The ability to use a character build that feels unique to you has always been one of Skyrim’s best selling points. This degree of uniqueness comes from deeper areas of customization like enchantments. However, even something as small as an item enchantment can completely change the way you use your character.
This list of the Best Enchantments Skyrim has to offer makes playing the game significantly easier. They let you take on higher difficulties with much more ease due to the additional damage and utility they bring to your character, often making newer builds much more accessible.
Enchantments in Skyrim
Skyrim has a limited set of items available to the player. Most weapons or armor pieces do not have additional abilities on their own. Adding enchantments to items you equip can change that by giving them all new effects.
Best Apparel and Armor Enchantments in Skyrim
The following Enchantments can be added to your character’s apparel. Their main functions include boosting your character’s traits by making them more proficient in certain skills and increasing their stats.
Fortify Heavy Armor
Building a character in Skyrim that can absorb enormous amounts of damage without flinching can be a lot of fun. In such a case, you will need every piece of additional damage resistance and armor fortification you can get.
The Fortify heavy Armor enchantment increases your proficiency in Heavy armor to reduce the damage you take while wearing it.
Fortify Light Armor
If you’re using Light Armor, chances are you are running a glass canon build. This makes the ability to survive your encounters an important point of focus.
Fortify Light Armor, just like its Heavy armor counterpart, improves your proficiency with Light Armor. This should help you survive those risky scenarios with stronger enemies.
Fortify Stamina Regen
While not everybody may need a quick stamina refill, builds that use it often certainly do. If you’re a fighter who uses a lot of heavy attacks, or a sneaky Archer that likes to slow down time, chances are you’re often going to find yourself with an empty stamina bar.
The Fortify Stamina regen will increase the pace at which you recharge your stamina, getting ready for your next attack. This will let you get a few extra shorts in as an Archer before you get caught or not wait for nearly as long to throw your next heavy attack.
Fortify Healing Rate
Skyrim’s healing rate during battles can be infuriatingly low. While the restoration magic in the game can be used to improve your rate of recovery, it is nothing but a double-edged sword to mages as you have to sacrifice your Magicka to increase your health, before waiting for your Magicka to be restored.
Depending on the type of enchantment, Fortify Healing rate can greatly increase the level of health regen over time. Using it will let you spend less time evading enemy attacks with a dangerously low amount of health points.
Fortify Magicka Regen
A quicker health regen may be useful to most players, but if you don’t find yourself taking a lot of damage, but are often out of Magicka, this might be the enchantment for you.
The fortify Magicka Regen enchantment increases the rate at which you can restore your used Magicka bar.
It is also a great option for mages that are proficient in restoration magic, as you could quickly heal yourself and use this enchantment to keep your Magicka topped up.
Resist Magic
Magic resistance is one of the most useful abilities you can have in the game. Skyrim is full of creatures that practice magic. If you use a character build that focuses on ranged damage, chances are you are most susceptible to magic attacks.
The resist magic enchantment should reduce the amount of damage you take from destruction spells used by NPCs.
Having this available as a melee user should help you counter any mages that constantly target you from far away.
Fortify Alchemy
Fortify Alchemy may not be the enchantment you use on your regular apparel, but it is one to have handy.
As a player that is optimizing their resources as well as they can, Alchemy is a very beneficial system to have access to. Alchemy potions are useful in many areas of the game and can turn the tides of difficult battles.
Using an item enchanted by ‘Fortify alchemy’ while crafting potions can increase the potency of the potions you use. After creating the required potions, you can unequip the gear and replace it with something more suitable for the encounter you are going to face.
Fortify Destruction
This is easily one of the best enchantments for destruction mages.
If you are using a build that focuses on destruction spells, you probably know that your best bet is a shorter fight. High damage output mages are usually more susceptible to incoming attacks. Shorter fights give you less of an opportunity to take this damage.
The Fortify Destruction Enchantment increases the strength of destruction magic, letting you do more damage to your enemies. This should let you knock out your enemies much faster.
Fortify Carry weight
Almost every Skyrim player has complained about reaching their carrying capacity way too soon at some point in the game. A lower capacity usually means less loot taken from your dungeon crawls, making them significantly less satisfying.
As its name suggests, the carry weight enchantment increases the capacity of weight that you can carry. Using it should let you bring back more items from enemies that can in turn be sold to get you more gold.
Fortify Archery
Fortify Archery is one of the best armor enchantments you can get as an Archer in Skyrim. This is especially true if you are a stealth archer since you only get one shot before you alert an enemy of your presence.
The enchantment improves your expertise in archery, making you more likely to kill your opponents in one sneaky shot, preventing an unnecessary chase.
Fortify Lockpicking
While it is obvious that this enchantment will benefit players with stealthy builds that sneak into NPCs’ houses the most, there is something that every player can gain from it.
Locked chests with valuable loot are found throughout Skyrim, usually with trickier ones found upon defeating high-leveled enemies. As you find chests that are more difficult to open, higher proficiency in lockpicking becomes essential.
The fortify lockpicking enchantment boosts your skill in lockpicking, helping you deal with more difficult ones more easily.
Fortify Sneak
Sneak builds are some of the most popular ones in Skyrim. The sneaky archer, the assassin, the thief, and other similar builds greatly benefit from any boosts to their ability to sneak around silently.
The Fortify Sneak enchantment makes your character much more proficient in moving around without being detected. This should let you get much closer to your enemies for a better shot at taking them down. The muffle enchantment is also a great option for characters that want to move around quietly, especially with heavier armor.
Best Weapon Enchantments in Skyrim
While enchantments added to your weapons work on increasing your character’s skills and stats, weapon enchantments improve the weapons they are used on by letting them deal additional effects to enemies they face.
Soul Trap
The soul trap is one of the most unique enchantments in Skyrim. Instead of requiring you to use the soul trap spell on your enemies before killing them, and switching back to your weapon, this enchantment has a chance to directly trap the souls of your foes in empty soul gems.
While not every build will benefit equally from this ability, the soul trap is one of the best enchantments in Skyrim for one that heavily focuses on the use of enchantments as it automates the process of filling the soul gems without much of an effort on your side.
If you don’t have access to Soup Trap, the Fiery soul trap enchantment works pretty well too.
Chaos Damage
Not many enchantments can make a difference to a character’s damage output as much as this one does.
Chaos damage has a chance to do an additional amount of shock, frost, and fire damage. These effects can stack over one another and are capable of doing massive damage together. This is a great option for a player that needs the extra damage but can certainly make the game much more boring for players that don’t due to how quickly it can knock out your enemies.
Absorb Health
If you have built a glass cannon character, you might struggle to keep it alive at times. This enchantment should easily fix that problem by using all the damage you have focused on so far to keep your health topped up.
The Absorb health enchantment drains the life of your enemies and feeds it to you instead. This means that every time you take damage during a fight, you can gain it back by attacking your opponent.
This enchantment is fairly unique as, unlike most weapon enchantments, it produces an effect that is not found as a spell. The closest thing to it in the game is the drain ability that you can get by becoming a vampire lord.
Stamina Damage
The Stamina Damage enchantment simply takes a chunk out of your enemy’s stamina bar every time they are stuck with a weapon enchanted by it.
This is one of those enchantments that won’t be used too often but will be the best option when needed. The stamina damage enchantment is a great option against enemies that can get you with their power/heavy attacks.
Absorb Stamina
The Absorb Stamina Enchantment works a lot like the Damage Stamina one does, with a few added benefits. Instead of just taking away your enemies’ stamina, this enchantment focuses on recharging yours faster.
Each hit from a weapon enchanted by this effect will steal your opponent’s stamina and give it to you instead. This is a great option for anybody that uses physical weapons with moves that constantly drain your stamina bar.
Magicka Damage
Some of the biggest regular obstacles faced by players that use melee weapons are mages. Their attacks are much more difficult to counter physically and hiding is rarely an option with a sword.
Enchanting your weapons with Magika damage will drain the Magicka from these mages quickly enough to make them resort to other measures. This should give physical attackers the opportunity they need to take them down.
Absorb Magicka
After depleting your Magicka with spells, chances are, you will switch to a physical weapon until it is restored. Enchanting that go-to weapon with this effect will absorb your enemies’ Magicka upon being hit, letting you get back to using your spells much faster.
This enchantment has some niche utility but it serves its purpose well. Using this effect would benefit players that constantly switch between using physical weapons and spells the most.
Paralyze
The Paralyze enchantment has to be one of the best ways to control a crowd of enemies, as it lets you deal with the rest while some of them are unable to move.
Using a weapon that is enchanted with ‘Paralyze’ can cause enemies to stop attacking you for a while. This can allow you to either flee a battle or move on to other enemies. It also lets you easily use time-consuming attacks more often.
Shock Damage
This one’s fairly simple. The ‘Shock damage’ enchantment lets your weapon inflict shock damage to your opponent, which stacks on top of your weapon’s regular damage.
This enchantment is particularly useful when your weapons aren’t doing the damage you want them to.
Fire Damage
A weapon enchanted with this effect does an additional amount of fire damage to your enemy. It is often seen as the best damage type as, unlike the others, not many enemies you encounter will resist fire damage.
Weapons with fire damage are particularly useful against frost-based creatures.
Frost Damage
Like its counterparts, the Frost Damage enchantment does frost damage to opponents struck by the weapon.
While many enemies you will face in Skyrim may be resistant to frost damage, it comes with a set of utilities that a lot of other enchantments do not. Frost is incredibly useful in slowing enemies down. You can use this slowed speed to get your attacks in, flee battles, or strategically counter crowds.
The list above is not an exhaustive one. Traveling the lands of Skyrim can lead you to find various other great enchantments such as Fortify Smithing, Turn Undead, and others that have their own sets of uses.
Not all of Skyrim’s enchantments work with every build. To maximize the effectiveness of your character, you will need to find the best enchantments in Skyrim for yours and use them right.
If you are still searching for more Skyrim mods, check out our guides for Skyrim SE Enhanced Camera, Skyrim polygamy mods, Skyrim unarmed mods, Skyrim vampire mods, and Skyrim real clouds mods.
Do you agree with this list? Do you have any enchantments that you use regularly? Let us know in the comment section below.