Which is the superior investment of time and money? 90 conjuration with perks on various abilities and the atronach forge, or 90 smithing with perks put on the basics+daedric? I hear smithing is faster and easier, but outside of arcane smithing and daedric smithing it's not that useful. Conjuration seems more useful for combat savvy people, but seems like it requires more work and using the atronach forge itself requires slightly more materials to produce daedric.


Also, can you still upgrade daedric and other armors/weapons at the forge without requiring the necessary smithing to upgrade them twice? If not, that would probably tip the scale in favor of smithing.

You can't improve armor or weapons at the atronach forge, you can only make weapons and armor from ebony weapons and armor and you can't improve anything well without smithing skills.

You can actually make steel armor as good as daedric armor and it only costs one perk.

The only reason to go to daedric is because daedric weapons are much better than steel weapons since there is no damage cap, meaning you can make daedric weapons with much more damage than steel weapons.

An upgraded Daedric 2H weapon allows you to about one shot anything out there besides dragons. Add in alchemy and enchanting loop and than you can one shot the dragons also.

Smithing is also extremely easier to raise unless you do some cheesy conjuration "powerlevel" trick.

100 Conjuration and pulling out 2 Lords allows you to go make a cup of tea, come back when finished and collect the loot....

Well that, and I really like the Daedric armor appearance. So I guess then it's smithing > Conjuration? Would svck not having some of the conjuration perks but I would really like to be able to upgrade all my gear.

Yeah I planned to max out alchemy and enchanting, with the bare essential perk upgrades on smithing. I'm more a shield+sword type anyway.

though realisticly you would not need that much damage anyways unless you wanted to coast through the game blindfolded.