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SPOILER INFO
This article contains no spoilers.
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As you probably know, playing Skyrim is to a large extent a fight to beat the system. The two BBB's (Bethesda's Blatant Blunders) which I took on the other day were:
1) unique items are complete garbage;
2) critical hits are as good as nothing.
I am not the first to point out that it just isn't right when you kill a couple dozen undead, find your way around traps, beat a huge monster, find a chest and are rewarded with a weapon with an incredibly cool name – only to find out that even with all the improvements you can make, the weapon still does less damage than the weapons you and your followers are already using. It is more than a disappointment. It's an insult.
And the very thought that 6 points of additional damage could be refered to as "critical hit" is insane.
I have been frustrated with that screaming nonsense for a long time. It occurred to me only recently that since Skyrim Economy Overhaul changes the prices of many items, maybe they include unique weapons and armor items, meaning it has records for them which can be altered with TES5Edit . And a moment later I had a horrifying thought – what if those items are actually all right, and it's SEO that is ruining them, like it ruins health potions?
Well, turned out that SEO had records for most unique items, and in most cases it had not diminished their usefulness. You can't alter skyrim.esm with TES5Edit, but fortunately SEO, Dragonborn, Dawnguard, USKP and update.esm have almost all unique items covered between them. I decided to be cautious at first and made the items only 2 times stronger. The so-called critical damage I increased 4 times for the time being. I doubt it will make any visible difference, but I don't want to risk the game going crazy.
Actually, critical damage ought to be increased for generic weapons as well, but that would be too much work. Neither did I bother with increasing the prices of unique items, many of which SEO has cheapened beyond all reason. It ought to be corrected, but I am too lazy for that.
But at least there is a chance now that I am going to pick up stuff in dungeons that I can actually use.
Added much later:
For my latest game, I made the strength of unique weapons 8 times their vanilla strength, except the ones which were not really meant to use as weapons (i.e. Nettlebane and maybe there were others I can't recall at the moment); the latter I set to 4 times vanilla. I set every unique weapon's critical hit to twice their new regular hit, regardless of vanilla. I know I should have increased the regular weapons' critical hits as well, but that was too much work because there were so many of them.
I can confirm that it's perfectly safe to increase the strength of unique weapons, and it's something I definitely recommend you do. It adds greatly to the pleasure of dungeon-exploring.
[originally published 2017-05-06]
