discussed before.


The Enchanting and Smithing skill sets seem to be extremely overpowered. I'm not a huge gamer myself, and after about a week of playing it, I find the game getting easier and easier and quite boring the more I play. I think the only reason I'm playing it now is to see how the story( great story I might add) unfolds and not so much the joy of adventure and finding rare and amazing items. The thrill of seing a dragon when I first started playing was amazing. Now I see a dragon and pretty much destroy it into a million pieces.


The ease in which anyone can upgrade and use these two skills to become untouchable is almost comical. Is this the way the game is supposed to be or is there some sort of patch comming out in the near future? I have even considered starting over and avoiding these skills in general and rasing the dificulty much higher.


I love this game and want to continue playing it for as long as I can...But this is really putting a buzz kill on the game for me. Anyways sorry for the rant.

Just about it.

Can't say whether or not those intended work-arounds were meant to be in there, but they are pretty broken and have far too much synergy as they stand.

I've read about these things, and am avoiding them on the principle that they will ruin the fun for me. I seem to have this attitude in most games, I always seem to avoid the "overpowered" weapons in COD too.

I just didn't like how they totally take away the "go exploring for sweet loot" factor.


Why waste time hunting it when I can just stay in Whiterun and smith it?

if bethesda was smart they would make soul gems a lot more rare to find (like daedric weapons and armor in dungeons.) that seems to be a simple fix, make it slower and more difficult to level up. Same could be said with smithing..

Agreed. I am going to mod the things to HELL!!!

so don't powerlevel smithing and enchanting all at once, hell, you don't have to use them at all. they can be overpowered for a reason, because its an elder scrolls game and they are supposed to give you the option to make your character however you want, so the option is there for you to choose, its not forced on you.(unfortunatly skyrim gives less choice than previous games as far as character development)

I think smithing and enchanting are generally well implemented in this game. Being able to create and name my own weapons and gear is, for me, a great deal of fun. So I really dislike the idea of having to avoid crafting entirely just to keep the game challenging. It wouldn't take much, in my opinion, to make it balance out better.

Get rid of fortify enchantment potions entirely - this would help reduce the synergy, and prevent the enchant->alchemy->enchant loop exploit
Reduce the max benefit from enchanting from the current +160% damage to more like +50% damage - it should be less than you can get from your combat skills and perks
Introduce a diminishing returns system for smithing, with the max improvement to weapons and armor also being more like 75% of the bonus you could get from skills and perks alone

These changes (well, maybe not the third) would be pretty easy to mod in, but I'd like to see an official effort from Bethesda, as I'm sure a lot of console players feel about the same.

As has been said, it is your choice. However, the choice is whether or not to use the results of the skills, not to avoid using the skills at all. You could easily max Enchanting and Smithing (and Alchemy, of course) but simply not use the results. Having a 100 Smithing is not going to help you when you face a dragon in rags, or even iron armor.

I personally wouldn't say they were overpowered. I, to be honest, wasn't interested in most of the perks so decided to concentrate on the production strength perks in Enchanting and Alchemy after maxing Smithing and tryed a combination of making 'fortify Enchanting' potions then using them to make 'fortify alchemy' gear but the gear seems to cap out at 27% bonus -(so far I've only gone 5/5 on the first enchant skill and 2/5 on the alchemy one) and to be honest the Fortify Enchant potions are quite a low bonus compared to other fortify skill ones, like smithing potions at 86%. Not only that the "make item and improve it twice as much" just doen't work, before I choose the particular skill I could already improve an item but not make it but adding the skill does not double the improvement or allow you to make a better base item as it should. I was really glad that they actually added item making in this installment as it is a major attraction in any RPG to me.[/sup] [sup]If anyone usually states anything is overpowered, my frequent response is to simply raise the difficulty level!

It's not generally overpowered. Just armour is far too cheap to craft.

Depends.... I guess they can be a bit powerful at lower levels, but I maxxed them out at high level and it was largely unnecessary. I haven't even bothered enchanting an armour set, because it just isn't necessary.

Now I wish I had put my 20 perks into something cool.

It is generally overpowered. When I say overpowered, I mean it does not scale properly. The choice shouldn't be use or and be completely overpowered or not. You should not have to use arbitrary rules. How you level the skills really isn't an issue. I feel that they should have instead used work-orders to raise your skill to make crafting fun. It is far too easy to powerlevel the skill without ever waiting on Iron Ingots to respawn. Just by playing the game normally, I have the best items you can possibly get at level 25. Level 25. That is ridiculous. Enchanting is broken due to the fact that you have enchants to Fortify primary combat oriented skills. Those should not exist. Further, how you level enchanting is silly. Having to capture souls yadda yadda is just stupid. It is tedious and pointless to have to cast soul trap then kill something to fill a certain size of soul. The fact that weapons even have charges is also silly. I am not a big fan of ammo, consumables, or any maintenance type system that is more work than it is fun.

Stopped there.

If you want to make the game more balanced then choose one between alchemy, enchanting, and smithing and do not put perks into the other two.  For example if you are a thief/assasin type choose alchemy, if you are a mage type choose enchantment, and if you are a warrior type choose smithing.

If a game included an in depth crafting mechanic that allowed you to create dozens of varieties of unique, enchanted weapons and armor, but rather than allowing you to wear said gear, it was simply displayed in your home while you were perpetually limited to your starting equipment, would you think the developers maybe had a screw loose?

http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/watch-out-we-got-a-badass-over-here-meme.png

No, you SHOULD have to make whatever choice suits your playstyle and character concept rather than the developer's making the choice for you (and removing the ability to make the choice for many other players).

As for the mechanics, it is the same as it has always been in TES (i.e., soul trap, charges for use, etc.)

You may want to play a different game if this is not to your liking. This is a role playing game, after all, so choice is essential.

don't focus on crafting skills.

i really don't understand why people focus on crafting skills over combat related skills.
but that's just me i guess, i much prefer the combat over crafting o.O

I am so sick of this excuse. You guys just do not get it, at all. I agree yes you should have freedom of playstyle and character building, but YOU DO NOT. The majority of choices in the game lead to my character being overpowered. If I want to take Enchanting and Smithing and in the process it makes the game far to easy, my options are DO NOT TAKE IT AT ALL, or NOT BE SATISFIED WITH BEING OVERPOWERED. Those really are not choices at all as both lead to me being unsatisfied.

ok so you say we're forced to take smithing and enchanting? ok.
and your also saying if you do not take these skills your unsatisfied? confused.

Yep, both are good ideas and fun to use. However, if you want to keep any sort of challenge in your game, then you must avoid them unless you keep making low level crap. Problem with that is Bethesda removed weapon and armour degradation. So once you craft that low level stuff, you really have no reason what so ever to ever do it again! Unless you wish to sell it all off which becomes pointless after you start to level up.

They should have taken a better route with the smithing side of things, as for enchanting I havent really touched it much so I dont know much about it. For smithing you should have got a set amount of exp for each item, so if you make an iron dagger you get say ten exp and if you made a iron greatsword then you would get say twenty exp. This would stop people grinding iron daggers (like I did) to get the skill up to 100 quickly and force them to make items more suited to their playstyle.

I also think certain ingots should not be sold in stores, for example dwarven, ebony, orcish, moonstone and malachite. These ingots are the ones required for higher level smithing and should be, as a result, harder to get hold of again forcing players to go out hunting for ore and ingots.

For enchanting I agree that sould gems are littered everywhere, I think it was something to do with people complaining about a lack of them in Oblivion but I dont know myself, I'm just speculating. Personally I think they should be rare and that their should be some sort of quest that sends you down to Blackreach to mine them showing the player that there is a source that they can tap into to access the soul gems. Hopefully that would mean less soul gems can be placed around Skyrim making them harder to come by and therefore make the enchanting skill harder to level up.

On Master, you may have a challenge. If you took play time to power-level to dragon, yes. If you took your time working through the game and need that extra boost to beat a specific fight, no. Whichever you prefer to spend your opening moments in a game are your own... your in-game character is ugly at this point and needs to be remade anyways. Go start fresh and spend some time in the fight instead of boiling over hot coals.

I am saying if I want to take up Enchanting and Smithing, there is no way to avoid being overpowered outside of intentionally gimping myself. I am saying that by taking Sneak perks and Archery perks, combat is trivialized. I want to take Enchanting, Smithing, Sneak, and Archery - but if I do I am overpowered.

My options, as laid out by the enlightened community, are to not take the skills I want to take and play like I want to play, or to wear inferior gear, or to play differently.

I should have to modify the game to make it easy. Instead, the game by itself is easy. Essentially, CHEATING IN THE GAME IS BUILT IN. To avoid cheating, you have to mod the freaking game. That is completely backwards to how any game should function.