So after succesfully playing an enjoyable dunmer to level 74 on adept, going through most of the disciplines yet being a dual wielding light armored type, i decided to see how Master difficulty would feel.
I must say its a nightmare.
My toon is a heavy armored shield wielding imperial, hit level 14 (twas hard!) got some perks into 1h damage, armor bonus perks, block perks. The gameplay is challenging enough to be fun UNTIL i am faced a 2 hander opponent. They simply don't die fast enough and they more or less 2-3 shoot me. They are so resilient usually that i go through all my pots and food and they are still up to kill me. Yes, a companion helps but i choose not to have one so early in the game (wth will i do when mobs scale up). A swarm of 2-3 bandits with one wielding a 2-hander means usually gtfo fast . Also they will crit me with my hp only at half wich is like: COME ON!. Im not even going to talk about enchanted weapon mobs or god forbid, Dragons. That first tower one took me 90 min to finally defeat it to my shame with a bow, hiding in the tower a lot like a wuzz ( im supposed to be a sword and board damage soaker LOL).

So my questions to you is, knowing that i am level 14, no unuseful perks used, have no magic resistance yet, have a full dwemer suit on + sword, all enhanced to exquisite:

Are all the "pff the game is to easy, i pwwz00r on master pff bethesda sux" cowdungs cheaters and console abusers or am i doing something wrong? please help its frustrating not being able to complete any quest and dread any orc with a iron greataxe...

Shield bash is all you should use your stamina on when facing a 2h or boss (scaled) melee opponent.

You can keep them locked down while you kill them. Also, grab the mats for vegetable soup if you can't kill them in your stamina bar - this will let you shield bash forever.

The actual combat flow (using an axe or sword) should be bash with two swings, bash and two swings, etc. Maces you'll only get one swing in reliably (and sometimes axe depending on your reflexes). The important part is not letting them hit you without you blocking.

It is a combination of things, the biggest is not trying to Master like you do Adept or you'll die constantly. It is do able, see the Naked Nord Challenge thread, it just requires a different approach.

yes i do what you guys say however, the damn 2handers have wider range than my bash, wich leads to waste of stamina and i also take a lot of damage even through the block bear in mind i only am level 14 thats about 160 hp and armor rating of some 254

It is Master difficulty after all.

You don't want to actually be blocking their hit, you want to be bashing them before they get a hit off, then hit them while they're staggering, then bash again when they recover, and so on. That's what I mean by 'locking them down'. You don't trade hits with them, or you will lose.

LOL I've been playing Master with a Battlemage (2H, Heavy, Resto/Destro) and I have to say at level 14 I manage it pretty good, but it's definitely a challenge. Have to do a lot of running and healing, blocking, pots, food, every tool available to make that guy survive. Not to mention effin mages, they will one or two shot me, most of the time. When I see them I get out of whatever dungeon/cave they are holed up, I hate them with a passion.

But yeah, Master is no faceroll, unless you are really giving yourself an advantage by console commands or raising all three crafting skills to 100 and doing the Alchemy/Enchanting loop or some other kind of exploit.

Mobility is key, forget shield, posions are your friend (paralyz for 27 seconds works wonders)

im definitely thinking of going to see the graybeards, a full unrelenting would definitely help with those bastards. and the paralyzing idea is sweet

I have to say that I strongly suspect the people who complain about Master being "too easy", are probably the type of people who figure out the absolute most powerful combination of skills/strategies and relentlessy exploit them.

I'm sure it's quite possible to make your character an uber-god-of-war in Skyrim with the right combinations of things. It's been possible in all the previous Elder Scrolls.

I wouldn't worry if you are finding Master to be a challenge - it's supposed to be. But, if you find a particular type of enemy too hard, you'll need to find another strategy to deal with them. Some posters mentioned some things that might work. You might try using more poisons and enchantments in combination with your weapons. I think in the situation you described, I'd be inclined to try a hit-and-run approach, since you can't endure their attacks for long - get in, get a power hit in with a weapon that has a useful poison on it. Get them staggered with the power hit, then back off and let the poison do its thing while my stamina recovers (and I drink any pots I need to). I'm guessing at level 14, you don't yet have any alchemy, in favor of having trained up your weapon, armor, block, and smith skills (at least that's what it sound like), so you'll have to use bought/found poisons. Even though the bought/found are usually weaker than player made, they can still be more useful than no poisons at all for those really hard opponents.

Then dart back in, power attack with the re-poisoned weapon, back off. It might take a long time to defeat the enemy that way, but if you can mostly avoid them landing attacks on you, that should help a lot. Get in, get them down a little lower on health, get back out.

Don't forget to Shout. Don't have any shouts yet? I'd concentrate on getting some, I think.

Granted that posion was made with 100 in Alchemy and full forify Alchemy outfit. Slow is also a good posion, also if you make equipment to Fortify Alteration by 100 then Enchant a weapon with paralyz you can use it without using up charges.

well i just got my butt handed to me again so i'm going to grab Lydia and her exquisite dwemer sword of my making. Also i enchanted my sword with some hp absorb, we`ll see how it goes and im defo going to see the graybeards soon

that is definitely good to know even tho imo charges should spend anyway, its not my magicka there, but this is grounds for another discussion

People who complain about Master being easy are either:
1. Lying. This is the most common thing. They say that they play on Master because everything else is too easy because it makes them feel good about themself on the internet.
2. Exploiting. I'm talking min/maxing Smithing/Alchemy/Enchanting (usually on Novice difficulty), making broken gear, then switching to Master and complaining about the game being easy.
3. Super Tryharding. These are the meta-game people who spend hours plotting routes and tactics for raids in WoW. They fully utilize kiting, sneak, and AI abuse to win fights. Sad, really.

Lvling really helps too. I never power lvled...intentionally anyway, but got as I lvled the game became easier and easier and the easier it got the higher difficulty I put it on. So now I'm lvl 51 and playing on master with dragonarmor, resistance and all that stuff. It's still a bit easy for my taste and am hoping that someone will come out with a mod or something that will make it a tad harder.

At level 14, you have no excuse to have HP this low as a melee character.

I laughed hard at that one.

I believe you (the OP) have a point. I point that I made several times.

I've only had one character so far and not a huge number of hours. But given all the "Master is so easy" stuff, I decided to move from adept to Expert and Master.

I've come to the conclusion that unless you are at a high level or use exploits, a typical character cannot possibly be easy on Master - at least not at lower levels (below 20 at least). Even if someone is twice as good at me at FPS (which is what combat amounts to), I just don't see how it could be easy.

The problem is that some enemies are very easy even on Master. Like Wolves, or regular Bandits, or regular Daugr. But the higher level characters can be insanely difficult.

For example after switching to Expert I ran into a Spriggan Matriarch, which had a horrible ranged drain or absorb health spell. After many reloads I was able to defeat it but was dieing constantly.

Then figured that maybe was an anomaly. So I switched to Master (level 18, two handed, Exquisite Steel, Lydia with about the same) and tried another dungeon. It had mages. The regular mage was no problem. Then I ran into a Fire Mage and an Apprentice Shock Mage. My character had 40 stealth and hid in a corner and sniped at the Fire Mage. If the Fire Mage saw my character, the character would be dead in probably under two seconds. So I just hid there like a coward/jerk while they kept beating up Lydia and the inexplicably leave her alive when she gets low health so she can attack again. My character sniping with poisons. After about 45 minutes of this exact thing, the Fire Mage was still at about half health. It was absurd. The only thing to do in a case like that on Master is to leave, level up, and come back later.

So I don't get the "Master is super easy" view. Maybe easy at level 60, but not at level 14, in my experience.

I actually have a very similar character - Imperial male with heavy armor, one handed weapon, shield and restoration magick. Currently, my guy is level 22 I believe and I am also playing on Master.

What I noticed so far is that there are areas/dungeons/enemies that I simply cannot take on at certain levels. However, this has only happened a handful of times so far and, luckily, not too often. So if you run into this either flee or reload your game to a previous save. Besides that, I'll let you know that I do die a lot, especially in dungeons. I just completed one of the first Companion guild quests where you explore a cairn with one of your brothers. One part where you enter one of the first larger crypts I had to die over 10 times easy until I figured out how to beat it.

This would bother some people but I usually play games on their hardest difficulty and am pretty competitive. If you aren't having fun I'd say drop a difficulty - who cares.

There's a lot of strawmanning going on in this thread, so I just wanted to add that while Master isn't 'too easy' or even 'easy' it's not 'too hard' or even that hard.

It's basically 'just right' for me. Screw up and you're dead, but you can kill stuff without 'cheating' or 'exploiting' provided you know what you're doing.

Did you per chance power level your smithing since you have exquisite equipment at lvl 14, thus over-leveling yourself a bit and your combat skills not being up to par?

lets see now: i need to block a lot hence i need some stamina right? so level 14 = 170 hp and 10 from the arkay amulet, and 160 stamina. Your post is wilingly inflamatory and i will be treating it as trolling


if i did it wasn't intentional, i just used up my mats to forge stuff and sell/use, it was cumbersome and i hadn't gotten a house to store stuff yet, only got 2 perks in smithing

Check out mystream for pointers on this build. Master difficulty dead is dead. The key IMO is alchemy potions not abused. A few paralysis poisons and your set

2 perks in smithing will screw you in combat. That's two perks you didn't have in dmg or dmg mitigation.

I tried master for oh about an hour.. You guys are seriously good if you can do this. My hats off to you all.