Ok so my first few characters leveled fast on Smithing, its entirely to easy to get enough iron and leather and such to make a few hundred daggers and boom youve got a 60+ easily smithing skill. Heavy armor wearer and killed a few dragons? Spend all your dough on iron and leather till you have 100 smithing, full dragon plate armor is nice.

So I make a full on mage guy who wants of course to make his own potions. For the first 20 hours of gameplay I gather ingredients. I laughed when I found I had like 80 of about 5 different ones. ANYWAY.

After figuring out a combo that had lots of ingredients, 70 of one, 80 of another. I went to work and made 70 resist fire potions.

I gained 4 skill points total for all 70 potions. Then another skill point, single digit, 1, for using the rest of my ingredients.

How could something like this fall through testing? Was it meant to be so easy to level smithing but entirely impossible to level alchemy? If so, why?

Its not like theres never ending ingredients to go around, and if you want to be good at it you get what you can and make what you can. But for all that work, and all that clicking on veggies I got 5 skill points. Its redicilous.

Now I understand this is skyrim, so I made a Valkyrie type girl toon in full heavy armor, sword and board ready to rock. It took all of 4 or 5 hours of play to get 100 smithing and full dragonplate armor.

So anyone else have this problem or just me?

Ironwolf

Change your birthstone to thief if you want to level alchemy faster.

What? Alchemy is a thief skill? Haha. I hope it does make a difference. I will try it.

I have three seperate characters now, no cheats at all, all level 20 +, my valkyrie being 34 I think.

I want my mage to be fun, I guess Alchemy isnt a mage skill haha. Thanks for advice!

This is too true. It feels like a few iron daggers made or a couple locks picked is equivalent to 20 potions, thief birthstone or not.

...wow someone else on the internet that uses Ironwolf what are the odds huh... Anyway making triple ingredient potions seems to boost the leveling rate, maybe I'm wrong but it seems like it does to me. Alchemy does seem to level slow, I guess that comes from trying to scale it back from how quickly you could level it in Oblivion.

yeah alchemy is a theif skill . so use that stone levels 20% faster, also there are potions and enchantments that will also help with alchemy

Yeah which is silly, because they made smithing soooo easy. Lockpicking isnt that hard either, but there just doesnt seem like theres enough locks to get your picking to 100.

Alchemy on the other hand is something that is beyond useful. I mean once i got my smithing to 100, I didnt touch it after I had my full suit of dragonplate, skyforge steel sword and such all at legendary level.

Whereas alchemy Id use all the time because i go through potions fast.

Again I dont want to cheat, but I just cant seem to find enough ingredients to get my alchemy up. Ill try the thief stone/3 ingredient trick, see if that helps.

i would say alchemy is more of an assasin skill but is useful if you decide to get you'r pickpocketing skill up but i recommend getting the theif stone to get it up slightly quicker

At night find a locked residence. Pick the lock, enter. Exit the residence and door is locked again for you to pick.

Well I think the point was you'd be using Smithing and Enchant far less than Alchemy; potions you make many at a time and use them frequently while in theory you wouldn't be making gear or enchanting things quite as often. I don't think it's that bad, there's sort of a Bell Curve to it, I've noticed now I have a middling (30s/40s or so) skill in it and know many more combinations I have more opportunities to make them and train the skill up.

Probably Bethesda thought everyone would go through the process of Mining -> Smelting -> Smithing
Anyway they probably want to dissuade people from getting easy money and levelling up alchemy at the same time; potions were a total moneybag in oblivion

It may be a bit too slow, but it has to be slower given how many ingredients are out there. i probably have a 1,000 ingredients sitting in storage I don;t collect iron or souls at nearly the same rate. I could probably spam make a 100 potions right now, if it progressed like smithing I'd of had a 100 alchemy within an hour of getting to an alchemy lab.

Every house locks at night. You'd be trespassing and risk getting caught, but just go around the cities and lockpick all the doors. If you allow the region to reset with the 72 hour thing (which I believe still works, haven't tested it yet though), then you can pick them all over again.

Find a trainer for Alchemy. It costs a lot though; I probably spent 100,000+ gold for training. Potions can sell for more in this game, so 100,000 gold is a little less intimidating. I'd say that Babette, the little girl in the DB, is probably the best trainer. She's a master and you can also sell your potions to her. When you pay for training, all that money is added money that she can barter with, so you don't have to find another person to sell to. Just train, sell the same amount in potions, train more, and repeat.

Well thats the thing though, its not just half of smithing, its like 1/10th or less.

I dont mind a slow roll up hill, I have a full on mage character and that is a huge uphill battle to fight dragons and go into dungeons with no tank in front of me.

But for me to spend so many hours collecting ingredients, then trying to get my alchemy up 5pts, seems way way to low.

I had an epic fight with a Deathlord yesterday that got my Valkyrie characters block from 60 to 90, in just one fight. I used every potion, every spell, every shout. I think I used my racial ability 3 times to get him to run away while I healed up.

The point Im trying to make is, I understand why they did it, but they went to an extreme. I dont mind working for it, but this IS a game. It shouldnt FEEL like work.

I like how leveling alchemy is slower because in Oblivion it was just way to fast and to much money to be made to quickly.

I tend to power level alot as well but maybe that's breaking the balance. If they designed it so you could make your own weapons and armor then use them and only make more when you wanted to change what you're using. While potions would be made much more often because you would use them much faster than the armor would require repairing or creating new.

Again I tend to power level so I'm not disagreeing with the play style; however, I don't think Bethesda took mass production of armor into consideration for balance where they may have for alchemy. This would possibly explain the imbalance.


EDIT: If anything I would like to see the leveling with smithing to be slowed, but these are just my opinions.

Another thing, in Oblivion, the more ingredients you used to create a potion the more points it gave to towards the next increase. Possibly the same behavior in Skyrim?

Alchemy gets a lot of money in Skyrim too. You can make potions that have a base value of 1000 gold, although most aren't worth that much.

For some strange reason Alchemy skill gains work off the base price of the potion, rather than the quantity made like everything else. So you could be like me and be level 38, have crafted just under 400 potions and still be 43 skill only because you bought 10 points of training from the Alchemist in Whiterun. I mainly use potions for healing because in the time it takes to cast a spell like Fast Heal you get hit around 3 or 4 times from a 1H weapon or enemy spell, which is the point at which you die, so spells are only good for after combat. Not to mention that there aren't any spells above apprentice (Fast Heal) even at the Mage College. The Restoration lady at the college didn't have any and I've not found anything higher anywhere else.

It is definitely hard to level alchemy, and I am even using the Thief stone.
Blacksmithing levels faster but the iron daggers won't give you much profit. Alchemy levels slower but makes a lot of money. So maybe it was intentionally done this way.

There are diminishing returns for smithing iron daggers as your blacksmith skill increases, it takes more iron daggers to level at higher blacksmith skill.
But I'm not sure if the diminishing returns are more than, say, smithing dwarven daggers.

I have heaps of dwarven ingots thanks to a nice dwarven ruin plunder, so I'll test it out.

Alchemy is slow to skill even with thiefstone. You can just buy ingredients from potion shops which helps...It can be expensive when you first start but by skill 60 you can make 3k gold per round.