It took me about 6+ hours to get my Alchemy skill up to 100 but in this video it shows that the Smithing skill can take 30 minutes tops to get it to 100. Why is Smithing so easy to level? Would you consider this an exploit?

Poor balancing? Having all smithed items give the same amount of exp seems to invite leveling by smithing the cheapest thing.

I suppose they could have made it a little harder to smith stuff, but what can you do?

Its because you get like %50 xp for every thing you smith and %5 for every potion you craft. I too find this odd especialy considering that you can just buy everything you need to level smithing, where as you need to go find all your alchemy ingredents

Smithing is easy to level because each object you craft rewards the same amount of XP. So smithing a ton of iron daggers will reward you the same amount as if you smithed Dragon armor.

It's not as easy as that video makes it out to be. For one, I've never ran into a vendor that had that many iron ingots. The most I've ever seen available is 20-30 (either it's a PC to console thing or that guy gathered a bunch of iron ingots and sold them to the vendor before recording). Secondly, once it starts getting higher it doesn't level anywhere near that fast. Once you're at 70, 20 daggers will net you only a few levels. Lastly, once you get your smithing leveled up, the materials required for the higher level stuff isn't as readily available as iron. So unless you were stockpiling or have probably as much gold as you spent leveling smithing in the first place, you're not gonna be able to do anything all that useful with it 'cept improve what you already have by a decent amount.

You can speed things up a bit by fast traveling between different cities and waiting for vendors to refresh, but it's not just hey I'm gonna roll up on this one vendor after getting off the carriage and go from 1-100 and make myself a full set of daedric armor and weapons in 10m for free. It is without a doubt the easiest profession to level, but it's not as ridiculous as that video makes it out to be.

Alchemy seems to be a pain unless I'm doing it wrong. Potions don't net much experience from my experience.

Edit: Vendors don't carry that many ingots. Not even close. I've seen around 20, but 145?? Console commands.

It's honestly a lot easier to acquire a lot of leather through hunting and buying, then just make a lot of leather bracers.

I am the best Iron Dagger smith in all of Skyrim.

It only took you 6 hours to get 100 Alchemy in Skyrim? Shit, I remember it taking me aboot two weeks to get to that in Morrowind.  
 
Anyway I think they tried to balance it in such a way as to avoid the grind that comes with leveling smithing in most games, the kind of grind where you have to make 1000 bronze breast plates before you can make steel, then make 1000 steel, and so on (hello Runescape). Seems like they couldn't work out a good compromise and just got lazy though. 

@Morien said:

I am the best Iron Dagger smith in all of Skyrim.

How dare you challenge my Iron Dagger smithing honor!

Alchemy is a pain to level. You have to find a good potion combination, like invisibility or a potion with 3-4 effects, those give you the fastest progression but even with the thief sign and well rested bonus it takes a while.

@shinboy630 said:

@Morien said:

I am the best Iron Dagger smith in all of Skyrim.

How dare you challenge my Iron Dagger smithing honor!

If you think about it, you guys are the same person in Skyrim.

Sorry for blowing your minds!

To level alchemy a little quicker, try to create potions with multiple effects since they give substantially more xp than simple 'Restore Health' or something. A good indicator is the estimated value of the created potion on the crafting screen. Try to create ones with values of over ~300-400. I made a lot of Fortify Two-hander potions that boost fire resist as well (to fight dragons) and the process unintentionally leveled up my alchemy from 20 to 70.

I had hoped the smithing worked like crafting systems in MMO's.
Smith some iron, smith some steel, smith something higher, etc etc.
But I'm now the queen of hide helmets, I guess.

Its a single player game that levels with you, so in regards to this:

Who cares?

Nice job breaking the game for yourselves.

and, Enjoy the results of boosting your level with a non-combat skill in a game where enemy levels are determined by the player level.

Also, from a game-balance perspective, if you didn't grind daggers, your BS skill would never increase really - I mean, you don't have to repair or re-sharpen your armor or weapons, and even if you make your full set of armor, make your weapon, and do the same for a companion, smithing still wouldn't keep pace with your other skills. You'd be level 30 with 30 points in smithing, and you couldn't even start to make level-appropriate armor or weapons anyways, so it would be useless as a skill.

Smithing levels fast because its completely useless until you get a ton of points into it. Nobody needs to make Iron, Leather, or Steel armor (or the weird in-between ones), because they're super common in the world already.
 
Also single player game, so who cares. Not to mention that video is bullshit. 
 
If you really wanna complain, pickpocketing levels extremely quickly. Or find an enemy that can't reach you and summon bound sword over and over to rapidly level conjuration, or cast detect life over and over in a town to level it super fast.
 
My point is that you can level most of the skills in the game just as easily, it all comes down to if you want to or not. I leveled conjuration to 100 in about 45 minutes, and Destruction to 100 in about 90 minutes. Pickpocketing was about an hour, Sneak was an hour or less, same with 1 handed.  Blacksmithing was about 90 minutes, Alteration was 30, Illusion was 60.
 
Its not really out of balance. If you want to grind a skill, you can do it pretty quickly. Except for Alchemy and Speech.

Because it's poorly balanced.

You can level Alchemy quickly by combining Blue Butterfly Wings and Blue Mountain Flowers. Both ingredients are easy to acquire and available in large quantities. The potion you get from it is worth 700-900 gold and levels Alchemy very quickly.

Because it's an Elder Scrolls game.

In Oblivion you could crouch/sneak in a corner of an Inn and hit the auto-run button. Leave it for an hour or so and come back, and you have 100 sneak. And don't get me started on Morrowind. You could be the über-Nerevarine in 20 minutes.

The important part is that not all the skills need to be balanced. This isn't an MMO, and doesn't need to have every single skill 'n' perk be in balance with each other. You can now pick master locks without needing 100 in lockpicking, and I think the game is better for it. That, however, has made all the lockpicking perks pretty much useless outside of roleplaying reasons. That's fine, and I don't see a single person complaining about that.

So in the end, it doesn't matter. My latest character has smithing, and I just got to 80 with it after 40 hours of play, because I didn't do the route of traveling to each city, clearing out all the iron ingots, and grinding iron daggers. If some players want to do that to get incredibly strong armor early in the game, and at the cost of their other skills in regards to their level, that is their choice. However, anyone who power grinds like that then complains that they're either too powerful or gimped in other areas has no one to blame but themselves. They are the ones that chose to power grind.

IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS

exploit? Yes

Alchemy is always the most RSI inducing skill to level.

But yeah, the balance with smithing is completely gone. But I'm guessing some mods will adress the balancing soon(ish).

Doing this now.

@Bam_D_Leprechaun said:

IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS IRON DAGGERS

LEVEL UP

Every bandit in Skyrim now has easy access to the hundreds and thousands of Iron Daggers that I made, enchanted, and the flooded the market with. I have undoubtedly made the world a more dangerous place, but on the plus side, sweet new set of armor!

I'm doing this right now, I buy the ingots AND the ore, smelt the ore and I get more ingots, I do this to both shop owners as they have their own supply, it's ridiculous.

SO MANY IRON DAGGERS

After making all that stuff you still have nothing to help you. You still need to get the stuff for the Daedric armor. Which takes a while.

I wish the world was more responsive to these things. For instance, a merchant won't buy anymore daggers than he wants in stock which is determined by demand which is determined by location. Doesn't seem like a hard system to integrate. What would be a little more difficult is dynamic equipment on A.I. If you make a kick ass piece of armor and then sell it, an A.I. will acquire it and wear it around. I know in S.T.A.L.K.E.R., A.I. will pick up and equip better items than what they are holding.

Meh.

I've found that Paralysis potions are where it's at for levelling alchemy since unlike a lot of the other potions you can make with multiple effects -- they're actually quite useful so you can either sell or keep them for when you're up against a tough boss. I've mostly had to buy the ingredients, but a lot of the more common paralysis ingredients are fairly cheap, so I just get a good stock and then make a bunch of them at once -- usually gets me at least a level or two.

Its because you get like %50 xp for every thing you smith and %5 for every potion you craft. I too find this odd especialy considering that you can just buy everything you need to level smithing, where as you need to go find all your alchemy ingredents

I don't know if I did it wrong, but I did that last week and it took me 2-3 hours and 12,000 gold to get to 100. Once you get to level 60 or so in Smithing, it takes many a dagger to level up once. Also, it takes a few hour since the vendors don't have unlimited amounts of iron and leather. You have to wait a few days to get more.