Firstly, I'm no expert when it comes to TES, I was a big fan of Fallout 3/NV, but Skyrim is my first Elder Scrolls game.

So, my issue is smithing, or rather, having a merchant do it for you. Why has Beth removed this feature?
I'm currently RPing an archer-thief, and though it goes against my idea of RP (as a thief) to level smithing and create my own weapons, I don't see any problems with taking my weapons/armor to a Smith and paying to have them improved.
You would have to be a certain level in relation to whatever you want improved, for instance, you want your Glass Bow improved to legendary, you'd need to have at least 90 in Archery and the appropriate gold.

I feel that this would enhance the RPing element in the game, would help (not entirely fix) the issue of having too much gold in later levels and also give Smiths a more defining role.
So can anyone else spot any problems that would arise if this feature was implemented in this game?

Lastly, this isn't a complaint thread, it's a reflect-on-an-awesome-game-and-through-community-discussion-give-the-developers-some-similarly-awesome-feedback-leading-to-an-even-greater-game thread

Cheers guys

A good idea, maybe a missed opportunity, but not likely to ever be implemented. There we're thousands of missed opportunities in a game this size, they made way for the thousands of great features that do exist in the game.

I think that's a solid idea for NPC Smiths to be able to improve your weapons. It's not exactly a feature Bethesda removed though, since Smithing was never in Elder Scrolls previously. Unless you're just talking about Smiths being able to repair in past games.

But, semantics aside, I agree that NPC smiths being able to improve your gear with be a solid idea. Maybe part of the DLC?

There's two sides to this coin. On one hand, why shouldn't you be able to pay a smith to improve your stuff for you? The way it stands now, blacksmiths serve to only buy and sell stuff. They can make stuff for the armies, but not for you? And there are Master blacksmiths, like Eorlund Graymane. But poor Eorlund can't make anything better than a decent steel weapon and the knowledge of how to improve anything you might have is somehow lost on him.

On the other hand, if you could pay them to make and improve things for you, the Smithing tree becomes useless. Right now I have some Enchanted Legendary Daedric armor that I'm going to sell. The listed price for the armor alone is over 10K. The entire set would be close to 20K. Through alchemy and enchanting, I could save up enough money by level 20 to buy such armor. And if it weren't already enchanted the price would be like 8-10K for the entire set, which I could then just enchant myself. That means that by level 10-15, I could easily have Legendary Daedric armor.*

The only way around that would be to make such items cost ridiculous amounts of money to purchase.For example, say the cost to outright buy steel-plate is like 30 grand. Fine. But then if you made the same set of armor, you'd only get a few hundred coin for it.

I don't see how there's any way around it without completely throwing the economics and Smithing skill out of whack.

*Actually, by level 6 or 7 you can save up 10K if you're really frugal.

Eh, Morrowind did it by having NPC's that could enchant your stuff for you, and both Morrowind and Oblivion had NPC smiths that could repair your armor for you, and I don't think that ever made the Enchant or Armorer skills pointless.

It would just have to cost a lot of money to get those upgrades.

Then Beth would have to tune the game balance with the assumption that all players improved their weapons. And fans of overpowered smithing would rage that they couldn't one-shot dragons anymore.

What annoys me more is the fact I can't pay someone to enchant things for me. I can ask a mage at the College to do it, but he tells I should do it. It's like Bethesda thought about adding this and than decided against it.

What they should have done would be keeping the way gear got worse over use as in Oblivion, but the blacksmiths or the smithing skill itself should allow you to repair the gear. If you then played someone that didn't use smithing you would have to pay up to get your gear fixed. Also they could made it so that when you wanted to craft a sword, unless you did it yourself they could do it for a fee and the materials. The sword would then be standard values and not tempered. Tempering could also be done by them for an additional fee. That way you would have a money sink and some nice RP touch to the whole thing also.

same with alchemy and Enchanting also, but the result of the strength on the potion ore the enchant should be less then if you actually had that skill yourself. That way you would make going alchemy, smithing or enchanting worth it, but for those who didn't want too could still get things made, just not as good as you could have made it yourself.

Yeah, I support it

paying for upgrades is a no brainer and another example of the poorly implemented trade skill mechanics.

I suspect there are a lot more fans of smithing who think it is ridiculously overpowered and needs to be brought back down and made more realistic, than there are of that other camp. I think the OP's idea is great too, and would like to see that done as well. But with either or both, please bring the max amount of improvement that can be done to items back into more realistic territory, thanks.

I'm all for this idea especially for role playing. Why should my mage character bother with such tiring manual labor when he can just pay one of the two smiths in Whiterun to do it for him? Besides not all characters, even warriors, are going to be interested or have the aptitude to smith.