Alchemy/enchantment/blacksmith.

I'm at level 60 with 10 unspent ability points that I don't even need to use at the moment. I only need to use 2 pieces of heavy armor to get over 660 defense (which is the reduction cap I think). My weapons do 500 damage each, and have 2 enchants on them. I leveled everything legitimately with no exploitation at all, still I feel like I am way, WAY overpowered even with the difficulty raised to master I am still unchallenged. I honestly don't even need to fight, my follower Lydia can handle literally anything herself and this was done using the games mechanics legitimately.

Honestly I just feel a bit let down, this doesn't seem very play tested at all; by that I mean it's completely imbalanced. The only way I could possibly be challenged even a little bit is if they added additional difficulty settings.

So, here's to hoping they add a much higher difficulty in the future.

TL;DR

Honestly, if I knew I'd be THIS imba doing this alchemy/enchant/blacksmith combo I probably wouldn't have. I didn't even read about it or anything I just looked at this stuff and said, Damn, if I do this, this and this I'm gonna get better gear for my 1handed heavy armor build. I mean leveling this stuff I was able to get 100,000 gold without a problem without exploiting at all. So not even money is an issue either anymore.


Anyone else did this feel a bit annoyed that there isn't a harder difficulty setting to choose?

I find it's just easier to leave the weapon damage at 60% it would've been better if they left it like in oblivion where nothing jumped to 300 damage after improving it afew times or atleast not let it go into triple digits .

Honestly, that's precisely why I didn't dabble into enchanting. As a mage, if I had the no magicka cost destruction I know for a fact that I'd be doing nothing but spamming the same dual-casted spells over and over again. Instead, I decided not to invest in enchanting perks which has forced me to use other means, such as dabbling in illusion to thin out the enemies before I face them.

It makes for less of a rinse and repeat playstyle, for me at least.

What did you expect? You took the three most powerfull tree's in the game and went nuts with them. You CHOSE to do so, YOU made it overpowered. The game just let you do it.

You must be new to Bethesda's games? That's how they all are, get ridiculously overpowered by just playing the game normally. If you want challenge and are on PC, there's mods for that. If you are on console your only choice is to purposely avoid everything that is any good.

The last bit at the end confuses me. I mean, it's so outrageously overpowered; then why wasn't it ever balanced? Of course I chose to do it, as a dual 1handed build with heavy armor, those 3 trees are the most logical thing to go into for that style of play. I'm just wondering why it's so completely overpowered. Isn't it the developers jobs to balance gameplay for this very reason we're discussing?

I just fail to see how this is supposed to be the players fault which seems to be how people are describing this. I feel a bit disappointed to be honest. I mean, I legitimately leveled these three tree's to 100 and wanted to become powerful, just... not THAT powerful, lol. I mean is it really so hard to place Caps in the game? I mean the damage reduction cap is 560/660 defense right? I can forge armor with 1400 defense.

Capped at 660, yet can make 1400+?

That's.... just bad development. How does something like that sneak past testing or doesn't get patched?

There is another way of putting this, which would be "clever use of game mechanics", which is basically not "exploitation" on the basis that you use the game mechanics in a clever way. Known to the rest of the world as exploiting game mechanics. And yes, I do believe game mechanics should be fixed. I don't think gurgling potions and crafting gear upon gear, potion upon potion should be a legitimate playstyle, there should be a limit on how much gear can be improved.

Exactly. Especially regarding damage, as there is NO cap in the game for damage. I put a bunch of 47% increase dmg enchants on my char and my char's weapons deal 500+ dmg that seems kinda broken. Apparently there's an armor cap for 660 but it makes even leveling this stuff kinda pointless due to the 660 armor cap, cuz I can make armor that will give me 1400 armor lol. Enchanting and blacksmithing just needs to be balanced.

Agreed!

TES games give you the freedom to decide how powerful you want to be.

If you can't handle that freedom, then

Its a single player game, not an online mmorpg. Balance doesnt come in to it when you are the only in the the games universe that can litteraly do everything and every skill in the game. Its down to you, the player to decide how it plays out and how easy or hard it is. Its called freedom of choice.

The armor cap is 567 btw, anything about that is of no use.

Nope. I've never taken it off medium.

(On the other hand, I also haven't done all the crafting skills on a single character. My first character, a sword&board warrior/thief jack-of-many-trades, only did Smithing and some Alchemy. Smithing was the first skill to 100, around level 48. I felt challenged by the enemies I faced from level 5 up into the mid 40's. Of course, the final damage on my best weapon at Smithing 100 was around 110, so..... )

I also feel that these "professions" are kind of useless when it comes to gameplay itself. It doesn't alter the game much in terms of how you play it, it doesn't give the player more choice in how to interact with the world. To me it seems it is only a roleplay chose, like choosing that your character is a hardy self reliant warrior and as such he should naturally be a blacksmith. It also annoys me that as long as you have the raw materials for it, you can arm all of Skyrim with daedric armor and weapons, which to me seems utterly unrealistic, there is no effort in crafting other than the aquisition of raw materials, which honestly is not a taxing process in the slightest.

Yes, I will agree on that to some degree. It is of course up to the player if he choses to play this way or that, but I don't think immortality through crafting should be a valid playstyle or a valid choice for roleplaying. And singleplayer games do require balancing, but the choice to balance it is up to the creators. If I had been developing these features in this game I would have undoubtedly found a way to make these skills more satisfying to the player.

I wish they kept to morrowind standards not "oh we need to make this playable for an inbred monkey!" enchanting and alchemy and ARMORER would be great.

While I would agree on the point that the "looping" effect and borked potions should be removed, the skills in themselves are essential in an RPG game these days. Customisation of the character is a key selling point in RPG's. These 3 skill give you the player the choice in gear selection and progression. Far to many games arbitrarily force the player in to one set of gear to progress or force "grinding" to aquire quality items which are again arbitrarily assigned as "the best" without the player actually having a say on when they aquire such gear, what the actual gear will be, or how they use it.

Skyrim simply gives the player the choice. Wear whatever you want, whenever you want, with whatever effects you want within a pre-set system of making them. How good or bad they are is down to you.

Don't break the game and come here talking about it's too easy. I hate these threads. If it's bothering you so much make new armor and weapons and don't use the loop, take off your smithing gear. I don't understand how that's that hard to do.

because I leveled into these tree's and I don't like using console commands unless it's to fix a broken quest or something.

How can I break the game by playing the game legitimately lol.. what the... so lame.

I think it all comes down to choice, and freedom. Some can't handle that it seems.

what does that have to do with untested borked gameplay?

Different people see "legitimately" in different ways. They also have different standards of what "normal" play is (some people think that games should be min/maxed to the furthest allowed extent, and the difficulty balanced to challenge that gameplay style; others think that min/maxing is going beyond what is required, and the game has no requirement to balance for that. Most people fall somewhere in between. Personally, I don't mind that the game allows min/max powermongering, but it's not how I play - I have to force myself to think that way, and generally only do it for games that actually are balanced assuming you'll powergame.

Everyone else seems to have managed by only using the 3 skills when they actually need to, thus leveling them slower, and not abusing them by using one to power the other to then power the third to power the first again.

If we taught NPCs real unrestricted RadiantAI, do you reckon they may learn of this looping process and mess everything up? Be total chaos if everybody in game had over 9000 damage swords.

Yes but the very basic argument here is that something is wrong with the game, hate it or not these threads have a valid point. The looping bug should be fixed, and I personally think that the crafting skills should be more satisfying in the way they assist the player in quests or interactions with the world.

it would be fixed if they didn't allow you to make fortify smithing potions or fortify enchanting potions with alchemy.

It seems like a really simple fix so I'm not exactly sure why they allow you to make a smithing potion that adds 130% to smithing on top of gear that you can enchant that also adds to smithing.

That's not using a "loop" it's just using what's already there. I consider beating a game by maximizing my efforts in that game and beating it with the build that I maximized, (mix/maxing).

Problem here is that this definitely wasn't play tested.

It all depends on how one looks at it. Some people say "Oh, it's obvious, you just fall into it, it happens without even trying". Others of us, it didn't even occur to do such a thing, think that doing the loop takes a lot of deliberate going-out-of-your-way to do, and that it's not something that "just happens". In which case there's nothing to fix - it's an specific, highly-involved thing that you have to consciously choose to do, so if it gives you an "imbalanced" advantage.... that's fine, because you had to choose to go out of your way to do it. (Just like a Chameleon Suit in Oblivion. Need to do a lot of deliberate work to end up with one of those things, so complaining about it is stupid - the game certainly doesn't hand it to you, or lead you in that direction. )