I used the smithing tree on my last character but I've never really made it a huge thing. I get to Dwarven and that's it; and that's only because of the money you can make from it.

But with this new character I decided to focus more on smithing. She's a light armored Reguard so yeah, leather. However, I've discovered that while I'm up to the point where I can make Flawless Dwarven and Steel, I can still only produce Superior leather. So I went to Thieves Guild and joined in order to get the TG armor to see if it would improve to above Superior. Nope.

I thought I'd read a post by someone here saying that all types of armors could eventually be improved to the armor cap. I also thought I read someone who had somehow smithed fur to the cap as well. Was that faulty info or PC mods? But if there is a way to continually improve leather in the vanilla game, I'd like to find out how. Thanks.

P.S. is it because I haven't gone further up the light armor side of the tree? I haven't bothered with Elven because 1) You don't just run across the materials to improve and/or make the stuff all that often, and 2) My hot looking Reguard isn't going to run around looking like a Thalmor [censored] no matter how highly I can smith the stuff.

With a high enough fortify smithing effect a single piece of armor can bring you to the armor cap. But it takes a lot of fortify smithing exploiting. By exploiting the crafting system one could make the spell dragonhide last for thousands of hours and be at the armor cap naked.

Leather isn't effected by smithing perks so it take a lot more fortify then it would with your Elven or steel armor.

I see. So what's the process then? Chug a ton of fortify smithing potions while wearing as much fortify smithing gear as possible when improving an item? And can you do it with just potions? I have one piece of enchanted gear for it but I have enough ingredients to proabably make 10+ potions. Obviously I've never done the mega stacking thing but this time I want to use some exploits. Thanks!

Two fortify smithing potions won't stack.

Here's how it basically works, a potion of restoration fortifies the magnitude of your gears enchantments. Simply drink the potion and reequip your gear. It will remain fortified until the gear is removed.

Now say your wearing enchanted gear that fortifies smithing and alchemy. Make a potion of restoration, Drink it then unequip and immidately reequip your crafting gear. Its now more powerful and you can make an even more powerful potion of restoration. You see how this loop works. In just a two or three steps you can easily bring leather armor to the cap.

Wow. I won't do that though. That's too much. I guess I really don't want to use the exploits! But thank you for taking the time to inform me. I appreciate it.

With 65 smithing you could improve that leather (or anything else you don't have the perk for or that isn't linked to one of the smithing perks) to exquisite, with 100 to flawless. Better than that you need potions/enchanted items as described above.

To improve Leather armor to Legendary you need a Smithing skill of 168 (because there's no perk point for it, if there was, the skill would be 91). It is entirely possible to get a skill of 168 without the restoration exploit, or indeed any exploit, because since there is a point of diminishing returns designed into the Enchanting/Alchemy/Smithing ring you can assume that the level you can get it to is intended.

I can Smith leather-based armors past the cap with: 4 pieces of +25% Fortify Smithing gear and a +120% Fortify Smithing potion (that I make), but as Abrinth said you don't need to get quite that high. Of course, they are past the cap when I view them, but I have Well Fitted and Matching Set perks and I've never subtracted those bonuses to get the armor base.

Cool. My smithing is at 61 right now and my character is standing at the gates of the Dwarven ruin in Markarth. The next time I play it should take about 30 minutes to collect what I need, get the skill up to 65 and then improve my already improved TG armor. Awesome... I think .

It's true that you can get every set of armor to the cap of 567, but that's not just based on what you can do with Smithing. For some of the sets you will also need to spend perk points in the Light Armor tree. There is a way to finesse it with the minimum perks spent if you want to be very frugal with your perk points.

It may be worth mentioning that you can improve existing, unenchanted armor without spending any perks in the Smithing tree. The only reasons to spend perks in the Smithing tree are:
1. If you want to be able to make the armor yourself from raw materials.
2. If you want to improve weapons - there's no cap to your damage, so this is always a good idea.
3. If you have existing enchanted armor/weapons, such as quest rewards that you want to improve then you need the Arcane Blacksmith perk.

Yes. I warned the OP that my experience of the leather-based armors being over the caps could be based on my Light Armor perks (Matching Set and Well Fitted (I got the Heavy and Light ones mixed up - I meant Custom Fit.).

Edit:
If I did the math correctly (subracting the 100% Agile Defender bonus, 25% Custom Fit bonus, and 25% Matching Set bonus) then I improved the Leather Armor set to an Armor Rating of 548.

So you don't have to scroll up: I improved it with:
4 pieces of +25% Fortify Smithing gear
1 +120% Fortify Smithing potion

Or, if you're on pc, you can get a mod which will "fix" leather (and some other things that don't appear in the tree) so you don't have to jump through hoops.

They're low hoops.

But some are flaming! I've never tried the resto potion amplification exploit, mainly because the only toon I have that's into alchy and smithing also has http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Powers#Sinderion.27s_Serendipity, which is NOT what you want when doing this. It's already easy enough to make gear so good that you are almost in god-mode full time.

Why not? SS just gives you a 25% chance of an extra potion being cretes. No bonuses that I am aware of.

^^^^^ This! We (Wood Elf and Janessa) are rolling with legendary fur armor. It's not godly, but it's in a good zone for protection. I haven't spent any points in smithin, but will just to improve Dawnbreaker and Spellbreaker.

We can improve Spellbreaker? I don't use shields so I've never tried. Can we improve the %-age of spell damage reflection or just it's armor rating?

Spellbreaker is improvable. You only improve the base armor rating, the enchantment of an item is never affected by any tempering process.

For the OP - I like the look of the lower end light armors much more so than the high end ones so I modded the Steel Smithing perk into a Basic Smithing perk that affects all the low end items such as leather, fur and iron weapons and armor. With that it's fairly easy to get a very high armor rating with "mere" leather armor without resorting to any form of exploitive potions or items.

I didn't know if the spell reflection was an enchantment or quality of design thing...since we have no Fortify Spell Reflection enchant.

Yeah, I was thinking of improvement of the armor rating. That would be cool to boost the enchantment! I'd love to do that with the some blades and light armor that I find in chests.

I've never calculated or researched the max damage done by NPC's spells, but 50 seems kinda' low. I just reread the description and see that it only acts a Ward...I thought it reflected the damage back on the caster. I guess I wanted to think that due to it's shape.

Make Fortify Alchemy potion, drink it, make it again, drink it, over and over until you're making incredibly powerful alchemy potions, make a fortify smiting potion, ???, profit.

I don't know why they didn't do this to begin with. They have "Advanced Armors" perk on the left side of the tree for steel plate and scale. Would make sense if the first perk in the tree was "Basic Armors" where you can make Steel as well as improve all the low armors "twice as much".

I will have to get a mod for this.

I don't think there are fortify alchemy potions, just enchantments. But you can make a fortify enchatment potion, drink it, and make better fortify alchemy gear.

Yeah, there's no Fortify Alchemy potions. Similarly, there's also no Fortify Enchantment enchants. But there are Fortify Enchanting potions and Fortify Alchemy enchants.