I guess I'll tell this story again, because I'm not seeing much about this. And I can't be the only one experiencing this garbage in the game.

I play an Altmer mage on Adept difficulty. I'm level 40+ with 250 Health and 400+ Magicka (I can't remember the exact number there... 430 now, I think). My skills: Destruction 88 (focused on lightning damage w/ Disintegration), Alteration: 85 (I have Mage Armor and Resist Magic perks maxed, with Stability and dual casting for more duration), Conjuration: 80, Restoration: 50ish, Alchemy: 100, Enchanting: 100. I don't bother with Illusion, yet, and probably never will. I wear all cloth armor with Destruction and Magicka Regeneration enchants on the head and chest, and Resist Magic on the ring and necklace. I have a total of 76% Resist Magic. I run Ironflesh at 240 Armor Rating, which doesn't seem to protect very much.

I know some of you are playing on higher difficulties and still I don't see many complaints about being one-shot-killed, but even if you were, at least it would make sense on the highest difficulty level. But there's something very fishy going on here, and I would like to know if it's a bug in the game, or just the way things are. And if it's the latter, then I think I'm going to have to quit playing, because I can't put up with this.

I go to Lost Knife Hideout (or Cave or whatever it is called), and clean the place out. I go up to the second level of the cave where the animal pens are, and go into the room. Thus far, I have had no problems killing anyone. Then suddenly my character dies and flies across the room in slow motion. My first thought is, "What the hell just killed me?" I reload and the same thing happens. Just suddenly, quickly, I fly into the air and I am dead. An arrow is sticking out of my shoulder.

So it's an archer, one-shotting me. I think, well, I will summon a frost atronach to keep him busy. It doesn't work.. the frost atronach immediately explodes and then I fly across the room in slow motion as I am one-shotted. This archer guy is killing my summon in one shot, and then me, too.

The third reload, I get between the archer and another bandit, and the bandit is hit by the arrow and immediately dies.
Then I die, next.

Something is wrong here. It can't really be this way, can it? They must have given these bandit archers too much damage by accident? Like added another zero on the end, by accident?

Most of my deaths seem to be to archers too, their scaling is a bit strange at times. But the game'd be really boring if every place could be cleared the same way imo

See if you can sneak up on him (don't need melee range, just close enough to hit reliably with spells) and spam him with dual casts so hard he can't get out of the Impact stunlock before he dies.

Have you tried .... leaving and coming back later? Most dungeons have one "boss" level creature/NPC who is MUCH tougher than the rest of the rabble in there.

There are areas of this game that you can't just walk into at any level and expect to win like in Oblivion.

Or try a different strategy. A scroll, or staff... Have an invisibility potion? Getting close might make them switch to melee instead of some amazing bow that they were spawned as using.

Sometimes the scaling in this game is a bit sketchy and you'll get one opponent who is ridiculously tough compared to the rest of the rabble that you one shot. Yes I understand this is intended to be a sort of "boss fight" but a lot of the time it just makes no sense at all, like a bandit chief being a god of war, to the point of being able to kill dragons, as compared to the rest being a disorganised rabble. Unless this one guy is actually some form of Daedric Prince in disguise I just can't understand why they're so damn tough. The is the Elder Scrolls not a D&D game.

It happens.

My Level 49 Assasin character got chomped in one go by a cave bear the other day. The scaling is a bit weird sometimes.

I am not a sneaky character. But it would not have mattered anyway. He was not the only archer there. There was this guy, and a woman, and both of them had bows. And both of them hit like they were shooting armor-piercing mortar shells from Panzer cannons.

The enemy archer damage needs to be scaled down.

I had a similar issue with enemy conjurers becoming God. One-shot by ice spike. But at least I worked around that with Resist Magic. Now they hit like little girls.
But these archers, there is no workaround, and they can shoot you through the walls.

EDIT: This archer and his female friend were NOT bosses. The bandit chief there was a sissy. I let him attack me on purpose just to see, and it took him 6 hits to kill me. Getting one-shot by trash archers makes me convinced that enemy archers are BROKEN. At least the high-level ones are.

I actually still have my save-file is anyone wants to see. Heck, I'll e-mail it to you if you give me an e-mail, and you can see for yourself what I mean.

I find it quite thrilling and then frustrating when you run across one of those high damage inflicting archers and you get bi@tch slapped and your @$$ handed to you. I recall one location, Shroud Hearth I think, that I finally gave up and moved on. The archer would draw back and let an arrow fly so fast hitting me square in the head almost every time. There was no moving or sneaking or even hiding behind a rock that I'd be lucky to survive. At first I was like wtf...cussing and trying to regroup at what just happened consuming potions, checking armor, scrolls, etc. Reflecting on that encounter, I do find myself thinking about it and in the whole scheme of things I do like the variety of having that rare possibility of every once in a while getting hammered by some character. Kind of brings you down a notch, a little humbling, don't ya think?

i find numerous occasions where you'll be rolling and ripping through bad guys no problemo.... and then.... like a giant happened to waltz up behind you and turn you into a crushed pop can out of nowhere..

while it is indeed super frustrating... i do like it.

I'm a sneaker/strategist..... I tend to look for the best possible advantage i could get with as least amount of direct hits received be it malee or range.

I know even as a light armor wearer with top level gear, and high resists, i can get steamrolled by numerous enemies in direct one on one fights. Where i can sustain about 10 guards beating on me at once, i can't survive usually more then 1 or 2 hits from say SPECIFIC archers or malee enemies. Someone with a two handed weapon if they can land a hit, usually will kill me. Mages with that damn icebolt thing have a habit of destroying me in 1 or 2 hits as well.. and if they have the big ones, i'm screwed if they can hit me. Almost all the main bad guys i can't go toe to toe with, have to do the whole sneak, fire an arrow, run away and hope their hp doesn't recharge and that i can become hidden fast enough to avoid direct detection otherwise i'm likely dead.

Archers are truly wicked (and I love it) in this game. That is classic too, such as Ranger classes being weaker in melee but able to stand out of combat range and just DPS the crap out of anything.

Even on lower difficulty this is true. I'm currently on Master so it's real bad, so cloth armor is esentially naked to them. Not sure if magic based armor works well or not I haven't done it.

I would suggest trying to counter this with another classic strategy, and that's summon a Tank for you. The Ice Golem is probably a good one. If your light or nill armor big DPS your weakness is, well, any physical damage from anything.

Frost Trolls are a great example of aggressive NPC Tanks that can wipe out 10 NPC's on a rampage with ease, and wound up leading the svcker up the entrance to a city until me, 2 more guards and 2 horses were finally able to take that monster down.

For reference my light armor stealth character can take 1 hit from a Frost Troll. 2 hits and I'm a dead smudge.

I play on Apprentice. I think its silly that im the 'dragon born' and a bandit war chief can take me out with ease. I dont play ES series for gameplay challenge, i play for the exploration and 'slight' challenge. Seems they ramped up average difficulty in this game because many people complained of the previous games not being 'challenging' enough. These people should be playing something else, cause if youre looking to die and reload 5 times in an ES game it seems to break any immersion

I get one shot killed all the time. It's no bug lol, games are already too easy to beat. I finally can enjoy a game with a challenge! Don't blame it on bugs plz! I don't see why I should complain, I just use my brain and find ways to win battles without getting hit. Which is awesome. If people started to cry and complain about it, developers are gonna make it all too easy again. If I wanted to play stupid eaasy games I'd go back to playing console games. If you think it's to hard I suggest you lower the difficulty or get better I play on max difficulty btw, so it's normal for me to get killed easily. If you don't want to play challenging games, don't play PC, play console like other kids, don't come here and cry to make the developer create games I can't enjoy cuz they're too freaking easy. The only thing worst than bugs is people coming here and complaining that things they can't beat just because they can't figure out how it works.

I think you missed the part where he tried that and they just one-shotted his summon before one-shotting him too. xD

You know I do understand what you mean here in that you just want to be able to explore the world and enjoy it without concern the next rock or bush has a Grizzly, Troll or sharp shooter waiting to cut you down like paper.

But, there are far more folks looking for true challenge as opposed to feeling like a demi-god. It adds SO, so much to the game for us because it seems more real, because we are "just another joe" in the world and not an automatic skull-cracking, fire lobbing demon compared to everything around us.

As far as Dragon Born I look at it like this. I am specialized in killing Dragons. That doesn't automatically mean I am specialized in killing everything I ever encounter like a bug. That's what made Oblivion so horrendous. There was no threat, ever, no matter what. After awhile it simply didn't matter what you encountered, you could just wipe ithrough it like paper and keep on going. That's extremely boring.

BUT... you have the command console at your disposal to make and tweak yourself to be precisely how you want if the games default behavior is driving you away.

For example, Player.ModAV Health 1500 will throw on an additional 1500HP without changing -anything- else, thereby not making you wicked strong but now giving you a much more massive pool of health so you can stand longer in battle before you go, giving you a better experience if I read what you're after correctly.

So far on this character I am explciitly role playing and have not used any console at all (except occasional check on essential flags when I want to take something out for annoying me). And it's rough as hell. At the moment I have to run, a lot, from all kinds of crap. Encountering a full blown Grizzly in the wild is a death sentence if I try and fight. This makes exploring so much more intense and dangerous which was sorely lacking in previous series.

man u tryin to start them flame wars boy.

also, Skyrim is a console game.

Oops sorry about that. Then he should definitely just pump an extra 1K or 2 into his health pool with ModAV and it should make it much more tolerable without ruining everything else nor making him super (offense-wise) strong.

I don't see a problem. Player characters can easily one-shot kill NPC enemies, it's only fair that they can do the same.

Hi,

I don't mind super-tough enemies, though I can see why it'd be annoying, I generally just come back later.

However, something is...odd regarding the damage enemy archers can deal...

I'm an archer myself, level 97 in archery, plenty of perks, I'm also sneaky. My best Ebony Bow does 104 damage (smithing improved) at my skill level. Add to that the Elven (I think) arrows that add 20 to that and the 25 fire damage plus damage over time when burning. Well, I can do ~150 pure damage or 450 with the 3x sneak bonus. Thing is, I wonder how enemy archers are doing over 200 pure damage to me (i.e one shot, 200 is my health) despite me wearing full Legendary Elven Armour (though not sure on the math how armour reduces damage.) Add to this that they are NOT sneaking me, so no 3x bonus for them, and they're only usually using fairly normal bows - i.e. base damage of no more than 70 (at my skill level) for the very best enemy bow I've recovered and they often just use Iron or Steel arrows. Even if they had 20 damage arrows their best attack should be way less than the 150 I can do.

So, yeah, something is odd - it's like certain enemy archers have like 200+ Archery skill or something as they're getting their bonus from somewhere - it's certainly not from their gear so they must have some massively buffed base archery stat.

Oh yeah, even at 450 sneak attack damage I encounter plenty of foes that this doesn't even do 25% damage too - most recently some Drauger Wights. I'm level 42 btw.

Cheers,

Scoob.

^ Unless there really is a bug (which based on the total amount discovered so far, it may very well be) I would guess they are getting Crits. A lot of them.

Yeah, very good point, repeated crits would go a long way to explaining things - what is the crit bonus do you know off the top of your head?

Scoob.

^ nope sure don't but if they're (no clue, could check their stats with console though) super high archery skill with (unknown) bonuses and massive crit percentage they would certainly be ripping off chunks like clever through butter.

The OP could do that easily enough, use console commands to invul or pause the AI then to select that eveil archer and dump it's stats and have a look.

I play a high sneak archer, with summons and companions to tank for me. If I get one-shotted (or two-shotted), it's almost always from some plate-wearing dude with a great sword or a battle axe who manages to get close to me. I tend to do a lot of running when my sneak gets burned. The armor-boosting and the ward spells are also a help.

Do NPC archers use poisons? A poison-resist potion might be in order.

Yeah, heavy melee characters can cause me a scare for sure. However archers don't appear to use poisons etc. though sometimes they'll have an enchanted bow which does extra damage.

Must admit, I've not put any perks in light armour, my armour is only 300 or so...maybe I should lol. I think I'm a perk-point horder as I'm always waiting for the next best thing to spend them on - having miss-spent on destruction early game and rarely using it.

Scoob.

I'm not going to use a cheat to make the game playable.

If these arrows ignore armor and do 250+ damage in one shot on normal difficulty, AND the archer is NOT a boss, sorry, but I'm calling bug/oversight on this.
I'd like to hear someone at Bethesda say one thing or another about it. Probably won't happen, though.

P.S. Is the Construction Set even out yet? I would imagine yes, if there are already mods available for the game... surely someone will discover the truth of this, hopefully soon.

I've taken some big damage from archers but I have 380 health and legendary dragonscale armor so it usually takes 3 hits to kill me. If I sprint and fire breath them or two-hand power attack they are dead quickly. When I happen to run across a couple mages with shock I lose every time. One hits me with cold to slow me down and then they proceed to zap me to death before I get close.

agree