In terms of maxing out damage/armour rating, can't you just enchant your items after you've improved them, making it a pretty pointless perk? ...

Well, it's for improving already-enchanted items you find as loot, or further improving your own enchanted items if your Smithing skills/perks increase after you've enchanted them.

But practically speaking, yeah, pretty useless and entirely skippable.

Yes and No, Maybe.

Not pointless. As my character is not a smithy, but I do upgrade my weapons and armor (no crafting, just what I find/buy) so it allows me to do so with that equipment.

I agree. You can't raise armor and damage ratings on enchanted items without smithing them, and for that you need the Arane Blacksmith. While true that the enchantment is unaffected, the physical attributes are what the arcane blacksmith perk is good for. So like my Dwarven boots of Braughn when smithed using Arcane Blacksmith, while still only adding 30 points to my carrying capacity, can be improved to provide a higher Armor rating.

imo its the most important skill in blacksmithing and worth spending two points to get on (almost) any character.

why ? because you can't make 40, 50, 60, 70 stat or percentage items in certain slots but you can find and buy them and i'm not talking about weapons but gear.

on top of that there are the unique and artefact weapons, items, sets and individual gear with pre-existing stats you will want to keep like loads of the later light armor and thiefs guild/dark brotherhood related quest rewards for example.

...and my character is not an enchanter.
So being able to upgrade that shield of +60% shock resist I find in some tomb is nice.

Far from useless perk imo.

This.




...in the end, the "usefulness" or "uselessness" of many of the perks depends entirely on the build you're doing and your playstyle.

Congratulations you just won the internet, want a cookie?

Yeah, I meant in terms of maxing out a character for damage and armour rating, not playing through the game at a steady pace. Kinda said that in the first post

You can skip it if you plan all out ahead, and only use your own crafted gear and such.

This^

You wouldn't be able to improve Dawnbreaker or Blade of woe without it. And others of course, they are the only one's i can remember off the top of my head though.

Don't forget chillrend. It looks awesome, the paralysis proc is deadly, and if you get it after lvl 46+, it's one of the most powerful weapons in the game. Especially if you took the left side of smithing and don't have access to upgraded daedric weapons.

in terms of raw base dmg the top leveled version of Chillrend IS the most powerful sword in the game.

you can see this in the qasmoke test map where the weapons are listed in cabinets in order of dmg.

It's the most powerful sword in the game that you can find, perhaps, but far from the most powerful that you can have, thanks to crafting.

To answer the OP's question as I believe he intended it, yes, Arcane Blacksmith is entirely useless if you're planning on crafting your own uber gear. Just improve your crafted gear before you enchant it.

no
if you don't want to spend time or perks in enchanting it's quite useful
you use one perk and only one skill tree instead of many perks in 2 skill trees

in terms of raw base dmg excluding enchants it is.

all the crafted weapons are in the same cabinet and if you can improve say a Draenic sword by 200 dmg (just as an example) via blacksmithing you can improve Chillrend by exactly the same amount thus it still sits higher because it started higher.

that said the weapons have groups here everything has the same dmg for 2 points or so then another group, then another as it goes down.

the most powerful weapons in the game in terms of the raw dmg numbers are maces specifically the Draenic one and the Mace of Molag Bal.

just for you here's some pics

http://oi42.tinypic.com/2qle3uv.jpg Chillrend 37 dmg as seen with this char (ignore the bows listed that's due to my skills)

http://oi42.tinypic.com/2eey2bc.jpg Draenic sword 35 dmg as with this char