How exactly are the smithing and enchanting skills overpowered? I know this has been discussed to death but I was simply wondering if the skills themselves are too powerful, or if they only break the game when leveled through grinding at early levels? I've leveled these skills up naturally throughout the game, and only when the equipment produced was something I was going to use regularly. I'm level 33 with a smithing skill of 58 and an enchanting skill of 48. I have a flawless orcish armor set with shield. Am I really taking the easy way out?

They are too powerful because they're too easy to level up, and make any fight a cakewalk.

It's when you use the skills in synergy with each other that they become crazy. For example, you enchant all the equipment you can with fortify alchemy. Wearing this gear, you make fortify enchanting potions. You drink the potions, and then enchant a new set of gear for improving alchemy. Do this loop a couple of more times until it doesn't get any better. Now, wearing your best alchemy stuff, you make a couple of fortify enchanting and a couple of fortify smithing potions and enchant another new set of gear that improves smithing. Drink that fortify smithing potion while wearing the +smithing gear, and then you have super-armor and weapons after you improve them.

The way you're doing it is not OP.
-Loth

If you are leveling naturally, then no. It's when people "power game" with these skills that the issue arises.

Play the game your way and enjoy

This is excessive use of those skills, but also without using this exploit, smithing/enchanting has WAY too much impact on gameplay.

Thank you to all who have answered so far. I just wanted to be sure that I wasn't missing out on some of Skyrims more challenging elements by using these skills.

I don't know if they are over-powered so much as they are very easy to level up. I know early on in the game just disenchanting 2 items would level up my enchanting skill, and I think that it only takes like 498 leather bracers (or any other item) to level smithing to 100. Now I am with you, I try not to level them up "unnaturally" but I go a little further than you do, as I will often improve gear that I find to make more money on the sale. I will also make and improve gear for my followers as well. Also, sometimes if I am really low on funds and I have alot of leather goods I will make and improve a few sets for sale, also I will make jewlery for sale. I think though that the complexity of the item should bear weight on the smithing skill, so just making leather bracers, shouldn't level you up as fast as making a Elven Sword. Also, I think on the enchanting side, disenchanting should offer as much experience as tasting an ingredient does in Alchemy, and performing a powerful enchanment using high quality gems should produce more experience. That is just my 2 cents on it though.

But the way I see it is that by choosing to develop these skills I'm choosing not to develop several other powerful combat styles. As a result of being a strong smith/enchanter I have limited myself as a warrior character.

Tough call, believe it or not... smithing doesn't really do much at all. I've done the research with the console myself.

If you use the console to give yourself zero weapon skill, then each level of an improvement to a weapon (fine to superior to exquisite, etc.) only adds at most 2 whole points of damage, and sometimes only 1. It's the skill level that is the real problem... when you start multiplying skill levels to the weapons, the damage starts to climb exponentially instead of linearly, and at the top end of the scale is when true weirdness happens. This is why the most powerful enchant for combat you can put on your gear is not elemental damage, it's fortify one-handed or fortify two-handed skill. Check it out for yourself!

-Loth

EDIT: tl;dr: having a high smithing and enchanting won't really do much without also having a high weapon skill.

I agree! It's too bad we probably won't ever see a patch changing leveling elements such as this though, as many people are willign and ready to exploit these loopholes.

My one handed skill is maxed out if that makes any difference in correlation with my smith skill

Then you, sir, are getting the most bang for your buck! If you enchant fortify one-handed to as much gear as you can (ring, necklace, etc.) then you will definitely see a big jump in damage output. This becomes even more evident when you have maxxed out and perked the Enchanting tree as well. Anything that multiplies against that 100 skill will have a big impact... this means Armsman perks, too.

-Loth

And that seems to me to be a bit too powerful. I don't want the game to become too easy simply because I enjoy building myown armor

Right -- like I said, the way you are doing it is not OP. You won't trivialize your game by playing it the way you are. I think the point everyone here is making is that it's very possible to be OP if you seek it out on purpose by power-grinding certain skills and using them in a certain way. Now you know what that way is... so if you are having fun with how you are doing it now, don't change anything.

-Loth

Haha yeah ok I see you're point. Thank you lothario, I will remember your wisdom in the dark days to come.


You are my hero and ever shining light. My stars in the blackest of nights. I am forever indebted to you.

LOL you're a goofball.
-Loth

I'm sure most already know this but i hadn't read it here so here goes.

Enchanting can also allow a pure warrior who's never touched a spell perk to cast master level spells cost free. and that's without purposefully exploiting the game via alchemy/enchant stacking.

That seems overpowered to me but again nothing forces you to make this choice, this is only doable if you enchant all 4 peices with fortify (spell school) reducing magick cost by 100%.


EDIT: and yes i am aware you can only aquire master spells by having 90-100 in that skill but my point is still valid for arguments sake.

There is no "leveling naturally" for smithing. You have to create a ton of stuff you won't need no matter what to level them, there is no other way. If I leveled smithing by only making and improving armor and weapons I'd use I'd probably never pass level 30 in it. Enchanting it depends - players who recharge weapons have a legitimate way of leveling naturally, but for those who don't(bound weapon users, elemental fury users) it's just like smithing.

At least smithing level up far too easily, and from doing "low level work". That doesn't make sense. No aspiring cooks became master chefs by cooking tea if you know what I mean. For those who doesn't want to perk it but still climb the skill, get the training then. The current implementation is simplified to beyond the point where it doesn't make sense anymore. My character is a hunter, who is supposed to know how to make cheap stuff from the prey - instead she becomes a master smith (without most of the perks) for crafting and improving (mostly) leather armors and selling them. She's a hunter, not a smith - and I can't prevent it from happening.

I think some of the perks should require cross skill requirements. Like, i.e. if you wanted to enchant glass armor, you'd also have to be on glass level on the smithing to do it, to fully understand how the material works and so on. I've seen several places where cross skill requirements could have been put to good use (in a "makes more sense" kind of way), but it isn't such that everything have to be that way. Unfortunately, with BGS it seems they have an "all or nothing, everything must be equal" approach to how things should work, so I doubt we'll ever see it.

The same goes for skills and attributes - why are only a single attribute governing a skill (Oblivion)? In many cases it makes sense to have both two and three with various percentages, maybe even with racial differences. But it's so simplified it makes me sick. That being said, the more complex a system is, the more difficult it is to achieve a well balanced game.

i put the blame on poor enemy scaling, not the skills themselves. i really like making stuff to sell and making my own gear. but this has two possibilities to throw my game out of balance....either my combat skills are not high enough and i level too fast to keep up with the enemies or my combat/armor skills are too high and smithing makes my game really easy. either way, i have to avoid doing something i like to do.

what's odd, is the beginning of the game (helgen to whiterun and surrounding area) you have access to two mines, one of which contains a transmute ore spell and a ton or iron ore. less than an hour in the game on my very first playthrough, i had the spell, a bunch of hides, and about 60 iron ore. of course i turned all ore into gold, made a bunch of stuff and before i knew it, game broken less than an hour in.

Smithing can be raised "naturally" (if there is such a thing) by simply improving the gear you scavenge from your enemies to sell. You find a rusty suit of steel armor on a bad guy... fix it up first before you sell it, so you can get more money. This isn't power-grinding by making a bunch of crappy iron daggers en masse, and this also serves to use up all the various types of ingots and ores you come across that you might otherwise never use. Let's say that you hate orcish equipment and never want to use it... but you need the orcish smithing perk to get to daedric, which is what you really want. Well... now getting that orcish smithing perk wasn't a "waste", was it? Mine the crap out of orichalcum ore deposits, because you can use them to get more cash and improve your smithing to reach that fabled daedric level. See? No cheesy iron daggers x 500 necessary.

-Loth

edit: @steal your face -- did you dump a bunch of perks into raising weapon damage? That will break the game fast if you do a lot of smithing. You can smith to your heart's content as long as you don't start getting skill multipliers. And yes, it kinda svcks that the game is fragile like this... play on master.

i do play on master. and yes, that's another thing i learned after first playthrough, never to put more than one point in the + damage combat skills. or armor skills for that matter. or sneak skills. which i'm ok with, just leaves more points for other areas. but what i did notice, is putting points in the +damage is balanced until you get to level four of the perk or your overall level gets around 30 (but this could be because of out-levelling enemies, not the perk itself). there's a point when combat gets too easy and then i start a new character. i guess my criticism is, instead of meta-gaming to maximize i find myself meta-gaming to keep a consistent challenge at high levels. i'm not sure if it's bad game design or beth's game philosophy.

The fix is very easy, believe it or not:

Give enemies armor.

That's it. Did you know that all creatures in the game who are not playable NPC types have a zero armor rating? Whoops... could have used a little polish there for the bestiary. Also, the NPCs that DO have armor... have low skills -- which, as we have seen in this thread, makes all the difference. What's the point in giving a high-level bandit chief steel or better armor if his skill is only 20? Might as well be naked... especially fighting the player who has intelligently armed and armored himself within the ruleset that nobody else seems to know about in Tamriel.

They just need to adjust the enemies' stats and equipment... and by "they", I mean modders. Beth ain't gonna do it.
-Loth

PS Imagine taking on a roomful of high-level vampires who are wearing more than necromancer robes, and have very high armor skills. Hell, give the dragons 50-60% damage immunity from their scales which are supposed to be some incredible armor if you wear them. Now the game isn't a breeze anymore.

Something is always way too powerful in any elderscrolls title. I always had too regulate down my chars in this series.
Its because the base rule set of the elderscrolls, compared to other rp rules like d&d, is teribble stupid.
Do you remember damage reflection, spell and magic resistances in oblivion. Was easy to get them on 100 early in the game. In morrowind it was possible to enchant gear with regenerate x health every sec . Or the negative spell effects in daggerfall, which could give you rediculous positive spell effects. And this time they throw out a crafting system with infinite skill boost possibilities.
Why they always underestimate things like absorb , deflection, 100 resistance, damage multipliers above 50% and so on is a big mistery or its simply bad game design.

I remember one time in Arena when I made a 10000 point Shield spell for the lulz. Yeah... that might have been a bit much, seeing as how that 10000 lasted forever as "extra hitpoints" until hacked away gradually down to zero. Skyrim might be the most balanced TES ever made, TBH... but damn, they coulda done better. I can't wait to get the CK and do some surgery on this game.

-Loth