The enchanters you hire never fail. You can imbue items with any spell you know (so it pays to know all types of spells). But the hired enchanters NEVER fail. So why enchant anything on your own?

I read the page at the old UESP Wiki. I know you can stack all manner of potions to bump your Luck and Intelligence. You can learn spells to boost Skills, then enchant attire you later wear for enchanting. But this only increases YOUR odds of success, right? It's not like you're going to cram 200 spell points into a 60-point Exquisite Belt, right?

The cost of enchanting isn't a real concern given the amount of money you accumulate later in the game, so I don't get why the UESP Wiki kept going back to the cost of hired enchanters.

Oh, and can someone translate this:

"There is a 100% chance of success to create any enchanted item if you have maximized (100) your Intelligence, Enchant and Luck when using a spell with 8x100 points Fortify Enchant for 1 second on self before enchanting the item."

How do you come by a spell that bumps your Enchant 800 points?

Personaly I agree with you. I've always thought enchant was the most useless of all skills. Even with maxed out Enchant, intelligence and luck you can only make moderately powerful enchantments with any degree of relyability. As for your question. I pretty sure either bloodmoon or tribunal adds a purchasable spell that fortifies skill. I'm not 100% though, I've never spent much time with either expansion. Once you get ahold of that you can just take it to any spellmaker and have a spell made that has "Fortify Enchant 100 for 1 second on Self" eight times. Then again you could always exploit potion making to create ungodly powerful fortify intelligence potions but I think of that as a form of cheating.

I've thought of making a simple mod for my own use that makes the Soul Trap spell affect based on your enchant skill rather than mysticism. I don't know if it would work but if it did it would make it possible to increase the enchant skill's level much faster and easier, making it a much more useful skill. You would still need to rely on hired enchanters or the above mentioned tricks to make anything of any real power (your not going to pull off any constant effect enchants with this) but it would be great for making simple, low level weapon enchantments especialy earlier in the game.

Once you buy a fortify skill from a certain group NPC's from either TM or BM you can thereafter have the ability to fortify any skill.
These for sale fortify skills are magical by nature, but will lend you the ability to have any fortify skill made.

It was a lot of fun for me for RP purposes.

On my Ashlander Warlock enchanter, I used my own personal enchanting to enchant items using the souls of Almalexia and Vivec.

In order to do so it required a massive ritual involving both the spells oldplayer is talking about as well as the chain alchemy trick for massive intelligence.

However, I felt incredibly awesome by forging these ultra power items on my own. Definitely a rewarding experience.

Let's not forget the Master Enchant trainer (without mods) attacks you on sight.

I never take this skill up.

Enchant is a very handy skill; it's not just about enchanting items, it also controls the efficiency of found or purchased items. In other words, high enchant gives you more uses per charge.
With a medium Restoration skill, you can cast a fortify enchant 100 spell quite cheaply that will allow you to make minor enchantments yourself. As an alternative you can have an enchanter make an item with this effect for about 8000g. The obvious easy way is to stack fortify intelligence potions (8 intelligence= 1 enchant for enchanting purposes) so getting up to about 2000 intel will suffice for most weapon enchantments.

In addition, enchant is a favored Telvanni skill so it's a natural skill to have for a non-magic oriented Telvanni character. Enchant is a must for all my characters.

edit: BTW, while money is not a problem by mid-game, combining enchant with alchemy can give you powerful enchantments right at level 2 or so when money is a little harder to come by.

Enchant also helps your enchanted item regain mana faster.

For me, the fun of Morrowind is making my own enchanted items. Also collecting souls in soul gems. Oblivion's system really stinks in this respect.

As for the OP's question, it may depend on the type of character you play and your playstyle. For me, enchanting is one of the best skills in the game and the lack of it in Oblivion really undermines the long term enjoyment of that game in many ways. Especially with the way they completely undermined enchanting PLUS removing the actual skill. Basically, the enchants are very weak, plus you are forced to use a city-based enchanting system, which completely undermines any attempt to roleplay any character type who stays in the wilderness.

I like the enchant-skill.
One thing is enchanting for my own,and make stuff(restore health/fatigue) to companions,or members of your settlement/stronghold,kind of rp-reasons for it more than practical use I admit
Besides it trains the skill making all those small enchanted items (rat souls+various grades of rings/belts/amulets).
It also improves recharging of your enchanted gear and weapons so it has practical use.

Ordinary it could be easier to make the good stuff like CE wich is more or less impossible without tricks like alchemy abuse/fortify spells,besides CE I′m happy with the rest though.
For CE I "pay" with daedric and other expensive items and use professional enchanters,on the other hand it makes sense that CE is hard to get,maybe too hard,I dunno.

I'm not undervaluing the Enchant skill itself--not at all. It's great how a high Enchant gives your magic items greater mileage (using them takes less of the total charge as your skill goes up).

I just don't understand why anyone would bother enchanting anything with their own character, when the hired Enchanters never fail. I thought I was missing something important in the argument, as the UESP Wiki page on the subject is just a bit too sloppy for me to sift through.

Still, the skill can be exploited to such a ridiculous degree: Enchant your armor to raise your Strength, for example, and you can kill most anything in the game with a single blow.

And some things make no sense at all: You can get 24 pounds worth of Feather in an amulet, or instead raise your Strength 24 points (which allows you to carry an extra 120 pounds). These two things aren't equal. Feather should cost a LOT less than it does, or raising Strength should cost a LOT more. And a lot of potential enchantments are just as wacky.

Recently I played as a character who for the first 10 levels or so relied heavily upon self-made enchantments to survive, and it worked quite well. In particular, absorb health or elemental damage rings set to "on target" are very efficient at taking down strong opponents, as a medium-strength enchantment can be activated a good 6-7 times in the amount of time it would take to cast a single spell- perhaps a bit too efficient, but balanced well enough by the difficulty in enchanting/recharging at lower levels. My character did end up paying guild enchanters for the high-end stuff, but that didn't matter to much by that point as I had trapped enough more than enough souls in soul gems to pay for enchanting (using self-made soul trap on strike weapons to collect them).

Gawain, if a player wants to play an enchanting type character, obviously they will enchant their own stuff. What is confusing about that? It's like asking why a fighter type character would bother to fight his/her own battles rather than just having companions do the job. Or perhaps asking why a fighter type character would ever repair their own equipment rather than having the NPCs repair it.

I never use NPC enchanters, except perhaps to buy empty soul gems. The enchanting of stuff... that's what my characters do, after all. Why in the world would they ask an NPC to do what they already do? Doesn't make sense, and certainly violates any kind of roleplaying of the characters.

As for Feather and Fortify Strength, again they are two different things and there can be roleplaying impacts. Feather reduces encumbrance; Fortify Strength increases muscular strength (and thus related things like max encumbrance and damage from strength-based weapons). Two very different things with different effects.

I've always thought the feather effect was a bit broken-- I might as well increase my strength for better benefits than bother with feather!!

As for enchant, enchanting is expensive, and since I'm not interested in constant grinding or visits to Caldera/Mudcrab merchant (I've yet to find him, but he's not that important), I'd rather enchant stuff myself. Besides that, I enjoy being able to recharge all my stuff on the go-- it wouldn't do for my silver staff of paralysis to lose its effects while I'm trying to kill a Dremora, now would it?

Having Feather and Fortify Strength cost the same is a definite bug. The Wakim's Game Improvements mod sets the mana cost of Feather to 1/7 that of Fortify Strength. If you don't want that whole mod, it's easy to create one of your own that makes only this change. That's what I did in my game.

I admire those people that actually used self created enchants to level. Recently I changed the enchant formula in the TESCS to make it probably that I will succeed with an enchant. That's not hard to reason out, I think I went from .5 to 1.5, then played it a bit, still it's not much RP with all the power up skills I do.

Well, given the formula on the UESP Wiki, you'll see that it's even for a PC enchanter possible to enchant the highest rated items with no chance of failure. For example, with my current stats, I would have to boost up my Intelligence to about 4000 (since I don't have any Fortify Skill Spell yet) to enchant the Daedric Tower Shield for myself. This seems pretty much, but you are starting with some lower rings, amulets, that increase Intelligence for a few seconds. Then use them to create more powerful Intelligence enchants until stacked you reach the desired value needed to enchant a high level item.

As for the game flow itself, I don't think that you can get up your stats as high that one-hitting everything is a real issue (probably with cast on use items possible, but no chance with constant effect items). As full Daedric Armor Set is the heaviest armor in the game, I enchanted most of the items with constant Strength. But I'm still far away from one-hitting (besides lower creatures), because you are always limited by the value of enchantment points the items have. And that's basically a good thing, since otherwise we would talk about some kind of cheat in my opinion.

It's kind of a ritual for me to do the preparation and enchant a newly acquired item. Truly not the same as spending a few thousands to get your enchants. But your opinion may differ, as I have to admit that 210 Strength on my character is probably way too much, I guess when I get some other items I will enchant them more balanced.

As for the issues about Feather and Strength, I fully agree. But I will not change the original values of spells / skills, as I want to keep my installation pretty close to the Vanilla game. The only solution is simply to avoid enchanting Feather effects.

I can only repeat that Feather and Strength are not the same thing and are meant to be used for different reaons for different characters.

For a character that does not want high muscular strength, does not melee, etc, Feather makes more sense than Fortify Strength. It's a roleplaying game, after all.

The thing is, even if all you want to do is increase carrying capacity, each point of Fortify Strength gives you five times the effect of a point of Feather. It never makes sense to use Feather instead unless you mod that relationship.