Blacksmithing

Blacksmithing is a profession which allows players to craft heavy armor and weapons using metal materials. In Elder Scrolls Online, Blacksmithing consists of five activities:

• Refinement
• Item Creation
• Item Improvement
• Deconstruction
• Trait Research

All of these happen at a blacksmithing station. Once the player interacts with it, the blacksmithing panel will open and the player will have access to the activities mentioned above.

Refinement

Refinement is used to turn your raw crafting materials into something you can work with. Refinement has its own tab in the crafting window. You’ll need 10 units of raw materials to turn them into crafting materials.

Refinement does not yield Blacksmithing experience / inspiration, but refining your ore into ingots is beneficial to you, because you have a chance to receive Tempers and Trait Materials in the process. Tempers are rare items used for Improving weapons and armor. Trait Materials are used for applying Traits.

Creating Weapons and Armor

To craft heavy armor or a weapon, you first have to choose the type of item you want to craft, such as heavy armor helm or one-handed mace. After that you select how many ingots you’re going to use to craft the item. There’s a minimum number of ingots which will give you an item with the lowest possible level requirement and stats. You can choose to use more ingots, which will increase the item’s level requirement and stats.

After the desired item type and number of ingots have been selected, you need to select a Racial Style. A racial crafting style affects how the armor and weapons look like – the effects are purely cosmetic and do not affect the stats at all. By default you will only be familiar with the crafting style of your own race, but as your character progresses in game, you’ll learn more racial crafting styles. Each racial crafting style has their own Style Material, which are also required to craft an item.

The last thing you need to do is select a Trait which you want to have on the item. Traits are effects / buffs which are applied at the crafting process. To apply a Trait on the item that you want to craft, you must have researched the Trait and have the relevant Trait material.

Congratulations, you’ve just crafted an item and gained some experience in Blacksmithing!

Improving Weapons and Armor

You are able to improve the quality of weapons and armor. Each time you improve an item, its rarity type upgrades along with its stats. There’s five levels of item rarity:

• Normal (white)
• Fine (green)
• Superior (blue)
• Epic (purple)
• Legendary (orange)

Improving items happens in rarity tiers. For example, if you have a Fine-quality sword, it will upgrade to Superior-quality. If you upgrade it again, it will be of Epic quality.

Improving an item in Blacksmithing requires you to have Tempers. The more Tempers you use, the greater the chance of successful improvement. There are several types of Tempers, and supposedly the Tempers required to upgrade an item to legendary quality will be very rare and valuable.

NOTE: If you fail to improve the item, it WILL be destroyed! If you absolutely do not want to lose your item, make sure you use enough Tempers to eliminate the chance of failure.

To improve an item, you must choose the Improvement tab on Blacksmithing crafting window and then select the item you want to improve from your inventory. After that you choose the number of Tempers you want to use.

Deconstruction

Deconstruction is the process of breaking down weapons and armor. This can be done from the Deconstruction tab on Blacksmithing window. Once you deconstruct an item, it will be destroyed and you’ll receive experience in Blacksmithing and some materials.

Researching Weapon and Armor Traits

Traits are buffs or special stats on items. You can only research Traits from items in your inventory that have Traits on them. The item will be destroyed, and the research process will start. The research process takes a long time, 6 hours by default, and you can only have one research active at a time. What’s more, there’s eight traits for weapons and armor, and the research time doubles for a single piece of gear after you’ve researched a trait for it. So the first trait you research for say, a helmet, will take 6 hours by default. The next helmet trait research takes 12 hours, the one after that 24 hours, and the research time continues to double all the way to the last researchable trait, which then takes a whopping 32 DAYS to complete! And yes, you do need to research the traits for every gear slot separately.

You can reduce the time it takes to research traits and allow the research of multiple traits with the Blacksmithing passive skill Metallurgy, though.

Once the research is complete, you’ll be able to apply the researched Trait on items you craft in the future, as long as you have the Trait materials.

Blacksmithing Skill Line

The Blacksmithing Skill Line includes a bunch of passive bonuses which help out with Blacksmithing. By default players will be able to craft weapons and armor made of Iron Ingots.

Metalworking passive skill will open up more Ingot types, enabling smiths to craft higher level gear out of better quality Ingots. From high-end crafting perspective, players will need to use eight skill points on the Metalworking passive just to be able to craft items with all ingot types.

Keen Eye: Ore makes spotting ore in the world easier. This will help finding ore, but isn’t necessary. Unless you want to make spotting ore super easy, your valuable skill points are probably better off spent somewhere else.

Miner Hireling skill is an interesting concept. How it works in practice is a question, but in theory it is free ore and other items on a regular basis. How much ore and other items you get will define the usefulness of this skill.

Metal Extraction improves the chance of extracting Blacksmithing ingredients, such as ore, ingots and possibly tempers, trait and style materials. If you are an avid blacksmith, putting points into this skill will be useful.

Metallurgy reduces the research time and gives the ability to research more than one trait at a time. Since research takes such a long time, this skill could prove to be nice. In reality you will probably only want to have very specific traits on your items and as such, the value of Metallurgy isn’t as great as it seems at first glance. Being able to research multiple traits at once is definitely a nice bonus, though.

Temper Expertise passive skill, depending on how big of an increase it provides, will no doubt prove useful. If it takes less Tempers to improve an item, you are able to improve more items and thus craft higher quality gear. For serious blacksmiths, especially at the high level, Temper Expertise will be invaluable.