In Oblivion, one major problem was that as you levelled, health values were inflated massively on enemies, while your damage increased marginally. This led to end-game fights lasting many times as long as battles earlier on, which quite frankly gets boring.

In Skyrim, attributes may have been removed from the level-up screen, allowing you only to choose from health stam or mana to increase...I'm worried that might exacerbate Oblivion's problem even more, since none of those stats raises damage directly.

I'm hoping that the perks on level up, and the damage bonuses from leveling skills, will compensate for your health gains and your enemy's health gains...but none of us know much about either of those systems as of yet.

Thoughts? Did you encounter this problem in Oblivion?

I found this as well to a certain extent. To me, combats should be quick and merciless; either you die, or your enemy dies. In Oblivion, I found myself having to modify weapon damage values to keep things in line. If a Nord Bandit smacks me in the face with a warhammer, it should -hurt-.

Certain enemies should be harder to kill, of course; an Ogre isn't going to fall over in two hits, but it should be able to kill the player pretty quickly if you fail to defend/dodge.

I'm hoping for a smaller damage variance in weapons, but a smaller increase in health as you go up levels as well. If I'm level 50, I still want level 5s to have a chance of killing me if there are enough of them or I make several mistakes.

I think they will fix this problem, I think Todd mentioned combat being quicker and more dangerous.

The damage went up fine if you leveled "Correctly". That is, if you were a warrior you chose major and minor skills that enabled you to get the +5 bonus to strength, endurance, and one other attribute (probably speed) and only leveled those skills, in a certain order, by a certain amount. The only problem is this system svcks and is nearly impossible to do

Agreed, but even that failed eventually as strength and other key stats maxed out.

Agreed and i think that is what they are shooting for judging Todd's remarks in the Building Better Combat Hubdate.

I think it helped somewhat in damage to do it that way, but it tends to result in the same problem in the other direction; many enemies just can't harm you very much, even though they have a great weapon of some kind.

My latest playthrough is with a levelling mod that lets you assign points when you level up, giving you the +5 bonus on every level, and it still doesn't really alleviate the issue. Again I've gone through and increased weapon damages across the board in order to make combats more dangerous.

Oblivion was a pretty bad offender on having hit point values rise too drastically though. I'm pretty confident they'll fix it for Skyrim.

What? Your saying no more attributes?

That s**ks.

We don't know yet. They just haven't been seen in anything so far, so it may be that they're more behind-the-scenes, or it might be that they're exactly the same as before with (hopefully) a different levelling system applied.

I honestly did not have this problem in Oblivion. :shrug:
In most cases, I actually had to turn the difficulty slider to quite high level 35+.

Or they may only be uppable via perks and armor stats