No ty, already takes quite a long time to get to max level, and some people have jobs & families to worry about also..

Edit, I've been playing since it came out with almost all of my spare time, I'm level 15

I have also wondered about this. The highest difficulty is not supposed to be fair or balanced.

Question: Is your sneak 80 and your combat skill 30's? or something else like that? Because when your level advances too far past your combat skill it gets quite hard..

My character has 63 Sneak, and 36 1handed.. I manage on Expert... I dont do smithing or enchanting (just to clarify)

I played on Adept my first play through although I wasn't initially aware of that. Got to level 73, and I deleted my guy and I'm starting again soon. Will play on Master this time. It sounds good. I love the game, I found it hard but now I know what I'm doing it's easy enough, Bethesda did a great job though -- best game I've ever played.

I play on master. Master is a good challenge and I don't have any strong point against it. Unless you can count those times where a stronger bear appears that is more difficult to take on than a dragon. Then again, there are weaker types of dragons and so are bears.

It basically depends on the encounters. Some times you pass through a place you have been before, so you get lower level fighting bandits. Other times you are surprised by a skilled boss scavenger (just realised they seem to be using perks too) or a really powerful mage with two low level bandits harassing with melee.

I've got 3 perks in smithing, steel elven and magic. I did not try to prove the game unbalanced, like maximizing the smith class or only making bracers or daggers (just because they are the most economical). I build a full set and gp sell it. I don't care about "optimization" ratio - this is not that kind of "real time strategy" game.

I have been enjoying myself without having to worry on limits and "dangerous powergaming". If you are not having fun you are just not doing it right ™.

TES fans have traditionally expected a certain degree of godliness for their characters at the end of 200-300 hours of game play - even for those who bragged about the game to been too easy after following the optimization guides.

I for one believes in this: the more open the game, the easier to break the game. Observe that from Morrowind to oblivion to skyrim, we are losing freedom in terms of spells and effects (levitation, command human/creature, skill debuff, spell making) and in turn, our character is actually LESS broken. Those who do not know how broken oblivion and Morrowind characters can become with much less effort, have not played those games.

Master Difficulty - "I got one shotted, not balanced" thats is not problem of balance, bandits, guards and bears thats kill dragons in short time is actual balance problem,
I have feeling thats most of Dragons level is tied to Player character level almost equally but have cap on certain level, while certain wild life and bandits have character level +X and their level cap is higher then dragons have, thats why we see such strange things.

Yeah but it's not like we're talking about an MMO. This is a single player game. You aren't under any type of time constraints other than those you impose upon yourself. Slowing skill leveling down means that monsters are going to be more difficult to kill on all difficulty levels. It also gets rid of the so-called exploits. The only reason enchanting/smithing are exploited is because they are so easy to level up. Slow that down and the exploiting stops. So does the problem with magic. Instead of casting spells on higher level creatures where your spells have little to no effect, you'll be casting at creatures at about an equal level. The game gets more difficult and a lot more fun.

I play master for the same reason. In real life, even a big-god-damn-hero can die to a lowly bandit, or errant arrow simply because his missed a beat - being able to stand there and soak up a barrage of arrows or being mauled by a dragon feels more immersion breaking than being one-shotted through carelessness. And even in the scale of heros, there exist those who are stronger, faster or smarter than you and pose a serious threat to your survival in a fight.

Just remember Oblivion's high-level level up message

they have played those games morrowind tends to get put on a pedastal most of the time and no one admits thats all nostalgia with my ps3 broken ive turned to morrowind and can see alot of what makes charachters in this game broken

Two things that got me to stop playing on Master difficulty:

One-hitting. Especially happens with Archers. You walk somewhere with fully smithed armor, normal enemies can barely cause a dent to your health, then suddenly you drop dead, because an Archer one-shotted you. No while you might argument that this adds challenge to the game, it in fact only adds a hit to the quick-load to the game, because the second time I know where the archer is and he will no longer kill me. Effectively this turns out to be just annoying but nothing else.

There is no difficulty later on. At the beginning everything was fine and dandy. I had epic battles, common enemies were tough and in general I was challenged a lot to get through the quests. Then I obviously leveled up too fast, enemies were pointlessly beating me up, forcing me to retreat and work on my equipment. A bit annoying but well, still ok at this point. A few levels later and with some serious armor and weapons, enemies were suddenly just a nuisance, but no longer a challenge. The common enemy could not do enough damage to even scratch my health, only 2h enemies were a bit challenging, but that stopped a bit later as well. I finally moved back to Adept, not because I was overwhelmed, but because the difference between Master and Adept was just the time it took to bring down the health-bar of an enemy. No enemy even remotely has a chance to kill me (beside those one-shotters), so all I have to do is to pointlessly bash down their hp. Adept is exactly the same non-existing challenge, but it takes like 10 minutes less to complete a dungeon.

That is where balance should come in, to keep a constant challenge at Master level, but Bethesda failed to deliver that.

Wrong. Slowing skill leveling means the player is that much richer and well geared at any level range, which in turn would make it much easier to play at level 20 with such change than in vanilla. It only took you twice the time to reach that point.

Smithing isn't easy to level and thus broken. Smithing is broken because the benefits are huge and because there's no way to level the skill through natural usage : you HAVE to make a lot of stuff you don't need at all except selling to NPCs because once you made a couple elven weapons and armor sets, there's no need to make more but you still didn't unlock the next rank items anyway.

This is probably the most sensible thing I've read around here since Skyrim was released. In the previous two games it was far easier to break the game by exploiting it's mechanics. Of course, I wouldn't expect most people here to admit it, at least in the case of Morrowind.

I concur here. Master level difficulty is supposed to HARD. You should half to "exploit" every "broken" skill of the game to succeed. People want to play on Master level difficulty but they want to 'role-play' their conan character who runs around with only a 2-handed sword in a loincloth. Then they complain that the game is too hard.

This is why games have become overly easy as the years progress. The highest level difficulty of any game should be NEAR impossible to beat. People always have the option to turn down the difficulty to their enjoyment level.

Please.... leave the highest difficulties alone. They need to be challenging and should not be 'balanced' for everyone to play.

If you are going to re-load and find that annoying play on normal level like it was meant. Wait, killing you with a well placed arrow is "not fine" yet you want the highest difficulty setting?

And if everything would be constant there would be no challenge, at all.

I had one character once that was fighting that awful troll. He sliped in a rock and failed to shield up, so he died. Because of a rock that he triped over. That happens. If you feel humiliated by such details there are other difficulty settings.

You do what you want. I have been using restoration and cannot max it. I have been smithing and cannot max it. Why? perhaps because I spend more time having fun with my adventures and some guys spend it all sitting in front of an enchanting altar or smithing daggers and then come here to complain. If something is wrong it's the player.

My main problem is that the health and damage of enemies doesn't make sense in the context of the game world at all.

A bandit with an iron weapon and hide armor should not be tougher than that dragon you just killed no problem just because it has an extra word thrown into the name such as "Plunderer" or "Marauder" or whatever. At least if you're making high level melee/archers, make them a more well geared faction with an appropriately more interesting/important reason for being hostile since obviously such skilled fighters should not still be running around attacking travelers in rags with pitiful weapons. The player should have some ability to visually gauge the difficulty of an enemy, it's not only important when it comes to giving the player fair but challenging combat, but also for reaching the level of immersion that TES games strive for.

Honestly, bandits should've been capped at a certain level and it should've been a fairly low one, with a mid level cap on their leader types. Similar for run of the mill enemy mage/necromancers, who end up taking more arrows from my archer than anything wearing robes should be able to take without at least using some magical form of defense. If they were casting ebonyflesh or something beforehand it'd be acceptable.

And when it comes to animals/creatures, size is always a good indicator. They did a fairly good job on making spider size somewhat related to their strength, for example. The same should've been done with more things.

your using destruction on master. That's your problem.

Excellent point! One I've tried to make myself.

Master difficulty is supposed to be unbalanced. It is supposed to be unrealistic. It is supposed to stack the game very heavily against the player.

With Master Difficulty the game should allow your character to be one shot killed. And at Master Difficulty you should not be able to one shot kill an opponent with a destruction spell.

The game should be balanced for default (Adept). Master Level difficulty should be horribly unbalanced and just for fun and not normal play!!

In my opinion.

Usually the only times I get "one shotted" is when I shoot an arrow at someone that doesn't die and suddenly they turn into a super archer because they start pulling MY arrows out of their body and firing them at me limitlessly.

I play on master as well with both of my characters. One sword and shield warrior @ 47 and the other strictly mage @ 27.

Smithing alone can make a warrior-type decimate everything on master. Forget enchanting and alchemy, just the ability to upgrade gear that you find in the wild makes you near un-killable. I even skip purchasing gear from merchants, so I'm only using gear I find that I upgrade myself.

It's easy enough to avoid using smithing to keep some semblance of challenge, but I guess the question is, should we have to? It's not a huge deal for me, but I can see how some may be irked that they have to purposefully gimp themselves.

The only thing that can one shot my warrior is Dwemer traps (those spinning blades) when I'm not paying attention. For the mage, I definitely die faster due to lack of heavy armor, but kiting solves that. I'm finding that as a mage, the game seems quite a bit more challenging. Both are still fun to play, but something does feel off about master difficulty.

I call [censored] on people that are claiming the game is too easy on Master.

I find myself getting facestomped easily if my sneaking fails or if I get jumped by a bear, saber cat, ice wraith, etc. in the wild, and this is on the standard difficulty of "adept".

I played a sword/shield type though with light armor and archery and did not do any smithing/enchanting until 48 or so. I regularly got one shot by the nasty melee types if I didn't block and interrupt their power attacks. It was actually a lot more fun this way as I had to be on my 'A game' pretty consistently to avoid being destroyed. I appreciated the challenge. Now that I've got the smithing/enchanting thing done (just with ebony too, didn't even do daedric) I can ignore the blocking and go full offense without any real risk, and that cheapens the experience a lot.

Basically, Master difficulty is as hard as you want it to be depending on what you do with smithing/enchanting.

It depends entirely on your skillset and playstyle. A sneaky type that doesn't get the crit/sneak attacks off to debilitate an enemy is going to have a much tougher time of it than a full plate monster with a shield blocking most melee damage, 50% of all magic and any projectiles.

I'm playing on master and I'm really enjoying the sense of danger that it gives me...some things are weird, like LOLbears and LOLsabrecats being true monsters that can oneshot me, but I like the game this way.
As for Dragons, their difficulty was...strange if compared to said animals or elite bandits...till late 20's Blood Dragons, they started to hurt a lot...I'm a lvl 28 dunmer assassin, first Frost Dragon I met yesterday destroyed me with 1 single breath while I was running for cover...

My only complaint about Master is that I don't really consider it "challenging", just tedious. The inane amounts of HP make it nearly impossible to beat certain boss NPCs without cheesing it in some way (and yes, smithing god-level gear, spamming archery attacks from stealth while the bad AI stands there and slowly turns into a pin-cushion, and chugging five potions per second during combat are all cheesing). If you have to essentially cheat in order to progress, what's the point of playing on the harder difficulty? Can you honestly say abusing sneak attacks or cumulative crafting bonuses presents more challenge than running around one-shotting everything on Adept? There's very little skill demanded from the player in either circumstance. Having beaten the game on master with my thief, I've now resigned myself to playing on normal with my warrior so that the melee combat will be enjoyable without smithing broken gear. It will be boring 90% of the time, yes, but at least I won't have to devote half my perks to maxing out three crafting trees in order to not instantly die to a single attack from boss monsters while I'm spending 5 minutes whittling down their HP with dodge maneuvers.

Master would be much better if it toned down the hit point bonuses. Then it could still be challenging without forcing you to cheese the game in order to progress. The vanilla game will always be piss-easy for those who choose to min/max anyway, so it's not like it's going to be hurt their experience any.