Question for Experienced Players About Enchanting

[K9Pepper]

Is enchanting worth investing into?
Or rather, are sets good enough to ignore it or is enchanting better overall?
I recently started playing this and I was curious before investing anything into enchanting.

[Krutsi]

If you're not interested in an ultra boring minmax oneshot gameplay of just stacking a massive damage bonus to bow/onehanded/twohanded with enchanting, no. Yesterday's nerf basically made enchanting only useful for that kind of cheese play, if you want to give your stuff a balanced set of stats then sets give you more overall stats with no investment much earlier in the game than you could hope to make good enchanted gear at.

[Commisar Jon Fuklaw]

Long time enchanter here: Having done 3.7 playthroughs since enderal released in 2016, I can assure you that enchanting is a lot better than it was at initial launch, or at any point before Forgotten Stories was launched. However, the nerf is effectively a 33% reduction in the effectiveness of enchanting, and is quite jarring and has had some rather pronounced effects.

However, post-nerf, enchanting requires a 170 crafting point investment, or 43 levels (max enchant/alchemy), in order to be equal to what it was with an 85 crafting point bonus and no alchemy involved, period, pre-nerf. Grand soul enchants with max strength fortify enchant potion presently range from 5% weaker to 1% stronger, numerically, than enchants without fortify enchant potions pre-nerf. They are still somewhat stronger than what you can find from absolutely end-game tier items and give you the option to specialize your gear rather than being stuck with the typical generalist stuff you'd have with set items/random loot.

As an added "bonus", not having good fortify enchant potions is now a much bigger overall hit in effectiveness of the skill. Without fortify enchant potions, what you can craft is barely on par with what you can find in mid-late game, though you can still specialize, for what it is worth.

That said, the ability to stack melee/bow damage to safely deal with one hit wonders such as lords of the lost ones, that one lost one mage, etc. is much reduced, so if you are playing melee only or melee/bow hybrid, you will need to be much more careful about going toe to toe with such things, as they will happily instagib you with 400+ health.

Additionally, the loss in enchanting effectiveness means that you are no longer able to use effectively use enchanting as a means to fill in for other utility skills on its own. For rhetoric/bartering, you will need other gear, such as the sublime robe/swashbuckler helm/etc. to get perfect pricing, for sleight of hand and lockpicking, you can no longer just keep enchanted gloves and be as good at both as is reasonably feasible with 15 in each skill, as mix and matched late game sets will have equal or better effects.


TLDR: Nerf big, enchant requires full investment in alchemy to be worth it now, enchant can no longer stand in for other utility skills effectively, high level enemies much more dangerous on higher difficulties due to enchant nerf

[K9Pepper]

I appreciate that you took the time to give a lengthy answer and explain it well. Thank you.

[Bluebottle]

can you find soul trap enchanted weapons in the world that you can cannibalise? all i've found so far is a staff but i didn't realise you can't disenchant staves

[armavir99]

Originally posted by Bluebottle:

can you find soul trap enchanted weapons in the world that you can cannibalise? all i've found so far is a staff but i didn't realise you can't disenchant staves

In the world I found weapons with fire, frost, shock, damage mana, absorb stamina, absorb health enchantments - you can buy such weapons also.
I bought bow with paralize enchantment.

[Nerevar]

while the long post is very close its not true fully actually.

you can STILL make way stronger effects with alchemy potions just as before the nerf as the nerf only addressed the perks.

i was able to create over 200% bonus damage with my test after the patch with just 4 items and WITHOUT alchemy potions (besides the fixed one that was used). so enchanting is STILL overpowered. it just went from "absolutly broken" to "overpowered" with the patch.

since you can still obtain 300% bonus with alchemy potion at higher levels its still stupidly strong now. the balance issue wasnt fixed yet. it still makes iron path a joke. some enemies just went from 1 shot to 2 shot now.

with the changes to handicraft item bonuses in the same patch enchanting is now in fact the by far most useful crafting skill to actually level up with points first. it also is still the best skill to raise your damage. better than any perk or skill in the whole game actually. followed closely by alchemy thanks only to the enchanting potion you can still make (which wasnt nerfed AT ALL)

people who say its no longer good or useful are absolutly clueless on what they are talking about.
sad fact. numbers speak for themselfs.

example : best ring with % one handed bonus in the whole mod = 15%

selfmade ring with JUST 100 enchanting and a few bonus items + the fixed 7% buyable potion = 48% bonus. still over 3 times as strong as anything found. WAY stronger than any setgloves or boots aswell (this includes breaking the setbonus) and this is without leveling up alchemy to make it even stronger. can probaly still reach around 75% on one item with that.

it still makes mages worthless as thier dmg cannot keep up with the above at all on higher difficulty. you get manaless casting tough if you want.

i made a ticket on thier tracker and showed them a solution to this balance problem without further nerfing enchanting itself at all. will see if they take it as it does require very little work on thier end.