I'm on the Xbox 360. Yea, it's extremely annoying when they fly underground and come back up about 200 feet away from you with low health but just fly away and you can't catch up.... You miss out on a few dragon souls that way (not that I need them).

It's obvious that they've put a lot of work into dragons but really you aren't any kind of high end developer if you can't comprehend object relations programming.

if you think how a "real" dragon would act, it wouldn't fly slow so you could hit it, and it wouldn't land close to you so you can wack it. their breath has an awesome range, of course they're going to land farther away. they weren't meant to be easy

umm in my game the dragons land whenever they feel like it, even at full health in the cases I haven't bothered to shoot arrows at them (like I usually don't, I'm a sword dude)) they just need a bit of open ground to land...

The dragons have a good groundwork, but they have many quirks and failings too in my opinion.

1. Landing somewhere/on something, flying around in a circle, then landing exactly where it was a moment before, repeatedly, looks really odd,.
2. Landing at all, when there are multiple enemies on the ground, there really ought to be a sort of "confidence" value that determines when a dragon lands before it it is forced to.
3. Decision making can be a bit slow, may be animation related...but it can basically turn around and take forever to decide whether it wants to bite you, or use its breath on you.
4. Not enough raw defense or raw attack damage, that or a percentage of their damage needs to bypass resistances and armor to remain threatening.
5. No maneuverability when grounded. No leaping, or running, or any sort of evasive or repositioning maneuver makes them sitting ducks.
6. Not enough shout diversity.
7. As mentioned before, indecisiveness regarding to priority targets. Its main target should always be the greatest threat at the moment.

My only frustration is the dragons choices of landing zones at times. The game has a lot of mountains and it seems like every time I use dragonrend the dragon chooses a spot a mile away up a mountain instead of the flat plains under it when I used the shout.

I would say they should land a lot more often. The only time they are actually dangerous (on the default difficulty) is when they are on the ground. When they are flying around they don't attack fast enough to overcome any method a player can use to heal themselves. If they never landed then you punish melee orientated characters (and it is massively boring waiting for them to land even with a character that has a ranged attack but hasn't spent a lot of perks in that tree). How about you force them to always land right on top of the player and stay constantly in melee, how much fun would that be for Mages, or Archers?

Dragon AI is pretty impressive and most encounters evolve into an epic battle. Ocassionaly they do akward things like flying trough a mountain or shifting focus on a rabbit but overall its very good. If they were only a little harder to fight but I guess that would make hell for 2h and dual wielders.

I agree that Dragons, and I mean not only the AI, but the animations and sound effects as well, are pretty impressive and have been amazingly well executed.

1st real WOW with a dragon , ontop of a monutain at the dragons "shrine" and it was flying and landing but 1 hit to many meant it couldn't fly. I was standing on this flat top bit in front of the shrine, the dragon came falling down and hit the side of the flat area just over the edge out of view. The snow and earth came rumbling up in a wave of earth and I had to move backwards- was real cool.

lol that has happened to me alot to!

I agree and as usual Bethesda showed us in videos before release so called dragons picking up and dropping people, which I have yet to see at 100 hours in and level 35. Has anyone else seen it happen in their game?

One of the smartest AIs I ever seen in gaming. Much better than those AIs scripted for every single second from other games.

LOL.... really? Many of us do "know" gaming, that game you quoted... yeah. Tell you what, I'll stick with Skyrim thanks

I agree the dragon AI seems good. I'm not such a great gamer (as in skilled, I do know programming & games though) and I regularly get stomped by dragons. I don't max or min my skills, I don't grind any, I level "naturally" from stuff I'd do anyway. If I need to level a certain skill, I get training. So, dragons represent a challenge for me every time. I'm happy to see them flying about in an apparently "realistic" flight pattern, although I understand why they occasionally present a target and also land. It's to give me a chance, after all it is a game

Dragon AI is well done and well scripted, I agree with that. Making them land is needed to make them more melee friendly.
Never seen them clip through buildings or terrain...only flaw I've seen so far is when they decide to attack some mudcrab/wolf/other stupid animal instead of you/guards/npcs that are a real menace for them.
Anyway, to improve these beasts, they just need more attacks, expcially some sort of AoE for when they land and get surrounded by npcs, and they need more shouts, I cannot stress enough with that...giving them some shouts beside the breath/ball ones would make fights harder and more interesting.

The dragons are pretty sweet. Even the constant clumsy dive bombs onto open ground nowhere near me are endearing.