we all know about the issues with the games crafting systems currently. many suggestions where already given to adress this however some of them are simply to complitcated when there would be a simple fix to adress ALL issues at once without making the current system useless or underpowered.

the answer is simple :

HIGHEST VALUE COUNTS.

now let me explain what this means in detail:

the reason the crafting gets out of hand is you can have FOUR entchants of the same sort on your gear at the same time. and ALL four count adding up to insane numbers in dmg or zero manacosts etc etc etc.

simple change it so that effects you get from GEAR ONLY (effects from perks and other permanent abilitys should not be traded like this otherwise you get racial balance issues + problems with the standing stones aswell) are handed so that only the HIGHEST value one takes effect e.g.

if you have 45 35 and 30 fortify alchemy .
only the 45 fortify alchemy thing will take effect at all the other can be there but wont give you any benefit at all.
if there are four of the same effect value e.g. 45 45 45 only ONE of them counts.

this would fix ALL current balance issues with the crafting entchanting and alchemy and smthing.

tough one problem remains at the end : smithing

some say smithing is op on its own because you can get the best items early on and that very easy. well thats true. but how to balance this? well sadly that thing is not the fault of smithing itself think about it after reading the text below.

smithing itself actually would be FINE IF skyrim had enough UNIQUE items that had 3 or even more entchants on them and that have similar strength to deadric ones or even better like back in morrowind days (the fact you cant upgrade deadric artifcats for example even with the deadric smithing perk seems like a simply oversight to me and should just be changed since it makes sense).

this would reduce the power of smithing while it still remains useful so that someone who does not skill smithing has worse dmg than someone with smithing which makes sense in the end because smithing should grand an advantage when it comes to weapon dmg and armor rating.

this can only be "fixed" by adding alot of new unique items with good entchants on them either via dlc or patches/addons.

let me hear your toughts.

nobody has to say anything about this at all?^^

Far too intrusive frankly, also looks like it could break too easily.

Smithing would be manageable if levelling it was based on the difficulty of the item being created. As things stand creating 10 Iron Daggers increases your Smithing just as much as creating 10 Daedric Warhammers. An Iron Dagger should give decent experience at low levels, but should do barely anything when your skill is high. This would make power-levelling Smithing impossible at low levels, since the materials required for high level gear wouldn't be around yet, and you'd HAVE to create high-level gear (like Glass or Daedric) to increase your Smithing quickly at high levels, like from 90 to 91.

Smithing would fine if you had to go out and actully get the Mats for the high level items rather than turn to the NPC by the forge and purchase everything you need. The merchants should only sell the low level items, want somthing better? Get out there and find it!

You are incorrect. Higher lvl items that are more rare give more exp per combine then iron. Most people would have noticed this if they didn`t buy iron,craft,wait,buy iron,craft,and wait. Same goes for alchemy, crafting a low lvl heal potion at high alc lvls will yeild almost no exp in the exp window, but if you mixed different mats together you WILL find some recipies and combinations that will give a full skill point and alot that will increase you skill with like 4 - 5 combines with a high lvl skill. So they way they did the crafting was indeed the right way. Just everyone else is spamming the iron daggers and saying how easy it was. If they took the time to craft higher lvl items as they became available they would notice a huge decrease in the amount of mats needed to reach max lvl.

With a blacksmith skill of 90 it takes roughly 12-15 iron daggers to gain a skillup. Theres other items that will give you a skillup with 5-6 combines. So you see the diminishing returns on the lower lvl items is there. Where it was 4-5 daggers to gain a skilup early on. It`s just not as radical a curve as you would like it to be. But in the end it boils down to the player and they choose to go about working their skills. If you are the kind of person that will sit there and max a craft skill in 2 hours then I`m afraid there is nothing an elder scrolls game can do for you to make you happy.

Your idea boils down to allowing a single enchantment which can be overwritten with a more powerful enchantment. No novella required.

I was under the impression that the biggest problem was the feedback loop between enchanting and alchemy. Basically, you make a potion that makes the enchantment more powerful, then a more powerful enchantment that makes your potion more powerful, then an even more powerful potion to improve your enchantments etc.

If you just take potions that improve smithing/enchanting out of the game, perhaps it would become more managable .

believe it or not the "loop" is not the source of the probleme with all this ^^ it barly increases your dmg that much compared to the rest.

e.g. you can make an enchant with +40% more weapon dmg WITHOUT alchemy loop using at all.
with the loop FULLY used you gain a mere 7% more. thats it. to the loop does not even get you 1/5 more as BASE already gives out. the problem is not the loop. its the entchantment three itself thats to strong.

i agree with you 100% mate.
your suggestion is as good as mine is. thats the problem with the moronic level based vendors/lootlists. but to fix THAT a big mod is required which will take a long time to make.
as bethesda will NEVER get rid of this scaling based on lvl thing. they dont WANT to get it. otherwise this system would have been gone after oblivion already. beth didnt get it : why create handmade dungeons if the loot you place is 100% random + level based then the entire dungeon could be randomly created aswell why bother?

thats nonsense in a offline game like this it may work in games like diablo where you go out hunting with your friends online or via net to keep you long entertained but in a singleplayer game like skyrim such a system is complete utter fail and nonsense.

Um, you can't make Daedric, Dragon, Dwarven(usually) without going out and getting items.

..

not entirely true mate:

you CAN by just buying anything (deadra hearts just go winterhold merchant he has always 2 hearts regardless of your level and dwarven ingots are also sold by merchants sometimes). except for dragon. thats correct.

Really? So is that just a mod, then? I've seen people having improved Daedric artifacts.

You can definitely improve Daedric Artifacts (which are different from Daedric Armor). You just need the Arcane Blacksmith perk.

I should know. I'm using an improved Spellbreaker.

i should have cleared this one up better : you can upgrade them but they will never get the same upgrade value as deadric ones for example with the perk. the difference gets bigger the stronger the weapon is upgraded example :


dawnbreaker : max dmg 314 fully upgraded.
deadric 1hand sword: 518 dmg
mace of molag bal : 349 dmg

I dont like this idea, because it creates harsh limits on what you can do, a direct counter to the essential core of an elder scrolls game.

well beth already implemented counters en masse since morrowind so why bother with one more or less i say... just look at the things in skyrim now : magic resist cap, armor cap, next elder scrolls will have a damage cap i take bets...

my idea seems to be the best solution without nerfing the entire entchant three. the crys about difficulty dont really matter since TES games have NEVER been hard no matter what difficulty you play them if you know what youre doing. same goes for skyrim.

you dont even need perks at all to get strong or the best gear itemwise. you only need them to get the best stats in some cases. armor cap and magic resist cap can be reached without perks at all i you want.

My question is why all this shouting about 'balance'? Sure, there may be some things that they genuinely don't want people doing (having Daedric/Dragon stuff at level 1-2 would be broken, yes, but it's also pretty unfeasible unless you are power-gaming specifically to that end) but, ultimately, what is the 'issue' this is causing?

More specifically, why do you (general 'you') care if someone is playing the game a certain way? What impact, over all, does that have on ANYONE except the player?
Please note, before people start screaming as is the norm on the wonderful interwebs, that I'm not asking for insta-hax or an I-Win button or anything blatantly stupid like that. But why should I, for example, be penalised with things that other people arbitrarily found 'unfair'? I mean, I worked specifically on getting my smithing to 100 for Dragon Armour, found I preferred Daedric and then worked on a set of that. Now, I haven't really bothered with enchanting much, other than grabbing some Grand Gems and slapping a nice mix on my armour and weapons (shock damage on sword, +block on shield, +stamina on boots and ring etc etc)
What effect does that, any of that, have on anyone else? It doesn't break/exploit the game. In fact you'd need to be one-shotting Dragons or Dragon Priests or entire armies to get into cheat/exploit range.

I just honestly don't get what all the fuss is about.

A way to balance this is not to exploit it. I started leveling my smithing early on and filled the smithing perk tree only to realize that this would really damage the sense of discovery in the game so I just self-imposed a restriction that I could only upgrade found weapons and armor instead of crafting them. I also only chose smithing vs alchemy/enchanting/smithing, to not over power weapons and armor. I don't see how people find this so hard. The game can be as easy or as hard as you make it. Yes there are things that you can do to overpower your character and make the game easy but just dont do them. You need Bethesda to restrict you? Cant people exercise their own self restraint. Bethesda didn't make the game too easy, you are making the game too easy. Stop blaming others for your lack of self control.

Ah, I see.

I'm not really fond of this idea. The magic and enchanting systems of Skyrim have already been so gutted and restricted that they're barely a shell of their former glory, this would just take it another step away from the freedom that Elder Scrolls games are known for. It's always been possible to cheese the systems in TES games, why is it such a big deal now? I'm in favor of LESS restrictions, not more.

I believe this would remove most, if not all, of the problems with the exploitable crafting. Until it is fixed, if that is, I will just have too continue too not bother too make uber-gear beyond what I can make with the smithing skill alone.

believe it or not : i am also not a fan of restrictions.
but skyrim is the most restricted elder scrolls game EVER released.
reasons : beth limited the perks to much by only giving out 80 at most AND NOT giving any way without cheats to reset them.

so if you have skilled a perk you are restricted to this perk. FOREVER. where is the freedom in such a system? and since the skills without the perks barly do anything anymore compared to older games bethesda is going the route of limiting anything even further the power of your character does not come from the skills by themselfs anymore.

it comes nearly 90% from the stupid perks now they could aswell have removed ALL skills and only making the perk threes with
lvl requirements instead of skill requirements. and believe it or not :

THIS will happen in the next game to dumb it down even further because morons are the widest market today and any developer seems to go that route.

why do i say this? because i HATE what the devs are doing to GOOD game series just to make more money...

Fair enough, I didn't realise there was a diminishing returns system in place. Try not to assume too much about how others play though; I only hit Smithing 100 last night, at level 43. I've kept my Smithing and Enchanting basically high enough to craft the next tier of armour and weaponry when my current gear started to lag a bit. I've certainly not sat there and maxed it in 2 hours, my play time is 55 hours.

I guess the issue is that even if Iron Daggers give less XP than a Daedric Armour, they still give too much. I was able to gain the last few levels of Smithing just with Iron Daggers; by that stage the XP gain from an Iron Dagger should be almost non-existent. I just generally think it should be more difficult to raise Smithing and Enchanting, because even without power-levelling it it's still very quick and easy to get to 100.