This is not a topic meant to draw flamers or anything like that. I'm legitimately inquiring about where the balance issues are.

I have a level 52 Khajiit. Initially I started with Archery + Sneak + Lockpicking. I was quite pleased with the results. Things were really tough at first, but gradually became easier and easier (but not as quickly as Fallout became easy). I still die frequently to dragons (since you can't get sneak bonuses against them) and occassionally get overwhelmed if I don't use the stealth approach I built for.

However, I saw on these forums that people found Smithing, Enchanting, and Alchemy to be horribly overpowered. I also saw people mentioning 9000 damage weapons and weapons that could 1-hit kill the final boss.

I'm not one to take advantage of exploits or abuse balance issues (I like a challenge), but I thought it would be fun to try making one of these super-weapons, just to one hit kill a dragon before tossing it into a lake, where I'd never get it back.

I'm now 100 Smithing (have every perk on the Light Armour side, plus Draogn and Arcane). I'm 50-something enchanting and have five perks in there. I think my alchemy is mid 70s, but I hate alchemy and don't intend to try it. I figured Smithing and Enchanting would be enough to one-hit dragons, based on the complaints I'd seen.

I've purchased many weapons, found many weapons, tried every Daedric Artifact...and can't get a weapon above 70 raw damage (and that 70 damage weapon is my old bow, that I had long before I raised Smithing to 100). My enchantments help, but they run out of charges really fast and are always inferior to the enchanted weapons I had to disenchant to get the enchantment in the first place.

Summary/TL;DR:

What am I doing wrong? How do you create a one-hit-kill-super-weapon? If I can't reproduce the balance issues without Alchemy, then I don't see Smithing or Enchanting being much of an issue on their own.

You make crafting buff potions to make crafting buff items and then use those items to make better potions and then you continue until you get to max and then you make your equpment

Everywhere.

That's what I figured. That means the only change necessary is to prevent potion effects (for skills) from stacking and remove fortify enchanting and fortify alchemy effects. Bam, balance issues solved? I guess Destruction would still need a boost.