Anyone who's ever played Fallout 3/New Vegas, knows that all the weapons require up-to-date repairs and upkeep, in order to constantly keep the weapon rating and damage up.

Why no repair with Skyrim?
Has any Oblivion game required repair on weapons for continued use?

I would think, after slashing hundreds of Dragons and Drougr, any blade would become dull.

because repair was annoying,

Hey look my gun broke after one battle and i need to pay an insane amount of money to repair it....after one battle...really?

Yeah it was annoying having to constantly visit blacksmiths or haul around hammers to repair your gear. In Morrowind, if you had a low skill level and tried doing it yourself you, would fail. Constantly. As a Miscellaneous skill at 5, you might get one or two repairs out of one hammer.

i miss weapon degredation, it was realistic and you had to actually prepare for something

"realistic"
Yeah, because it's realistic because after hitting a bunch of things with a weapon you can no longer wield it and you're forced to hit it with a hammer a bunch of times to get it in TIP TOP SHAPE.
But if you're not skilled with a hammer you might have to get hammer lessons so you can hit your sword with your hammer more effectively.

"and you actually had to prepare for something"
Yeah, aside from hoarding magicka/health potions, making sure all your magic weapons are charged and you didn't forget your Daedric armor.
All repair hammers did for me was make me over encumbered.

Obviously that was a silly game mechanic. Blades really do dull, though. I don't know if you've ever noticed that. Also, f you've spent much time with axes and sledgehammers you also know that the handles break or loosen.

So weapon degredation is 100% realistic. In this game we actually have smithing as a viable game mechanic and it screams for weapon degradation. What am I doing when I "improve" my gear? Why can't the smiths do it for me? Why can't I find already improved gear? Naw, we need weapon degredation. Not having it is just lazy and it makes smithing seem contrived.

The problem was that the system was stupid. Blades are not sharpened by hammers. You would also be able to sharpen most blades with rocks. If things did break, odds are they would never be as good if reforged nor would you be able to reforge them in the middle of nowhere with a hammer, maybe if it was duct tape, but it was just a hammer lol.

In FO3 it was even worse, a gun would break down after a handful of clips, I fired thousands of rounds from my shotgun and never had to switch a single part in it. I just had to clean it a few times but that in no way required me to breakdown my other shotgun lol.

I agree. Banging of things with with a hammer isn't going to help. Thus my point about Skyrim's smithing potential. And yes, I suppose you could sharpen a blade with a rock if your smithing skill was at 'Novice'. By 'Master' you are using an 8000 grit Japanese waterstone and your two handed great sword is as sharp as a surgical instrument. Let's have a little depth here.

No, you can sharpen Iron swords with regular rocks from the river. Small rocks. Maybe even some low quality steel swords.

I wouldn't really mind if they decided to bring back item degradation, so long as the weapons and armors would last longer like in Daggerfall, and did not constantly lose their effectiveness every time the item's health would decrease (or more technical, every single time you use the weapon). One way this can be done if they choose to do so is to have effectiveness ranges (unless if that was what they did in MW and OB, though it certainly doesn't feel like it), where certain ranges of values would have identical (or at least similar values of) effectiveness, as well as better balancing to make certain that the item won't completely degrade after like three enemy encounters (actually, a lot of the issues with item degradation in MW and OB was probably due to the fact that it took so many hits to kill enemies, and in MW's case, there was the glitch where dozens upon dozens [maybe not quite that many, but it feels like it] of enemies would spawn within a single location, causing you to have to fight a lot).

For example for the effectiveness ranges, suppose there is an item with health 100, and there are four ranges. 76-100 would be one condition (maybe called "Superb" or something), 51-75 would be another (perhaps called "Good"), 26-50 would be considered "Poor," 1-25 "Damaged," 0 "Broken." Each item would then either have its own sets of degradation values that would translate into a 100 health degradation system, or each item would have its own value for health and have the conditions assigned to each range (the latter sounds more doable). I don't know if that would be the exact possible system, but they can do item degradation without making the system ridiculous or have that issue where "oh look, I just got a new sword that does up to 30 damage, but only at 100% health" that has been mentioned before (I think Todd Howard himself stated that as an issue).

Also, keep in mind that I said it should be BALANCED if they decide to implement something like this in the future, meaning that stuff will not break after fighting a pack of wolves or something else that is equally tedious or ridiculously unrealistic in terms of degradation. This stuff's supposed to be made of metal and other hard minerals, not balsa wood.

Amen. Thought this from day one! I was like "Oooh an entire smithing station" then realized weapons never dull or break. Seriously?!?

When born with the soul of a dragon, all weapons and apparel gain +1 to Indestructible.

It may have been realistic(except the degradation rate of course. Swords, hammers, axes or armor isn't useless after killing off a group of bandits), but I like that it has been removed. It was simply a chore that meant that all melee characters trained Armorer. At least we can realisticly chose to not use smithing.

Nit-picking here. That would make the thing surprisingly less useful in combat. You hit something hard (armour, bone etc.) and that surgical edge is going to chip like a mother.

I miss having to upkeep my weapons is was always nice to have another money sink, also I liked having to keep an eye on them adds a little more depth to the game.

I will agree that just banging on you weapon with a hammer was pretty stupid but I think it's even more stupid to have weapons that never break.

Thanks for contributing.

I don't mind them removing the armorer skill in Oblivion as it turned into a useless skill once you hit 100 and hammers never broke, but they could really have added the possibility to repair your items on the various blacksmith's that you find. Either by allowing the blacksmith repair it with for a certain cost and wih a % chance of making the weapon slightly better then before or via the smithing skill allow you as a player to repair things yourself. It would have been a decent moneysink and also made sense in both terms of realism and depth in gameplay.

One thing is not a aproblem in the game and that is money, more moneysinks would be appreciated.

Like anything that is remotely RPG, that requires some planning and forethought and keeps you from playing this game like an FPS, it has been removed.

If you watch pretty much ANY GOOD post-apocalyptic film their guns are always on last legs and need constant repair. Personally I like the repair function and which they kept it all be it with some tweaking. I like the idea that sharping your blade at a grindstone will keep the damage up, a blunt blade is a useless blade. That with the fact you can attack full power with no stamina makes the game far to easy and loses realism. It was obvious this game was dumbed down for newbies.

I agree, repair in fallout was amazing, requiring you to steal parts from other gear and spend money looking after your gear.
However repair in Oblivion was horrible. Now it was good in the fact you had to carry back up weapons incase your first broke but the speed at which they broke was terrible. They would break in the course of a few fights in my experience. This was negated in fallout by having weapon repair kits which were easy to carry, or picking bits off other dead characters to repair.

It should be in, but the weapons need to last longer. Have them dull but after a bit they dull no more, or have the degredation be slower. Then we can get our armour patched and our weapons honed when we return home. Perfect.

The ultimate system would take into account the effects of what you were fighting ie, a dragon wrecks your armour with its fire. A stone golum or ice chips your sword. Rotting creatures destroy arrows fired into them etc. That would be mint but i know its a lot of work. But in my opinion its the little things that count.

I liked it. At least it gave you something to do. /shrug

Elder Scrolls Game.

And yes, yes it has. Repair was all good. It kept upkeep costs on your character, so you really had to do activities for profit. I.e not just going around killing cliff racers for the shear hell of it.

maybe if your "improved" weapons and armor lost their + status over time and had to be reapplied. the durability system is dated and annoying though

i spent a good 3 hours a day killing those annoying bastards "for the hell of it"

Bad example as I killed em whenever I saw em, and very occasionally hunted the bastards with extreme prejudice. .

But you get what I mean don't you? Your character actually had upkeep costs if you paid it yourself, and still did if you repaired the gear yourself unless you found enough hammers and so on. I had a Skyrim character who pretty much never sold anything, and by level 15 he was sitting on 10 grand just from gold and gem pick ups (I sold the gems, and that was it).

Level 14 was only about 30 hours in, at the most.