There is no +enchanting gear, but there is a +alchemy enchantment. Enchant a set of gear with that, craft stronger +enchanting potions. Craft stronger +alchemy gear with those. After doing this about 4,5 times you craft +smithing potions and enchantments. Use them to create Daedric weapons, improve them and then enchant them with +skill enchantments.

The maximum end result, with using +alchemy gear created weapon skill potions, is a 16k+ one-handed sword sneak crit.

The system is obviously broken (one-shotting everything at Master difficulty). Especially with how cheap and easy it is to level smithing (making low level stuff all the way to 100). The easiest fix would be to remove +smithing and +enchanting from potions and enchantments. With 100 smithing and enchanting you can still make ridiculous items.

When the most powerful equipment available is player-created gear, something is wrong in my opinion.

Choosing to respond to this post from a couple of pages ago, since its the most well thought out and logical argument. I still disagree however.

Lets drop the attitude about it being an exploit. Most rpgs have this thing, where if you min/max a single skill early in the game.. you're walking the game. I min/maxed sneak on my 3rd oblivion character and walked through the game like a shadow. Oh my god.. exploit... or .. I chose to min/max a single skill and be godlike for it.

Blacksmithing is hardly the most entertaining thing to do in the game, I can't imagine what a dull grind it must be to min/max smithing and enchanting and alchemy. True, the game is designed with blacksmithing used in moderation rather than to be grinded. It probably never occurred to bethseda that someone may spend hours and hours watching a "hit with hammer animation".

I can't comprehend what you actually hoped to achieve when you spent this time maxing out the enchanting/smithing/alchemy and making the greatest armour and weapons in the world, killing everything and then... its an exploit? Life and Roleplaying games are there to be exploited. If you min/max a skill to become the best in the world in almost any skill.. guess what, you're probably going to have lots of money and be respected, and life is probably going to be pretty easy from then on.



The diminishing returns idea is very sensible, workable, but I'm not convinced its still necessary. My only main criticism is that the vast majority of players probably don't spend all their time smithing, and do so periodically. You still had to spend your perks to learn how to craft the higher level items, again, not something most players would do, as they are busy playing the game not maxing out smithing early.

Also, where on earth are you getting all this iron from anyway? I certainly haven't found an almost unlimited supply of the stuff... I guess you did, but it always seemed to me, that the smithing was limited by materials.



Hmm, probably because if you could get better equipment in the game, it would make the skill redundant. DUCY?



Only if you stop using the false argument that its an exploit. Any skill at 100 should have the potential to crush the game, thats the way it should be. If you choose to drop most of your perks, hours of time smithing and obtaining iron (where is all this iron!), into one skill with that, then yes, its exploitable.

Don't get me wrong, I understand WHY you feel aggrieved, its just not the issue you think it is.

Just as a side point, your argument is that the hardest difficulty in the game should be impossible to play UNLESS you spend many hours min/maxing skills, and stacking enchantments to overpower your crafting....

You really don't see whats wrong with that?

Whining about smithing and enchanting being OP is just hilarious. You do your best to exploit the game to become as powerful as possible then cry about the game being to easy and unbalanced. You can exploit the games in a lot of ways, e.g. stand around an enemy and spam conjures 'til you reach hundred, or, save before every pickpocket/lockpick, et cetera, et cetera. Should Bethesda remove the option to save whenever you want too because it makes the game unbalanced and too easy? This is a singleplayer game not a MMO.

Oh and by the way, check this thread out and you whiners might actually get a hint what TES is all about. http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1275643-how-to-play-skyrim-correctly/

I'd have more time for the "its against lore" debate if dragons were not such indescribable weaklings.

Seriously, I can't understand the issue. Why are there no threads about killall? It wrecks the game too.

Honestly, I'm really not sure how you can worry that little timmy playing in his walled off sandbox on his side of the world is somehow a threat to you...




Step back and consider your argument - basically you're saying you lack self control to NOT abuse something and this is somehow the devs fault.

Nope the problem is really with smithing and enchanting and its easily proven.

Few examples.

1. You can make a lot better gear than you can even find in the game. This kills the whole purpose of looting, since the "epic gear" you find won't match even close to what you can make yourself.
2. Scaling difficulty is not enough I agree, but making it even harder makes mages position even worse. With scaling difficulty you make many more problems so its not sufficient solution.
3. The process of smithing is broken. It would be a lot fun if you need to advance in materials in general to advance in smithing. after iron move to steel etc.
4. Enchanting problems come with effect stacking. Without any potions or better gear with just only perks and grand soul gem you can make item with 42% fire resistance(even with out 25% more fire resistance perk). And you can have multiple enchants in one item. The resistances you get are over the top and you can't even find enough good gear in dungeons to beat that.

I have few easy solutions in mind.

1. Lower armor ratings _a lot_. Improved Daedra Armor gives you nearly 1000 armor rating when it should be around 600-700.
2. Improving items give you a lot less extra armor (or damage). You can nearly double the armor rating or damage with improvements
3. Item enchantments can't go over 100 points. This makes skill enchantments good for characters with low sneak. So you can make sneak gear for a warrior example.
4. Lower enchantment ratings _a lot_. With perks and grand you could get 15% fire resistance. Then you can stack them for more. The items in dungeons could still give more per item just to make them unique

Only with these 4 improvements to smithing and enchanting systems you could fix nearly the whole system. And these aren't that hard to implement. I'm sure modders will do it, but It would be nice from Bethesda fix their totally broken mechanics in their game of the year

My problem is how you can basically loop enchanting & alchemy to create even more powerful Blacksmith & Enchanter elixirs... Unless you can't craft those and I'm just assuming here.

The other issue I have is in just how far you can stack your bonuses in Smithing..

+28% smithing on..

Chest, Gloves, Ring, Necklace..

50% at least from Blacksmith elixir.

Thats a 162% increase for weapons and armor OVER the 100 perked Smithing items... The end result is demi-god level Armor and weapons so obnoxiously strong that every encounter I entered was laughably easy, even on Master difficulty.. 168% total bonus? You've gotta be joking me.. The only time I EVER use this horrible stacking is to take Unique weapons like Mehrune's Razor or the Nightengale Bow and have them reach comparable damage to a Legendary Daedric weapon that has ONLY been upgraded with standard Smithing skills.

I don't have any problems with enchanting.. At all, even when you use +25% Enchanting potions and have x2 effects on your items. The trick to this is to not just put, say, 1-handed damage on every piece you can... This is what breaks the game. Better to put resistances on your jewelry, and have bonuses to all your different skillsets so you can use them all equally and when the situation calls for it...

Example: My current Dragonplate set, upgraded with vanilla 100 Smithing at the moment. Upgrading to Daedric later.

Helm: Magika Regen & Destruction cost
Chest: Stamina regen & Magika regen
Gloves: 1-handed & archery damage
Boots: Stamina regen & 2-handed damage
Shield: Blocking %'s & extra health
Necklace: Shock & magika resist
Ring: Fire & Frost resist

You see.. As a Redgaurd Lycanthrope warrior who uses Destro spells on the side, I've got all my basis covered.. All 6 resist types, my magic & stamina regen, Tanking through the shield, and the big damage bonuses to all three of my main weapon types.. The only thing I'm missing is Sneak/Silence on the boots.. But I have the Nightengale set for that stuff.

The only problem I see is in Smithing, you should not be able to stack bonuses that high.. 50%? Sure. 75%? Alright.. 100%? Seriously? 162%? Roflcopter

Yeah, i agree that if you want to be uber smith really early on the game and spend hours crafting stuff and buying ignots (they are not cheap!!) from money you got from clearing handful of dungeons... then its not exploiting. If you do that... You also level up by crafting and enemies level up too... so you would need a damn good weapon and armor for not get kicked blind by leveled up enemies cause you spent all your levels increasing smithing instead of sword handling. Sounds balanced for me.

Oh yeah, a question...
if i made myself a smith apron that increases weapon and armor improving by 15% and then have a ring that adds 15% to that value and an amulet with 25% increase then... can i get to improve stuff by 55% or is it only the highest value of enchantment and that is 25%?

Because... after making myself all that gear i couldnt improve stuff as much as i thought i would.

Just quoting these two posts because they pretty much sum up why some of us balanced crafting. Now on to some of the arguments.


No. Powerleveling isn't such a big issue. A player could naturally progress his Smithing and Enchanting and start hitting 100s near lvl 40-45. Even then the jump in equipment quality from the one that you had up to that point to the crafted&upgraded ones will be so big that it will completely break the game. Smithing on its own is also a problem, since you can craft the gear throughout the game that's superior to the one you can find. I don't know if I've found more than 5 items with (Superior/Eqxuisite/Improved etc) tags in my exploration. In roughly 90 hours of playtime. With smithing, you need to put only one perk into steel crafting and you're set equipment wise for the next 15 levels. The problem then repeats itself with Dwarven. And Ebony. And Glass. Etc. How is that fun?


Most of these are so ridiculous that I facepalmed every time I read one. Newsflash - we (or at least I) don't care how others play the game. It's about my own enjoyment of the game.


No. If you want to be overpowered, turn down the difficulty, you have that option. I on the other hand, can't go above Master difficulty which is still too easy without imposing artifical restrictions on myself.


This is relative, but the problem is similar to the one I explained in first posts. You don't actually have to min/max your character to achieve over the top results. Problem is, I might consider a weapon damage of 200 gamebreaking, someone else might think this doesn't happen until weapons start hitting for 500. Obviously he needed to min/max a lot more to get those numbers, but problem is still there - even in their vanilla state and without synergy of other crafting trees, Smithing and Enchanting are still very very strong.

Bottom line: some of us want to progress our characters to the best of our (their) abilities, without worrying that it will trivialize the difficulty of the game. Because believe it or not, we want a degree of challenge in gameplay, even in singleplayer games.

Can they at least just make a 6th difficulty level that actually has an impact? Even blatant cheating wouldn't make the game any easier.

I really don't understand these complaints.

You have to deliberately try to exploit the crafting system in order to experience this problem. No normal player is ever do it by mistake.

It isn't an exploit, and you don't have to try at all.
The only trying you have to do is trying not to smith or enchant so that the game isn't so unbearably easy that it's borderline obscene.

I've been doing some crafting in the game.

If I don't deliberately power-level the skills, deliberately create potions/enchantments to deliberately buff up my other crafting skills in a neverending loop, then I can only get powerful. I can't become god-like no matter how hard I try. I can only become god-like through deliberately exploiting the aforementioned buffing loop.

How about you simply choose to not do it? Problem solved!

Debatable whether it can be called an exploit but its really wrong that you can skill up to master by making iron daggers. If you are an expert smith you should need to make expert level gear to advance.

One day its: "This game is so easy LOLZ. You just need to learn to play"
The next day its: "Hey dont talk about removing exploits. If you dont like them you dont have to use them"

It's not about self-[censored]-control.

It's about THREE skills that are majorly OP.

Try playing with and without them, it's an enormous difference.

You can't remove an exploit. The whole point of it being an exploit is that you are exploiting a system that would be just fine if you had used it as intended in the first place. Smithing is very powerful, but I'm not convinced that Bethesda didn't intend it to be.

My main problem is with people who exploit it then brag/complain about the game being too easy. Abusing broken mechanics is like using console commands; it's perfectly fine but you can't toggle god mode in command then have your opinions on the games difficulty be taken seriously.

Maybe the "gods" were wise enough not to place too much power into a single item to the hands of a fallible mortal.

Yet mortals, lacking the wisdom of the gods, sought to obtain power beyond mortal ability, to combine the mystical fields of alchemy, enchanting and master smithcraft into creating objects of such power, that the mortals themselves became Gods.

In their arrogance, they wielded such power like a toy... yet without the wisdom to use it wisely, suffered greatly and brought upon the end of days across Tamriel.

Sad story.. roleplayed well by so many posters. Bravo. Truly has the Icarus myth never been portrayed so effectively in a roleplaying game.. well done guys.

While playing the game I realized that it didn't seem to matter what I was crafting to gain skill. I thought, "Oh, cool. I can just use the stuff I naturally have in my inventory as I progress through the game. I don't have to spend hours offline plotting where I'm going to go and when. I can just play." The wonderful thing about this game is that it doesn't dictate where you must be in the world at any given point in your leveling. It does its best to conform to you.

Don't take that away. I want to spend countless hours wandering around the world enjoying the story, environment, and death I bring to my enemies. If I wanted to spend countless hours of real world time reading strategy guides and grinding something, I'd play an MMO.

My thoughts on this are that obvious exploits should be fixed, if you have to jump through hoops and work for it I don;t care. This kind of falls in a grey area and should probably be fixed a bit. On specific issues.

1: Leveling blacksmithing: the problem is the moronic perks force you to be able to level via iron otherwise you can;t level it without the perks. Fix the perks first, then make leveling the skill dependent on the quality of the gear.

2. Crafted gear is the best gear in the game: Um good, if it wasn't you would defeat the purpose of crafting. How lame would it be if an end one handed sword just granted you 200 skill in one handed with the perk tree fully filled out? Why did you waste the time leveling one handed if you could just get it in an item.

3. Leveling naturally: What is natural for a warrior who occasionally smiths is different than from a crafter focused character, it is not good for it to be fine for the former but broken for the latter.

I played most of the game without enchantments on Normal difficulty but once I enchanted everything it became far too easy so I bumped the difficulty up to Master. Problem solved.

theres a diffrence between good and completely OP game breaking. Having said that if you like having them then that's cool.

the OP does have a point i think , its the exploits and raising straight to 100 thats the problem , which is each persons choice wether to do.