Stalhrim weapons feel weaker than they should for how hard they are to get

[NordOfSolitude]

I just finished getting all the Stalhrim ore I needed to craft a full set of gear and... it's fine? Like, mechanically it's fine. The frost damage is solid. But after everything - the Black Books, the whole Miraak questline, the lore about it being this ancient material tied to the old Atmoran civilization - it feels like it should hit different, you know?

Ebony Smithing gets you basically the same stats. Daedric is actually stronger. And yeah, I know Stalhrim has that thing where frost damage scales with Smithing, but it's not enough to make it feel special. It's just another crafting tier that happens to be blue.

I think the problem is that vanilla Skyrim doesn't really reward you for the effort. You're doing this whole DLC questline, diving into Apocrypha multiple times, and the payoff is "slightly better than Ebony." If Stalhrim had its own perks or if the frost scaling was actually meaningful on Legendary difficulty, it would feel earned.

Anyone else craft it and feel let down, or is it just me?

 

[EbonyWarrior]

Yeah, I get this. The lore buildup is there - you're literally pulling this stuff out of the frozen past, Miraak's whole thing is tied to it - but the actual gameplay payoff feels... flat. Especially compared to how Morrowind handled unique materials. Back in Vvardenfell, crafted gear felt genuinely different from vendor trash, and there were way more tiers that actually mattered. Skyrim streamlined that to death.

That said, the frost scaling thing is real if you're deep into Smithing. On my current playthrough I'm running Stalhrim with Augmented Frost and the perks that boost frost damage, and it does chunk harder than it looks on paper. But you're right that it shouldn't require you to basically build your entire character around it just to feel like the effort was worth it.

The bigger issue imo is that Skyrim doesn't differentiate crafted gear enough in general. Daedric being objectively better is kind of wild when you think about it - you go through all that Black Book stuff and Apocrypha is genuinely unsettling, but then you could've just mined some ebony and gotten something nearly as good. A unique perk or enchantment baked into Stalhrim gear would've fixed a lot of this. Even something small, like a passive frost resistance or the frost damage applying to your shouts somehow.

Mods help here if you're on PC, but yeah, vanilla's a letdown for what should feel like the "capstone" material of the DLC.