In finishing up work now on a massive combat/companion expansion I am finding one of the most challenging aspects to be the striking of a fair and immerse balance that will simultaneously enrich the game experience without trivializing content.

Part of this challenge is determining what difficulty to balance that content to. As it is I am drawing up all my balance tables on the assumption of Master difficulty or above. I feel this is appropriate at this stage of the game's life and people's general experience with the title.

Another consideration however would be where the "sweet spot" levels out with regard to auto-leveling lists. In other words sure, the player can continue to level to 81 and even beyond now, however what level does 90% of the game cap out at? In my experience there is very little you encounter in vanilla Skyrim or the DLC's that is above ~level 50's.

So I am wondering, what general guidelines would you follow in your experience? Where does the "soft level cap" of leveled lists seem to fall in your experience, and what is a good "target max" to shoot for realistically, beyond which it is fine to start making things a bit OP since a level 81 character by itself will already have trivialized 90% of content.

EDIT: This maybe should be in the mod section.