I was recently 'splorin' a dungeon where the only "monsters" were mages. And I noticed the mages were extremely weak. They just cast silence at you(which is useless since I'm playing a pure warrior atm) and then they throw themselves at you, hitting you with their staff. No magic, just staff. And since they don't wear armor, and all attacks hit them, they go down in two hits. At one point four of them ganged up on me and they fell like wheat to the scythe, I barely lost a quarter of my HP. I think it's unbalancing since they drop good loot.

Thoughts?

Wait until you meet spellcasters at higher levels... And until then, thank the divine of your choice for Daggerfall's silly monster AI.

Daggerfall scales most of the monster encounters to the level of the player. Which means not only won't you encounter liches and ancient vampires when you're low level (unless they're part of a special quest or a pre-programmed location like Scourg Barrow), but that all the human 'monsters' you meet will be around the same level as you. At the start, this makes spellcasters very weak opponents, but later in the game they'll be deadly. NPC's seem particularly fond of point-blank shock spells, so resistance to shock will come in handy if you can manage it. They're dumb with invisibility, though. If an NPC spellcaster turns invisible, just keep swinging-- they'll march right up in front of you all the same.

Heh. I went further into the dungeon, and I ran into a lich. I was full health, so I thought, what's the worst that could happen? And I charged him swigning my sword. Needless to say, he killed me in one hit.

usually when i see or encounter a lich early on, i try to find another way around or run like hell and lock him in somewhere.

i even made the stupid mistake to lock an ancient vampire inthe same room where the quest object was, didnt notice that until it was done cuz i was in abit of panicked state.