Ive come across the realisation that after completing the Deadric quests and all the other Quests for the Unique and Powerful artifacts, that they are no where near as effective as
a Legendary Great-sword. For instance I travel all the way up to the peak to collect that priest of Boethia for the quest of Molag baal, fight some pretty tough enemies and all I receive
for my troubles is a shoddy Mace with less damage than a Ebony Longbow?

In Comparison I can steal away with some Ebony and buy a few Deadric hearts somewhere and make myself a heavy hitting weapon for less time and less effort?

These items are meant to be of substantial power from higher beings? Also its not just Molag, it can be accounted for nearly every deadric weapon I have come across. I feel as though
I have also been cheated because the value of some of these items are way out of proportion to a suit of ebony armor I may come across. I have a stash in my house of basicly all the deadric items and
I feel like im working in a brothel for souls, since I am a champion of nearly all of the deadric princes due to the ease of which I aquired the items. With the exception of Azura's star I should mention.


My question to the readers of this is that- Should the Deadric quests be beefed up even more and the weapons even more powerful to make it feel like you had to work almost inpossible ends to archive
such a mighty weapon.

Also do you think there needs to be a review on the pricing, and maybe a boost in shopkeepers gold?

Arcane smithing allows you to make them more powerful

Not nearly as powerful as stuff you can make in raw damage or enchanting wise. The daedric artifacts are pathetic and the only one is kind of cool is Mehrunes Razor because it has an insta-kill chance.

If you feel this way then perhaps you shouldn't use/abuse the crafting system. Either at all, or anywhere as much.

Its not even abusing because I have not cheated. Wearing rings and gauntlets of smithing to increase your weapon grade ect ect.
If you think using your brains to acquire better equipment is abuse, then I must be very saw indeed. However you answered my question William
that there is an issue between the deadric equipment and the hand made stuff so to speak.

I have arcane enchanting ability but my smithing is maxed out, ive upgraded my favourite item which is the mask of clavis vile, and it does not stack up
in comparison to my deadric helmet of cold resistance.

Well the game isn't particularly hard anyway, so this doesn't really matter from a gameplay perspective. Looking at it from the lore side of this I agree with you completely however

How, some of these weapons have three or four effects on them?
A certain Sheild is also pretty impossible to beat as well, nothing you can make will top it and only it's looks will either make you love it or loath it.

The main reason though, you appreciate something you worked hard to get over something you just threw together at a forge.

Artifacts are mostly fine, it's the smithing system that is unbalanced.

Meridia's weapon for example, does the same damage of a standard glass sword but the sunburst explosion it does when killing an undead is wonderful for clearing up crowded places. The way I understand it, the point of artifacts is not providing the best weapons in the game but something highly unusual or not possible via normal means (crafting, enchanting, etc...)

There are some that speculate that they are in the wrong crafting categories (and there are plenty of other little bugs in the weapons and armor stats, so it shouldn't come as a shock). However, I am not convinced yet that it wasn't intentional, since the enchantments are powerful, and you can get the items at pretty low levels (I think).

But no, you don't get the 2x "improvement" bonus when crafting. There is a mod that puts Dawnbreaker in the daedric category for smithing purposes, for example. That's the only change made to the weapon. Which makes sense, since it is a daedric weapon. Then you can improve it more, and make it more powerful.

I am not proposing any of this as a solution, just adding something to the discussion, I hope.

Very few artifacts really have great value.

Spellbreaker, Azura's Star, Sanquine's Rose and up to a point Mehrunes Razor come to mind. Most of the other things can be replaced by better things and weapons. This isn't the fault of the weapons persé as some of have them a purpose beyond being a normal weapon (Meridia's sword, Wabbajack) and others simply never were that brilliant.

The problem lies more in crafting which allows you, rather easily, to make all things more powerful then anything the Daedra can offer. Crafting is overpowered, I don't know if improving Daedric weapons to change this would be a good idea, I'd rather see crafting becoming slightly weaker.

how would one make crafting weaker? Less ore lying round? Increase the amount of ingots to produce an item?
If the problem is indeed crafting which I think Fishy is correct.

Maybe an increase in the skill level bar on blacksmithing on how fast you can learn and/or the level of strength in terms of your skill to make such an item?

I mean most of the abilities on the items given by the dremora princes are fine, its the armour value that hurts and the fact you can not receive bonuses for example for having a full set of the same armour (heavy skill perk).
Still anyone has to be kidding that Molag Baal mace with a damage of 11, a 3 second window for soultraping (try that on a minimum on expert to kill a cave bear) is kidding themselves. And this deadric prince is meant to be
about domination? Ironic isn't it

I believe the Daedric items are designed for folks who haven't mastered smithing and enchanting. It takes a lot of time to get those tradeskills maxed and buying (finding) the mats adds to it. But you can get Daedric artifacts quickly and without much trouble.

For example, the mace is pretty easy to get when you think about it. Yes you have to rescue someone, but you can do it all at a low level and in one play session. Plus, the enchantment was very helpful to me at the time as I didn't have soul trap.

Spoiler Alert :

Almost every blacksmithing table has a pile of ingots you can steal in the night, and then you just make a lot of daggers, sell them to the shopkeeper (as item is no longer stolen), buy their ore/ smelt and make more.

This make Skyrim similar to Daggerfall. Morrowind and Oblivion.
One artifact spear in Morrowind was the only weapon who had better stats than self mad items. Ring of the Khajiit was nice in Oblivion.
None of the artifact weapons in Oblivion was close to an daeric weapon enchanted with an high level sigil stone.

Main weakness in Skyrim is that most of the artifacts don't benefit of smithing perks.
See this as an bug, put them in fitting material classes or daeric.

Also you can access many if the items pretty easy at low level, making them to strong would unbalance the other way.