So I realize people were taking advantage of easy ways of leveling smithing, and from what I understand Bethesda changed how you gain experience from it; you now get more experience for crafting valuable items.

Smithing is ridiculous to level up at the start of the game now because the materials required to craft an Iron Dagger cost about 2000% more than a dagger is worth. Pray tell how many Steel Chest pieces and Gold Rings Bethesda feels like we should craft before being able to craft Dwarven armor?

Not going to lie, I'm a little upset at this decision, especially since enchanting levels up with almost no effort.

i think its stupid that a level one can sit there mine wait a month mine again and get 100 level of smithing

You mean it's stupid that someone takes the time to mine and craft gear?

What am I missing?

I like it better this way, before you could get 100 Smithing at level 1 and outgear anything thrown at you immediately. Not to mention, it doesn't exactly make sense that you can essentially make simple, easy to make Iron Daggers straight to 100. How much skill could a blacksmith honestly gain from making iron daggers to the point where they suddenly find out they know how to make daedric and ebony and glass? Alchemy is pretty time consuming to level too, so it only makes sense that Smithing is as well.

*cought* Enchanting *cough*

For a low level character the buy and sell prices are ridiculously skewed.

Well Smithing was easier than Enchanting before they patched it, so now Enchanting is at the bottom of the ladder. I'm sure they'll get around to it, if you really want that much balance. I do agree that they should at least lower the amount of gold that self enchanted stuff sells for. Turning a pickaxe from a 15 gold value to a 700 gold value using only a petty gem is quite ridiculous.

But I really like how Smithing feels now.

I mined, hunted and bought leather and iron. craft daggers and then enchant them and sell. smithing lv raised, enchant lv raised and a lot of gold was made. I really didn't notice much of a difference in this after the update.

Why in the world would you buy the materials? That's what looting, hunting and mining is for.

I for one really welcome the 1.5 changes. In fact, i liked them so much that i used the console to reduce my current characters level down to 50 (from almost 100). Did the same for alchemy and enchanting.

Much more rewarding now ...

I just want consistency.
Everything should either be as easy to level as enchanting is now, or as difficult as smithing is now.

Making Iron daggers and leather bracers is still useful at early level. If you hunt, you get lots of free leather.

Making Jewelry is very good for leveling up smithing too. Get Transmute spell, make lots of silver, and make Silver Amethyst Ring and Silver Garnet Ring. Use up all the gems you find in your dungeon crawling.

If you have some other way of making money, you can get training with Eorlund Gray-Mane at Skyforge. Training is cheap for low level.

At level 30 you can start making more advanced stuff. You can get serious amount of dwarven ingots from dwemer ruins. Make dwarven bows and make lots of money.

At level 50 you can start making Steel Plate Armor. Buy Steel Ingots, Corundum Ingots, and Iron Ingots from the blacksmith, make Steel Plate Armor, sell it back to him. Instant profit and free smithing experience. At this point, your Smithing leveling problem is solved. You can grind it rather painlessly and make profit by becoming a travelling blacksmith. Go to different cities, buy up steel and corundum, make armor and sell. They are heavy, but if you have Steed Stone, and wear Steel Plate Armor, they weigh nothing.

So, for me leveling up Smithing is fairly painless. I like Steel Plate Armor a lot. It gives you good protection and looks good, And you can get to armor cap pretty easily with it.

spelunking in the dungeons that Bethesda so generously put in the game for you to get the gear the old fashion way... by killing the people with it and taking it off of there cold dead corpse. sitting at a smithy would strike me personally as boring

I don't see the issue here. You're training in Smithing - so that involves investing time and money that you will make back multiple times at higher levels.

Think of it this way - if you bought a sword from a guy who's only smithed one iron dagger before in his life, you probably wouldn't pay full price for it, no?

Smithing is fixed now. Iron daggers having no diminishing returns was an obvious bug, and anyone who argues that it was working as intended frankly are deliberately being obtuse.

Enchanting may get some leeway because you need to actually find and disenchant items to get new enchanting "recipes".

It's much better now - you need to work at it. And if you collect pelts and ore/ingots on your travels you can find enough raw materials to have it level steadily at a sensible pace whilre being encouraged to make good stuff as opposed to endless iron frikkin daggers. Personally, I find it so much more satisfying to collect a big stash of materials obtained questing and gain experience by making stuff that's worth making.

I do think enchanting should be nerfed a bit in line with it. My current character has a enchanting in the 30s without ever having enchanted a thing - it all comes from disenchanting stuff (in case I decide to use it later) and recharging stuff. I don't think you should get any exp. for charging up Sanguine's Rose or whatever - I see that as the equivalent of replacing batteries.

You buy your materials? That's a waste of money. And your percentage is seriously skewed. Materials costing 2,000% more than the dagger? If a dagger costs 100 gold, for example, your percentage would mean that the materials would cost 200,000 gold. Bit of an over exaggeration, wouldn't you say?

What is the best piece to smith at lower levels, as far as cost of materials vs amount of training received. For example, should I make iron helmets or iron armor? Or does it wind up being about the same?

I have no problem with smithing as it stands. Hunt and make leather helmets; mine iron, transmute and make gold jewelry. (Silver jewelry is a pain because you have to remove the silver ore from your inventory after every spellcast. Else it goes to gold before iron goes to silver.)

Also, consider that you shouldn't power-level smithing too far at the beginning, or the combat will get quite difficult at low levels (below 30 or so). You need to ramp it up in proportion to the combat skills to keep a decent balance.

Little tip. One if not the best place to gather ore, gems, and also soul gems is in Blackreach. Mulitple ore veins everywhere.

Smithing was to easy before. They fixed it to the way it should of been.

This is just a side effect of WoW players getting Skryim. They can't believe a game exists that isn't some kind of messed up competition, so they whine about nerfing stuff.

give them some time... they'll probably figure out a way to balance enchanting out more, too... did you forget that not only are they continuing to look for things to patch, and ways to fix them... but ALSO working on the expansion pack, dawnguard?

just be glad bethesda is working so hard on skyrim, you dont need to take a whip to their flesh.

I don't play WoW.

I agree, I recently started a new save, and find it to be immensely annoying how much effort is required. I care little for attempting to make a game overly realistic, as if I wished to spend ages attempting to master blacksmithing, I would do so in real life. It is a persons decision to overpower themselves through level boosting, and I feel it simply served to conform to the modern doctrine among games to be realistic, at the cost of gameplay.

It's much better now it's been fixed.
Providing you had the money/items you could have Deadric gear before level 10, which completely takes the fun out of the game.

Am I the only one that sees no problem with smithing? When I level it up I just make leather armor. Its easy to get material, cheap to make and levels it up pretty quickly. Then I use any left over material to make iron helmets. Making gold rings boost it up pretty good too.

2000% in that context is usually read as 20 times the amount. If I say McD's is charging 100% more for the $1 McChicken, I'm not saying it's $100 now.