Quote Originally Posted by The_Jackal View Post
Iell, there's no right answer to whether the best quest items should be better than the best crafted items. If you can't make anything top tier from crafting, why bother? I'll agree that the crafted gear shouldn't be so far and away better than items you get in the world. Ideally, you'd want crafting to be able to improve, and scale up, dropped rewards. That way there's a reason to do it, and a way to keep dropped items being cool. Give them some effects and combinations which can't be duplicated from crafting, and you're golden.
You have to have a bit of a gradient when it comes to quest rewards, I think. There are some items which are basically just "this is my lucky dagger," which is fine as just a bog-standard steel dagger, and then you have stuff like "The god Auri-el crafted and wielded this bow in the war against Lorkhan." To my mind, crafting should allow you to make things that are better than most of what you'll find in the world, but not quite as good as daedric/aedric artifacts.

I like the way that Enaisiaiaon handles it in his Artificer mod. Daedric artifacts are already as powerful in terms of physical damage as you could make with master smithing, but with the caveat of being unable to smith it further yourself. You're not going to be able to improve on a weapon that a god crafted, after all. They also each bear a unique enchantment, and usually have some kind of downside as well. Volendrung weighs a ton, swings about half as quickly as an equivalent warhammer, but makes up for it by sending enemies flying a la Fus Ro Dah. Dawnbreaker does 55 points of sun damage on its own, and triple that to undead, at the cost of swinging at about the speed of a war axe. Wabbajack does 200 points of damage with its attack, and has infinite charges, but also weighs about thirty pounds. Stuff like that, which makes them interesting alternatives to just crafting your own gear.

But also, with the difficulty slider being there, I don't know that it's an objective problem.
I've felt for a while that Bethesda's difficulty slider is basically a shortcut so they don't have to spend time balancing the game.

But it doesn't. There's no skill that Enchanting completely replaces, and good luck affording to level up crafting without getting some other skills. There's plenty of good perks in every skill tree that are good by themselves, better with crafting, and not redundant. Only the core 'cost discount' perks in magic trees are really the problem.
It doesn't completely replace them, no, but it allows you to obtain similar results with much less investment. Muffle, Fortify sneak, fortify pickpocket, and the sneak attack thing from the dark brotherhood make you a passable thief for almost no investment, even if you don't get the benefit of automatically losing enemies when you start to sneak. Fortify stamina, block, heavy armor, and one-handed makes you a decent tank, even if you've spent the past fifty levels upping your mana. And of course, if you have enchanting, the main difference between you and the archmage is that one of you will have perks to make your spells more effective.

I agree that Enchanting is a chore, but surely it's not THAT hard. If I may, consider leveling speech to get your merchants more agreeable, along with the perks that let you sell anything to anyone. Then you can buy soul gems from the game's abundant spell vendors, and sell all the junk you'd otherwise have to lug around to seven different vendors. I don't even bother with using soul trap. Cash->Soul Gems->Enchanted Weapons->More Cash.
Didn't say it's hard. I said it's tedious. It's a skill from which nearly every character benefits immensely, but which is boring to acquire. In essence, all you have to do is acquire soul gems, go to the station, and spend the next hour mashing the same buttons in the same order.

Disagree, they're all kind of OP. They're tedious to raise, but honestly, I don't mind it too much. I just intersperse dungeon clearing with some crafting, then go back to dungeon clearing to get more materials and gold.
Oh, aye, especially in tandem with one another. However, it's Enchanting that really causes problem. You can't get into too much trouble with smithing's damage increase, or with alchemy's temporary boosts. But throw Enchanting into the mix, and suddenly you have weapons that deal three hundred points of damage, and permanent max-cap magic resistance, and potions that make the vanilla potions useless in comparison.