Bethesda shouldnt have all those supplies there so easy at the blacksmiths and you shouldnt be able to go to max level crafting a cheap low level item. This was just laziness on Bethesda's part. They all know how to do a proper trade skill system

:D

They do? :confused:

This is the first time Bethesda has ever had crafting armor and weapons like this in any of their games.

Ya but they are all gamers and they play other games. Its so easy to see how other games do it and just take the best from that. This system they have is pure lazy on their part.

:D

Oh, but they did. The whole "level off any skill" punishes a character for leveling up by grinding a single skill.

Its not cheating or exploiting if you use smithing, enchanting and alchemy. what is exploiting is do the enchanting and alchemy loop to get game breaking game. the exploit loop is enchanting fortify alchemy on as many pieces of armour as possible, then making fortify enchanting potions, drinking said potion to then go back and enchant a new and stronger fortify alchemy and so on until you running around in heavy armour with 2.5k armour rating and dual wielding weapons that hit for 3.2k. that is exploiting and goes against the game balance which for some reason people on this forum seem to thing that balance isnt needed in single player games

Oh lord imagine if we had Enchanting, Smithing, and Alchemy as non-leveling skills like you could have in the previous games. Level 1 with 100 Smithing. You guys would go bonkers and start a riot and demand your money back and-

Oh wait I guess you already do that. :hehe:



I disagree. It's not cheating if it's clearly within the limits of the game itself.

Cheating is getting the construction set and giving yourself a little chest with 100,000,000 gold and full Daedric Armor right outside of Helgen. Cheating is using the console to enable godmode.

Cheating is not using skills and abilities and items the game already gives you.

Cheating? No....

But it is a broken system....

Then don't.

The system is broken but to me it makes a bit more sense that smithing would level faster then alchemy... alchemy you need to continuously make potions and poisons whereas with smithing... how many suits of armor do you actually need? One way smithing could have been made better is if you have to upgrade every level on a piece of armor to give some skill (tho upgraded armor would need to be made more valuable too); You shouldn't be able to get to 100 off of making iron daggers and leather bracers but that said they shouldn't drop off too early either, I think level 40~50 would be about right for them to give depreciating returns. I don't however consider this a glitch, or a bug, this is the way the system has been made and so it's not abusing to do this currently.

In my opinion it should be as follows
Leather 40~50
Iron 45~55
Steel 50~60
Dwarvern(sp)/Elven 65~75
Orcish/Advanced 80~90
Ebony/Glass 90~100
Deadric with no drop off

This.

Smithing, enchanting and alchemy are broken.

IF you want to have the game feel like you're playing godmode, and want to never ever loot enemy corpses ever again, and never explore caves because there's nothing in the caves you or your companions possibly could need, and just finish the game and be over with it...

go abuse smithing and enchaning, and use alchemy too.

But keep in mind:
You will not find better weapons, armor or items.
The game will not feel challenging nor like a game, but like an interactive movie.
Your quest rewards will mostly all be worthless.

You're essentially a god, and can be one at level 24 after two or three hours of smithing and enchanting.

I consider the likes of 'up down left right A start' or use of a gameshark as cheating.

Anything else is, at worst, an exploit. Smithing is fin of you keep it in line with other skills. I've levelled mine slowly, and only bumped it up when my gear has started to become weak. Is THAT cheating?

I think you are confusing the concepts of using a skill, and exploiting it.

You're mixing things up here.
The level-scaling of enemies has nothing to do with the fact that skill grinding is still possible in this game.

Clearly you're exploiting armor by reducing the amount of damage enemies can do to you and thus are cheating.

Cheating would be the wrong term in my mind. A lot of things might be an exploit which drastically lower the challenge of the game, whether or not that is fun for you is all that matters. For smithing, well they kind of forced their hand on this when they picked the absolutely moronic perk structure that gained access to better types of gear. Since a player can't make better gear without the right perks they have to let you level the skill with just iron. If they were not idiots at game design the perk tree would have been much more interesting and have given benefits outside of what should have been gained from just leveling the skill(different material types)and then you could have stopped or ended the gain to skills from iron at skill 25 or something.

Yup. I also exploit life by having fun.

There's a difference between "using Smithing" and "I used Wait to super-grind-powerlevel Smithing to 100 as soon as I got to Whiterun".

I'm level 39. I've been leveling Smithing as I go, with materials I've found. My Smithing is 71, and I'm only wearing a couple pieces - because the enchanted gear I found in dungeons is better in the other slots.

For me, Smithing isn't "cheating" or "overpowered". It's a nice bonus that was worth leveling, that has given me a few helpful bonuses. But, as I mentioned, I didn't powerlevel it and then abuse synergies with the other crafting skills. :shrug:

No.

I wouldn't do it that way myself, but I'm not you.

Play how you want.

:rofl:

Cheating?

:rofl:

There's only one way to cheat in this game and you can only do it if you're playing on PC.

Of course, they'd have to up the "found in the world" availability of the higher level materials, if you could only go 65-100 on those ones. I know that I've barely found enough mats to make a single set of Elven or Glass gear in the exploring I've done. If I hadn't found a bar of quicksilver in the shops, I wouldn't have been able to make my Elven sword until long after I started finding Elven and even Glass weapons in the world.

Or maybe there's plenty of that stuff out there, and I just haven't explored enough. I've only played 60-70 hours so far, with so much wandering and sidequesting that I've just gotten to Solitude on the MQ. :tongue:

AS has been said countless times..it's not cheating, play as you want
It doesn't affect other people, so feel free to do anything that takes your fancy

This. I've done Smithing and Enchanting on my guy, maybe a bit of alchemy, but all I ever made were health potions, which I've started to acquire faster than I use them. I wouldn't go into that whole synergy loop as it seems pointless. I dont want the best armour straight away, I want to work my way up to it!

Ok well I decided not to level those two and continue from master. It feels perfectly balanced for me now and I die quite often. Don't see reason why I want to ease it up from this.

They're not cheats but I think they should be tweaked.

For example:

For blacksmith I would reduce their stats so best drops come from dungeons + would make harder bs to lvl up.
For alchemy I would put little time limit when you can drink pot again
I would change that last enchanting perk so you won't get 2 enchants.
Pickpocket I don't know how to fix that. It's fast money method if you constantly save game, if you don't save you die from aggressive npcs. You can basicly rob freely and lvl up weapon skill to 100 from trainer. At least they should tweak npcs little.

etc etc.. just quick ideas.

Not cheating whatsoever. IF you don't want to be an over powered god like being, just don't stack crafting enchantments together (like +X% black smithing on every piece of gear along with being stacked with alch BS potions). Other than that small oversight, all 3 professions are quite fun and add a little spice to your game.

I don't believe any of the skills are cheating. As said before by many others play the game you want to. Just remember two things -

1. Don't [censored] about your character if you level the wrong skills by 'power leveling' and you can't compete or have to lower the difficulty
2. Don't brag about your character if you level the right skills by 'power leveling' and the game is too eay or you have to raise the difficulty

If you want to be level 20 or so with 100 in smithing and echanting and 20 in everything else you will have the best stuff. It's the role-playing version of being rich, all the benefits, now go out and learn to fight.

Personally, and especially on the first play through, I don't like power leveling, but I do at least understand the idea when playing through on a second or later play through where you want to have a different character build, but don't want to have to completely rebuild your character.

Enjoy

EDIT - Just saw the comment about training, which I hadn't though about. They may have to figure out a way to limit training, as anyone who has a computer can find out where the trainers are and can actually purchase their way to a 90 in anything/everything while power leveling other skills. That I would consider borderline cheating. But as long as you are not doing some kind of actual cheat (think item dup from Oblivion) then its probably ok.

Nonsense. AFAIK bugs, cheats and exploits are always part of a game, where else would they be...
Having to mod a game to remove exploits is bs too.

I agree with the idea above, to limit experience gained depending on materials.