Hi,

I've read a lot of threads about people playing Master difficulty and saying that it's too easy. I'm kind of the opposite, I play Adept and once I get my character around level 22+ I'd say the difficulty really begins to ramp up.

Right now I'm playing on an old character that I've recently revisited. He's an Imperial, level 24. His main skills are one-handed (67), heavy armor (56), block (42), and restoration (37). Though his Smithing is also high (67) and his enchanting is (52). His Health is 250, while his Magicka and Stamina are both 150. He wears an entire set of flawless Dwarven armor, while wielding a combination of a (Superior) Dawnbreaker (24 damage) and a (Superior) Spellbreaker (64 armor). Naturally, he'll also use healing spells too, because I'm playing him as a Paladin type.

But anyways, my character feels pretty weak. I just went into a bandit camp and some of the enemies there seemed like they were made out of rock and it took forever to bring them down, probably between 15 and 20 swings. And at the end of the bandit camp was a bandit chief that completely rolled me. It was like my attacks, even my power attacks, could barely move his health bar whereas each attack he did easily took 1/3rd of my health. I was interrupting his power attacks as often as I could, though I was pretty much out of stamina the entire fight. In the end I beat him, but had to chug half of my health potions (I didn't dare put my shield away to try and use a healing spell). I've experienced similar problems when I encountered a 'Blood Dragon'. Once I persuaded the Dragon to land, I ran up and tried to beat the crap out of him, shielding myself with Spellbreaker to try and take a little of the bite out of the dragon's flame breath. Here too, I had to pretty much hit tab and bring myself to full life three times with health potions.

I'm really trying to get back into Skyrim, because I want to try Dawnguard and give the game another chance, but inevitably it seems that all of my characters kind of run into this 'roadblock'.

So I thought I'd just throw my problem out there and see if anyone can point out what I'm doing wrong. Is it just that my sword svcks too much right now? I've been going pretty heavy into Smithing on every character because I think the benefits of weapons/armor improvements are just too good to pass up, but am I leveling way too many skills and should instead focus on just 2-3? It might not be an issue if every time I decided I needed to pick a lock or make a sale didn't level me up, like how it used to be... Or is there just some 'trick' to combat that I'm apparently missing besides 'Dodge/Bash enemy power attacks, power attack your enemy when you can, and otherwise try to slash at him while blocking/avoiding his own blows'? I realize the wildcard here is my perks...I'm pretty heavily invested in the one handed tree though not everything is as maxed out as it could be (I think I'm at +60% one-handed damage instead of +80%), But I do have the perk that increases the damage of power attacks while you're standing still so I try to make sure I benefit from that advantage as much as I can.

For all of Todd Howard's talk about how 'flexible' the new system is ('Get bored of a sword? Use spells!') it really seems like I need to be a lot more focused on building a sturdy character to succeed at higher levels, lest the game scale itself above me.

TL;DR? Don't reply unless you read everything.

Thanks in advance for any help.

As far as I remember, Dawnbreaker has a pretty low base damage, so maybe that is part of the problem. Focused builds will make you comparably stronger, both in terms of skills and perks. Still, 67 in one-handed and the three base perks sounds reasonable for your level. Do you use any mods? And are you sure you set the difficulty to Adept?

Against armored targets, you may want to invest on maces, perk-wise.

As for dragon tactics, for the time being, don't stand in front of them. Hit them on their sides, where the wings are. They can hit you with them too, but the damage is considerably less.

I was having the exact same problem at these levels with a very similiar character. Especially warriors with BIG weapons (usually high level bandits) were my doom.

I solved it by being a rather defensive tank that then brought a follower to the party. I also tried other people like soldiers or the Stendarr people to help me. At higher levels, I still do rather little damage (24 is my best weapon) but somehow, shouts become more and more important. Embrace your destiny. Become a dovah.

You can unbalance the game in your enemies favour by doing too much crafting. As you level up the enemies get tougher, so it's important to keep your combat skills up to match them.

Once you get to the point where it starts getting tough, only put perks into skills that can end a fight quickly or block attacks.

I would say play on expert for the most balanced experience. Master is ridiculously difficult and not fun until later in the game when you get extremely overpowered, while adept is a joke in terms of difficulty. But of course, unless you severely gimp yourself in this game you're still going to become overpowered eventually no matter what difficulty you play on, it just seems expert gives you the longest experience of balance.

Ah yes, Melee. Making sure to balance your health and armor skill with your weapon skills is usually enough, but it seems like the outlying factor is that you're using a rather low-damage weapon. By the time I'm at your level, my bow does more than fifty damage (excluding arrows, poisons, and upgrades).

Consider investing in a bow. There's no crime in softening up the opposition first.

Second, melee characters really benefit from alchemy skills, and it's a bit of a money for jam skill. The reason I say this is that even with a basic grasp of the skill, you can churn out your own potions, and if you invest in alchemy enchanted apparel you won't need to spend perks if you don't want to. However, aside from the benefits of stamina and health restoring potions, when you upskill in it you get access to making some extremely potent combat brews, not to mention what you can do with a smithing potion. For example: Got a weapon rating of 60? Chug-a-lug, it's now 120. Not good enough? Smear smear...it's now a poisoned blade. Think your armour rating is too low? Swill down that fortify smithing and now you can improve an extra 63%.

Gamewise, you can chop and change your difficulty settings...and there is no shame in scaling down if things are in that 'just too tough' category. The game is meant to be enjoyed, not endured.

Specifically in your case I would suggest that your sword is too weak. 24 damage at your level and skill set is really underselling your character. Further, your stamina is wayyy too low for a melee character. You can offset that to a certain extent with restoration if you perk up the regen stamina as well as health perk, but you then face the problem of having to free up a hand...I'd suggest that if you do that, then the sword is thing you swap resto with (hotkeyed, naturally).