After a short break I got back to the game expansions with my "Twilight Berserker" orc character, who is now around level 53. I've felt for a while that the game became way too easy around level 20 or 25, and thus increased the difficulty to 100. This helped a little bit but in somewhat frustrating ways. For instance, the enemies seem to have the same health, but never miss you even if you use sanctuary spells.

In any case, this was working great until I started encountering werewolves just now. It seems that a werewolf can one shot me with over 500 health with the difficulty increased. I tried lowering it to 64 or so and this still randomly happens with no warning or ability to stop it, which is very frustrating of course.

Is there a way to increase the difficulty that won't leave me either underchallenged against anything but werewolves or better challenged against most enemies, but one shot at random by werewolves? Thanks.

You, my friend, must be using the Morrowind Code Patch. If you enable the "Hand-to-hand is based on strength" option, werewolves become instant death machines. They will break your shield, eat your sword, floss with your intestines, and wipe their mouths with your exquisite clothing. I ended up un-ticking that option in MCP.

Interesting. I am, yes, but "Strength-based hand to hand" is unchecked. Even so, these werewolves are taking out 561 health in one shot a reasonable amount of the time. Could it be some other patch-based setting of which I am not aware? I use all the standard ones along with some of the more popular monster mods.

Oh, yowzers, that's surprising. What's your armor rating?

564 health and 330 armor rating. What you describe makes it seem like the hand to hand box IS checked, as my shield was damaged to 0 rapidly and so forth, but when I loaded the patch to see it shows it unchecked. The thing is, the werewolves are hitting normally about 1/2 or 3/4 of the time. Then they unload with a mega shot that hits for near or over my health max from time to time.

Hm, you describe everything exactly as I remember it.... maybe you do have some mod issues... I'm pretty sure most current modders know how to deal with dirty gmst's, or whatever the game-breaking game settings are called. That was an item of concern when I was initially having this problem.... Are you on the most recent 1.9 release of the MCP?

I assume it is. The file doesn't show the number but I was careful when I installed everything, and all of this was installed within the past 6 months in any case.

I just tried rerunning the code patch with the same options checked but it didn't appear to do anything with this problem. It is basically impossible to fight more than one werewolf with this going on, that is for sure.

Werewolves are hard even at normal difficulty. Pushing the difficulty slider all the way to the right made the werewolves hit your character 6x harder than normal. This setting affects all enemies equally. In addition to increasing enemy damage pushing the slider all the way to the right reduces the damage your character inflicts by 6x.

Maybe that is what it should do but it doesn't appear to do that for my damage. I still 2 or 3 shot everything regardless of setting. I have been playing with this throughout the day, and the werewolves are still 1 shotting me at 0 difficulty setting. Either way, there is no way that my character should be getting killed this rapidly. I have the ultimate gear set save for 1 pauldron, plenty of health, and really high armor. Normal creatures are completely unthreatening.

6x, both ways? Wow, if it were anyone but you, Pseron, making that statement... I would be highly skeptical. But your knowledge is undoubtable. Is this with all attributes at 50? Is there some normalizing factor that softens the 6x in practice, perhaps other multipliers that get applied in the damage calculation (luck, attack, strength, etc)? Difficulty at 100 has certainly never seemed 12x harder in combat....

Well, I made myself a few shield constant effect items that I will incorporate into my werewolf battles, but according to UESP even the toughest werewolves on 100 difficulty should only hit for 300. These hit way harder than that on any difficulty.

It may be worth upgrading to the new MCP - it's at 1.9 now, just released last month. Re-patch your exe according to the MCP readme (making sure strength-based H2H is unchecked), and see if it does anything.

Thats normal i think. I have xbox morrowind and the Mortaag Glacier were wolves hit over 500 and break my daedric tower shield in one hit...
And i have over 400 armor rating. At this level you have to rely on physically dodging their attacks as in "getting the fawk out of the way", doing hit and runs.

Enchant an exquisite ring with two spells that “cast on use”, Restore health 100 points on self and Fire damage 100 points on target in 20 foot radius (I also had the Dragonbone cuirass). I used a Golden Saint soul to make this and I had 100 in Enchant, so I could cast this spell 40 times before the ring was empty of charges. At 100 difficulty, it was still tough against 6 werewolves at once, but it worked without my character ever dying.

The trouble is that there is no time to heal on some of these hits between my maximum 564 and 0. You can't heal for 100 if the hit hits you for 600 at random. I'm sure I can figure a way through this, but I'll be darned if I want to have to reinvent the character to do it. Orbital bombardment and ranged spells are not part of this concept. It also makes absolutely no sense to me that I could go away from my keyboard for 5 minutes against every monster throughout this game, including Almalexia, and come back at 50% or more, yet get one shot by werewolves all of a sudden in one specific area. I don't see how this can be "as intended", especially when the wiki says they do far less damage than this on 100 difficulty, let alone 0, which I have returned to with basically no change it turns out in terms of this issue.

The only 2 things I used that made werewolves killing machines is the Code Patch option (which you don't use) and Fliggerty's Improved Hand-to-Hand mod.
If it's neither of those...any werewolf specific mods active?

No werewolf mods, no. My only thought is that the code patch is turned on even though it says it is off. The werewolves in the maze should be harder than other werewolves, right? They are exactly the same in terms of hit and damage but with more health, when they should be hitting much harder than the usual ones as I have read. They appear to ignore sanctuary spells to some extent (my character uses them extensively). I have gained a little wiggle room by crafting several shield items to get my armor rating well over 400 and by training my medium armor and blunt weapon skills to max, which in GCD added a fair amount of health to my total. They are still wrecking crews well beyond what they should be, however.

At least this way I can defeat them with some reloads instead of throwing my hands up in frustration. It is still pretty frustrating when Captain Falcarius gets one shot whenever he happens to move in front on a whim.

Squidmaster, you are in cast mode before they attack and just start peppering the werewolves with fireballs from the ring. You can start this from a distance and continue it while you back up. Each time you click to cast they get zapped and you heal 100 points. I clicked faster than they could hit, although it was a close call a few times against 6 or 7 werewolves. My suspicion was that any potion or spell effects I had going stopped when a werewolf hit me. I checked this with my character and it certainly seemed the case, although I have not read this anywhere. So any buffs or restore health potions I had in effect stopped. The ring was the only solution I came up with. After I got through alive I went back and replayed it several times. The Restore Health/Fireball rings always work.