Around the level 14 to 20 the difficulty spikes like crazy. Bandit highway man's one shorting you with magic, what is the solution for melee warriors to take down magic foes?

If you're not good with manual dodging try potions, enchanted gear, or get a follower and send then in first. Spell casters can be major dikes on hardest difficulties. Also, if you aren't roleplaying, google up that standing stone that gives you magic absorption and no magicka regen, if you're not using spells at all you'll only profit from it.

1)Become ethereal, close the gap and start chopping.

2)Cold breath, close the gap and start chopping(my favorite)

3)Paralyze poisons

4)Magic resistance equipment, rings and necklaces

5)Million other ways.

If you are still running the sword and shield character that you had at level 11 against the Dragon, I 'd dare guess you could obtain Spellbreaker, now. Aside form previously suggested elemental and magic resistances, there is the use of the Atronach and/or Lord Stones.

Sometimes I wonder if the game is glitched to really weaken your character for a while. I was just playing my current character in werewolf form at Valtheim Towers where the first time the archer on the bridge took half my health away on the first shot. Then the bandit chief managed to finish me off after I thought I had corralled him and did and upper-cut claw swipe only to miss. After reloading the game the archer on the bridge manages to one shot me. I'm like wTF!! The first time only half my character's health and the second time a one shot kill? Definitely some sort of gamesave reload glitch/ bug BS going on here.

I've also noticed it with vendor prices and inventory. You wind up selling some stuff and accidentally sell the wrong item, reload your save and the store's gold amount nor inventory reloads with it. If you buy something and then reload, that items is then gone from their inventory.

I also made a post on another thread about a weak ago about my frustrations with the AI while having Farkas along during a particular quest. If this is BGS' cheap s way of creating "difficulty" ... Meanwhile this is on the default Adept difficulty level. I also can't help but wonder if the game notches up that difficulty setting on you after you beat the game, without telling you

I'm on adept too. I've found some tactics to fight mage but it's so unbalanced, so because I don't have 100 alteration with the magic resistance and the Lord stone I'm done for? Why don't my destruction spells do that much.

You don't have to invest perks in alteration to fight high level mages and now that you know that they are a royal pain you need to be prepare for them.

Visit the general merchants IN major towns and buy magic resistance rings and neclases.

Visit the alchemist and buy various poisons, then the castle wizards(like Farengar) and buy scrolls of summon storm atronach or firestorm and you are good to go.

One simple tactic. When you've made contact with the mage use the shout ''become ethereal'' and let him deplete his mana pool. Before the shout goes off, use a paralyses poison in your weapon and hack him once. The guy is now down and paralyzed and you have all the time in the world to prepare a firestorm scroll at his sorry face.

Another tactic is to open the battle with a storm atronach scroll and as you know storm magic depletes both health and magica. Even if the mage survive he won't be able to use magic for a while. Get close bash him once and power attach him.

Don't forget health potions if the mage isn't one-shotting you with fireballs

Schmoe......your one shot archer death. Its not a glitch or a bug mate.

The kills by 'devastating npc' quite typically an archer are becoming documented and discussed with increasing regularity by those of us who have suffered the loss of really long play hours Dead is Dead chars to these game killers ( they kill your play through).

It's principley due to a special and hidden 3x extra damage perk only available to npcs. It is awarded by the programme seemingly at random and will not show up on reload. Check it out in UESP Wiki.

It is a perfectly bona fide game mechanic, but horrendously unfair if your playing DiD. If you managed to simply kill the offending npc before they shot you.....then you would never know that they had the insta kill perk. But if they ping you first........Goodnight!

Good to know, thanks , but obviously doesn't make me happy that devs resort to such shamefully low, cheap means of adding "difficulty" to a game. Not to mention supposedly you can run your armour numbers pretty high but it still caps out at ~650 (then why the are those numbers so high if they're useless past 700)

The armour cap is not actually a cap my friend. The armour continues to provide increase protection as the AR rises, BUT at an exponentially reducing rate.

An AR of 542 is "considered" to be the cap with four pieces of Armour worn, but in reality if you smithed your gear to say 1000, it might provide an additional useful protection. I have actually tested this to verify it.

I can't remember the exact figures......but let's say for arguments sake you face a particular enemey archer and you have gear at the Armour Cap (542). Let's say you let them hit you with a single arrow then check your health. Let's say your health dropped from 500 to 100 with that hit. Now you change up into, your better armour which is rated at AR 900. With fresh health, that hit now drops your health from 500 to 200. And doing the same again, but with armour of AR 1500 drops your health from 500 to 250. You can see that a big increase in AR is needed to produce ever smaller amounts of protection.

Is it worth worrying about......hell yeah! It's the difference between just surviving a hit....or just dying from it.

My best vanilla armour ever was Legendary smithed Dragonscale......no exploits used......AR 1490 with shield equipped. Even with that, level 50 Falmer Warmongers on Legendary were almost two hits lethal. You can't have too much Armour.....unless your a robe wearer of course.....but that's a whole different ball game

Edit.....if you look it up on Wiki......armour protection......there is a rough graph shown of the way the armour protection rises by smaller and smaller amounts as the AR goes up.

Oh one more thing.......all armour....even shields......includes 25 points per piece bonus AR that is hidden. So where the cap is considered to sit with four armour pieces AR 542....you need to reach AR 567 with only three pieces and AR 592 with only two pieces to reach the same "cap". Which as I've explained is not a hard cap at all....just a point on the graph where armour seems to take a long time to make more difference.

Hope that helps......don't wanna write that one out too many times