Blacksmith and leather enhancing of imbued items won't make much difference. Even valorite ingots just add 13 resist, and barbed leather only adds 12. Neither of those would make much of a difference. However, when they reworked woodcrafting for ML, the Devs made woodcrafting enhancing ultra-powerful. They never did increase the other crafts to make them anywhere near as potent. Imbue your armor first, then enhance with bloodwood for an extra 18 resist AND hpr 2, then imbue a bokuto and add 2 hpr AND 16% life leech with bloodwood. You end up with some really uber items with bloodwood. I can see plenty of reasons to enhance wood items AFTER imbuing, despite the tremendous amount of risk; we end up with a 650-700 range item that's better than any of the major artifacts in several cases.
My future suit:
A MATCHING! suit, all GM made, all bloodwood, all 70s: you need 350 points of total resistance for all 70s. If you keep making regular pieces till you get just the right resists in the right place, you can use all 108 points that enhancing 6 pieces with bloodwood will give. By having arms lore, each piece has 40 resist to begin with, total 240. Add the 108 points for enhancing the 6 pieces with bloodwood, and a veteran cloak, and you don't have to use one single imbuing point to get to 350.
REMEMBER: Imbue first, then enhance; if you enhance first, you lose the extra benefits from imbuing. Of course, when you enhance, there's close to a 90% chance that it'll pop. But that's the risk you have to take to get truly uber stuff.
I'm going to Imbue each piece for:
3x stamina regen
2x hit point regen
7 stamina
7 mana
5 hit points
Then enhance to get the extra 2x hit point regen per piece, total 4 hpr per piece after enhancing.
Then I'll add a ring and bracelet with:
HCI 15
DCI 15
DI 45
dex 7
str 7
on each
and I'll keep using my old 8/15/14 reflect/HCI/DCI shield, from before they removed hci from all the new ones that spawn. I've been offered a fortune for mine; think I'll keep it.
That will make my warrior's uber suit's totals:
all 70s
18 stamina regen
24 hit point regen
42 stamina
42 mana
30 hit points
dex 14
str 14
DI 90
HCI 45
DCI 44
reflect 8
Swinging a Bokuto with 15 hci, 15 dci, 30 ssi, 40 di, and 45% lightning, plus enhanced with Bloodwood for 2x HPR and 16% life leech.
Which will make my total offense:
60 HCI, 59 DCI, 130 DI, 30 SSI, 45% lightning, 16% life leech.
I think I'm going to like imbuing. A lot. Of course, that suit will cost a major fortune in materials, especially since I'll probably pop like 100 of them trying to enhance them. I'm guessing I'll have like 100-200 million in materials by the time it's done. I'll probably have to spend 20 million just buying bottles of powder of fortification; it'll take about 20 applications of it for every piece of armor that I pop while trying to enhance it. It'd be bad to spend a fortune making that suit, then lose it because I didn't have enough left to insure it. LOL
Questions for Wilki: What are the current caps for HCI, DCI, DI and SSI? And the current cap for stamina/dexterity? If I'll be over the caps for anything, I'll need to change some of those to keep everything under the caps. For instance, I could add magic resist skill instead of hci/dci or damage. Also, do you know what the odds of success in enhancing each piece of that suit will be for a GM carpenter?