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

[SubRosa]

I am thinking it is that transmute metal spell that is the game breaker too. If Ancasta had just mined the iron and churned out twenty iron swords, her skill would not have shot up like that. But I have noticed that once you start smithing things like elven items, your skill shoots up really fast. That is what Hera was doing, when she got the skill to 100. One elven bow nets you a big skill improvement.