Smithing and enchanting are essential whatever character you're going to tackle.

I also started encountering difficult opponents beyond lvl 30 and a pure mage/thief/warrior is not going to win without investing in these two. Also, if you dilute your progression into too many skills your character will not be strong enough once the real nasty enemies start to appear.

Type "killall" in the console... Why work at all? lol.

Im willing to put down cold hard cash in a bet that OP is the average PC gamer on these forums and probably pirated the game to boot.

Never really understood the concept of ragequitting. Are you like, expecting someone to try and stop you? 'Cause I really couldn't care less man...

Really, either stop playing the game or turn down the difficulty. I don't recognize your complaints. I play a melee character on expert and get killed quite some times, but not to an annoying extent. I'm always prepared for the most difficult fights. If you know any opponent can be a hard opponent, then what's the problem? Just always use your tactics, even fighting the easier mobs.
I guess this just isn't the game for you. Too bad.

This... Beth gave us two things this time around that were missing in OB.. neutral encounters, and mobs that telegraph aggro before attacking.. so you surely can pick your fights. And as Kalniel says, "Approach new encounters with caution" .. you gotta scope em out before you rock on up.. if I get within say 50ft and npc starts banging his axe on his shield or, you know, saying stuff like "That's close enough", then I figure he probably gonna want to dance.. and its way cool not knowing whose gonna end up tap dancing on whose head. That generic-looking grunt with the iron armour and fug off claymore may end up pushing in my.. stuff..
I've missed that since... Godrod Hairy-Breeks in Ulummusa, actually :mohawk:

Potions, you can buy them or make them and they are instant compared to spells. Always have Frost, Fire Resist pots with you and of course Healing pots/Fortify health, assigned on quick use. By lvl 27 I had used about 500 of those. They provide you wit infinite magicka, health, skill, etc.
And as far as weapon damage goes I really can not see a reason not to apply a poison of slow/paralyze or something doing 40 points of extra damage.

I did it at level 7 and didn't die once


All I had was my bow, my companion, and my two swords xD

haha so now you want the game to tell you if your able to kill them or not, wow. just go, leave.....

Game is balanced for Adept, not Master, not Novice. Complaining about balance when playing on anything that's not Adept is silly.

Learn to give up, sometimes opponents are stronger then you, just come back when you get better gear, I was lvl 25 and got randomly attacked by an ancient dragon, he hit me once with a melee attack and 0,5 sec later he ate me... Was at full hp, now at 30 I beat one by getting better items/using poisons... The game, I love how it works... You just don't get it

OP wants skyrscape.

A lot of people seem to be missing the actual point I feel some folks are making:

That is that I don't think anyone is complaining about tough monsters or no-go areas as a whole; those are just fine. You meet a new creature, of course proceed with caution but....

It's when they pop out of nowhere completely at odds with the setting of the quest/dungeon/no rhyme or reason to them. Quite often there aren't even any visual clues. For example, I had a room with 2 guys in plate armor and shields and a caster. I one shot the plate/shield guys and the caster took about 10 hits. Yes yes, caster/magic etc but some inkling that actually she's a powerful one, even a different name from "bandit mage" is helpful.

How can one reasonably be expected to know that "bandit" is about 20 times tougher than "bandit" they are standing next to when they wear the same outfit, have the same name etc?

I don't think many people expect to be sent into a dungeon on to have the enemy power be at about 4/10 only to meet a random guy in a random pack in a random room who, for some reason, its set to 11.


It's just one of these things, its not game breaking for me, I have adjusted; but it still annoys me sometimes.

That can't be right. You know there are different types of generic mobs right? Bandits have Bandit Outlaws, Bandit Highwaymen, and Bandit Chiefs that are all much more powerful than normal Bandits.

And in my experience they usually throw hard encounters like that near the end of the dungeon. It's always made sense to me when I hit a "boss encounter" that's one hard guy and maybe some lower level henchmen, because right after it I usually find a nice chest to loot and the exit to the dungeon. It's hardly "random".

Can I have your stu.. damn, wrong forum

I appreciate the semi-random difficulty, particularly after the predictable "I Win" snore-fest combat became in late-level Oblivion.. by way of example, as a level 28 archer thief I had started to become quite good, and quite cocky, sneakin' and assassinating with abandon. I had begun to worry that maybe I'd hit the "challenge cap" for my char, until.. a little Den west of Riverwood disabused me of any such notions..

Bandit Chief and his Two-hander of Fiery Retribution = 10 straight deaths and a chastened little Khajit thief.. its not Dark Souls, but it can be surprisingly, refreshingly nasty at times :rock:

I've only ever seen chiefs, but the mage/warrior x2 encounter I definitely had as I moaned to a mate about it

She was tougher than other bandit mages I've ran across too. I know for a fact her name wasn't anything special as it was one of the rare non boss occasions where a HP bar didn't just disappear.


A similar vein was a "silverhand leader" I ran into as part of the companions quest line, guys outside were of low-average toughness/danger; the leader though....2 hit kills constantly, the amount of times I saw my head chopped off....In the end I could only beat him using berserk. Now, I'm not complaining about this, BUT the difficulty step up feels wrong, if he's that dangerous then usually the lead in to him wouldn't be that simple either.

To use terms most here will appreciate, it was a bit like how you'd feel running into a deathlord in bleak falls barrow.


As I say, it is annoying, but I can get passed it mentally so it's not a material problem for me.

I agree with you. (And to some extend, with the OP).

I don't mind if the game is hard. I don't mind if some quests or some caves are hard.

The problem is, I have no idea what I'm getting into. An NPC gives me a quest "go get me this book". So I go there, it is in a chest outdoors. Just open the quest, done. Or you are sent to a cave, kill a few mobs, get the book. Done. But then you get a similar quest, just "get me another book". I'm at the same level, it's the same questgiver, same wording, looks like the same type of quest. But when I enter the cave, bam, no chance. Getting owned left and right by every mob. If I had known I wasn't ready for this quest, I'd done something else first.

Or worse. You enter a cave. Kill a bunch of NPCs. Continue while slaughtering NPCs. And suddenly, bam, some regular NPC kills you over and over again. Not a named one, not the end boss of the cave, just a regular one. Sometimes with a new name you hadn't seen before. But I've also ran into a regular bandit that hit like an endboss. Very weird.

Or a quest to go somewhere in a cave. In the first room, there are 2 snowy sabre cats. I can't even kill one. Let alone two at the same time. Why was I sent there ? How can I know which quests are totally out of my league ?

My questbook is exploding. And every time I turn in a quest, I get 2 new ones. I can't speak to NPCs anywhere, or they trick me into taking another quest. No problem in itself. But it would be nice if I knew how to clean out my questbook systematically. By doing easier quests first. But with the current questbook, I'm just randomly trying quests, and hoping they aren't out of my leaugue still. That can get a bit frustrating sometimes.

Unrelated to the OP's post. But related to the questbook. I wish we could see more info about each quest. Especially the ones under "miscellaneous". Seeing only a single line is sometimes not enough to make me remember what exactly it was. Or who gave me that quest. Or why. Or where the questgiver was located. Skyrim is an RPG, but it is also a story-telling game. The quests tell little stories. With just a brief questbook, I feel I'm missing out on some of those stories. Especially when your questbook is so full, you can't remember everything by heart.

My first few levels in the game were sort of a pain because I kept giving into the "chug tons of potions to survive" trap.

Eventually I decided to force myself out of that bad habit and find other ways to survive.

Right off the bat, preparation is key to survival. There are a ton of excellent potions out there that cover almost every possible playstyle you can think of. Resistance potions were my first focus. Health buffs and stamina buffs, and armor buffs were next as melee.

What I do now is carry a few of each useful type for my style. I'll tackle the set-piece fights such as the one you describe, which I suspect is either Draug Deathlords, Scourge or Wight based on the difficulty you're having. They're essentially boss-level enemies compared to the regular Draugr or Relentless Draugr. They'll definately hit hard. Afte a few seconds of gauging the fight, evading hits as much as possible, I use the resistance potions appropriate for the fight. If one is casting frost attacks or using frost weapons (they're weapon might glow blue) I'll pop a frost resistance potion and likely an armor buff. If I'm up against a tougher Draugr like a deathlord that sinks a lot of damage, I'll use a stamina buff to remain competitive.

Next, one of the main things I failed at, early on, was stamina conservation. Within minutes of the fight, I'd be out of stamina for blindly throwing power attacks. I've found that, instead I needed to learn the attack patterns of my enemies so that I'd evade their attacks and move in for a few quick shots. When my stamina was fairly high, I'd slap them with a power-attack.

This and making judicial use of your surroundings, pillars, stairs, etc. has been key to survival in fights with multiple enemies. Try to lead them away and thin out the weaker types first. Skeletons. Draugr. Restless Draugr. You should then have an easier time of fighting the heavy-hitters. Trying to take care of the heavy-hitters first is only going to get you overwhelmed.

As people suggested, better equipment is fairly important, of course, but its evading damage that success lies.

That being said, I've found myself in a few difficult situations. Last night, I was cramped in a very narrow hallway and faced with 2 deathlords and 2 scourge. It was pretty painful.

But I never, ever, ever, resolve to potion chugging. That just ruins the game as you mentioned.

Balance isn't perfect, but its not as bad as it might seem very early on.

Yeah, it's usually the Boss at the end that is the though one. When Lydia says "I have a bad feeling about this" :hehe: Some bigger dungeons have a "mini-boss" at the middle too. Other than that the enemies are usually pretty even.

And damn these forums are are hostile. "Blind really devoted fan" type of hostile even, which means it'll take a long time before an intelligent conversation of the game's flaws is possible.

Post of the day

You do realize that some points in this game requires you to be higher level right?

This game is fantastic.

There are places you should not enter or be at unless you have a certain level.

Learn to play the game instead, since you can overcome even the toughest of enemies with cunning and tactics at lower level.
And yes, they will 1 shoot you if your health is too low, or their damage is so high that even if you are at full health, your 100 hp which you likely have, is nothing.

Power attacks does additional weapons, if the enemies you are facing are around lvl 20 with corresponding skill in 2h and a half decent 2h weapon, they will 1 shot you if you hp are 100-150 and you are wearing very bad armor with no skills in it.

Go back, redo some other quests, LEARN the game.

But above all. Be GLAD that you have a challenge.
One game I do not recomend for you is Dark Souls. Skyrims only contender to RPG of the year. Skyrims combat looks like toys in a box compared to Dark Souls masochistic murdering of your character.

One word: Patience.

"Baldur's Gate and Diablo, for what they were, absolutely massacre this product in terms of balance and enjoyability."

Not too sure about most of your post but this part is key for me.

Just got off another thread posting about gameplay. With all the low spec'ed mobile devices people now play games on, there has been a massive return to retro style games. And it is glariingly obvious that many are masterpieces in simple engrossing gameplay without the need for amazing and life like graphics.

I don't see the point in creating this amazing beautiful world, in amazing (and they are utterly amazing and epic) dragon fights..... when there are so many weakness and problems with the underlying gameplay and balance (which rely on the player to self fix through difficulty slider).

It's time for substance to rule over form, for too long the games industry has been turning out form - games that look ever more life-like and graphically brilliant but often lack substance.

Heh, playing Demon's Souls and Dark Souls is probably the reason I never got mad whenever I died in Skyrim. And I died often too, being an unarmored mage on Master difficulty.

You want something to ragequit about, go try Ornstein and Smough. :rofl:

I agree somewhat. For example, why can't I swing my sword and heal at the same time? Why can't I parry with my sword just because I have a spell in the other hand? How come sometimes shouts just do not work?

And, to be fair, that kind of punishing difficulty will only ever appeal to a "select" demographic.. I'm not exactly sure "punishing difficulty" is what Beth were shooting for with the bandit/necro uber-bosses.. lack of testing at the top end of the scale, perhaps ? And I will concede one player's uber-harsh, metal-as exciting boss encounter is anothers Albino Radscorpion :nuke: