So I am planning my char's build on skyrim calculator... is arcane blacksmith worth investing a perk into?

Depends. If you plan on obtaining artifacts and then upgrading them, it's definitely worth it. Being able to upgrade to Legendary is one of the greatest strengths of Smithing.

If you plan on making armor, and then enchanting it, it may not be worth it. You can improve the weapons/armor beforehand, and then enchant, instead of improving afterward.

Then again, it's only one point, and it may be useful at some point.

Absolutely, you can almost double the base damage of an enchanted weapon if your Smithing Skill is high enough. Plus, no enchanted weapons are found (so far for me anyway) that have any smithing improvements.

Ok thanks, I don't have any interest in upgrading smithing since I only want to use artifacts...so I will invest the perk into arcane blacksmithing to improve the artifacts I find

Couldn't you find glass armor, enchant it, then use just 2 perks to get the same armor if you had made it yourself, then enchanted it?

But if you want to upgrade them again, you won't be able to...

IMO, there are no pre-perk requirements, so you must spend only 1 perk on it. If your char plan to smith extensively there's no reason not to pick that perk.

It really comes down to preference. I think that if you want to have an enjoyable gaming experience and feel as though you've accomplished something without completely trivializing the game, then Arcane is the best of all of the Smithing perks. You actually get to upgrade those cool artifacts and make them much more useful than what they previously were, and this is important if you like the way they look and function.

It's not the "most powerful" approach. That would simply be accomplished by Smithing Daedric gear and then upgrading it with +%smithing items, then adding double enchantments on top. This however, totally trivializes everything about the combat on any difficulty and makes the "fun" factor take a nose dive.

If you really want to use Smithing, but don't want to break the game, then Arcane Blacksmith is your best bet.



Your Smithing skill matters though. You don't have to put anymore perks into the tree, but the actual skill level determins how high you can upgrade your gear. I don't know the exact requirements, but it's the difference between "Flawless", "Epic", "Legendary" and "Peerless". Getting 100 in Smithing is a must if you want to upgrade the Enchanted gear you find to their fullest without using +%Smithing gear. Adding +%Smithing gear only improves you that much more after skill level 100.

You have to pick up Steel Crafting perk as a requirement.

If you're wanting to use artifacts more than normal weapons, it's a huge boost to have Arcane Smithing so you can improve them.

One cavaet: Each of the artifacts still corresponds to a weapon type (a lot of them tend to be Ebony materials) and you can increase your improvement of them further if you also take the related perks to the varying tiers of material quality in the smithing tree. Not necessary, but can be a nice option to have.

You need Steel crafting for everything in the Smithing tree, so it's practically irrelevant. But it's not like you need Dwarver-Orcish-Ebony-Daedric or Elven-Advanced-Glass like Dragon requires.

Hey I was just being precise