Not boasting, but my char (girlie Altmer mage/assassin) is so powerful now (lev 35) that dungeon exploring is just plain dull. every enemy is killed in seconds with no special strategy needed. I think i made a mistake in letting her get to high (master) levels in blade and blunt and bow as well as all armour and her magical abilities. sounds like heaven to those at low levels i guess, but i tell you its making any questing dead boring.
she has not died once since her 'birth' on 3rd july as i play dead is dead, but now, the fun of the risk of dying has almost gone.

i can't bear the thought of yet another re-start especially since i've created the prettiest altmer maiden yet and (sentimentally) i don't want to lose her. however, i do wish i had gone for a serious role-play strategy by insisting that she live and behave purely as a mage - i.e. no weapons or armour (except conjoured ones).

similarly, i have to say, that having very high speed, acrobatics and athletics is ruining the realism and you get no time to feel that your really there - she runs like a motor cross scrambler bike. i've started deliberatly walking her around - but it takes an age to get anywhere (as of course it would IRL). trouble is its too tempting to go fast for convenience sake.

when i started her i adopted the rationale, that, knowing she was relativly physically unfit, she would deliberatly choose to wear non-mage-like he heavy armour until she was fit and strong. well, that worked too well cos after a short time the protection afforded gets kind of addictive - so you push harder to get to higher skill, eventually maxing out at 100. so then you move on to light armour and go at it again. by the time your a master in both sets you don't need them! cos your health stat and mage's defensive magic has also risen.

so whats the moral of this tale? well, its that getting too good is very bad if you want to keep some challenge in the game.

Have you tried the difficulty slider on the menu?

Hmm. I can understand the attachment. What about enchanting something with CE silence and using only hand to hand? CE drain health, speed, whatnot might also help to feel more vulnerable. You could also go unarmored and limit your potion drinking, or how many potions you will carry at any time, or purposely gimp your potions by only using a novice mortar and pestle.

I hope you can revitalize her.

Edit- I don't know if you're on PC, but if so, Wrye Bash has an excellent Import Face feature that would allow you to reincarnate your Altmer into a new game without losing her lovely face.

I would start a new character, but this time don't make him or her so over-killy. Give your new character some limits. My paladin, for instance, can't use destruction or conjuration magic or Alchemy, since all these skills violate her Holyness. My dark-elf country witch, on the other hand, is a whiz with Alchemy, but her evil-ness limits her from using Restoration (she uses Drain spells instead!), light, and other "good" magics.

Technically, she (or any of my characters) could pick up a zillion skills, spells, quests & factions, but then she would't be as special any more. Then the game would get dull fast! NOne of my characters have speed over 40 or 50. I agree that a Speed attribute higher than this makes things feel unrealistic.

I agree that with experience the game gets too easy. I used to play uber all-rounders and like you, got bored.

So, I fixed it. My current character is at her top level of 20 (4 major skills she won't touch) and lives with loads of gimps to keep things interesting. Just a few of them:

Dresses for fashion only - normally has an armor rating of about. . . 6. Lol
No weapon except a bow. Doesn't throw any elemental damage spells except her flare for cooking crabs or illuminating dark tunnels.
Has never added a single attribute point to her base strength, endurance or luck.

Basically, she is a highly specialized glass cannon mystic archer.

While she does play very carefully, she can go anywhere and fight anything. In 500 hours she has died exactly zero times, and we have never been bored.

What worked for me in the past when things seemed to get boring was to think of it as my character being bored. The logical thing to do then is to ask your character what would get them excited again. The answers were different for each character but there always was an answer and it was always the beginning of something new and fresh.

The simple addition of a portable camp mod has got Angel all excited about camping. She has abandoned her post at the Arcane University where I had her testing out new spell combinations.

Turn up the difficulty slider..?
I find it hard to believe you kill mobs in "seconds" at level 35 if you're using 100 (max) difficulty.

If you need to up the fun after things get bring do what i did, go into every city and kill everything in sight, the Imperial City is best for this because the guards actually are a challenge, and they SWARM you, unlike the pathetic city guards of other places

When all the quests are done and your character almighty, that′s when RP kicks in

I second that

I'm a newbie who has been working on figuring out exactly how to avoid the OPs problem before I play through the game. The same thing happened to me in Fallout 3. So far, from research and from getting great adviceon this forum, here are a few things that should help...

- Move the difficulty slider to the right. I'm at 75% right now, which makes enemies do 3 times the damage and be 3 times as tough. It makes a huge difference. Moving the slider completely to the right will give enemies 6 times the health and do 6 times the damage :unsure:

If you do start a new character...

- Don't use Illusion magic.
- Don't use Conjuration magic.
- Don't create customized Destruction spells.

That should make things pretty difficult. At least it's making things very difficult for me... but it's fun!

I thought occurred to me, to slow down your character you could make a low power, long lasting drain speed spell on 'self'. In fact, custom spell making to adjust your character could become a whole quest in itself. Spell making is an art. A one-damage-point fire-damage spell added to weakness spells helps to identify the MOB amid a crowd and lets you know when the spell duration has worn off.

Time to try a little finesse instead of brute force.

I have to agree on that. Its very hard to believe a character, even a well made character could kill mob's with as much ease as your describing. Anyways though. All of the previous suggestions are good, especially enchanting an item to lower your own skill. As well as simply creating a better storyline, one wish involves either finnese or large scale battling.

Probably as other said you are playing on lower level difficulty. My favourite character is lvl 48 or something, the highest level I could achieve. I am playing with him on the middle of the difficulty slider.
There are some enemies, that are very tough. I have to use poisons, sneak attacks, blocks and to dodge them all the time. If I get rounded by more then two I have to heal my self with potions and stuff or even run.

Thanks guys. Well my difficulty slider (on vanilla ps3) is in the middle - so i guess sliding half way to the right would at least bring back SOME risk in combat, but its not the whole solution cos my char would just put a 20 points/sec forr 60 sec fire damage spell on the enemies and turn invisible until they are toast - its just too tempting. No, whats missing here i fear is the element of role play.

I am leaning towards the dreaded re-start - i do have "the save you never delete or overwrite" that is, the one just before you exit the sewars on day 1. So, i can keep my lovely Vulnavia - but this time i think she will insist on sticking to the pure mage concept - dumping all those distastfull weapons and armours before venturing outside. Also,keeping that speed stat down and really WALKING everywhere - running being reserved for a few seconds during combat (or fleeing). Just like real life.....

There is one teeny little issue i have with this. See, normally you wear heavy and repair it a lot and bash everyonev with blunt weapons just to increase that endurance stat - without it your health is pathetically low - in fact well below the damage done by a single necromancer lightning bolt. Therefore on her first encounter with a serious magik user, shes gonna get fried. I guess blunt bound weapons are ok to use and i suppose i can still add 1 point at a time to endurance - but its gonna take an age to get ANY kind of reasonable health level. Even a minor fall is fatal at health under 100 - its gonna be real tough - remember also i only play dead is dead - so even tougher then

Final poser - what factions do you think she'd join (other than the MG 'natch) - would a pure mage still consider the FG? What about DB or thieves? Normally i like to everything, but if role playing i guess some of it must be off limits - what do you think??????

Edit: sudden epiff-ephiph-any, oh hell - IDEA. What do reckon about making a hard copy crib sheet to remind myself of the rules (Tenents! Lol) that i need top stick to, to keep her in role.

Endurance. Two approaches:

1. Repair the armor of everyone you kill, even if you just drop it. That will net you plenty of armorer skill. If you use a dagger or staff, you can quaff a few shield potions and let weak enemies rail on you while you block. Pay for some heavy armor skill boosts. There is some more endurance.

~ or. . . and my recommendation:

2. Ignore endurance. My character is a glass cannon with base endurance. Here are a couple stats on her:
Level: 20
Hours played: almost 500
Deaths: 0
You wanted some challenge, right?

This is my approach too. I've always thought there was kind of an irony involved with Endurance. In the early levels, when every point of health is lifesaving, you don't see much of a difference in hitpoints between a character who maximizes Endurance and a character who doesn't. Later, when we do begin to see a difference in hitpoints, hitpoints are not nearly as important. By then the player's uber combat skills prevent most enemies from hitting the player as often.

I completely agree with the no endurance boosts. Another thought would be to, if you still plan to start another character who is a mage, is to take the Atronach birthsign, or a birthsign that has no magic bonuses at all. I have a mage and a ronin atm. The ronin is born under the Atronach, and can only use Mysticism and Restoration. The mage, frankly is in the same category as your assassin; he can cut people down in no time, using strictly magic, even with the difficulty setting at 75%. I haven't played him in a month or so.

If you are going to role-play, mages guild only. I cannot see any logical way that you, as a pure mage, would join another faction. Besides, you've already done it all before on a different character, that is, you've experienced all the different things in all the different factions. Now limit yourself to one faction, or none!, and put more study into the world around you.

hmmmmm. thanks again. Food for thought......

It's much easier to role play when you take the factions out of it at the beginning. IMO anyway. Don't worry about those and see how things go. When I set my character up, her majors are what she uses and is good at on a day to day basis. That is how I view them. Minors are things she knows about and has no interest in at this time. That does not mean that she won't inevitably find something she knows little about COULD be useful to know more about. Such as sneak or whatever. Here comes more role play. How can I learn more about this? etc, etc. After listening to rumors, finding that some skill is lacking by adventuring around. Finding magic becoming weaker as the world around her grows stronger may lead her to the mages guild. It will all sort of snowball from there.

My Chaos Witch had no interest in the mages guild or any other guild for that matter until she found the spells she could buy were not keeping up with what she needed. She pvssyd with some at the guild, heard about Hannibal Traven and WHAM. She joined up and it became her mission to take him down and bring back necromancy. Throughout that, she found out she LIKED killing. And she was very good at it. She has a collection of small pointy things she loves to play with along with her magic. Enter the Dark Brotherhood when she offed the old guy and Weye because he was a pitiful excuse for a human being. What? Mage AND DB? Yup. And she is quite good at both She's fun because I let the game take her on her path. I don't worry about endurance, strength, etc .. I let her dictate what interests her. Basically same for my other characters as well.

On the guilds, I agree with OuijaU. Let your character decide and develop that as they go. Fortunately, you have done all the guilds so you shouldn't mind if your character is picky. I'm very careful not to try and use mental gymnastics to rationalize and push my characters towards guilds. Here is how that applies to my current character:

Buffy is an archer who won't touch a melee weapon. She began to realize that if she wasn't going to use a melee weapon for backup, she would need some magic. The head of her local mages guild in Bravil was an illusionist who allowed Buffy to join the guild. She was trained at the University as a mystic archer and feels quite a bit of loyalty to many individuals in her guild who have helped her.

It would not occur to her to join the guild that uses things like swords or axes to hit people - she knows she is physically too weak (stuck at base strength) to do anything with a sword besides piss off her foes. Besides, with base endurance, she's not built to go toe-to-toe with anything. Why send a scrawny elf where an arrow or spell can go?

She willingly murdered someone who was a clear and present threat to her, but could not force herself to complete the DB initiation - she won't kill on command and she won't kill innocents - so the DB is out.

Similarly, she finds she earns plenty of money making and selling potions/enchanted items (thanks to the mages guild) so she doesn't really have an interest is stealing stuff.

Jauffre was quite rude to her, so she stormed out of his priory and certainly would not join his outfit.

So. . . it turns out that she is so far, a one-guild happy elf. :dance:

I put my bosmer archer chick in charge of the fighters guild precisely cause I didn't care for their tough guy atitude

Though admitedly strength, luck and personality were the only base values she had by then

Once I went on a massacre in the IC market district and I killed over 50 guards at least, it was all because of my poisons because I had maxed alchemy and was only level 11 with 60 marksman, so if you ask me, don't use any potions if you want things to be harder.

I sometimes wish you could pick less than 7 majors. Some of my characters are not that good at lots of things.

If you max the slider, you'll be surprised at how weak you become. A spell like that will only do 3.3 damage per second and will either get ripped by Dispel or healed through if you put it on a caster (and you'll die of old age waiting for it to nibble through a leveled critter). This forces you to change your tactics and throw out your basic tools in favor of more subtle things.

If the character is getting stale, there's nothing wrong with "reincarnating" her and going through differently. It's done all the time by the people around here. The fun part of Oblivion is the stage where your character is evolving, not finished.