The comment from Verant (I forget who exactly said it, sorry) was
that "exceptional strength" would give you the bonus in
blacksmithing. "Exceptional" was not defined so we can only
speculate at this point; I _personally_ would consider strength
over 150 to be exceptional, though they could easily have meant
125 or 100. When the bonus kicks in, and how good it is, will
take a long time and a lot of blacksmithing to give enough of a
data sample.
In any case, I sincerely doubt a strength of 98 would get any of
that bonus.
--
"Ninety percent of everything is crap." - Theodore Sturgeon
There is now over 550 billion pages of info on the World Wide Web.
Therefore, there are 55 billion web pages that are not crap.
[Revision 2.0 of this sig. New to 2.0 - Ted's quote has been corrected.]