Recently I've been playing on Legendary difficulty. At one point I was fighting a dragon priest, which was rough, because he kept 2 shotting me with his fireballs. I decided to cast my low level spell "Conjure Familiar" and let the wolf tank the dragon priest a bit. It seemed to be working.. awesome now I can hit the priest with my bow. Wait a second, the wolf is taking way too long to die...

At this point I started reloading a quicksave and summoning my familiar at different level difficulties. It turns out, the famliar would die instantly on Novice, and get progressively beefier as the difficulty went up. On legendary it took WAY too many shots from the fireball to die. I've tested this out with other enemies and results maintain. Now, after some googling, I've read that summons should stay the same as the difficulty changes, as the difficulty only changes the player's damage / received damage. What's the deal?

I've tested this with no mods and it still happens. Is this the same for everyone? Is this intentional? I like to raise the difficulty for more of a challenge. When I play on legendary I don't even want to use conjuration anymore because it makes me feel like I'm cheating.

Someone help me out here please.

It happens to everyone. It seems there is a thing that makes enemies do less damage to each other

As difficulty increases, you are weaker, all enemies are beefier. So on master diffculty, it takes 5 arrows from a Deathlord to kill a Giant, where in Adept, it takes the Deathlord only two arrows.

Legendary makes the enemies, that much beefier? Familiar suriving fireballs? All because people can't control their meta-gaming habits? lol.

Exactly how many shots is "way too much"? Fireballs are splash-damage, so the damage maybe inconsistent. My familar used to be able to take 4 or 5 direct firebolts (not "ball") on Master. I haven't used familiar in Legendary yet, I'll test it out later.

Deathlord's arrows hurt like a [censored] on Legendary, even with max armor cap. Arrows seem overpowered in general on Legendary. They hurt more than any magic or any weapons; which is kinda weird.

It only has 32 health. A single firebolt on adept will kill it, depending on if the enemy has any augmented element perks. Fireball one-shots it no matter. On master, an enemy with no augmented perks would take only two fireballs to kill it.

I'm going to use adept as it is what the game's balanced around. I don't know the exact number, but the Deathlord archers with Ebony bow and arrows do around 200 - 300 per arrow.

So legendary would make it like 2,000 damage or something stupid. I'm pretty sure it does around 600ish on master. All of this in relation to the player that is.

It was something along the lines of two shots on novice, then doubled each difficulty.. so 4 on apprentice, 8 adept.. etc. until it was obviously OP at legendary. This is just frustrating me simply for the fact that yes, I understand that enemies are beefier.. but why should my summon be beefier as well.. it is an extension of me.. as the player. It shouldn't get stronger as the difficulty goes up. I could understand staying the same.. or even getting less tanky.. but the opposite? Come on..

My character was 550 health at level 81, with max armor cap and all Light Armor perks, and one shot take me down to 83 health and stagger me as well. I can really feel that arrow lol.

Also, OP, which Dragon Priest did your familiar tank? Was it Hevnoraak? If so, then this isn't strange because that guy is incompetent like that.

Blasphemy!

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v730/ZoDiaC91/d6078a24-eca5-4eae-9a46-35abfaaccf49_zpsadc7cfb0.jpg

Lol. I believe it was Krosis. But the enemy my summons' tank don't really matter. And the numbers I presented are irrelevant. My mods change those around anyway. The point is just the gameplay function of a summon's ability to tank in relation (apparently reversed) to difficulty. Since ShadowHarold already confirmed it is this way for everyone, I'm going to chalk it up to an oversight in game design.. And I suppose that's just my opinion.. but I feel strongly about it! lol. I'm not dogging on Bethesda, as I downright LOVE Skyrim. I just wanted clarification and now I have it.

From My experience early in the Game with the Stray Dog and named Dragon Priests, A Familiar that is able to close to a Dragon Priest becomes viable until it times out. The Stray Dog was able to keep Dragon Priests stunlocked and unable to cast any Spells when it got close.

The survivability of what I have always viewed as a useless Summon is surprising if it is based on difficulty, I usually just use Familiars to set off traps

It's not an oversight. You summoned a creature. That creature is not you, therefore it's not bound to your stats or the damage rules bound only to you, the player exclusively.

It's because archery base damage is bow AND arrow. So Deathlord has all of this damage:

Bow: Ebony (17)

Arrows: Ebony (20)

Marksman skill: 93 (2.86 multiplier)

Perk: 2.5 multiplier

Legendary: 3 multiplier

(17 + 0 + 20) x 2.86 x 2.5 x 3 = 37 x 21.45 = 793.65 damage vs. unarmoured, or 158.73 vs. if you're armour-capped. Yes, archery does indeed hurt like pain compared to melee or magic.

I think that's off. That looks true for master. But on Legendary, it should be even higher.

I'm just straight tripling the known Adept damage. If K4 is reporting ~475 damage while armour-capped, then it's possible that the damage is being tripled twice: once as expected, and again due to some bug that I don't / didn't know about.

As a curiosity... @K4: How much damage is the same draugr deathlord doing to you on Master? Is it ~105, or ~210?

I used this to my advantage before. In one of the many times that Riften was being attacked by Vampires in broad daylight, a fight would breakout once I exited the Jarl's keep no matter what, and I had alreayd lost about 15 NPCs in that town from attacks within a few hours, so I wanted to minimize any more casualties. I had it on Legendary as everyone foght, and fired an arrow, changing it to Novice just before it hit, then switched back, and repeated. After like 5 tries I was able to have just two people die, so that was good enough for me. It's good to see the difficulty work to the advantage of the player.