Trade skill grind

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Oh, the unforeseen consequences of being able to "Legendary" skills to break the level cap..

Has anyone noticed how it's perfectly possible to buy everything, and I mean literally EVERYTHING, in terms of materials to powerlevel all three tradeskills? Not only that, but you can actually turn profit in the process, to the point of your supply of materials being on an exponential growth scale.

Smithing is the fastest one of them since every Blacksmith in the world can sell you north of 100 ingots of various types each time you visit them. On top of that, for every given material, there is a recipe that at least doubles the value of the ingots used as input. Once you don a Fortify Smithing suit, you'll be able to improve stuff to almost four times the value with just one extra ingot, putting you into x8 profit. Even at 100% markup and 50% sell value (provided by Speech skill at 100 alone, without perks), you still net a LOT per iteration, leading into an infinite grind loop, only restricted by your IRL endurance.

I'd like to hear some RP(-ish) ideas on how to restrict myself from doing this to advance in levels. I've already done this to powerleveling, as it's both extremely boring IRL and something you wouldn't really be doing as your character anyway...

My first thought was to use "Trade and Barter" mod to put trade profits to the slaughter by adding markup on stuff I buy and penalty on stuff I sell. Problem: Requires HUGE penalties to even start curbing the problem above, while making collecting dungeon loot even more pointless than it is already. Even more so since you can get around +300% better prices (both ways) by combining Speech perks, enchants, potions, unique items and blessings found in the vanilla game..

 

What dmc said, if it's boring, just don't do it. Anyway all the TES games tend to lend themselves to skill grinding.

What you're describing was even easier in Morrowind. Go to this one specific merchant, get ingredients for fortify INT potion, make potion, use potion, INT goes up, potions get better. Sell excess potions for more money than you bought the ingredients for. Even better, buy ingredients, sell them back, merchant's base stock of that ingredient goes up.

 

I've been trying to point that out since day one, and that gold has several other uses too. I prefer the Alchemy route though, significantly reduces the tedium. Also gives me an excuse to roam around the countryside doing quests/looking for ingredients/exploring.

I agree with DMC. You said it yourself, RP-wise "it's something you wouldn't really be doing as your character anyway". If you want something more compelling/dramatic just add some tragedy to your character's backstory, something concerning smithing. Or, along the lines of DMC's suggestions, you could argue that the local smiths/miners should be very familiar with the metals in the area and would normally never buy anything locally mined/processed because they already have a provider as well as a surplus of the stuff (the extra ingots they're selling to you).
That is, until you reach a high enough level of smithing and the quality of work becomes superior to everyone else's.

 

DMC, that Blacksmith Guild idea sounds easy enough to RP without bending over to convoluted schemes. That's pretty much exactly what I did anyway, just trying to find a decent enough metagame reason for it.

The first time you level up the trade skills it seems pretty well balanced, considering how many other, more immediate needs there are for your septims. You'd like to have Fortify Alchemy/Smithing set for leveling, but you'd need high Enchanting first, which in turn requires a lot of Soul Gems and so forth. You kinda lack such restraints on the subsequent iterations.

Anyway, I'll be looking at the Community Uncapper solution for fine-tuning my leveling preferences for subsequent playthroughs. Simply "forgetting" stuff for the sake of relearning it is VERY unsatisfactory way of keeping the levels rolling, to put it mildly..

 

For those interested, I've found that you only really need Trade and Barter or similar to make tradeskills no longer self-sustaining.

The trick is to hoist both fBarterMin and fBarterMax to as high as you can comfortably live with, when ONLY considering the value of items sold compared to their base value. A value of 5 means you'll be selling stuff at 1/5 value and so forth. Now, since MOST of the stuff you'll be buying off merchants is going to be ingredients, at least once you're past the initial spell purchases, just increase buy values by an additional +100%.

The by far best Smithing recipe in terms of profit is Orc Armor, requiring just shy of 200g worth of mats to create a 1000g item, meaning a profit multiplier of 5. So, if you're both buying the mats and selling the end product, you'll need to make sure your effective buy and sell multipliers stay at 5 or more when multiplied together. Considering you can "easily" get around +100% Fortify Barter (speech perks, enchants and Blessing of Charity but no potions), you need a total multiplier of 2 x 2 x 5 = 20 to ensure this.

Hence, something like fBarterMin 4 is enough to curb Smithing - you'll face a 4 x 4 = 16 value penalty, but since you also have +100% buy prices, you'll end up with a total x32 value penalty. Which is a bit above the x20 profit ratio available to Smithing with Fortify Barter, leaving a bit of headroom for potions. Hence, you can only ever hope to gain actual profit by making high-value improvements with a relatively low-cost ingot.

Problem solved!