Being a werewolf on Master is VERY difficult; 2 or 3 swings from an iron greatsword and no health regen make it quite daunting. Found myself to end up being hugely reliant on my howling to keep enemies at a distance, wish feeding didnt take as much time as-well.

I am horrible at high difficulty in most games, I've been at Master ever since level 10ish on my first playthrough - the game is frankly too easy otherwise. I'm someone who usually plays at Easy or Normal, no less.

I like using mods to increase difficulty as it can be more diffuse and interesting. Of course II use the settings too, but try to view that more as just another tool instead of solution onto itself. I'm playing on expert now, though master is sure to follow...because the epic challenges are the ones you remember.

Master + AI increases is the way to go. I'm not a fan of the increased difficulty mods that just continue to up the damage and health.

Maybe I'd play on Master more if there was actually an achievement for beating the game on it. (First playthrough was on master, now I feel stupid for not checking first).

Without a reason to play on it, Ill stick to Adept.

I don't have any mods that do that. The vanilla difficulty settings do that, which is why I find them inadequate by themseves...but to each his own.

Nope.

The game's difficulty scale is stupid, just like Oblivion's. It is not even across the board on ANY of the difficulty choices, due to inherent flaws and spikes in difficulty for no apparent reason.

Master is boring and tedious, Expert is better, Adept at least comes close to "plausible lore-true realism", and anything easier is for those who enjoy story and want combat to be very easy.

If you're familiar with the in-game books/lore, and the past games, as well as the 2 novels, then you should realize how difficult melee, stealth, and magic combat should be in the TES universe.

I think I'm TES retarted or something becuase adept is plenty challenging for me but I play most other games on hard or more and zoom through, At least that means I have lots of fun.


That being said I would rather have a slider like Halo where they got smarter and separate it out from damage adjustments. I really prefer damage ot be equal PC to NPC .On PC, fortunately I have mods for all that.

I see, and I can understand why you would want to experience combat where enemies that are the same level as you being about equal to the PC.

However, in my experience when I played very briefly on Adept at around levels 1 - 5, I was able to easily kill every enemy I encountered, often in one or two blows fighting with crappy weapons or the novice level Flames spell with no perks. The game felt broken in a way because the combat encounters were suddenly boring. As soon as I figured out it was because my difficulty settings had changed to Adept when installing Patch 1.6, I quickly went back to Master.

Perhaps this has to do with the way encounter zones are designed, so you encounter many enemies that are lower level than the PC and only a few that are at the PC's level. Or perhaps it's simply being overly accustomed to dying a lot more frequently.

Incidentally, Duke's mod for Oblivion was also my favorite With that mod, plus Combat Archery and FCOM, and the difficulty slider set to 75%, I died and reloaded probably 10 - 20 times for nearly every combat encounter. Suddenly I had to approach every possible encounter very cautiously, hiding from enemy archers behind trees, etc.

Emphasis on 'continue.' Without going to Master, I find all of the enemies are glass noodles that crumple when hit twice, and even with AI improvements this isn't enough.

Personally I love it it makes the game challenging and it makes everybody else put up more of a fight. Companions stay alive longer, dragon and giant battles feel more epic. It's just amazing.