Maybe they should be named "Unbeatable gods of death and destruction"?

I am playing a level 49 Khajiit. I can look at a dragon and it will die. I ran into a Foresworn on a road by mistake. Two hits and I'm dead. What is the deal with these guys? I'm forced to sneak from a distance, preferably from a higher elevation, and snipe them with my bow to thin the herd before even attempting to enter one of their complexes. And let's not even mention the Falmer. Am I doing something wrong? It is like they start at level 100 and scale up with the player.

Yeap. the briar heart guys are tough cookies indeed, not to mention the regular forsworns.

Let me get this straight. You're mad at the game for presenting you with challenges at high levels?

Dragons are only weak because everyone usually runs away from them; they haven't had the opportunity to build up their skills.

Plus, they can fly. It would kinda svck if they were as powerful as some other high-tier mobs AND they could fly, as they would just kill you over and over again with their bombing run attacks.

Well, the Forsworn are a bit over-powered from the beginning of the game. I'm only saying this because if you can kill a Forsworn early on, you can use their armor for a good while and their bows for much longer. I used a Forsworn bow into lvl 30+, simply because it did more damage than any other bow I came across and/or was able to upgrade.

Still, briar-hearts are ridiculously hard to kill, but that's consistent within the game as they are not actually human anymore - they're juiced up plant-zombies!

If you pickpocket their hearts, they drop dead very neatly.

That's one of the reason why level scaling svcks. Leveling up now lacks sense of accomplishment.
We're not talking about defeating a mythical enemy but random mob you have to go through each time you enter a cave. First time is a challenge, second time they're annoying but once you realize that leveling up doesn't make things easier you just quit exploring dungeons unless there's a strong reason to.

It is interesting that rag-tag group is so difficult later in the game. They are the only thing that is and it makes me shake my head to see my level 54 guy decked out in Daedric scrambling to beat them while they're fighting me in the same light armor they started the game with. They were much easer to kill at level 15. Its getting to the point I don't like to explore or quest in the Reach.

Yeah they become pretty badass on later levels. You wander into their camp thinking they will be easy meat and end up taking a dirtnap instead :toughninja: .

So, the Forsworn and Falmer have existed in Skyrim for thousands of years, and the best of them have learned how deal with "heroes" such as you.

And this is somehow unfair. That you can't map mouse button 1 to "I Win".

Actually, you can, but you have to put some effort into it. Oh No, Effort.

simple... summon dremora lord, cast destruction cloak and wall of storms wait for them to come shout become ethereal :foodndrink: watch them suffer and then finish them

I'd agree with you if it weren't for the fact that these enemies are often easier to kill at earlier levels. That makes no sense. As others have already mentioned it makes no sense that dragons can be dropped far more readily than a rag tag band of Forsworn.

Simply boosting an enemies stats is a very lazy way to keep the game challenging at higher levels. The game should make you feel powerful after all the time you've put in and things should be much, much harder at lower levels.

If you look at the chest of a Briarheart, you can see their chest cut open and the Briar heart inside of them. It seems the more esteemed practitioners of their religion (Briarhearts) get their original hearts cut out and replaced with the Briar bulb things...their chest is still open too, just a few stitch strings across the opening.

If they were impossible at low levels and challengin at high levels that would make sense. But them growing from one-hit-kills to one-hit-killers is the problem. You are being punished for leveling up.

Amulet with dual enchantments of shock and frost resist.

Either that, or sneak and powerful bow.

For your viewing pleasure, I present this in game re-enactment of said pickpocket.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6ocD85CGow

There are no awesome weapons or armor to find. At low levels you get lame loot, at mid levels you get good loot and at high levels you get great loot... but every single bandit wearing full enchanted armor with weapons that are more powerful than the ones that the gods and daedra made is just wrong. So at the end, the great loot is just trash because you get so much of it at high levels.

Then there's enemies. Every enemy feels less like an independant being, and more like a pokemon rival... the higher you get, the stronger they get. You never have to think about running into battle because the game levels the enemies to you and you will never be in over your head.

Briarhearts are tough bastards...other forsworns die like noobs, except for some mage...
My game must be differnt from yours because I'm level 45 and I've yet to find some "bandit wearing full enchanted armor with weapons that are more powerful than the ones that the gods and daedra made"...and killing bandits/foresworn is easier now than it was some lvls ago, same for some other enemy like Dwarven Centurions or Draugr Deathlords.
Actually I'm happy that @lvl 45, the game keeps me challenged when I meet a Draugr Death Overlord, a Dwarven Centurion warrior, an Elder Dragon...in general, something that can actually KICK my ass

guys let me share with you that at my level 74 dunmer with a lot of skills maxed out, i can practically choose what i wear, i grew out of daedric and am quite fond of the officer stormcloak gear which looks "Nordy" and i comes un-enchanted, so you can go wild with it , having all your perks and skill maxed up does scale even the most basic piece of crap armor to decent stats, so fighting Briarhearts and any other tough cookie is a question of thinking a bit ahead, not gear. They are bad-asses and i personally like it, its getting boring to charge a big pack of enemies knowing you will emerge victorious and limbs flying off . Any pack that have one Briarheart in it (or o.m.g. maybe two) will pose a problem, and its nice to have to solve it or at least that's my buzz for endgame

I just have one more note on Forsworn being overpowered early on: their axes and bows do more damage than Orcish. Considering that you can upgrade them further than Orcish (until high smithing levels, at least - I just never use Orcish gear anymore, so I don't really know if it ever evens out) - well, that's just a bit too much.

I hate to feed the troll that wandered in, but I guess I should reply...

I'm not upset that there are hard enemies to beat. In fact, I don't care if there are level 100 enemies in the game world while you're in the wagon on your way to your execution. My problem is that these level 100 enemies also level up with the player. I don't know how the leveling works. Is it linear, exponential or geometric? Regardless, impossible enemies at the beginning are just as impossible after a 100 hours of game play.

My issue with the Forsworn is that they are basically nvde. They are wearing bear claws and sticks, tied together with rope. They have daggers made out of sticks and bone. Yet, my 30 pound, two-handed sword of burning takes off only the tiniest bit of their health. ?! They raise their bare arm, holding a bone dagger, and they successfully block my sword? ?! I'm covered from head to toe in heavy armor with a rather high heavy armor rating. Some little female Forsworn, using nothing but two daggers, kills me before I can raise my weapon? ?! And what must I do to be able to dual-wield daggers and slash at god-like speeds?

The Falmer are essentially the same way, if not harder.

None of this makes sense. I would expect such difficulty from heavily armored thugs, but I can clear a bandit hideout with my eyes closed. There is something wrong with the leveling of the Falmer and Forsworn.

No you did not, that is a Mortal Kombat 9 video, still very nice.

The problem is not that the Forsworn are tough, it's that they seem to level up faster than you. At level 10 a briar-heart is a tough battle. At level 30 it's a life or death struggle against an uber boss. At level 50 it's a seemingly impossible battle against a god-like being.

Also their equipment is unreasonably powerful for what is essentially fur with skulls strapped to it and bone and wood lashed together.

I agree with this completely... i don't understand how anyone could say that this game is "too easy" in all aspects. i've played on adept and expert, and the problem i've always had is that there is EXTREME variability in the difficulty of certain encounters vs. others, much more than what would seem to have been intended by the game developers. On expert level, forswarn mages and frost dragons are nearly impossible unless you have a character with a very specific build and uber-crafted items. It does seem that whatever formula is being used to calculate enemy combat effectiveness relative to the player is just way out of balance, or, more likely, that the developers didn't bother to test how these formulas would affect encounters past the level range of main quest content.

what has happened with me is that i create a character and play the way i want to till right around when frost dragons start showing up. at that point, the enemy lists update and start throwing ridiculously, astonishingly broken-hard encounters at you that force you to dramatically rethink your build and playstyle. then, when the next significant level range is hit, the game does ANOTHER far-too-extreme shift in difficulty, which may or may not break your build. Eventually, your character ends up becoming forced into one of a select few types of "end-game viable" builds, either exploiting ranged combat/enemy AI and using summons, or overpowering with alchemy/smithing/enchanting.

so, the promise of "play how you want" is actually "play how you want... until the game mechanics go berserk and force you to optimize and spreadsheet your build, using all the online wiki resources that you can find".

Case in point: if you are a melee fighter hybrid class, and prefer to use light armor but little or no archery, you will need a MINIMUM of 150 health by around level 16-18 when you'll meet your first frost dragon, if you want to be able to stand toe to toe with them. their bite insta-kill animation is based on set values of health, which increases to 300 i believe for ancient dragons. better hope you're spreading your attribute values wisely before you hit each new enemy level list range. I made the mistake of pumping magicka and stamina instead.

They fall down pretty easy using Destruction at range. I bought into the hype and came in using Incinerate, but it blew the bodies far enough away that I had a hard time finding them.

I disagree with the difficulty mechanic of gimping damage while raising enemy HP, but at level 40 on Adept they are very easy kills and I may need to bump the difficulty up to find a challenge.