How many times can I improve a weapon or armor?

[Outlander]

I improved a few pieces of armor and my sword to legendary and I thought that was it. But I went back to the grindstone a few levels later and was able to improve it again.

What happened that allowed me to improve it some more? My level or more advanced smithing?

[Fear2288]

AFAIK, Legendary is the max tempering level.

Does the word in parentheses change to something else? Do the stats actually change?

Are you using any mods that mess with smithing in general, or tempering weapons/armor specifically?

Edit: I was wrong

https://en.m.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Smithing

Look towards the middle of the page and it’ll show you the list of extended quality levels and stats. The name remains legendary.

[alexander_dougherty]

The amount you can improve your weapons and armour depends on your smithing skill, you can improve it if your skill allows you to reach a new tier. There is no limit to how many times you can improve a piece of gear, provided you can take to another tier (ie superior>Exquisite)

[alexander_dougherty]

Legendary isn't as simple as you think, while the name doesn't change you can take to a higher amount if your skill improves enough.

[Outlander]

Originally posted by Fear2288:

AFAIK, Legendary is the max tempering level.

Does the word in parentheses change to something else? Do the stats actually change?

Are you using any mods that mess with smithing in general, or tempering weapons/armor specifically?

Yeah, my Dragonbone bow said legendary already but the stats increased by quite a bit. Same with my Madness sword.

[Rez Elwin]

There is no limit to the amount of times you can do it. Even when you reach "legendary" quality, they can still be improved further with enchanting or alchemy boosting the smithing skill.

[Outlander]

Originally posted by alexander_dougherty:

Legendary isn't as simple as you think, while the name doesn't change you can take to a higher amount if your skill improves enough.

Thanks, this is what I was thinking. What threw me off was that I was able to upgrade my sword and bow again but not my Dragonplate armor.

[mikk011]

You can keep adding incremental numerical improvements to your Legendary Armor rating to well over the armor rating cap with the use of gear enchanted with Fortify Smithing and through the use of Fortify Smithing Potions. There is no named improvement tier above legendary. To maximize everything to it's theoretical limits, you need potions, enchanting, and smithing @100 with all relevant perks, and there are additional buffs to notional smithing and enchanting skills available in the game (such as Ahzidal's Genius for Enchanting).

As an aside, I get bored with super maxed out weapons and armor. A bit of risk-inspired caution helps me enjoy the game more.

[Shaken_Widow]

you have a rating you can upgrade up too.

like if your skill allows you to upgrade a sword to do 300 damage, and then your skill levels up you can upgrade it to like 320 damage and so on.

same with potions that boost the smithing skill and enchanted items.

you could be level 100 smithing, and if you put something on or drink a potion that increases the actual smithing skill more, you can then proceed to add those points onto what you're upgrading, the only limit is the game engines math ceiling which is based on unsigned integers max cap in programming.

i believe the max level/number you can reach in any skill should be 65,535 as it is the highest an unsigned integer will go.

[Morgan Fun Gamer]

If you won a skill in the smithing tree smithing perk tree the perks on the perk tree if you get one of these perks it will allow you to upgrade an weapon or armour more times but only with the specific type of armour the perk speficies like Orcish dwarven daedric dragon and the perks will also allow you to craft any of these items aswell so you can improve it a few times then if you already have the perk or get the perk in the future you can upgrade it some more times and this can be done with weapons and armour I think.

[John]

Originally posted by alexander_dougherty:

Legendary isn't as simple as you think, while the name doesn't change you can take to a higher amount if your skill improves enough.

The calculation is even weirder, smithing potions (not sure if the unofficial patch fixed it) increase the price more than the damage value. So at lower levels it might be possible to make a flawless weapon with 29 power and with more smithing power and no potion a legendary with 27 as the quality is related to the percentage of value increase compared to the base value.

[Shaken_Widow]

Originally posted by John:

Originally posted by alexander_dougherty:

Legendary isn't as simple as you think, while the name doesn't change you can take to a higher amount if your skill improves enough.

The calculation is even weirder, smithing potions (not sure if the unofficial patch fixed it) increase the price more than the damage value. So at lower levels it might be possible to make a flawless weapon with 29 power and with more smithing power and no potion a legendary with 27 as the quality is related to the percentage of value increase compared to the base value.

not only that but if the potion is exploited through way of the fort restoration glitch and is an insane percentage boost, the damage value can become negated* due to the base cap of unsigned integers that i stated above, which is why if you sometimes continue to upgrade something the value may become through the roof when the damage somehow got weaker after the upgrade.

basically if you are able to hit that damage integer cap based on the unsigned limit you can reset its damage but not the upgrade quality, and it turns out to have some very interesting bugs like having a legendary ebony blade that only does its base amount of damage but is worth 110k gold.

meanwhile, gold is based on floating points converted into an integer, so that you can both have a higher gold cap than integer would allow and so that you can have fluctuating values based on decimals you can't actually see which is how items with a gold value of 0 can become 1 and 2, (the 0 is actually more of a 0.1 or 0.5, just stripped of the decimal to make an integer,)

[mcbarker69]

Originally posted by sandwichfren:

Originally posted by alexander_dougherty:

Legendary isn't as simple as you think, while the name doesn't change you can take to a higher amount if your skill improves enough.

Thanks, this is what I was thinking. What threw me off was that I was able to upgrade my sword and bow again but not my Dragonplate armor.

Once you've "enchanted" your weapon or armor, the enchantment can't be upgraded further. On the other hand, you can endlessly upgrade the effectiveness of weapons and armor at the grindstone or workbench as long as you have both the smithing skills and available raw materials to do so.