I am level 8, hanging out around Whiterun, and killed the first dragon easily at level 7.

The only real danger I felt was last level when I encountered a random Flame Antioch in the wilderness. Having pitiful bow skills, and I could not outrun/catch him. All the other quests are super easy. I have 1h, shield, heavy armor, restoration, smithing.

I bumped the difficulty to expert, but am thinking I need to go somewhere more challenging, tho I still have a bunch of side/quests in the area.

Is this build OP, or am I too high level for this area?

Maybe you should try playing the game a bit before killing a few mobs in the starting area claiming that it's too easy.

Novice : Babby first game
Apprentice : Very Easy
Adept : Easy
Expert : Normal
Master : Hard

In my opinion !

Your build is just normal, it's just that the game is really too easy on Adept.

Thanks. Will play on expert now.

Yeah expert is nice, probably the most balanced difficulty.

On Master even Deers can tank sneak attacks easily.

I play on Adept with my High Elf Mage and find it extremely hard. Though, my High Elf is also a Stage 3 vampire and unarmored, so that is probably the reason. Since I can play on Master no problem with a Warrior.

Expert is mostly well balanced - makes more fights seem actually dangerous.

There have been a few times, though, where I suddenly run into enemies on expert that literally cannot be beat (after many many reloads). Haven't played enought to know whether that's a result of them leveling along with me, or whether it's an area I need to back away from and come back to later (if that makes sense.)

The difficulty spikes a bit. starts off easy, mid-game gets hard, end-game gets easy again.

I've addressed this in another post, but from someone that's played on different difficulties... choose master and never look back. If the game feels easy at low levels it's only going to get worse as you level up. I've found the one thing that entirely breaks the game on any difficulty is smithing. Being able to upgrade your weapons to double what their raw values are is just ridiculous. Sure at first it sounds cool until you're one shotting everything with only 50 archery and assassinating anything that moves if you can catch it unaware. On adept I managed to do 80% of damage to a dragon with one sneak attack. It was a static spawn and I was able to sneak up on it and drop onto it's head. Had I actually had higher smithing and had a legendary dagger, or even a strong enchantment he'd have been dead in one hit. In no circumstances should you be able to one hit a dragon even if you sneak up on it. Period. What makes it worse is just choosing the first 2 perks in smithing is enough to trivialize the game. Steel smithing and magic item smithing. Being able to upgrade that ebony war axe of immobilization to flawless (highest you can do without more perks) is kind of overkill, not to mention any armor upgrades to survive longer.

I've since started over on master and not allowing myself to put any perks into enchanting or smithing. I am limiting my upgrades to what I can do with my raw skill points and so far I'm having the most fun with the game since I started. I actually have to use those poison potions to ensure I can do enough damage with my bow sniping. And now maxing out sneak and bow skills no longer makes the game too easy since you're not multiplying a ridiculous amount of damage on our weapon.

I set the game to Master at level 1 and never looked back. The very start wasn't really bad, if you were smart about your fights. When you get to the real enemies though after the first small town it really ramps up. I can say that I've died many times to bandits in caves and ran for my life many times from saber cats and bears. After a while though It starts to get easier again, with better gear and better perks and whatnot. Well except vs high level casters that is, unless you have decent resists, you can look forward to getting 1 shot by ice mages quite often.

My advice, start the game with expert, after level 10 drop it to adept, then put it up to expert around level 30, then master at level 40... The level scaling and difficulty is currently very unbalanced. I found mid game, level 10-30 to be a pain on expert and I died a lot. Beyond level 30 though I was steam rolling everything on adept.

Play on Expert. Adept is a tad easy indeed.

1h+shield+smithing+heavy armor is going to be a tad too strong later.
Smithing in itself unless you rush it is still okish, but ensure you never touch enchanting together with smithing, cause you will ruin the game by making it too easy for yourself.
A mediocre skill in smithing wont disturb the balance too much, but rushing smithing to get dragon scale armor around lvl 20 and even on master most enemies wont be able to touch you until you are 30+.

1h+shield is a healthy way to play, you wont do too much damage. Which makes the fights more interesting.
You will probably need to bump up to master later for your sake as you will block alot and be able to sustain hard damage.
But I dont recoment master until you are 20+ Unless you are one of those that focus on enchanting, smithing together as melee. Just dont do that, for your own sake.
Enchanting anyway seems like a far off skill that personally I would say only mages should have access to.

Personally i would say that you should only be able to choose one of smithing or enchanting, but thats me. But we have a freedom of choice and if people want to make themself into gods thats allowed.

Personally I would, if I was you, go with light armor, since you have shield anyway. If you go for a heavy block build with counter attacks you dont really need heavy armor anyway, you will also move faster, can sprint faster and much longer, and get the stamina reg perk from light armor.
Thats just my recomendation.

Yes. That is probably the most OP build without Enchantment or Smithing.
If you dont want to reroll you could try using light armor and master difficulty.

Yeah, adept does seem kind of easy (I'm at level 20)...thinking of remaking and trying another difficulty. Dragons don't really feel dangerous at all.

Master sounds like a lot of fun. But how is the difficulty on expert?

From my experience so far, it totally depends on the character you play. Some builds are easier than others. My destruction-less mage still has a lot of trouble on adept.
Adjust the difficulty while playing, and you will be fine.

I have to agree. Started on Adept too and found it very... easy. I have a fire enchant on a 2 hand sword too and skellies and draughts were pretty much a 1 shot kill for the most part. Scale it to Expert, it makes a nice, balanced difference.

Yeah... you did it right.

That's how it is working for me too...

It was too easy 1-15
Then the game scaled, and everything is hard to kill 16-35

But then, I could kill giants, Dwemer centurions (guardian and normal), etc... It was so easy

So I moved to expert. Now this game is [censored]ing on me again

What is it like playing on Master compared to Expert or the default difficulty in general? Curious to know and I can't test it for myself until this weekend, since I'm away for Thanksgiving...and the computer (and internet) here svcks

Master from level 1 is the most rewarding. Just stick with it....

Personally I thought master was like getting your privates kicked every other minute. Sure you could live with it, by would you want to? Then again I wasn't using either smithing or enchanting skills. So, if that really alters the difficulty level, it might be worth it. *shrugs*

I have capped physical and magic resist and have still been one shotted on master. You need to pay attention and any mistakes you make are generally punished. That is unless you use the crafting skills to their full effect at which point you 1 shot everything and nothing matters anymore.

Master is annoying, the difficulty system itself is lazy and unbalanced and all it does is make enemies have more HP and do more damage to the point of frustration. Your arrows and spells will do a sliver of damage to tougher enemies and bosses, while they will be able to kill you in 2 shots of a bow or a spell... It makes it more about exploiting bugs and glitches in the AI to be successful and enemy power and HP is largely skewed so direct encounters are often hopeless. instead it becomes more about trying to trick and break enemy AI, exploit poor behavior and path-finding or chugging potions like a Diablo game. Expert is a good difficulty. I was hoping enemies would be have better behavior, equipment and spells or something to make the game harder but in a fun sensible way... Master difficulty just seems annoying and you have to exploit flaws in the gameplay mechanics too frequently.

Yeah I played on Master for a bit (mostly waiting for the next patch)...and wow was it hard. It took quite a lot more strategy. This is just at level 2 or 3, forgot what level my character is. I'm not actually playing too much until the next patch.

For example, there is a certain cave near the beginning...some Bandits inside it (2 bandits, plus one outside the cave). The first time I went inside (the bandit outside was taken care of) I got pretty badly owned. I played it like I did on adept, a run in, beat-em up style game. Well, that didn't work at all.

Okay, so I went in a second time. This time I knew what to expect. I dodged, blocked, made a bit more use of magic...did get close to dying. Took out the weaker bandit first and then worked on the stronger bandit with a shield. With more strategy, I managed to take out both of them.

Went to expert, and the same scenario...it was actually rather easy, but still a bit challenging...felt like "normal" difficulty really. I didn't really need to think or use strategy for this one, I did dodge a bit though.

Went to adept and I was playing beat-em up, Skyrim style.

However, as far as I'm aware...it will get A LOT harder later in the mid-levels. Still, I think I'll stick with Master...it was more fun.

And dwarf fortress taught me dying is fun ;P