The spell all bandit dunmer seem to make before fighting which makes them dodge most of you hits? Its just damn tedious fighting like this.

They shouldn't do that in the vanilla game. Are you using the 'NPC AI casts zero cost powers' option in the Morrowind Code Patch? If so, just untick that option and run the patch again.

That, or a mod that does that is the most likely culprit.

In the vanilla game, NPCs don't use zero cost powers unless instructed to via script.

Yeah I had it active in MCP, thanks a heap.

I agree that it's tedious at the beginning of the game but when your character becomes better at sword, things will get easier.