Board Thread:Skyrim/@comment-124.197.17.180-20140717102252/@comment-29458028-20140726091544

Maus, I used gear to reach 700 damage. They were +55% one handed gears, 4 pieces, with Vampire and necromage, for a total of +275% more damage, thus that's nearly X 4 damage on top of 300% from one handed skills doing a grand total of 11.25 x my original base damage. Which meant I reached only 62 base. The highest non exploit base I hit was nearly 80 +, so with multiplier that is nearly 900 damage. And that is no enchantments. Total damage with enchantments thrown in can make a one handed stalhrim sword do 900 phys, 127 lifeleech and up to 1000 chaos, up to a total of 1000-2000 damage per swing. That's the max power I think...

The weapon upgrades are linear, so a similiarly made stalhrim warhammer will reach nearly 1150 - 2150 damage, inferior as it attacks slower than the 1 hand sword. The damage difference in this case is negligible. You probably have a Warhammer that seemed strong because you didn't remove fortify 2 hand boots (A warhammer can maximum do up to 36 damage more than a sword with no % gear. With the gear, at most it's 100 damage more). Strongest exploit weapon I made was a sword with 2.5 billion phys, no gear boosts.

Sometimes, I resto loop to improve a otherwise lousy sword for RP purposes (such as my 400 damage dawnbreaker or 600 damage ghostblade), but resto looping alone can give godlike base damage.

The Ebony blade can become very powerful if you make a pair of exploit fortify 2 handed gauntlets, but then it will never out DPS any other 2 handed weapon. Basically, the ebony blade, even if fully charged to max power, is useless. The end.