Blacksmithing - Resources, Materials, Improvements

Blacksmithing is one of 5 professions in Elder Scrolls Online. It allows players to create heavy armor and weapons out of different types of ore. Blacksmiths can create only metal weapons (swords, daggers and so on) and only heavy armor. This means if you want to craft bows and staffs you need to master another profession called Woodworking and if you want to create light or medium armor you need to learn the Clothing profession.

Blacksmiths, Woodworkers and Clothiers can not only create items. They can also improve them by increasing their characteristics. It is a very useful feature when you want to make your gear better.

Skills of a Blacksmith

Each profession in ESO has its own skill line consisting of a definite number of passive abilities. Here is a list of the Blacksmithing Skills:

	Metalworking (1/9)	Allows the use [Ingot type: Iron, Steel, Orichalc, Dwarven, Ebony, Calcinium, Galatite, Quicksilver, Voidstone]
	Keen Eye: Ore (0/3)	Ore in the world will be easier to see within 20/30/40 meters
	Miner Hireling (0/3)	A miner hireling will send you ore and possibly other items every day.
	Metal Extraction (0/3)	Improves the chance of extracting Blacksmithing ingredients
	Metallurgy (0/3)	Reduces research time by 5% and allows the research of two traits at once.
	Temper Expertise (0/3)	Increases the chance of improving items with tempers.

It will take 23 Skill Points to learn all these skills. But all skills are passive and will be useful if you are going to be serious Blacksmith.

Metalworking is a core skill of any Blacksmith. It allows you to use different types of ore. High level ore allows to craft high level gear. Thus it is impossible to progress in blacksmithing without mastering this ability. So make sure you invest skill points in this skill.

Other abilities are not so crucial and some players may want to master them, while others will prefer to invest skill points in other skills trees.

Resources

Any Blacksmith needs a lot of ore. The first ore you can use by default is Iron but when you level up and visit other locations you will find other ore types. Without “Metalworking” skill you will not be able to use ingots created from these new ore types.

You can find different types of ore while traveling but ,to be honest, it is not easy to identify gathering node without the “Keen Eye: Ore” skill. This skill can be found in Blacksmithing Skills line and highlights ore mines within a definite radius. It is a really useful skill and if you are planning to craft a lot this skill will help you to find ores much faster.

Tip: spend at least 1 skill point to learn “Keen Eye: Ore” passive right in the beginning. Learned once this skill will help you throughout the whole game.

Extraction Tab

Once you have collected your ore you need to smelt it to get ingots. You do this by accessing the Extraction Tab in your crafting interface. Different ore types provide you with different ingots: Iron Ore with Iron ingots and so on. Ingots are the core material of a Blacksmith and are required to create any item. 10 pieces of ore can be smelt into 7-10 ingots. so you will need to collect a lot of ores to progress as a Blacksmith. Smelting ore will sometimes give you useful gems and ingredients for improving items.

	Item		Material	Level
	Iron ingot		Iron ore	1 – 14
	Steel ingot		High Iron ore	16 – 24
	Orichalcum ingot		Orichalcum ore	26 – 34
	Dwarven ingot		Dwarven ore	36 – 44
	Ebony ingot		Ebony ore	46 – 50
	Calcinium ingot		Calcinium ore	Veteran 1 – 3
	Galatite ingot		Galatite ore	Veteran 4 – 6
	Quicksilver ingot		Quicksilver ore	Veteran 7 – 8
	Voidstone ingot		Voidstone ore	Veteran 9 – 10

The Extraction Tab is not only for making ingots. Here you can also deconstruct an item from your inventory and receive materials for crafting and improvements. It is a rather good way to get materials and receive experience points.

Note: The Blacksmithing Station allows you to extract materials from different types of swords, daggers and heavy armor only. You will not be able to extract matereals from bows, staffs, light and medium armor. You will require a Woodworking or Clothing Station for this.

When you deconstruct an item you can get ingots, stones for styling, gems or materials for improvements. The probability of extracting materials can be increased with Metal Extraction skill.

Creation Tab

This tab allows you to create new items using resources from your inventory. You need to check the type of the item, type of ingot you want to use and the quantity of the ingots, crafting style and you can also add special bonus.

As you see there are a lot of parameters there and you can create many variants of an item type. You can change the strength of an item by changing type and quantity of ingots. You can apply extra effects and choose how your future item will look by adding different reagents. Changing crafting style does not influence the strength but determines the appearance of the item.

Style

When you start your Blacksmithing career you can craft only your racial items. For example if you belong to Altmer you can craft only in Altmer style. You need to find special books called Racial Motifs in order to use styles of other races.

Racial Motifs are very difficult to find and the price of Motifs is rather high. Each playable race has its own motif. It's great to learn racial motifs of other playable races, but there are three styles that you may want to learn because of their rarity: Barbaric, Daedric and Primal. While traditional racial books may cost 5 000 - 7 000 gold, Barbaric, Daedric and Primal racial motifs may cost 50 000 - 70 000 gold.

They say that the highest chances to find a racial book are in Coldharbour. These books are usually hidden in chests or in other interactive objects, so we recommend you to research any object you can find.

Improvement Tab

This tab is used to change the strength of the item. Each item in ESO has a different quality: Normal, Fine, Superior, Epic or Legendary.The higher the quality the stronger the item is. You can identify the quality of a particular item by the colour of its title. As a Blacksmith you can increase the quality of your heavy armor and weapons via the Improvement Tab.

The improvement chance depends on the quantity of the improvement material (Tempers). Each piece of temper adds an extra x% to the chance to improve the item successfully.

For example, you will require 5 Honing Stones to have 100% success to increase quality from Normal to Fine. If you used less than 5 pieces you may fail. If the upgrade proves unsuccessful you lose the item and tempers.

It's interesting that you will require more and more tempers for getting 100% improvement chance for each next level. You will need 5 Honing Stones to increase quality from Normal to Fine, but 7 Dwarven Oil to improve quality from Fine to Superior. Temper Expertise skill will help you to increases the chance of improving items with tempers.

Tempers are rare and are difficult to find. They can be found during exploration of the world or by extracting other items with quality better than green (fine).

Note: Blacksmiths can improve all heavy armor and weapons in the game, not only items created by him. This makes the profession extremely useful.

Improvement not only makes the item better but also changes the appearance. The higher quality an item has, the more impressive it looks. Thus, improvement can be a great way to make your character more stylish.

Research Tab

This tab allows you to research new properties that you can add to items. In the beginning of the game Blacksmiths can create only simple armor and weapons without extra effects. But research allows you to master new traits and craft cooler items.

To learn a trait, you’ll need to have an existing piece of gear in your inventory with the trait you want. It will take several hours to master a new trait and the item will be destroyed during the research process. Once a new property is mastered, and you've obtained the necessary resources, you can apply it to newly crafted items. Here is a list of all the traits you can discover:

Traits (Armor):

• Sturdy –%Chance to avoid Decay when defeated
• Impenetrable -- +Crit Resistance
• Reinforced -- +% Armor value on item
• Well-fitted – Reduce sprint cost
• Training -- +Experience with item’s corresponding skill line (e.g. +% Heavy Armor experience)
• Infused -- +% on Armor enchant effect
• Exploration +% Exploration experience
• Divines -- +% Mundus Stone effect

Traits (Weapons):

• Powered – Reduce weapon enchant cooldowns by +%
• Charged – Increase enchantment charges by +%
• Precise -- +Weapon/Spell Critical value
• Infused – Increase weapon enchant effect by +%
• Defending +% Total armor and spell resistance
• Training - +Experience with item’s corresponding skill line
• Sharpened – Increase armor and spell penetration by +%
• Weighted -- +% Attack speed

Note: researching a trait will only unlock that trait for the specific type of item you researched it on. For example, if you learned Precise for a dagger you can use it for daggers only until you learn the same improvement for other weapon types.

You can research 8 traits for each item type. The first research for a particular item type will last for 6 hours, the second - 12 hours, the third 24 hours and so on until you master all 9 traits. It will take 1530 hours (over 63 days) to learn all 8 traits per item.

Metallurgy skill will reduces research time and will allow the research of two traits at once. This will help you to research traits faster.