I'm trying to play an archer / dual wielder, and cannot seem to get anything but basic weapons to stay hotkeyed.

For instance, I can hotkey two BASIC unsharpened, unmodified swords - no problem. L&R are both hotkeyed on the swords via favorites, I hit #1 and they come up. I hit #2 for my bow. Hit #1 to go back to swords if the enemy attacks me in melee. Everything is working fine, everyone goes home happy.

Unfortunately, when i upgrade my swords to fine/superior/whatever at the grinding wheel, this functionality is lost. I can no longer hotkey both weapons, it will not stack them in the L&R way such as when they are un-modified. Imagine my dismay when I think I'm doing a good thing by increasing the damage on my weapons, and now I'm left fumbling around in my inventory/favorites list in the heat of battle for my swords because I cannot hit a hotkey for them anymore. It simply doesnt work.

This is really inconvenient. Even more inconvenient than the bug that makes your hotkeys come unbound if you have several duplicate items in your inventory (like 5 hunting bows, your hunting bow will become un-hotkeyed,) I can live with that. I cannot, however stand fumbling around as I said, in the heat of battle when an enemy his lived thru my arrow assault, trying to bring up my weapons as I'm being pounded on.

Please fix this. Please?

This bugs me too...What I do is just open favorite and quickly put my left hand weapon in my hand, I name it starting with a so it's on the top...yes, that means I have weapon names like

a Daedric Sword

a Ebony dagger of stab

I even have the problem where any duplicated weapons I attempt to dual weild actually become unmapped from the hotkey I set them to. Top on the list of mods I'm going to look for once the CK gets released is something that lets you set two things to one key. I always cast my spells in pairs, whether it's frost cloak/steelflesh or muffle/detect life or summon atronach/bound axe. I raged pretty hard when I was first trying to get spells bound to the right hand and weapons bound to the left and found it impossible. The interface is just stupidly designed for PC, it's functional but not nearly ideal. The only thing really working with dual-weilding is the bound swords since it's easy to get the same spell to occupy both hands (even that's buggy sometimes), everything else is just too clunky. Press one button and have it remember two things to equip and which hands to equip them to, is that really hard? I can't even imagine playing this game on console. :wrygrin:

Especially the heat of battle, and I cannot take that much damage as a sneaky archer / thief type. Fumbling around trying to set things up right when my sneak attack doesnt actually kill the enemy outright and theyre in my face, sometimes w/ a few friends as well, can be disastrous. WHAM they get a first hit, pause into inventory. WHAM they get a second hit as I come out of the menu. WHAM probably get a third hit as I try and get my bearings straight and get oriented to face them properly. Now I'm like half-dead, if not more. Or less, however you want to look at it.

Oh nice, now it's time to pull up a restoration spell in one hand and blow the whole thing out of whack again LOL.

It's awful = \

My easy fix for this is I just enchanted the weapons, and renamed them to different things. Now I can favorite both of them and remap them easily. Problem solved. I know, I know, you shouldn't have to, but still, it makes for better damage. =P

I'll try that, tho I dont have much enchanting experience so it'll probably be just enough to rename them!