The real problem I experience is wild differences in difficulty from one enemy to another. I turned the difficulty up because every enemy I came across was too easy, even tho I've purposefully kept myself weaker to keep thee game more challenging. Then all of a sudden I come across a boss who one shots me, over and over and over with no way to over come besides smithing and enchanting god like equipment that breaks the rest of the game.

I've never been a fan of boss battles for exactly this reason, and I'm willing to bet that if they hadn't implemented bosses as such then there would have been no need for the extremes to which we can improve our equipment, which in turn would have made for significantly more balanced encounters. We'd probably still stomp the mooks, but then they're supposed to be (relatively) easy kills.

It would also help if they would get away from the +/- HP/DMG difficulty model, because it just doesn't work. What they should do is make it so that increasing the difficulty improves the AI, and/or improves their gear, however the latter runs the risk of causing the 'Daedric Bandit' problem all over again and should be used sparingly at best.

They can't have the dragon born follow the same rules as NPC. Cheap unbalanced skills such as paralyze and illusion spells aside, the true difference is processing requirements.

To fully process each effect on the dragonborn (standstones, artifacts, cool downs, health and mana regenerate, armor calculation, perk activation chances and so on) and then multiple it fully by the number of NPC on screen all in realtime would take rather significant processing power. And we have not included path find and combat AI requirements for each NPC. That is why NPCs appear to use simpler rules, to reduce computing requirements.

Ultimately, the goal of the game is to have fun, in the end i doubt you really want to be Frenzied by some NPC into killing Lydia.

They went in the right direction giving some Dragr shouts. Makes the "bosses" more difficult by giving them another tool to use against you. Problem being they still relied primarily on increased Hp and damage to make a mob more difficult.

I still think the problem comes down to scaling. It's harder to properly scale a more dynamic boss then one who is more powerful simply because they hit harder and can take more hits.

The way it is now most "boss" fights are simply longer, not necessity harder.

If your finding this game easy your cheating. Im lvl 34 on Adept playing a bladesman/archer who sneaks n steals. Plenty of enemies still one hit me.

If your complaining that its not a challenge to kill a wolf, GTFO. Whats a wolf to a guy who slays dragons...

Except you could give them a custom ability which fortifies their armor, leaving the economy unchanged, and them slightly tougher

Likewise you can give them the necessary perks...

honestly I don't understand this at all how did they overlook the fact that every skill scales except destruction even worse it scales fir npcs

What is the evidence that their damage scales?

Go charging at them with Steadfast Wards periodically. Eventually, you'll find they start cracking it even with the Flamethrower spells. (Or find a Wisp mother, they have an ice spike that shatters it at any level)

Either it scales, or they have access to extra sets of spells.

Scaling is exactly why certain game types PREFER percentages. It always scales with your gear,etc. Static increases are crap because they can be good at low levels and get progressively worse as you improve. Your post is pretty much in direct opposition to good game design.

That only happens in a poorly designed monty haul style game. If all hit point/statistic/item values were set up in a properly defined and linear progression, for both player and NPC, such an issue would never arise. Player mages feel the largest hit from the way magic does not scale, because their spell values are static, while npcs scale exponentially instead of linearly in response to the exponential way melee/archery/stealth damage increases.

Non magic damage scales out of control because of the numerous ways to stack weapon bonuses. And Skyrim already has incremental damage progression for weapons through the process of skill increase. Like I said, there's a reason why certain games prefer percentage based improvements and why the good numbers crunchers in things like MMO's let developers know a certain static increase in a game is usually crap. Percentages scale to things like gear,etc. Static increases don't.

NPC spells are an entirely different animal than the set the PC has access to. You are correct.
-Loth

I think one of the reasons the end game difficulty falls apart for melee/archery, and why its not so bad for destruction mages, is that melee/archery all have ways of increasing damage that scale roughly linearly with level. And they're multiplicative for the most part, not additive. Additive bonuses would still be linear. But multiplying a linear skill bonus times a linear smithing bonus (plus better base gear) times a linear enchanting bonus means your damage goes up with skill level cubed, while enemy health is (most likely) increasing linearly. To make it worse, I'm pretty sure the amount of skill level XP needed to go up an overall level increases faster than the amount of XP gained from leveling a skill (meaning your overall level grows slower than your skill levels - I did the math based on UESP info a while ago.) For mages though, nothing changes except access to spells, and I haven't checked but I'm guessing their damage increase is closer to being linear.

It doesn't matter if the game does a Monty Haul or not, since static increases are only worthwhile if the minimum and maximum damage or armor values attainable through gear fall within a fairly compressed range. If, for example, bows are capable of anywhere from 30-80 damage, then an increase of, say, 25 is quite significant, but when the range is 30-500+ then that same 25 becomes chump change once you reach the higher end of the spectrum. This, by the way, is why it's generally better for those engaging in stealth archery to not bother with damage enchantments; the only opponents against which they would make a difference are Elder or Ancient Dragons, and you'd be taking a Fortify Marksman potion for those anyway.

Fun fact: Fortify Marksman increases EVERY combat skill... not just archery. Unless they fixed it in 1.3 (probably not)
-Loth

PS Imp of the Perverse has a very good handle on why combat mechanics "breaks down" at the high end of the scale... the only way to avoid the disparity he mentions is by self-discipline, i.e., don't go crazy with all of the crafting synergies... pick one, or at most, two of Smithing/Alchemy/Enchanting skills, depending on your personal preferences. Just maximizing the possibilities with only smithing and enchanting will yield quite OP equipment when the skills are fully perked at 100.

This is the main thing that bugs me the most too - Player can stop time and drink infinite number of instant healing potions.

I've found it much more fun to just play with a lower difficulty level and not use healing potions at all...Then you don't have to pause combat at all and enemies aren't damage sponges.

Not the only way. At the moment I'm playing a Breton sword and shield tank with http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4444 installed. It cuts the magnitude of the fortify weapon damage enchantments in half (though I think it should be even more), as well as greatly reducing the strength of fortify smithing/alchemy enchantments, and gets rid of player crafted smithing/enchanting potions. These kinds of changes take a long time to playtest though, so I'm hoping one of the big name balance overhaul modders takes a crack at it to get a few more opinions in there, or, possibly, Bethesda.

*Edit - This character's also using minimal alchemy, I'm attempting to do all my healing via restoration magic and handling magic resistance through the Breton perk and shield perks. I'll still chug health potions though if I'm about to die and I don't want to have to load a save, but I don't buy or craft them, just pick them up. It's remained reasonably challenging so far (level 35 at the moment.)

I agree with the OP. I am now taking a break from skyrim because even at master from the get-go, I now have 2 lvl 60 characters and a "noob" at lvl 35... this game is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too easy. I love the game and the roleplay it inspires in me, but they really ruined my taste for the game by not testing it at all. Did they even pay a guy to play through it once? even once? I enjoy the optimistic encouragement from Loth about the construction kit, but i also share OP's response as well. Substandard QA is not "ok" because of a construction set.

Improving their gear would a simple way to improve an NPCs abilities. Your example is the precise example for that. If you take away that crappy iron sword from the boss and give him daedric gear, it would crank up his survivability and output. And just because they give the NPC gear doesn't automatically translate into it going into the game and breaking economy, etc. When you fight daedra, they dont drop the armor they are clearly wearing. Neither do the draugr. Nor do a fair portion of the NPCs available for you to fight.
However, I have come across NPCs that DO have upgraded weapons. I have found many Draugr with ebony or daedric weapons that were lootable. And again the draugr have both enchanted weapons as well as 'smithed' items, ie, honed battle axes, and the supple bows.
So there are at least a few examples of NPCs with PC-like upgrades.

That's rather to disappointing to hear. I expected Bethesda to flesh out NPCs with the revamped skill system.

I really hate those awkward moments when my follower dies to a mudcrab. Let me repeat. A mudcrab.

I don't mind if they don't insta-scale to me whenever I step on a skeever and level up but let me give them some decent armour and weapon at least. Right now due to flawed mechanics all followers go herp derp and change back to their lvl 5 stuff even if I hand them "Daedric Armour of Faceroll" and "Ebony Weapon of Easy Mode" or something akin to that. Not to mention ignoring given potions. Lydia was a particularly dumb one, walking into every single trap, jumping in front of my attacks and failing to drink even 1 measly healing potion out of the 40-50 flasks I had given her.

We'll be holding this to them after their talk about "balancing" in that blog post.

I have been single hit to kill with an bandit with an orcish bow, level 46 with 250 hp and 300 in armor, also been killed in one hit from an dragon, lots of other enemies like bears do serious damage and can easy kill you, I'm not so concerned about magic attacks as I have potions who makes me resist most of the effect but without them you can easy bee killed at all levels, playing on hard who work well as I'm able to do plenty of damage and expect the enemy to do damage to, yes most of the enemies are weak but some are dangerous, you just has to know who of the forsworn who are the briarheart

This is a far step from earlier games, Daggerfall and Morrowind lacked high level enemies. In Oblivion enemies at higher level just got tons of health but was not dangerous as their damage was to low, they just took a long time to kill.
Fallout 3 was better but enemies before broken steel was not very dangerous at high level with the exception of the rocket launchers.

Obviously high end npc get some sort of damage buff in Skyrim.

After nearly being one-shotted by a lowly random bandit archer on the road at level 60+ I'm starting to think there is something wrong. I'm not kidding, a single shot took about 2/3rds of my health even though I've been piling into health and stamina during my levelups. I'm estimating his shot did 250-300 pts of damage to me.