I completed one run of Skyrim last December on adept difficultly as I normally do on certain rpg's to take in the story/world first. I remember it being pretty damn easy.. After starting a new play-through on master, I still notice most of the game to be kinda easy until you run into "special" npcs/monsters that you may encounter at the end of a dungeon which will literally two shot my ass. This will make me scratch my head and question the games idea of "difficultly progression" as I just rampaged my way through a dungeon without breaking a sweat to encounter one mob at the end who can kill me in two spells. How do you guys manage to deal with this type scenario while trying to maintain a sense of acceptable progression? In which I mean not resorting to cheesing tactics such as power-leveling a profession before I even reach level 20? Spam the hell out of potions?

I'm currently a level 17 shield/one hand warrior type which focuses one 1 hand/smithing/block/enchanting(haven't taken advantage of yet), and alchemy which I feel are all at adequate skill level for being 17... And it's not like I'm venturing out into the depths of Mordor, these are random caves/dungeons I encounter doing quests and such.

The randomness of the difficultly system in Skyrim just bothers me at times. It's not that a whole dungeon is hard and makes you go "Maybe I should come back later" but just one specific mob that is godly and comes out of nowhere. How do you guys deal with the random spikes?

Level 17 is still quite low, and you may have stumbled into a high level dungeon. Which dungeon did you have trouble with? Perhaps it's one that we are all familiar with.

Just recently "The Break of Dawn" quest to obtain the sword dawnbreaker, which had a mage at the end with some pretty powerful magic, even after using resist potions. It's hard to tell apart high level dungeons when you can clear the whole place pretty easily until the end, maybe I just have to man up.

It's mainly attributed to how enemies scale on master difficulty; I had this particular issue when I entered Volkskygge at around level 15. The bandits and draugr didn't pose much of a challenge, but then I found myself getting completely crushed by the Death Overlord at the end of the dungeon. I tried to skip him and just run outside and get word wall, but I ended up dying to one ice spear by Volsung. The game is balanced around Adept so you shouldn't be too surprised by the flaw of Master difficulty, there's no real progression and it likes to just get in your face and beat you to death with one of your limbs.

Yeah that was a high dungeon, that guy is pretty powerful except when you are an extremely high level. Guy will prove to be an extra challenge at your level.

This sort of thing can happen at any difficulty, especially if you grind several levels with non-combat skills (such as alchemy).

You could knock the difficulty to Expert and try again.

I assume "cheesy tactics" includes exploiting the AI by shooting the enemy from a place they can't reach and such, so basically you want to be able to go toe to toe with them. If so, I really can't see other options than using some consumables. I have similar encounters as what you're describing with my new melee character, but I have the advantage of the ridicilously overpowered orc racial.

Yes I would consider Malkoran one of tougher bosses for a low level straight up melee character. It's probably easiest for a sneak archer type at low level. The damage multiplier factor of 2 in Master level can be rather severe sometimes. Things would get easier as you level up more.