Honestly, don't level smithing. It was the first thing I maxed and ruined alot of the fun for me. There was no longer much point to looting. I found myself just blowing through every area I went to not having any fun, all i did was swing my axe one-two shotting things as I sprinted through the dungeon. I went from Iron to full deadric in a matter of a couple levels. I think I would've been in mostly dwarven armor right now being very excited to find a new ebony piece. But since I leveled smithing so fast I haven't found an upgrade in 30 levels (there are none anymore). I'll probably be abandoning this character because of it.

If you do level smithing use it to enhance the armor you've found and not to make better armor.

Haha isn't that the real benefit?

I was able to upgrade my steel plate with ebony. That was the benefit of me placing perks in smithing.

But isnt it a good thing that you can upgrade the gear you find without using a single perk in the tree if you choose not to? Although having points in smithing does increase the *upgrade* bonus.

Huh? You can very easily level smithing as you go , much like enchanting. At 35 i just 80 smithing....and I dont feel gimped or over powered in anyway.

Just because you chose to abuse smithing for levels and quick doesnt mean it fits great in most playstyles.

Are you sure smithing has no skil cap...? I was under the impression all skills capped at 100 and to go beyond required fortify skill

You can only craft dragon armour?

That's weird, i'm a level 32 blacksmith who couldn't possible smith dragonarmour, but i have dragonplate gauntlets which i collected from a chest.

People keep saying you can't find dragon armour, yet i have found several.

He just meant it takes a while to get to 100 skill plus enough +smithing effects to add another 100.

If I read the description of the perks right, it says something like "Allows you to craft ___ armor and improve it twice as much."

Or at least it says something like that. So you can improve anything, but you can't improve it all the way without your perks. If that's not the case then there's probably a bug.

I didn't abuse it for levels, I simply Made what I could with what I had. I assumed that you would always be able to find better gear then you can make. Which you can't. I wanted to be as strong as I could get with what level I was. I just didn't realise that was as strong as I would ever get is what I'm saying. I didn't think "AWESOME I'M GOING TO BE OVERPOWERED!". I had no interest in being overpowered, as I stated, I was very disappointed to find out how broken it is the hard way. I just can't believe they would allow something so game breaking to be overlooked like it was. I've played elder scrolls since morrowind came out and was always able to utilize everything I had available to be as strong as possible without breaking the game.

But yeah I didn't abuse it. There was no way of knowing what the consequences were going to be. For instance I found out you could train from your follower and then take the gold back. That was obviously a broken mechanic and I never trained from him again after I realized what I had done.

It disappoints me how much game-breaking things they let into the game

If what you found was always better than what you could make... smithing perks really would be fairly useless... why would you assume that?

1. Smithing perks allow you to enhance twice as much as normal
2. Nearly every game that has crafting you can craft good items but not the best. You don't craft your way to godliness, you craft your way to the path of godliness. Crafting should help you progress to the top not bring you to the top.

If you still don't understand take a look at enchanting, it is actually done right. You can enchant your gear decently but you can't put the best enchants on your gear, for that you have to find items with the enchant innately on it.

I completely forgot the perks also increase that amount of the improvements you can make. That does make a difference and I think makes them worth it.

Wrong. I found a dragon plate in a chest.

Smithing is def worth it for the ability to improve your weapons, though.

Heh, some would argue it's the other way around. :biggrin:

I do see where you're coming from, though. In Oblivion it was possible to make enchanted gear that was far superior to anything you could find via looting, with a few exceptions for unique items, which meant all that high-end enchanted loot ended up being vendor trash you took massive losses on when you sold it. On the flip side, though, if we hadn't been able to do that then self-made enchanted gear would have svcked, as the pre-made stuff was generally not enchanted 'properly' and often fell short against top-end foes. Granted some of that was due to badly-done critter scaling, but still.

The other problem with needing to find items to get the best enchants is that in Skyrim loot is random while crafts are not; as a result, while Player A finds a full suit of awesome gear Player B never sees item one of the same set. Allowing self-enchanting to get those top results removes the frustration that randomized loot tends to engender, but does make it tricky to keep top-end balance; the player takes ruthless advantage of the system, while NPCs do not, which tends to skew power heavily in the player's favor.

The Diablo games have an interesting take on this, albeit drop odds on the best stuff are ludicrously low: in these games you can make gear that is better than pretty much everything else of a comparable level, but not by a huge amount unless you get lucky when the stats are 'rolled' upon item creation, however at the same time there are special and unique items that are better than these (sometimes by quite a bit) but are really hard to come by. The net result is a system wherein you can craft your way to a fairly high level of power; however, the very best crafts, which are the most powerful items in those games, take an insane amount of grinding for parts and the gear to make them with, due to the aforementioned abysmal drop rates on said components, which means that the vast majority of players will be at a somewhat lower power level than that due to the inordinate investment of effort needed to achieve it. Thus, you have both worlds at once: ordinary crafting will only get you so far, since the best stuff will be out of reach, but you can still craft the best items in the game if you are willing to go to the necessary lengths to do so.

For the record: I do not advocate implementation of such a system in Skyrim, as it would only serve to piss off the vast majority of the player base due to the game not being aimed at the sorts of folks who don't mind going to the aforementioned extremes to get the best gear. I wouldn't mind it all that much myself if the drop rates were more reasonable (some items in those games have, literally, a 1/300,000 chance of dropping), but then I'm weird like that.

Fair enough, I see your point, but at the same time, I wouldn't say that is safe to assume on that premise. For instance, in enchanting, chances of you finding the specific enchant you want on the type of armor you want, is fairly low, unless you do it yourself (and btw with enchanting perks enchants can be stronger than found enchants if you use grand soul stones... except the mage robes, those ones seem to just always have really high number on found/purchased items). For smithing, chances of you eventually finding glass armor/weapons, is pretty much 100%, so being able to craft them gives essentially no benefit aside from getting them early. If the only benefit was upgrading the items, and not the crafting, there would be no point in having the crafting system in game, and they could just have the upgrading system (with higher skillups granted).

That said, the way smithing works is OP, you shouldn't be able to mass produce iron daggers all the way to 100 skill, low level items should give progressively less xp, at higher levels, forcing you to make more expensive, and rare items... but that's just my opinion.

As to your second point, it doesn't hold true in older games, FFXI and Vanilla WoW come to mind as games where the best gear came from crafting (but materials for that crafting was hard to find and came from difficult encounters)

Yes.
Thats the point of using perks.

You get to create various of different armors and weapons. From Dwemer, Elven, Glass, Orcish, Ebony, Daedric to even Dragon.

Personally I am running around in a self made, full suit of heavy legendary dragon scale armor.
its legendary due to that I also upgraded it.

You dont need perks to upgrade things, but you need it to create. OR, even to upgrade magical weapons and armor.
You must take the perk to upgrade magic weapons and armor to even upgrade self enchanted weapons.

The smithing perks are very strong.

And to improve your armor.

Dragon plate have like 108 I think base armor.
Mine have almost 160, after I made it legendary. Not to mention I wore full dragon plate armor, all legendary, before I left whiterun.

Smithing is well worth it.

And even IF the best weapons are the one found.
Said weapons can be upgraded by you if you have smithing AND the perk.

So if you find a daedric articaft. In order to upgrade this, you need the Daedric smithing perk, which you get at 90 points, and you need the perk to upgrade magic weapons and armor, which you can take at 60 points in Smithing.
So either way Smithing is always a win win situation.

It's again one of those non-arguments. Yes, eventually you'll find the armours you wanted to craft and yes, eventually you'll be able to get 200 smithing skill to get your legendary items. But for everyone who wants their advantages during the game when they actually need them, smithing is great. When your smithing level is 20something without perks you can't do anything worthwile with your smithing skill. If you get the one perk, you can create a full set of superior steel armour in no time. At level 30 with your second perk you can easily get a full suit of superior dwarven armour at a time when there's barely any dwarven stuff in loot (if any). And those advantages only increase as the game moves on.

I think one of the problems is people speed level it early by buying loads of ore and it steamrolls ahead of every other skill. You can then create weapons and armour that you wouldn't have really run into by then and upgrade them to destroy most things you encounter.

On my blacksmith character although it's his primary skill Iv'e only used it to upgrade/ create stuff I need, only resorting to spam training it if I feel it's falling behind. This way I have a suit of exquisite dwarven armour which is great but doesn't feel overpowered. I'm about the point too where I'm finding the odd dwarven armour piece in chests and can buy off vendors, so it doesn't feel like Iv'e acquired way before I should have, but it was still quicker and cheaper than trying to find it or buy it.