You can make irons daggers from easily found or purchased items and level on like 5 of those

You can make potions from easily found or purchased items but to get one alchemy level you need to make 2.5 times potions to make a level


Where is the consistency?

Im not bashing either, just wondering why they specifically created that difference

Because the flowers you need are everywhere and abundant. Ore isn`t all that common in the wild. I see it here and there but every 10 feet there is 20 bunches of flowers to harvest.

Probably becasue potion ingredients are easier to come by and also because you're using more potions than weapons. Also IRL forging is a ratehr lengthy porcess compared to mixing remedies.

I found leveling blacksmithing to be super-trivial, just buy up all the iron ingots and ore, make iron daggers, (enchant them with banish or lifesteal if you can), sell them back, wait 48 hours, repeat. It's easy to get to 100 very quickly with very little gold (3000 or so should be plenty). Leveling alch to 100 on the other hand is a real pain in the butt, especially if you didn't make a habit of picking up every flower you saw. If you decide late that you want to level alchemy it can be a real nightmare to get very deep in.

Despite picking as many flowers as possible, it is still very difficult to level alchemy. I even had to buy training at higher levels.

Iron ore and iron ingots are actually abundant and you can get them just from merchants alone.

The problem is the devs forgot to put in diminishing returns for crafting cheaper mats. There is supposed to be diminishing returns for iron daggers.
Proof of this is in improving items. Improving weapons and armor increases your blacksmithing skill. Improving iron daggers actually does not increase blacksmithing as much as improving dwarven daggers. I have tested this.

They should have used the alchemy formula, where the amount of alchemy increase is proportional to the base value of the item you crafted. The more expensive the potion/poison, the higher the alchemy increase. Crafting a cheap potion only moves the alchemy skill by 1 mm.
Similarly, iron daggers should also increase the blacksmithing skill by 1 mm at higher levels, but crafting the latest orcish armor (or whatever new armor you unlocked) should increase it the most.

13 potions, is far more useful then 5 daggers... quite a bit so... Thats why.

Because no one needs iron daggers, but everyone can use potions.

No another smithing is OP thread... :brokencomputer:

Ore is not remotely as common as plants. Not by a longshot.

With my last character I went for all the crafting skills and they all ended up around the same level in the end. Ingredients for potions are quite plentiful and very lucrative if you know the right recipes. You have to look a little bit harder for ore and it can be quite difficult to find the good stuff. Not nearly as profitable as alchemy. The materials you purchase generally cost more than the item you end up crafting so unless you stick to materials you find yourself you're not going to make a profit. Alchemy ingredients are mostly dirt cheap and the potions you can make go anywhere from 50 to 1000 gold.

But it is. You can have 0 iron on you and 3000 gold and go from level 10 blacksmithing to level 100 in an hour by just buying the limitless amounts of iron from vendors and smithing it into daggers.
Try having 0 alchemy ingredients on you and leveling alchemy anywhere near 100 in an hour.

If anyone sat there just buying materials and not actually just using what is found in the nodes, then sure alchemy does take longer. But if you play the game and just explore. You will find enough materials to lvl alchemy beyond smithing with whats available ingame. Think about it, almost every 10-20 feet in the game there is a flower or multiple ones. Combining every 2 or three materials creates one potion. I can walk outside the starting town and start alchemy, you can`t do that with smithing. The ore and bars ingame are so much less abundant compared to the vast amount of pickable flowers and insects. For every one ore you find , you`ll find 50 flowers if you bother to look.

You must keep in mind that alchemy exp is not gained per potion but from value of the potion. I dont know the calculation but i do know what you get a lot more exp from crafting an 1.5k g invisibility potion rather than a 40 g stamina potion or something similar. So that statement does not really hold. I leveled 99-100 alchemy in 6 or 7 pots i think by crafting 1.7k g potions. So keep in mind, even adding negative effects to potions and positive effects to poisons increases the value.

Are you at the same level in Smithing and Alchemy? At lower levels it takes less activities to level a skill, as you increase it takes more. I have to make about 9 or 10 daggers now to level Smithing.

They should introduce diminishing returns to crafting, that will fix a lot of the current issues. Getting 100 in a crafting profession should require quite a bit of effort, not just spamming iron daggers and waiting 48 hours, rinse and repeat.

When we say "Ore's much less common" we're talking about going out and harvesting it. Not standing at the vendor and Waiting repeatedly for their stock to refill. :shrug:

Or they can just let the people that want to "grind" their skills do so and move on. If they want to play a spreadsheet, let them.

I'd rather not have the game balanced to be appropriate to this play-style, as I think it would simply wind up making these skills a huge time sink to develop for the rest of us that have no interest in using loopholes to grind our way through what is supposed to be a role-playing game. If any of your strategy involves "wait 48 hours for X to regenerate, then repeat" then you're simply playing the wrong game.

Something else to think about, Spamming the item over and over in crafting gives small increases. But if you try different recipies or combinations you will a very noticeable increase in how much exp you get from each craft. I was making healing potions and my alchemy is around 57 or so. That healing potion I was making to make me gain a lvl in alchemy would have needed like 200 combines because the exp bar hardly budged. So I tried just mixing different combinations of flowers I had and found one that gave me a full skillup with like 5-6 combines. Huge difference, I aslo noticed the same with armor. Just experiment and find what combines give better exp. As I am finding out alchemy lvls very fast when doing this.