True. I just think enemies should attempt to really yield instead of getting right back into the fight.

I know right?

I have seen a few that do, but they seem to be the exception, rather than the rule.


It's really all about preparation. On Master Difficulty, at low levels, you really have to be flexible. I usually keep a dozen or so vials of my trademark poison (Paralysis and Lingering Damage) to help me with tough fights. Some enemies are also fairly easy when you can learn their attack patterns. For example, Dragons and Two-handed equipped Draugr pack a wallop, but they're very easy to avoid once you lean how to read their tells in combat.

It's also worth mentioning, the Hardest enemies in the game, are usually the Human enemies. Not because they're all that powerful, but because they can break into "Finishers" on you, and there's naught you can do about it. So lets say a bandit beats you over the head with his warhammer because of an unlucky rock that blocked your evade attempt... It didn't kill you though, left you at 10% Hp, which is fairly common with marauder power attacks. In any other circumstance, you'd be able to do a tactical withdrawal and heal yourself up, but instead, about 0.0012 seconds after you realized you even got hit, you're thrown into third-person to watch said bandit take around 9 seconds to do some cheesy jump'n'drop attack on your skull, while your character sits there with his arms out waving them like an idiot.

And when all else fails, Skyrim has no Shortage of potions.

Define obvious exploit. Is knocking someone off a ledge with FRD or leading an enemy into a trap or into another enemy an 'exploit'? Is using a potion in combat an exploit? How about using a series of poison arrows? You'll have to clarify that for me.

How good must your alchemy and enchanting be? 100? I never was able to fight without potspam on master. Ancient dragons for example are impossible for me to fight (they 2 hit me on normal) on master they spell death. Master is a challenge and I don't mean to sound like I am against people challenging themselves but the entire difficulty just seems unbalanced and a bit far fetched. Even though it is a fantasy game.

I would personally have loved to see a realistic mode or something like 'hardcoe' from fallout. Where you character has to eat, sleep and drink. Being hit with a sword twice kills you, unless you block with your shield/sword or magical barrier and arrows 1/3 your health, no hp/mp regeneration unless you sit on a bench or sleep. Magic can 1 hit you. Just something that really really really punishes you. Well just imagine it's really you there, realistic mode means your going to die basically! Of course tweaks all the monsters in the game to die realistically also. 1 hit bandits etc. Still can't imagine a dragon being easy!

Edit: TheMagician I mean someone with sneak 100 sitting on a rock shooting three zombies to death while they look a bit confused. I mean running round a corner, slapping a deathlord in the face, running away, sneak mode then running round a corner, slapping a deathlord in the face, running away, sneak mode then running round a corner, slapping a deathlord in the face, running away, sneak mode then running round a corner, slapping a deathlord in the face, running away, sneak mode then running round a corner, slapping a deathlord in the face, running away, sneak mode then running round a corner, slapping a deathlord in the face, running away, sneak mode then.... I think you get the order. I get people want to play the game their way so I don't condone that at all. Personally I just play a way that makes me feel not so... 'dirty' Um err not good at explaining... simply put I kinda play with a Bushido playstyle if that makes sense xD

Also, Illusion Magic is probably the most powerful school for Master players. It could be interpreted as cheap, but early on (Around level 10), Calm can pretty much save you in any situation outside Boss encounters, Animage really helps with those pesky Saber cats.

Muffle + Frenzy + Invisible is also a great way to crowd control. I usually round up a ton of bandits or bears with Muffle on, frenzy them, then Invisible and sneak out while they kill each other, then finish off the survivor(s).

Is that exploiting?

Being sneaky or using magic is not really exploting the game. But being a warrior seems impossible on master for me

Yes, Warriors are at a critical disadvantage.

If you want to be a Stand-and-fight Warrior on Master, make friends with shields, beef stew, and Fortify Block Enchantments. That should help you out. Beef Stew will essentially let you bash an unlimited amount of times, though Power Attacks will still take you into negative Stamina, though very briefly.

I recommend Shield+Mace, and if you want to go the extra mile, make a full Crusader with Healing magic. Make sure you always equip your healing spells in the main hand (Weapon) so you can continue to block.

Protip: If you want to use Healing Magic, but don't want to join the College of Winterhold, once you have level 40 or higher Restoration skill, the quest in Riften's Hall of the Dead, will yield an entire suite of Adept level Restoration.

Bring on the Godly difficulty.

I'd settle for Master Difficulty turning the passive Regeneration down to about 0.10% per second outside of combat, and turn it completely off inside of combat (enchanting can still bring it back on, similar to how Vampirism works)

It's threads like these that give me the impression I'm doing something very, very wrong. I mean, I can't play above Adept without flailing for health potions every ten seconds and feeling completely ineffective in battle. And then you guys are having such a field day on Master that you need something harder? *shakes head* Yep, definitely doing something wrong.

I agree with this, I have trouble with my vampire character on Novice, but with my other character if I go above Apprentice I get my ass handed to me. I think I just svck really bad at Skyrim because in Oblivion I was a boss.

Don’t feel too bad. It’s just that character optimization in this game almost negates difficulty. RPing provides more challenge, but there are a lot of min/maxer’s here, myself included. I’m 2 shotting Giants with my Bound Bow at level 41 and wishing I could unlearn everything I know about maximizing my character right now...

When you're juggling illusion/Alchemy/Enchantments

things get nice a toasty for enemies.

If you've gone out of your way to build a Demi-god, what position are you in to complain about difficulty?

Its not as if you all of a sudden gain super human powers. I'm level 39 and its taken me 70hrs to get there. I'm on adept and its no walk in the park. I've not got any fancy power ups, just a legendary Daedric sword. I've maxed out 1 handed and heavy armour now I'm using light armour (nightingale) and a bow.

Sure is hard enough for me.

It's hard to make a character powerful enough that you feel confident in battle without going too far and stripping all encounters of their challenge, innit? I suppose I could go the whole route of crafting a fortify alchemy potion, drinking it, crafting another one, drinking it, etc., etc., crafting ridiculously overpowered enchanting/smithing fortifiers, drink those and then hammer and soul gem my way to greatness, but what's the point? I'd just be building myself an untouchable throne and then spending all my time atop it flicking dragons away like they're kittens. That might be fun for a while, but it'd get old real fast.

This remark will certainly make me unpopular. I think Bethesda got it right with the difficulty levels in Skyrim. I love playing on all levels of difficulty but what I love most about Master is that it's not like Master on Fallout 3 (where your enemies just got more hit points and did more damage), it actually feels right. I've a level 52 paladin/fighter build who has maxed out one-hand, block, heavy armor, smithing, and alchemy. If anyone attacks him with melee, depending on the level of the opponent, he'll either toast them within seconds or they'll be a nice back-and-forth for close to a minute (when using tactics). However, I will still get totally creamed by a group of 4 really strong melee fighters or even one arch mage if I'm not careful. So, there is still balance for me even at level 52 and it feels right.

Just started a mage who's at level two and hanging around at Apprentice until I get used to it.

A bit of misconception here folks. Staying at permanently level 1 is not super duper mega hard mode or anything.

Yes it is "harder" than the standard game and as always, it is harder at the start. However the difficulty will reduce sightly as you gain better non-leveled equipment and your skill levels increase. As I said before, the minimum level of dungeons seems to increase as you journey out of the whiterun hold. However that increase does not quite keep the same pace as your own power increase.

What does happen in this "mode" is:
1. Artifacts, loot and quest rewards actually matter now because enchanting is heavily nerfed in this mode.
2. You still get more powerful via items and skill increases so there is character growth. There just isn't that magical massive difference between a 1st level character who can take maybe 3 sword hits to the chest as compared to a 81 level god-killer who can regenerate faster than someone can damage him.
3. It keeps the PC closer to an NPC power level than super saiyan power level. How that helps is that it makes the NPC back stories and their fears much more believeable. Dragons become a credible threat. The battle for forts becomes less about, how much bodies you can loot and store on a dead horse before they disappear, and more about surviving say battle.

In short, I view it more as an role-playing tool, than a difficulty enhancer. An actual difficulty enchanter would be to level normally, but never perk your skills, now that is hard ... and boring.

Huh. That's actually a rather interesting point of view. I've never thought of gimping yourself as a roleplay mechanism before, but I guess it really would help you understand the trials and tribulations of regular NPCs, wouldn't it? You'd constantly be entering battles feeling frightened of what lay ahead and uncertain if you're capable of handling it, just like that elderly lady cowering in her hut as a dragon flies overheard and that merchant who risks his neck taking his caravan through bandit-infested territory.

I would say that Master difficulty is not hard enough at higher levels and about right at lower levels.

At lower levels your power is limited, since you don't yet have the perks and crafted items that break the game into a million pieces, so you're often at a disadvantage due to being outnumbered. This is especially true for melee characters, since they get hit a lot more. As a result, a fairly standard tactic is to string fights out so that you're not facing more than two opponents at once, as otherwise there's a high chance of being overrun.

At higher levels characters often have ridiculous amounts of power compared to the opposition, so fights are often trivial. It's still possible to get killed, since high-end opponents hit like trucks, but it's a really rare occurrence unless one has not been raising health (in which case you're asking for it). A few opponents remain fairly dangerous unless you've capped both armor rating and magic resistance, however you're only going to fight a handful of them and will usually be well-prepared at the time.

^{Well, on master if you play normally, i mean without using enchantment or potions or smthing, even with 300 armor and 300 health you can be shot in one arrow by marauders or falmers, thats just really annoying because all archers anticipate your moves and dont miss you, the first thing to do before starting anything is to level up crafting skill if you dont want to be one shot by every bears. Stay in whiterun and hunt the mudcrabs souls,, buy soulgems mine iron and transmute them with free alteration spell to level up smthing fast with jewellry. Its not overpower to have a weapon that makes 250dmg cause ennemies somethimes do much more, in fact its a need if you're scared to do 1 point of damage on falmer and they just one shot you.
its just the imbalance between ennemies and you on master (you do 0.5dmg ennemies do 2X more) that just push you to be fully resistant to magic or damage proof thats why its called master, cause no one can hit you cause you're the dovahkin}

For the morbidly curious, here's my build: Level 43, 100 Health, 100 Magicka, 520 Stamina (Master, obviously)

http://www.truancyfactory.com/images/misc/elsbet/heavy-block-two.jpg (no perks)
http://www.truancyfactory.com/images/misc/elsbet/one-arch-light.jpg (no perks)
http://www.truancyfactory.com/images/misc/elsbet/sneak-lock-pick.jpg (no perks in Sneak)
http://www.truancyfactory.com/images/misc/elsbet/sp-alch-ill.jpg
http://www.truancyfactory.com/images/misc/elsbet/conj-dest-rest.jpg (no perks in Destruction or Restoration)
http://www.truancyfactory.com/images/misc/elsbet/alt-ench-smith.jpg

My design objective in building this character was to always pick the worst perk (as far as I could tell) every level. I then created a back-story for my character that made these decisions logical. (The result was Elsbet, who turned out to be a very interesting character for me to RP. In fact, she ended up becoming my main character.) The goal was to see if it was possible for a player to build a character by accident that couldn't be successful using default game mechanics just by making bad choices at every level. My conclusion is that I couldn't intentionally build a character that couldn't succeed on Master, though it is a fairly challenging build. No matter what build you make, for RP reasons or otherwise, it's still possible to beat the game on Master assuming you use standard features like the best available weapons and armor to be found in shops and dungeons, take a companion, and approach combat strategically. Elsbet has the health and magicka of a level 1 character (she can't even cast Apprentice level spells without buffs, which makes dual-casting worthless), but fights 40+ level enemies. It was most challenging about the levels 29-38, but the challenge has started to drop off quite a bit.

I've scrupulously avoided grinding any of my skills, though some are much easier to level than others. (Enchanting, for example, is ridiculously easy to level.) My primary tactic in combat is to avoid getting hit. I use my companion and low level summons (Familiar, Flaming Familiar, Flame Atronach) to divert attention and then attack primarily with bow (frequently poisoned arrows, typically Frost Spider venom or the poisons harvested from Falmer). I am also a Shout ninja: between FRD, Become Ethereal, and sprinting I can avoid taking damage in most conflicts.

Dragons are, if anything, easier than most enemies: I often beat them without taking any serious damage at all: drink a resist fire/frost and then sprint/become ethereal, distract them with summons and fill them full of arrows. It takes a while, but it's not that hard to do. I use traps and other hostile creatures on opponents when they're handy, but I don't go out of my way to find them. I use scrolls and staffs when necessary against tougher opponents. The only enemies that really give me any trouble are archers and spell-casters. FRD does a good job sweeping them. A few well-timed power attacks from a two-handed weapon will incapacitate most spell-casters. I don't even really bother with resist magic. I figure out what their preferred type of magic is and then drink a resist potion. I think the only item I wear with any resist is resist frost on my boots.

I do probably die a lot more than most players (most things still kill me in one hit, after all) but it's by no means the hardest game I've played, even with these restrictions. I find Elsbet a lot less frustrating to play than Demon's Souls on normal settings. Master is a great setting for Elsbet, as I find the game quite challenging without being too frustrating. I can't imagine it being hard to beat with a normally perked out and optimized character, though.