Crafting is absurd

[Trey5511]

Lessen their effects. Decrease the amount BS improves gear, lower the strength of enchantments, etc.

[WarKirby3333]

After that, we balance the easyness of access to POWER on VENDORS. How?

Increasing the cost of their raw materials that directly affect blacksmithing grinding.

If materials are hard to come by, they have to be expensive. The time to get resources manually should be equivalent to the time to acquire the currency to acquire the same resources from the blacksmith, so that one doesnt prevails greatly over the other.

 

Iron is not hard to come by. deliberatel making it so for balance reasons would be stupid. there are better ways

 

 

I propose making blacksmith take 10 times more crafitngs. From 500 daggers to 5000 daggers. This will require more investment in time and money. It will ultimatelly prevent one to craft 5000 daggers in a sit, due to weight limitations, restock limitations, raw materials limitations, resources to actually get the materials to make these 5000 daggers. Thats the idea.

terrible, terrible idea. You want to turn a grindfest into another grindfest that endures for 10x longer? NO! Enchanting already has this problem

 

 

the actual solution is to assign a complexity value tro each craftable thing, and reward xp based on that. When you're at 40 blacksmithing skill, you can craft iron daggers all day and you would get NO experience. But make a dwarven armor, and you gain 3-4 ranks at once. simply make the complexity of each item a number from 1-100, and give xp based on how much below the complexity, your skill is. Whenever your skill is above the complexity, you get NOTHING.

 

when you're nearing master skill, only crafting daedric or dragon equipment would give you anything at all

 

this would force people to actually craft interesting things. Make steel to start with, but move on to dwarven stuff asap, then orcish/ebony/daedric as your skill increases. forcing the player to actually make varied things would completely remove the grind, and make it an interesting experince. aswell as making you go out and gather the rare things that can't be purchased.

 

 

Edited November 21, 2011 by WarKirby3333

[beholder2]

An overall solution could be :

 

You can't progress in these skills unless you pay the trainer for it. And you can also fix the maximum number of training possible per level from 5 to 2 (you keep the maximum of 5 training available per level, but you can't train more than 2 points in a skill per level).

 

At this point, the leveling of these skills should follow your level.

If you begin at 15 in one of these skills, you won't be able to reach 100 before level 43. Seems to be fair.

 

And according to training's costs, you won't be able to train more than one of these skills. So impossible to rush train early in the game.

Edited November 21, 2011 by beholder2

[blankstate]

As a former World of Warcraft endgame raider and power gamer I leapt into Skyrim's crafting with intense zeal. The point at which I discovered you get the same skill-up for crafting a dagger as crafting a large piece of armor or weapon was the hour in which my Blacksmithing went straight to 100 (think I hit it at Lv. 23 or so). When this happened, I wondered what was next. Then I thought to myself, 'Oh, right. I'm the only player on this realm-- I mean, in this world.'

 

Crafting does not drive an economy, and there is no 'time limit' on the main quest. Therefore, it should not be available as a speedway to godliness. The point at which I obtained a maxed out Legendary quality Daedric Greatsword with maxed out +Fire DMG and +Frost DMG enchants was the point at which I realized I didn't need loot. Period. I didn't need dungeon drops, I didn't need quest loot. All it did was let me amass vast sums of gold (ended the main questline at Lv. 39 with about 90,000 gold). I literally just sped through dungeons to get to the next point of quest dialogue.

 

I really think there just needs to be a big reduction on the numbers of crafted gear. Daedric weapons and armor blow any loot you can find or be rewarded out of the water on base values alone. Once you throw improving and enchantment in there the random dungeon loot is reduced to the level of common trash. I'm on my second playthrough now with a character whom I've expressly forbidden to craft (or even own a house) to force myself to use the equipment I get by chance, and I'm having a pretty rough time of it, but for a totally different reason.

 

Alternatively, if there is a way to engineer the system so that crafting different items gives different skillups, that would immediately balance out the system a LOT. That is to say, items requiring 3-5+ ingots provide full skillups, items requiring only 1 ingot give a minimal skillup. With the current mechanic, if I can buy 100 iron ingots (which is pocket change once you get up there in the levels) I get 100 full-powered skillups. That's pretty ridiculous.

 

EDIT: Re-reading this post, I do realize that other people don't play the way I do. The point I'm trying to make is that since crafting isn't "the point" of Skyrim, it shouldn't be the way to obtain the most powerful weapons and armor in the game. Those should be earned through questing or by random chance drops. I shouldn't be going through my second playthrough constantly frowning because, god, this would be SO much easier if I just picked up Blacksmithing.

Edited November 21, 2011 by blankstate

[Tivoko]

To fix the crafting skills I think you need to first look at why they are so strong to begin with. The quest rewards and dungeon drops fall way short of what you can make, even when not using a potion to increase the effects. I think the best way to go about it is to do a mix of increasing the power of rewards you get from quests (particularly artifacts) and changing how you level up the crafting skills. Of the three, I think Alchemy is the closest to being balanced, it takes a lot more effort to level it than enchanting or smithing does, and the skill increases are based on the value of the potion you brew. Take that same concept and apply it to enchanting and smithing: make petty souls count far less past skill level 30, and make iron/leather/fur/hide work the same way. By doing this I think you increase the desire to explore dungeons and do quests and at the same time make it harder to reach the pinnacle of crafting. I would also look at lowering the bonus that smithing gives when improving your gear (currently I have two daedric swords that do 125 damage).

 

As it is right now, there is only one dungeon and one quest reward that I view as worth getting and those are purely to power enchanting. Once I have both items I don't ever look at other rewards because I don't need them.

Edited November 21, 2011 by DM Veil

[Vatras]

After reading the posts above, I want to add my 2cp:

- I don't need a grinding system as is common in MMORPGs, which takes me 100 hours to get to the max skill, for a solo game, which can be played in 40-60 hours.

- Remember that the designers threw out a lot of things because they are un-fun - e.g. longer respawn and rarer resources are equal to grind (see above), which makes a game boring.

 

The ideal solution would have been to have better loot around, which has abilities that cannot be duplicated by crafters, thereby removing the superiority of crafting over rewards/drops.

 

(I am not bothered by the crafting ,btw, as it is the first time I can actually get some mileage out of the effort. In most games while crafting your way up you get little or nothing out of it, and when you are finally master, it has become unimportant that you are *sigh*).

[Gugus0]

I think the main problem is loot which is absolute TRASH 99% of the time.

I can't remember any interesting weapon or armor found in a random dungeon... it just sucks balls to fight in a dungeon for like 30min and at the end have a chest with 30 Gold and a potion. I mean wtf is the point?

[Robynah]

Its weird Beth have implemented this as brokenly as they have. When, by contrast, they've painstakingly gone through and issue by issue fixed nearly everything else.

 

Myself I just decided not to abuse the system and only smith to upgrade found armour and I dont attempt to bootstrap my skills with potions/enchants. Eventually I guess mods will fix it...

 

- seriously guys just dont do it... game is way more fun this way, combat is challenging, loot is prized

Edited November 21, 2011 by Robynah

[mutonizer]

A simple crafting progression table would limit it's usefulness. As it is now, you can indeed craft hundreds of leather bracers (which I found are the fastest, since leather is very easy to come by and cheap), and reach 100. Dwarven is also very easy once you get to it. The amount of ore you can get if you do a deowmer dungeon run and load up on parts to refine is quite insane, especially with a full set of enchanted "carry" gear.

By simple making it so each tier will only up the skill a certain amount of points at most, you would have to craft very expensive gear to get to 100. Leather at first, Iron, then Steel, and the like, until you reach the 90s and only dragon stuff will raise the skill.

 

Alchemy and Enchanting are far less powerful overall I found. Alchemy because it's simply consumable and Enchanting because the most powerful soulgems are much harder to farm.

[CaptainChaos]

I dk, if you waste all your perks with 100 hours of gameplay in enchanting, smithing, etc. how are you going to survive against 30th level monsters? At least on monster level, all that fancy stuff just gives you a fighting chance, at least if you have 30 combat perks like I do. Without honing your combat skills, you will be dead meet on Master Difficulty even with all that crafting. That seems to be the balance to me.