Am I the only who thinks it's goofy that a mammoth is trickier to tackle than a dragon? Watching a dragon attack what basically amounts to a furry elephant and lose is strangely...demoralizing. Dragons, tough as they are, just aren't feeling to me like the top of the food chain. You'd think an intelligent, armored, flying, fire-breathing behemoth of legend would be able to take care of a hairy, malodorous circus animal. Just sayin'.

It's because they have four tusks.

Nah, it's probably because mammoths really aren't a staple part of your every-day questing, so they can be given a cranked-up difficulty without much issue, where-as if Dragons were the same way, you could run into quest-progression difficulty-walls. I guess Bethesda just didn't want this happening.

As you level up this will change. I'm pretty sure a blood dragon would mess up a mammoth pretty badly, and elder/ancient dragons will have a field day. Also, a part of the strength of dragons is that they can fly around breathing fire/frost down on their enemies. As most players have some kind of ranged damage and/or healing this won't be too much of a problem, but that doesn't count for everyone.

A nice lore reasoning for this is that you're the dragonborn, so the dragons are more vulnerable to you, or being near you.

Have you ever attacked an elephant? Go out into the wilds of Africa and report back with your findings.

You do realize that the mammoths are a good six tons or whatever? The dragons would be tougher if they either (1) never landed and just roasted your butt from the air or (2) landed and stayed landed and chomped your guts out. Many times a dragon has gotten me blow half health, then it takes to the air again, allowing me time to magically re-heal myself. Then it lands and I whack it.

The most dangerous enemies in the early game has to be bandit chief, bears and sabertooth. All of those can easily 2 shot you in early game on master before you can get to use any kind of character progression to stand a chance. Especially sabertooth. My goodness do they attack fast.

Dragons on the other hand give you plenty of warning to prepare and telegraph all their attacks for easy evasion.

It will be the opposite when you level up a bit. Also you have a great tool when fighting mammoths, a medium sized rock. Just walk around the rock attacking them with bow/spells and they can't get you.

If you tackle a mammoth on open ground, you will struggle. I like how difficult they are as it forces you to think - you do not run in and shout BLAARGH, you stalk the thing, you hunt it like a caveman, and once you've found a raised bit of ground that it cannot reach you take advantage of its overly aggressive nature and rain arrows on it until it falls.

Yeah, I know elephants are tough, aggressive, weigh six tons, have big tusks, and so on. My point isn't that they shouldn't be hard to take down, not at all, but I just found it peculiar to watch Dumbo violently curb-stomp Smaug; not unlike a dead baby joke, it was both horrifying and strangely funny. But it comforts me to learn that dragons get tougher as I level, and will soon be putting the mammoths in their place, thanks.

I chalk this up to the dragons not making full use of their strongest ability which is FLIGHT. Basically a dragon should never voluntarily get into melee. That's silly. If dragons never landed and just strafed the mammoths with fire and ice breath, things would be quite different. You should have to force a dragon to land with arrows and spells before you can hack on it with a sword (or tusk).

Definitely. The enemies in this game shouldn't try to fight you on your terms, shouldn't make their imminent method of attack obvious, and just generally shouldn't ever do anything to level the playing field for you. They should ruthlessly exploit your shortcomings and hammer your weaknesses. Strafing is their most effective method of attack - so why don't they do it more than they do?

Dragons? Intelligent?

Sure sure, they've got speech and culture. But get back to me when they have tools. Bloody firebreathing geckos can't even use a dagger properly.

why does a murderer bandit kill someone with knives swords instead of guns bows? personal preference, there should be some dragons that like to sit there and eat you alive and some that would rather take flight to fight with their breath attacks (and there should be dragons for every tactic inbetween)

Indeed.

I think it would already make the situation far better if they had more types of melee attacks. Now they just stay still and try to bite you. Only thing they do while flying is breath fire/frost. Why not add a flying melee attack? Fly at stuff with their claws or jaws and rip it apart. They seem agile despite their size so why not use that.

They do indeed have tools - several six-inch long knives strapped to the ends of their appendages. Which is to say nothing of the flamethrower they can shout to their service. They can cook and cut their food with the best of us, my friend.