Seriously, ever since becoming enthusiastic about playing skyrim, I have always found the amount of stamina needed to even do basic combat moves, grossly overestimated. Obvioulsy when used in melee based characters, its utterly silly and poorly judged by the devs when building this game in the first place.

I also don't think the difficulty setting affects this cause' stamina is stamina, no matter what.

Take Shielding for example, it is the best offensive/defensive skill in the game, in equal measures imo. A big muckup with the mechanics is the amount of stamina needed for even just basic blocks.. when your character starts out on a playthrough, its like he's got the stamina of someone who is 100 yrs old already! totally bad value implemented here for vanilla game imo. Even doing power blows, without the perk, is ridiculous and over taxing in the fist place. Can't even run far without becoming completly drained of it. Its like your character is a chronic overweight smoker with serious medical issues surrounding his lungs and muscles.

I"m sure there is a mod to fix this or adjust it, but in reality, the vanilla game should not have had such an overestimation of stamina usage for such fundamental basic melee moves in the first place

How do other players who choose to create melee based characters feel about this?

We generally don't notice since it takes 1 stamina to perform anything in combat.

What Loz sad.

It's funny, most people have the exact opposite opinion, going as far as saying that regular movement speed when not sprinting (jogging) should drain energy and be reduced to a walk when your pool is empty. Because we can job across skyrim 100 times non stop and never need to stop to cath our breath...
People have also mentioned that power attacks should have taken a set ammount of stamina (such as spells) and if you don't have the required stamina, then no power attack. I've even seen arguments stating the new for regular attacks to drain stamina and when the pool is empty your damage would be cut by 25%-50%.

But I have yet to hear someone say the opposite, that we aren't given enough stamina and that power attacks and blocks are to costly... Until now.

Interesting opinion though

Lots of stamina threads lately.

I think normal swings should drain stamina as well as jogging in heavy armor without perks, and it can benefit from a dynamic recharge rate (like below 20% stamina the rate is reduced). So, I think increasing it is practically like removing it.

if you've ever played dark souls, then you'd see what its like to need stamina for just about anything.