I dunno about movies. In movies the character almost always has a gun just ready to fire forever without ever reloading. IRL however, almost all weapons/equipment needs maintaining. Armor has to be cleaned and oiled to prevent rusting (or degrading, in the case of leather) weapons also have to be cleaned, and bows have to be unstrung when not in use, blah blah blah. What I'm getting at is that repair hammers were the exact OPPOSITE of immersive. Unless those hammers also had some maintenance kit stashed away inside of them, at least. In TES version of the world, maintaining equipment can be done by simply smashing repair hammers into stuff!

I guess it would be nice if over a period of time Flawless went down to exquisite and then to superior and so on and you used your smithing to take it back up but can't say I miss it really.

I miss it a lot. I was pretty irritated to see it gone. It's sad how so many new-school console gamers are influencing The Elder Scrolls series; It used to be about challenge and realism, and now if it's "annoying" to casuals, they just axe it. I would have liked to have seen the option to turn it off or on. They should have included a lot of options for serious gamers instead of just relying on modders to fix their [censored]. Now the game is completely built for people who only started gaming in the last five years and just care about perrty grafix to look at while they be hittin' stuff. Oh, better not make it too challenging, though. It might annoy the people who just want to feel badass for once in their life. Please Bethesda, the people who care about these things tend to be the people who paid for and played Daggerfall and Morrowind when it first came out, maybe even using their childhood allowance. The next game, please include some beginning game options without forcing us to mod.
Some nice options would be:

Fast Travel [ ]

Quest Markers [ ]

Weapon Degradation [ ]

I'm sure there is whole slew of others that other people would come up with, but those are my big ones. It's bad enough that we can't have attributes any more. Bethesda, if you have any appreciation for the serious RPG community that made you what you are today, throw us a bone.

Played Morrowind and Oblivion on the PC and I can't say I am that broken up about it being gone. In fact I didn't even know it was removed until I took a look at some of my gear to check the durability heh. The only purpose it served was to annoy me halfway through a dungeon where if I did not have a decent enough repair skill or enough hammers, I had to go back to town.

NO!!!!

Glad to see it gone.

I always considered repair hammers to be a roleplaying tool to represent "you are maintaining your weapons and armor using the various necessary means". Having all of the specifics of gear maintenance most certainly would be overly complex and not add enough to the game to be worth it. Instead, the hammer simply serves to represent the concept of repairing and maintaining your equipment.

It's the same reason why people wanted the old fast travel system back rather than the Oblivion one even though they could "Just use it to get to the major towns and nowhere else and RP that they bought a carriage". They want a tool to help provide the opportunity for immersion and roleplay, but that doesn't mean they need or even want the tool to do the roleplaying for them.

With that said, I always thought that the Morrowind rate of gear degredation was more or less fine. Flimsy small weapons like chitin shortswords would break fairly quickly (but not so fast that you couldn't go through one or even two dungeons with just one) while better made weapons like a dwemer claymore could go for ages before they even started to show signs of breaking, and then certain artifacts like Chrysamere had literally thousands of durability and you'd be hard pressed to make them break even if you tried. (I once actually was able to level long blade from around 20 all the way to 100 in Morrowind using that very weapon and it still had plenty of health left by the end)

Yes, it's completely unrealistic that edged weapons get dull after repeatedly smashing their edge into steel plate!

Anyway, considering as even daedric armor would be at 0 repair even just halfway through late-game fights, the whole thing needed rebalancing very, very badly, and the fact that there was no "just repair everything" button was somewhat annoying, as was the notion that the stupid repair hammers kept breaking.

Made much more subtle, and less tedious, I would see it as making more sense. Having your smithing bonuses gradually degrade off of weapons, so that you had to stop after every dungeon, not every fight to re-hone your blade would make some sense. (And there should simply be a "repair all" or "repair everything I'm wearing" button on a part of the menu that doesn't require digging through my whole inventory to find the repair hammers again.)

I hated carrying around a load of repair hammers just to tap a button wherever I was to repair an item. Honestly with mines, smelting and crafting it feels more natural and enjoy seeking out hard to find ores for my latest project.

I get why some people would like it but I didn't think it was anything but an annoyance.

Not particularly, no. It's good in concept, but the actual execution was just so lacking that Armorer was a tedious task. I prefer the new Smithing skill by a lot.

I am one of the few who hate that weapons and armour never degrade anymore.

As it is now, once you find the best weapon/armour there is no point in ever going out looking for more weapons or armour... because well, they never degrade anymore.

Yes the old repair system was tedious. but, they could of improved this with all the new smithing and mining ores and such. I will be grabbing the first mod that adds back weapon/armour degrading.

I miss it a little bit, though not much. If they did have it I would hope stuff didn't degrade as fast as it did in Oblivion.

Not particularly, now that we have the Smithing skill to do other stuff with.


(Honestly... having to break a pile of hammers on my shield several times per dungeon run in Oblivion was kind of silly, when you think about it.)

No. I hated needing to repair my stuff after every single fight.

Now, if it was more toned down like in Fallout New Vegas (or even a bit more than that), with the new smithing system I think it could be done rather well.

I only miss it because in Oblivion, it was such a pain in the ass due to how quickly things broke, even when you had the "things degrade half as much" perk.

This would be the best solution, so even if its goes back to fine, it will never break but you would have to upgrade it to get it back to a higher level. I like this way of doing it, if it was ever added back

nope.. i dont miss it at all.. together with armor repair nuisance..

As you can upgrade them to fine.superior/exquisite then I would only like them to degrade back through those to normal again and only after a lot of fighting. That would be realistic imo.

Ob made a mess of the idea and has probably left many people with the wrong impression.

In Mw repair was just part of the routine of questing: Return home, sell loot, have the guy repair your items while you're there. Exotic items cost a lot to repair which added some balance against the availability of powerful artefacts and armor. As I never carried more than a couple of hammers or tongs I distinctly remember my heart felt relief on finding even a single hammer during those longer adventures - definitely enhancing my involvement with the game.

In Ob it was quite normal for your items to be in a sad state. In Mw leaving a dungeon with your items in tatters was a definite sign that you had accomplished something remarkable. So...

Yes. I do miss repair.

No .

No!!! I was so happy when i found out weapons wouldn't degrade

I wouldn't mind it if it were slower than Oblivion and the quality of the weapon nullified it completely once you got to stronger metals or magic weapons. But tap tap tap after every fight and buying loads of hammers was kind of boring/annoying.

Edit: Or a random break once in a blue moon might be fun then you have to use something else. Maybe a fallout ish method would be ok.

Dont miss it at all, I'm glad its gone! Makes life so much more easier and enjoyable!

I agree here, Morrowind had the best system by far. Different items degraded at different rates, and you weren't breaking items after a few battles. Items breaking were rare, and I think items got weaker if you didn't repair them. Oblivion, on the other hand, was ridiculous. It did get old after a while, since the rate of item damage was way over the top. They also needed to fix how many repair hammers it took. You had to be a master armorer if you didn't want to break a dozen hammers to fix one item. This is probably part of the reason so many people who only really have recent Oblivion experience hate the repair system. It was an unbelievable pain in Oblivion, while I thought it added a lot in Morrowind.

Bethesda should have worked on fixing it instead of just eliminating it. Again, they can cater to the people who would rather just have an easy fantasy, while still keeping the serious gamers who want different forms of challenge happy. --> Item Degradation [ ]

Blacksmithing certainly doesn't need anything else to make it more useful, it's already one of the godliest options available. Having to repair was annoying as hell, not any form of 'challenge', just annoyance. Good riddance.

Putting something in quotation marks doesn't really invalidate it. Sorry. Just because you'd rather have a much simpler, sword-version of Call of Duty, doesn't mean it should be that way for everyone.