Enchanting loop breaks the game faster than alchemy and nobody talks about it

[TamrielTactician]

I've been running a new playthrough on Switch and decided to actually commit to the enchanting / smithing loop early instead of just ignoring it, and honestly it's kind of absurd how fast you can trivialize everything.

Like, the standard advice is "do alchemy for money" or "level smithing for gear" but the enchanting spiral is actually the one that breaks the game the hardest. You get a single piece of gear with Fortify Alchemy on it, suddenly your potions are worth 3x more. Then you use those potions to boost Enchanting, craft gear with better enchants, which lets you make better Fortify Alchemy gear, which loops back. By level 20 you've got gear that makes your potions worth thousands and enchantments that just delete encounters.

The weird part is the game doesn't really warn you about this. Smithing gets all the hate for "trivializing combat" but at least that takes forever to level. Enchanting just... snowballs if you know the loop exists.

I'm not even doing anything crazy - just hitting the Arcane Enchanter in Solitude every couple of level-ups, grabbing soul gems from the court wizard, and suddenly I'm one-shotting everything by mid-game. On Legendary difficulty, which is supposed to be the "hard" version.

Am I just late to realizing this or does everyone else already know the loop is this broken? Because if you're struggling with early game difficulty, this is genuinely faster than grinding pickpocketing or waiting for alchemy ingredients to respawn.

 

[WhiterunModder]

Yeah, everyone knows about it, but you're right that it doesn't get talked about as much as the alchemy / smithing stuff. Partly because it's less intuitive - you have to actually understand how the enchantments stack and feed into each other, whereas "make potion, sell potion, buy stuff" is just brainless. The loop you're describing is textbook, though: Fortify Alchemy gear lets you make better Enchanting potions, better Enchanting potions let you craft better gear with Fortify Alchemy, repeat until you're literally breaking the game's economy and combat scaling.

The reason smithing gets more flak is probably just because it's more visible and feels more direct - you craft a sword, it's obviously strong, everyone sees it. Enchanting is sneakier. You're just putting a glow on some robes and suddenly your entire character becomes a god. Plus on console you can't really mod away the problem, so it just sits there being broken forever.

Legendary doesn't really help much against this either, tbh. It just means enemies have more health - but if your enchanted gear is already deleting them, the extra HP doesn't matter. You'd need something like Requiem or Wildlander (PC only, sorry) that actually rebalances how enchanting scales to make it matter.

The real question is whether you want to just... not do it? Like, you know the exploit exists now. You can just not grab Fortify Alchemy gear and let yourself level normally. That's what most people end up doing on their second or third playthrough - once you know the loop, you either commit to it for a speedrun or you deliberately ignore it to have an actual challenge.