Hi everyone,

I started out with a basic battlemage build, heavy armour, one handed and destruction. However I then decided a bit of restoration wouldnt go a miss, so invested some points into it. I then wasnted to try bound swords, as the damge was good, and i have a few points in conjjuration anyway for crowd control.

What im stuck on, is whether or not to go back to conventional swords? The conjured one is good, but i miss variety, and enchants!

However, do you think it would work, using a normal sword? and then simply swapping to my bound one to get souls, whilst putting out decent damage?

thanks

At the very best, a bound sword making use of the perk that increases its damage does as much damage as a daedric sword that has been upgraded to legendary with 100 smithing. If you plan on using smithing and/or enchanting, you are better of using an actual sword. Bound weapons are great in the beginning and still usable throughout the game, but in my opinion they should only be your primary weapon if you don't make use of the crafting skills.

Im using enchanting, but not smithing? what oyu think?

The conjured sword is good but as soon as you get access to Ebony/Daedric enchanted weapons the spell and any perks spent for it become redundant.

The Bound Sword isn't as powerful as a Legendary Daedric Sword, even the bow isn't that strong and it's the best Bound Weapon spell there is. Unperked Bound Sword is equal to Steel, with perks it's Daedric unimproved.

Ah, trick is, if you want to min-max and have a large variety of flexibility, and I figured this out very early on, is that you can build yourself a pretty good warrior without spending any perks in the combat trees. The trick for the "fighting classes" is the enchants in the apparel. You can have a very capable warrior just by building armour with good fort warrior skills in them.

That way, you can use your main avatar to play however you feel.

The bound sword is a viable alternative and you can also use alchemical poisons to further enhance its damage.

My build is a conjuration warrior.

Heavy Armor.
Smithing.
Resto.
Conjuration.
Duel 1 Hand.

These are the skills which I put points in. everything else, like bow for instance, is ancillary. I am a Breton as they have higher starting magic skills and the resistance to magic stacks well with heavy armour and gift of mara to make me a walking tank. I start with the warrior stone, move to the steed stone by level ten until I get the conditioning perk and then change to lord for the extra DR and MR.

I make my own heavy armor but level smithing in response to need, so it doesn't cause to many uneeded level ups. I only use conjured weapons, swords and bows. While the damage output of smithed, enchanted swords may be higher, the bound stuff gets nice bonuses, auto soul trap (great money maker), banish conjured enemies (one hit kill on storm atronochs ftw), immunity to disarm, can be enchanted with elemental fury.

Every decision made fits my playstyle which is go in, bash everything, grab ALL the stuff. Since I don't enchant my own gear it makes finding pieces nice. The nice think is that there is not a huge difference in DR between each armor type, smithing can bring even iron armor up to an acceptable standard if the enchant is worth it.

I only use bound weapons (I wish there were axes and maces though and maybe a shield) up to level 30 its great, very deadly. Lets see how well it works when I reach 50. Did you know you can poison bound weapons?

Have you numbers to back that up?

Only the main hand one.

I've tested it in game with the console before. I'm not going to spend 30 minutes doing it again for the one guy who doesn't believe it.

My impression was Bound Weapons, with the extra damage perk were equivalent in scaling to Deadric Legendary.

The bound weapons are really quite good aslong as you max out the tree for them.

Daedric Sword 14
Bound Sword 08
Bound Sword (Mystic) 14

Mystic Binding is the higher damage output for bound swords. Both values taken from UESP wiki.

That's correct.

Hmmm, it may not be, from further research it seems that maxed out deadric and bound swords will be 39 but deadric legendary would be 67, can anyone confirm?

For definite mystic binding perked bound will be at least as good as unsmithed deadric which based on other enhancements makes them quite good.