Level 9 now and it is getting a bit more difficult. Not because my character is a wimp - he is a Nord fighter.

More due to I think specific encounters (the hags, spriggans with the great tree, etc) are supposed to be more difficult. I had to lower difficulty on a few fights.

I've not met spriggans elsewhere, but in Oblivion they were a huge joke. Here they are very tough.

I've consciously thought about how much smoother everything is than Oblivion. It most certainly does not need to be modded. Challenges all over the place, if you're willing to search. I think one needs to understand that challenging doesn't have to equal time consuming. I found a dragon that I beat in about 5 minutes, but I was close to death several times. The dungeons are both, as even the easiest can take upwards of of 30 minutes. You are bound to come across some simple parts, but I will stand by the fact I've had challenge in so many places.

Go higher too, it was said that the most difficult challenges can be found at the highest elevations.

I have to agree with this thread. The game feels way to easy.
And if it doesn't really change with the maximum difficulty then it's [censored]d up.


MODS !!! we are waiting for you !!!

It seems very different perspectivefrom what other people are saying. I must say having mixed spawns is much better, instead of locking every leveled spawn per region, like Fallout. The only way to know for sure is when the CK comes out.


Definitely the indication of level scaling here. Static leveling, or some kind of "fixed" set of loot for each class or type of NPC, is what mods like TIE, OOO and FCOM did to fix Oblivion in this aspect.


I don't know how much difficulty setting is tied to the leveling issue. Does it make stronger spawns appear? Do they get higher quality loot? Or does it only adjust the damage ratio you do to NPC's, as in upping their health and damage attacks?


Definitely with you on this one. The real reward is in exploring and getting some variety. That does not mean thugs should keep getting upped armors like you describe. Things like the unexpected hard villain up the hill may get not that great armor and still prove a challenge.

On the other hand, Having dragons weaker than some grizzly bear... These are kind of obvious mistakes. Some overhaul must correct these. Let's wait for CK.

And, of course, I could not let pass the grinding issue I had with Oblivion. At first I started playing to get that 5 skill increase and that was just a pain. I enjoyed other playthroughs with character leveling mods much more. I hope this is not the issue when I start playing Skyrim and having to get stuck leveling the way Bethesda thought I would.

I'm only at level 6, but so far my experience has been that loot and equipment lists seem to be scaled, but the NPCs appear to be a mix of scaled and static.

definently scaled, much like Oblivion to or fallout or whatever bs they were going on about.


you wont see peeps with Dwemer Items until 20, this includes shops and enemies all of a sudden there is this MASSIVE influx of Dwemer bits and bobs god yes please Mods come to deliver

Hmm... I'm passed the level of bandits, but I also haven't encountered any that have anything better than hide/fur and iron weapons, a couple will have the occasional steel weapon, but no orc or elven weapons/armor on them. Aren't dungeons supposed to have varying level ranges and therefore varying enemies? Meaning that if you walk into a level 35-40 dungeon, at level 20, that dungeon is therefore forever locked at 35 and the enemies inside will be a lesser version of said enemy (think regular bandit instead of chiefs, etc.) I also thought that regions were locked when you entered them, but they would eventually scale a bit, and higher levels mobs would start spawning into them along with the previously lower leveled ones. I believe it's been said that loot/mobs in this game will be a mixture of leveled and fixed, but I haven't played enough to confirm.

Lol yes, this is so annoying, the sudden BOOM of new equipment.

Why even bother giving the player new equipment/spells etc if it doesnt actually make you more powerfull, or actually it does but you cant tell a different when enemies getting equally more powerfull aswell. With this logic you could just throw the leveling system in the trash can along with most of the gear and spells. Just give the player a set of iron armour a few spells and lock him at level 1. Wont notice a difference.

Gaah, need the CS now

I think this is blatant misinformation, the people complaining about easy dragons did not specify any kind of detail in the situation, such as difficulty level, skillset, items, amount of NPCs helping etc.

I can't vouch for lower difficulties, but I'm playing it on expert, and to be honest if people are displeased with the game being too easy and are playing on default difficulty then you really should realise what you're doing wrong.

Whenever I'm fighting a dragon If its just me I will run. If I take a dragon's fire breath to the face my hp melts in seconds, even on my HP stacking burly Nord heavy armour + shield user.

Fighting a bear on your own is completely different to fighting a dragon with a stream of NPCs supporting you.

Unless you fought the bear and then immediately after with no level or skill changes fought the dragon (both encounters without NPC support) then you have no argument.

Another thing to take in to consideration is how different archetypes match up to each adversary. And whether you have dragon specific enchantments on items such as resistance to whichever type of breath that dragon has.

This is sad to hear, modding this, and the speed of levelling / skill gain are my top priorities.

delete me >_<

While I agree that dragons are among the hardest enemies I've met in the game yet I still think they're way too easy to defeat for a low(est) level character. I can't help but think what all the fuss is about when my level 5 character with low quality equipment can defeat a dragon on his own. Dragonborn or not, I'm just a guy with a sword who can use dragon shouts. Why is everyone so scared if a few farmers would apparently be enough to defeat a dragon?

To specify my situation: I defeated a random dragon with frost breath (not sure what it was called) with a level 5 character wielding an Ancient Nord Greatsword (similar to steel quality) clad in Steel Armor. I didn't use any magic or shouts, neither did I have to use a health potion. I didn't have any help either. Difficulty was set to expert. To be fair my character is a Nord with 50% frost resistance and fire breathing dragons are much harder. But still, it's a really weak character. Dragons are scaled just like everything else, only that they're probably a few levels above the player's level. Spriggans for example are much more dangerous for my level 10 character now than the dragon was for my level 5 character. That's not right. It should be absolutely impossible for a low level character to defeat a dragon (without help). But that's not how it is.

It's just as silly as Oblivion Gates - you could close the Kvatch Gate at level 1 because of level scaling. The Daedra destroyed a whole town and a battalion of guards and a level 1 idiot comes along and gets the job done? Dragons behave very similar. I'm pretty sure you can easily complete the main quest and defeat Alduin (guess you have to, didn't play that far yet) before you reach level 10.

To some extent I agree dragons as a whole need to be more powerful than either the PC alone or with groups of NPC guards but this is a delicate situation, since difficulty and level scaling effect both NPC characters and dragons. Weakening the guards and other NPCs is obviously not the right move, so probably generally increasing the stats of dragons is a good bet, however the real problem is still that overall difficulty is increased by spreading stat increases amongst abilities, and drastically reduced by focussing on one skill and only using that.

By being a nord you cut the damage output of that dragon in HALF. Plus as we established before your character is solely levelled on 2 handed combat ability. It doesn't mean dragons are too weak for your level, it means that single combat skill builds are too over-powered.


Until we look at the CK we can only speculate on how exactly NPC stats are set, my hope is that levelled dragons vary from just over your level to way out of your league.


There are examples of level gating along the main quest, some lighter examples would be the frost troll's den on the 7000 steps to high Hrothgar. Heavier ones would probably involve some of the later dungeons, since it might be a lot harder to avoid the gating enemy than that frost troll, which I had to run from.

Wait for the Blood Dragons..... They will destroy you. Don't even get started on Elder Dragons

So at expert level enemys dont become a sword/arrow/fireball sponge? Thats is what happen in most games and is trash.

So what changes then?

Im asking becouse i cant play right now thks to the ultimate freeze bug.

Well, Nord is a regular race (one that probably most people will pick for their first playthrough) so I don't think it's an advantage only a select few have. Personally I think 50% frost resistance is far too much anyway. But whatever, even with a different race I would have been able to defeat the dragon, in that case I would have needed a few health potions of course, but that's not much of a problem since there are enough of them and since you can drink as many as you want (that's a different issue that needs to be sorted out imo). My two-handed skill was around 40 with a few perks and my sword was a cheap low level sword, I shouldn't be able to defeat a dragon with skill/equipment like that. The reason why I was able to defeat the dragon was level scaling, not my mediocre two-handed skill and the crappy sword in my hands.

In my imagination a dragon is an extremely powerful creature and I should need a skill of 75+ with all perks possible for that value plus a really good sword to defeat a creature like that. And even then it should be a tough battle where I need to use a lot of health potions. To me it's simply not right that a low level character with crap equipment can defeat a dragon.

Fixing the dragon scaling is probably one of the most difficult tasks though since unlike Oblivion Gates you can't simply avoid them. A super powerful dragon you can neither avoid nor defeat is no fun, even I have to admit that. I already mentioned this long before the game was released. Back then I hoped that Bethesda would simply lock the random dragon encounters until the player completed a difficult quest that only high level characters would be able to complete. But I feared they would cheaply solve the problem with level scaling, and that's what they did.


So far I've only defeated the second story dragon, the Frost Troll was the only 'gate' enemy I've met so far. My Troll was warped on top of a cliff above the path for some reason (glitch) and I simply ignored it. That's yet another problem I have with the game, the sprinting feature makes it impossible for enemies to catch up with you if you decide to run away from them. Gate enemies aren't possible unless you really have to defeat them to proceed (if they have a key you need for example).

That's what I've been trying to understand.


At least in Oblivion that's what happened when you increased the difficulty bar. Specifics on how Skyrim difficulty settings work may be known only when the CK comes out.

I'll just chime in and say that if anyone else is in favour of removing the scaling (so far seems no one is), I've started a tentative project.
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1264415-wip-interest-check-static-dungeons/

This is the problem, The hype said 'You are what you play' and if you play as a blacksmith then you'll have about as much chance as a blacksmith when fighting a bear. Yeah, the hype kind of missed that bit out.

40 hours, lvl 20 or 21 and I have not found any fight impossible. At the start of the game I sneaked off to the west, I always sneak around early on. Ding, a level gained. Ding, another level gained. Ding, this was getting silly, 3 levels gained almost entirely due to sneak. The writing was on the wall.

In MW I'd have made sneak a minor skill and at level up time I would have chosen where to allocate the stat points, avoiding anything to do with sneak unless I thought it needed a boost - it is my character, I can do with it what I wish. In Sk, I read the writing on the wall and come the first 'impossible' fight I looked to spend the couple of perk points I had in reserve: armor, ok, archary, fine, in the name of Todd, look at the level of sneak! And so, instead of playing my character my way I found myself forced into playing my character the way the game wanted me to play. The game appears well balanced for full on sneak, though some battles need somewhat manipulative solutions, the trouble is I do not particularly like the character the game has made me create. I'm at the stage where I'd like to experiment with item improvement but seeing how near the edge and fragile this character has become I frightened to squander any perks, dull and unimaginative though they be.


This is the solution, regional difficulty levels yay, and limited scaling within bands if scaling were thought necessary. Now my fragile sneaky character could frolic with the minnows until they toughened up a bit. I'd like that, sounds more like the character I'd enjoy.


This is my main issue at the moment, a few things have made me go ooo, but nothing has made me go wow. I'm out of reasons for exploring. Curse you Todd and your bloody focus on balance, I want my feeling of magic back!

.

Quick Question: Everyone who is complaining about the difficulty being too easy, how about you try something harder than adept before you request a mod? Thanks.

This is exactly what I think as well. Where are those artefacts that I remember from Morrowind? Where's that seemingly unimportant cave that ends in finding Chrysamere? Why do suddenly everyone wear awesome armour just because I do?
I haven't once gotten giddy with excitement over finding something in Skyrim, simply because I know that if I had gone to that dungeon later, I'd have found even better stuff. Clearing a dungeon as soon as you can manage becomes punishing rather than rewarding. You aren't given an awesome artefact that is really great for your level; instead, everything is watered down and it would have been better to clear the dungeon at a higher level. Instead of risk leading to reward, we have comfort leading to reward whereas taking risks robs you of chances to get good items at later levels.

*cough*points-at-my-previous-post*cough*

Dungeons have minimum and maximum levels. A given dungeon may be lv 10 if you are below level 10 or your level +2 if you are from levels 8 through 18 or level 20 if you are 20 or above.

Your loot wouldn't change that much.

"Wouldn't change that much" is an insufficient consolation for the fact that all important loot is randomly generated and completely generic "X of Y" items ("Leather helm of Fire") and all enemies have generic names; not to mention the lack of any hand-placed artefacts.
There is nothing rewarding about going through a dungeon and finding that the final boss and loot is of exactly the same kind as the previous dungeon since it's so incredibly generic (have lost count over how many generic "Draugr Overlord" or "Bandit Chief" I've killed at the end of a dungeon only to be rewarded with vendor-trash).
Level scaling isn't just about difficulty, but also about immersion and variety.

I think that it's more realistic for the "boss" to be equipped only slightly better if not the same as his cohorts. I mean, real gangsters don't all carry hand guns and their boss carries an AK-47?

This way seems more real to me. You'd see a lot of enchanted random items as there are a lot of mages with an enchanting skill to improve.

I can understand your missing the unique items though. But, personally, I don't mind missing them for a more "realistic" game.

i just got out of a battle with some falmer and their pets(forgot the name for a second)
cost me at least 10 minor and 3 large healing potions, and a full-heal from a standing levelup, with 2 companions helping me, on adept difficulty, i seriously don't get how people think the difficulty is set too low