The assassins are more powerful because they cant be dodged, and they're unable to block so you cant slow them down. They're the only ones i need potions for on master (or my trusty spirit wolf)

I did not say you can not comment.
I asked you - politely - not to comment in this manner on stuff you have not tried. And from your comments it's clear that you have not.
If you can not tell the difference, then I feel sorry for you.

Bandits can't be good fighters?

Have you been using a sword or a mace?
Are being hit?
Have you been using a bow and arrow?
What level you up to?

In a Elders Scrolls game from Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim (I don't know about Arena and Daggarfall I think they will be the same) share one thing in common though are are different games, when you use something like a weapon, magic, making potions, sneaks, lockpicks and etc you improve that skill, until you get into a certain point you get a level up that skill. I am tripping at myself at this moment, this http://i140.photobucket.com/albums/r11/Gerza71/TESV2011-12-0419-30-25-55.jpg will explain it to you. Adding bling to your stuff (I feel like I am repeating myself here) without getting hit and using it dose not cut it. You have to use it to improve from it. Its fine if you use your sword for killing and put bling on it. I use my glass sword which had 43 damage, when I put bling on it like making it fine the damage rose it to 46. I cannot improve it because I did not point any points for that skill, I think smithing.

And you dodged my point again. Lastly, I have used poisons. I have over 160 hours in the game at this point. This isn't a complicated game with esoteric mechanics. Poisons work once then need to be reapplied. End of story.

As others have said, if you do not place perks in combat and sustainability skills you cannot expect to do well in either aspect. As such those are skills I focus on first and foremost (not necessarily to the point of mastering), and the other stuff comes later. As my playstyle is that of one that does A LOT of cave diving, it's kind of a no-brainer.

Along with the other commentors, I'm left scratching my head. . .

If you are level 30, and all you've levelled up is smith/enchant/alchemy, you should be able to use the products of those skills to completely pwn the Bandits. I mean, seriously, the great armor you can craft should keep them from killing you instantly, the potions should allow you to stay alive, poison the enemy, and the enchantments mean your uber smithed sword should be able to do something useful like steal health, do frost/fire/shock damage, etc, and because it's smithed, should do decent damage.

However, it sounds like, maybe, you've levelled up a lot of skills a little bit, but none of them a lot, and have saved your perk points. If that's the case, then I would highly recommend spending your perks in a similar fashion to how your skills have levelled. . . perk up enchant, smith, and alchemy as much as you are able (but if they haven't levelled much, you may be "gated" from perking them a lot right now), then take most of the "left over" perk points and do a *little bit* - 1 to 3 perks per skill, in your armor skill of choice and weapon skill of choice. What this means is that your modest weapon and armor skill bonuses will combine with your modest enchant/smith/alchemy bonuses to make you as powerful as you need to be.

You will probably not need to heavily perk out the "combat skills" trees, but a small number of useful perks to combine with the bonuses you already get from your crafting will go a long, long way.

As an example, if a basic sword does 20 points of damage per attack, and your smithed sword does, say, 35 points of damage per attack, and you take the 1h perk that gives an additional 20% damage, and you take it twice, for a total 40% bonus, now your sword will do 49 points of damage.

Anyhow, in general, you probably want to perk your skills about the way you've levelled them. That is, you would only dedicate all your perk points to your crafting skills, if those are the only skills you've levelled up. Otherise, enemies will out-level the benefits of your crafting skills. That is to say, if you're crafting skills are each at level 60-75, then you should have been able to perk them up to pretty epic proportions, and they will be all you need. If, however, at the same level, your crafting skills are only at, say, level 45 or 50, and are only partly perked up because of their low level, but you have other skills at level 35-45 too, you'll probably need to perk up those other skills to be powerful enough.

1. What point? The one that you can manage poison usage easily with dualwield? Because I already talked about that.
2. How come you write something like "reaply every 2 seconds" when the weakest poison (paralysis - because that is what I was talking about) that you can possibly make lasts 5+ seconds? Which is far more than you need btw.
3. Yes. So what...?

Isn't there a perk (cant remember if it's picked or aquired through a quest) that makes poisons last for 2 hits?

Actually what it does is makes poisons last 2x longer - it doubles the lingering poisons duration (damage over time).
I have not tested for number of hits yet - might do that once I get back home.

Your whole original point was that you can gimp combat skills and get by with poison. I'm not saying you can't. I am saying, if that's the only way you can deal significant damage then you are going to have to reapply quite a bit if you're getting rushed by 5 enemies. At least five times. If you can kill them without poison then you clearly haven't gimped combat skills enough for it to matter.

If you are on PC, turn on TGM if you want to play with zero consequences from your character build.

Freedom and choices only have meaning if they have consequence, both good and bad.

Perks make a big difference in the relative difficulty. I had to restart a character because I didn't really know what I was doing and scattered my perks too much. Pretty soon I ran into troops like you are encountering. I restarted and made a tighter character and spent my points wisely. The game is much more doable now.

Ah now we're getting somewhere. I think what the problem is that you play a "barbar conan" type of character - which is fine if that's fun for you. I do admit relying solely on potions/poisons could be troublesome for a character like this.

The opening post was about why the bandits are too strong, and people were telling him/her it's impossible to get by without combaqt perks. That is why I stepped in - because I know it's perfectly possible, if you use your head a little. Or to be more precise - adjust your playstyle a little. Use your smarts. Go to college

You cant hold on to too many perks.

You can drive the car wherever you want but if you dont put any gas in, you wont get very far.

And that doesn't make it a bad car design either.

For all who are keeping up, I found out what I was doing wrong and mentioned it several posts back. I had a weaker blade equipped. And I have put no points into Alchemy. I've only invested in Smithing, Block, and Enchanting at this point. So far, I'm able to hold my own ground. You should also take into account that I use my shouts often -- especially Mark of Death.

That's because modern games use OOP ( Object Oriented Programming ) methodology. For games it's usually C/C++( though MicroSoft is now pushing C#). What they do is make a "Class", this Class holds all the information about an Object ( such as health, Stamina, Level, Abilities, Perks, skill levels etc). Any specific Bandit would be an "Instance" of this class. Basically, the Class would be the framework, and each individual Instance would have the values filled in as appropriate for that specific instance. Bandit A and Bandit B would both have all the same attributes ( health, perks,etc) but different values in each field.

You have to use your perks man, they make you more powerful... What do you expect?

What are you saving them for? Spend them and use them. Otherwise, put the difficulty down.

You can build your character however you want. That is what the difficulty slider is for. build a sub-optimal character and bump it down a few notches, build an optimal character bump it up.

It can be changed at any time, even mid fight.

Using "getav" on the console begs to differ. NPCs do seem to get the benefits of Perks, and don't have massive Health Pools like you claim. At Level 25, on default difficulty, a Bandit Marauder that specializes in melee generally has 250-350 health. Considering you start with 100 Health, that makes sense.

One thing is the NPCs Armor skills level up a lot faster than yours, so you'll more often meet ones with near 100 in Heavy or Light armor, meaning they're deflecting a lot of your damage.

And on Master difficulty, they deal 4x damage while you deal less damage to them.

I knew something was going on there. It was the only thing that made sense to me. Thank you for making use of the console to check on that. I'm playing on the PS3 console. So, I don't have that tool .. LOL.