Smithing after 1.5 Options

[SubRosa]

Has anyone found smithing quicker to level up after the 1.5 patch instead of slower? My only character to get it to 100 did it on version 1.6. Still, that at least took her a little work. But yesterday my tomb raider/mage Ancasta cleared out Halted Stream Camp. For those who have never been there, it has a ton of iron ore deposits (about 40 or pieces of ore), and a spell book for transmute metal. The spell turns iron into silver, or silver into gold.

Since Ancasta is still a new character and scrounging for money, she dug up all that iron, turned it into silver, and then into gold. That's about 20 gold ingots. She took it back to Whiterun and made gold necklaces. When she was done her Smithing had gone up 50 points, and she had advanced 5 levels. I am not exaggerating. She had leveled up 5 times. And at the end her Smithing was at about 70 or so. She had never done any smithing before that.

It was just so insane, that I went back to my save from before entering the camp and did it again. This time without mining the ore, or learning the spell.

That never would have worked with the old smithing system, where the value of the item you were making did not factor into your skill advancement. Her 20 gold necklaces would have been the same as making 20 iron daggers. So it would have netted her about 2 points in skill advancement. But now we get 50?

Has anyone else been noticing this?

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Jun 16 2012, 08:50 PM

[Lady Saga]

Yea, I think McBadgere said something about before 1.5, he (or one of his kids) could spam hundreds of iron daggars, and level up quicker than they could after 1.5 doing the same thing. The item has to be of a higher value (I think) for you to level up faster.

SubRosa, it must be due to the tome. Gotta be. All of my characters have found it so far, but none of them have used it. Gunter doesn't use magic, for instance, and probably sold that tome for gold. His Smithing levels up so slow...I always make extra items that he sells (rather than wears) and it still levels up slowly. He's not even able to manufacture Orcish pieces, yet he's Level 17 or 18!

Gunter could try harder though. He could take up mining, for instance.