Do you have to use glass/daedric armor or weapons (more so weapons, as armor is easier to deal with), to be effective?

One of the things I didn't like about Oblivion, is that the some of the other weapon materials (steele, silver, etc) seemed to become uslessless as time went on. From an RP perspective, I didn't care for the glass/daedric/dwemer weaponry, but the damage output of "lesser" weapons made later battles ridiculous.

Thoughts?

The higher the level, the harder some of the enemies get.

I am only level 35, had the game since it came out, and currently am using a Glass Warhammer.


Very effective, so it's your decision.

But if you were needing an answer, I would say upgrade your weapons.

you could get into the three crafting trees and make any weapons/armor viable end game, though it takes some time.

I am playing on master at level 81. I absolutely have to use deadric weapons.

There are exploits that you can use to smith any weapon up to end game quality.

Depending on how you build your character, any weapon or armor in any material can be more than powerful enough to deal with any situation. You can also go way over the top and build a character that some think is overpowered, or you can build a weak character that has to take more care. It is all in how you build them.

In the mid and latter part of the game, what you use comes down to aesthetics and role.

Well sure, you could still use stuff like leather armor and iron swords at higher levels. Technically. If you also max out enchanting/alchemy/blacksmithing to improve weapons and armor.

If you have a high smithing skill, you're going to be able to improve a weapon's damage by 100%-200%. The difference in damage between steel and daedric is considerably less than that, so you aren't putting yourself at a huge disadvantage by using lower quality stuff. I've started just giving my followers legendary steel weapons, so it isn't such a big deal when some draugr shouts them out of their hands and into oblivion. My current character also has 100 smithing, but is using elven weapons (there's only like 2 points of damage difference between elven and glass, and with the mods I'm using, I like the way the elven stuff looks.)

Elven weapons were the only good looking high-level weapons. Are they not as good in Skyrim?

trying to run around with a 'live off the land' philosophy at the moment. nothing i'm using is crafted/upgraded in even the tiniest way (except for potions/poisons, but nothing you could call an exploit), and i've skipped the MQ entirely, thus, no dragon shouts.

even if i get a sneak crit with poison and a few more hits in before target reaches me (playing an archer) 9 times out of 10 i'm gonna have to run or rely on illusion. starting to think the game's actually balanced around smithing. wasn't having nearly this much of a headache on my last playthrough (most of the shouts, max smithing/enchanting and fortify effects all round)

Look at it this way. Ebony is better than steel plate, right? But steel plate with smithing is far, far better than ebony without smithing. So if you want a high armor value, it matters less what kind of armor you wear than it does how well you can improve it. So figure out what armor you want to wear, largely based on looks, and smith the hell out of it. I have a smithing skill of 100 and a full set of smithing-improving enchanted equipment with percentages of 8%, 12%, 17% and 17%, and smithed to Legendary level, my steel plate armor, gauntlets and boots, Ancient Nord helmet and Skyforge Steel helmet have made me a powerhouse that can tackle anything without making me that's invulnerable to everything while one-shotting giants and dragons and Draugr Deathlords and such. Regular bandits go down in one or two shots, bandit chiefs take more hits, and giants and dragons remain a (beatable) challenge. Last night I sent three Thalmor to their reward without it being a walk in the park.

So wear what you want and smith it well. You can certainly go with steel armor if that's what you want. There is no perk for iron armor or any light armor below Elven, so those won't be able to be smithed all the way to as high a degree as you could materials with associated perks (Elven, glass, steel, Dwarven, Orcish, Daedric, and Dragon) but they should still be viable if you smith them well and perhaps work with block, especially for the lower-end light armors.

It pretty much is. http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii167/bl3count/rangedcrafting.jpgof archery's damage per second compared to destruction magic damage. There are two sets of points, one for no crafting, the other for full crafting. The line for full crafting pretty closely matches the destruction damage, the no crafting line is way lower. So they're expecting you to use crafting to keep your damage competitive.

thanks for the link, disheartening as it is to have my thoughts confirmed. guess i'd better get to deer hunting...

It's unfortunate the the game is focused around pretty much one skill. However, I think any character can make do without it.

It's not so much focused around one skill, as it is that they wanted to make sure it was worth it for those who opted to work with that skill. It makes a big difference - more than armor type, in fact - but you can do without it if you really want, and if you make sure you give some attention to other combat skills, and of course no perk is an all-or-nothing proposition. You don't have to either ignore smithing or else push it to 100.