I find it sad that in vanilla version ((including any future DLC)) that dragons can be owned by Giants and Trolls. I've seen giants take down regular dragons, blood dragons and once an elder dragon. I have yet to see 1 dragon pick up a giant fly him into the air only to drop him. I've seen a frost troll take on a blood dragon and win. Once I came to a village I can't remember if it was Falkreath or Morthal but the town guard had somehow downed an ancient dragon so it was a free soul for me.

So your not fighting ancient dragons on master setting? You can't comment then. If your not on the hardest setting, why the hell are you saying its easy.

If your not hugely exploiting the crafting system, ancient dragons will be difficult on master. They have the equivalent of 6000 health when your on master.

Ancient Dragons whoop my ass....

Besides, I'm pretty sure if they made the dragons rarer people would be complaining there aren't enough dragons.

I made every named dragon do 100x damage and have 25000 HP.
Epic win.

Dragons are supremely arrogant.No mere mortal can harm them. So they land have their Oh s**t thats right the Dovakiin moment and die.

Game mechanic wise I agree the bunnies should not beat up dragons

I think the scaling curve of dragons doesn't work terribly well. IIRC when I was at low levels Dragons were reasonably difficult. If the Dragons scaled up faster that may help. I'd also balance a Dragon out so it should be able to take out a couple of Giants fairly easily. Right now I don't believe that's really the case.

Really? That's your solution? Turn up the difficulty? Sorry if I can slay an Elder Dragon in all of ten seconds. It's not my fault they svck. You know why turning up the difficulty isn't the answer? Because there are far tougher creatures out there. Dragons aren't the hardest thing out there you know. Dragons are underpowered. I play on regular difficulty. That means I take 1x damage and receive 1x damage. So I am facing dragons as they were designed to be.

It happend liek this

"Design Document" = There shoudl be dragons! They should be like wolves or deer, they are just IN THE WORLD flying around!

"Implimentation" = Oh, crap! When we set up the system so that dragons are just flying around, that meant you could encounter one at any time. As a solution, lets make dragons weak since you will encounter them so much.

"Production" = Wow, now they fly around backwards.

Bethesda just doesn't know proper enemy design. They make enemies conform to the player, when it should be players that adapt and rise to the challenge they are faced with. Unless an enemy vastly outlevels you, there is little doubt you will win by default. There is not much in the way of tactical thought required, no real need to adjust your fighting style, no real need to study your enemy's behavior. The game simply feels as though it was designed so that you cannot lose. You are more likely to reload a save due to a bug, than from genuinely dying to a powerful enemy, or underestimating a weaker one.

I'm estimating that on normal difficulty, the elder dragon has ~2000 health. You're doing 200 damage per second with your weapons, what weapons are you using?
They also dish out quite a bit of damage, so I assume you have a high magic resist to.

"as they were designed to be", the game isn't designed to be played on normal difficulty only. Some people are better at the game, they can play on a higher difficulty. Some people like a challenge, so they turn up the difficulty. You on the other hand, complain that a certain aspect of the game is to easy on the middle difficulty.

I think dragons are quite balanced, if you were to play the game on master against an ancient dragon you would find its difficult, just turn up the difficulty and stop whining.
Not sure what enemies you think are harder than elder dragons, possibly draugr deathlords. They have around 1000 health IIRC so you should be able to kill them in 5 seconds with your 200 damage a second weapons...

I honestly don't see how people are curb-stomping dragons later on in the game.

My character build is far from optimal, but dear lord, elder dragons destroy me with bites and breaths.

It isn't very hard, I don't even have dragonrend yet and it is almost piss easy to predict and exploit their actions.

First of all, dragons are easily baited into landing as long as you are around a large open space. You can just hide in a corner someplace, and wait for them to land, they will do so almost as soon as they can.

Second, since dragons are monster type creatures, they have inflated hit points but 0 armor value, which makes large hits extra effective. Marked for death is very effective because using it brings their armor value below 0 since they had none to begin with.

Third, they seem to have an incredibly weak stagger resistance, making it possible to repeatedly stagger them...which means they will never get an attack off.

Fourth, if you walk around to their far side or back, their AI will tell them to spam their melee attacks repeatedly, instead of telling it to back away, or turn around. And their melee attacks tend to be very slow, and weak.

Also, they have a pretty large hit box, which at close range takes away much need of precision. They also tend to fly around a lot, giving you ample time to heal, instead of trying to pressure the player and burn them down.

Did you know when fighting Dragons, SOMETIMES you can hide behind one of the word walls were you encounter them and for whatever reason they won't attack you. There is one on Northpeak or Northwind summit, the one in the Rift and you go through that mine with skeletons to get to and come out in an abandoned-mine sort of place. The word wall there I have hidden behind to regen mana and the dragon trys that sliding type move and breathes fire but can't seem to figure how to harm me. Meanwhile I can summon a flame atronauch and it happily throws it's fireballs at the dragon without the dragon fighting back because it can't figure out it actually needs to somehow get around the word wall to get to me.

From my experience, it seems like their "bite" attack do more damage then their shout attack.. So that might be another reason?

Why are Dragons so easy to kill- And stupid?

Being stupid they are easy to kill.


I don’t know why they’re stupid though?

Melee attacks are slow and weak? I believe the strongest attack is the ancient dragon bite, it does ~300 damage. So yeah you're not going to be taking much hits from them unless you have a huge magic resistance and a very high armor rating. Which I assume you people do, and then you complain the game is to easy on the medium difficulty.

They have a large hit box, because they are large, what do you want instead!? They don't have a weak stagger resistance, most enemies will be staggered by the impact destruction perk on its own. To stagger a dragon you need the element damage perk as well, otherwise it doesn't work.

Assumptions are the mother of all screw ups. I'm playing on master, with non-enchanted weapons, 0 resistances, and under 400 armor rating in light armor. Aside from my first encounter at level 10, I have not felt threatened even once by a dragon.

You are ridiculously asking just about EVERYBODY to invest in archery or destruction to even be able to make a notch on a dragon

For one, there are 20 Dragon Shouts, 3 words each (meaning 60 dragon souls), reduce them by the ones you know from quests and you need roughly 40 dragon souls or a bit more

Now, if I'm a Stormcloak barbarian who wields two axes in my whole life, what the hell can I do?

Making a dragon continuously fly is NOT, in fact, a good design. It is a problematic design that needs to be banned the moment the thought spits out of a designer's mouth, as it will potentially cause nobody except ranged characters to be able to collect any random dragon's soul. While Skyrim is technically not an Action game, forcing melee characters to wait for hours on end just to see it eventually landing is already a game breaking experience. Remember: players want to play, not waiting around, there are dentists and lawyers for that

What IS a good design, is to make dragons still challenging even on the ground, not to take away any capability of doing anything to it

Note: this applies to random dragons that can appear out of nowhere in the wilderness. Quest dragons like the first dragon you kill DO need epic fights like you describe, but not random dragons (and ranged characters need to be readily available in case you're a melee)

That is indeed an issue. Dragons stand around, largely immobile on the ground and tank hits, when they really don't have the durability or melee prowess to warrant such behavior.

Perhaps they're simply incredibly arrogant. Not to mention that while strafing runs are the safest way to go, it's more difficult to kill any one person. Hovering or landing on a building and blasting away is deadlier, but they're vulnerable to magic and arrows. Landing allows them to use both their breath attacks and bite their foes, but makes them vulnerable to weapons. I think it's mostly them overestimating their own chances.

I used to think like you, but then I took an Ancient Dragon in the knee

And so, I experienced a less than 3 seconds death.

Besides, you know everything about the AI's behavior, winning is certainly to be expected. If Sun Tzu sees your post right now, he would've added "and you should not complain about it" after "if you know yourself and the enemy, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles"

It has more to do with the way Bethesda implements the "difficulty", should've toyed around with more than just multipliers. Dragons are supposed to be kill-able for "casual" players (die hard fans would know them better as "streamlined" gamers), so their behavior and constitution IS justifiable. it's just that that very behavior does not change between difficulties, so it's more like "dragons for casual gamers, but takes more hits to die" variants

Just because one type of dragon is moderately challenging, does not absolve them from the mockery that all others before, are. Even knowing most of a dragon's routines should not trivialize the encounter to the extent that it can. There should always be an element of luck or chance that can throw off even perfect execution, lest all battles become a foregone conclusion.

And I don't buy the casual argument at all. If people can tell us its too easy because our difficulty is not set high enough, we have every right to tell them it's too hard because your difficulty isn't low enough. It's better for things to be too hard than too easy in my opinion, It is easier to adjust downwards than upwards.

In my experience (300+ hours), dragons land when they have taken sufficient damage or when they detect that they cannot hit you from the air. Basically, they do what the OP suggested.

As for ease... well, like any enemy, they are only easy if you spec your character so that they become easy. That's a player choice, not Beth's.

Explain to us how you are killing these dragons then, you can't be seriously be telling us you kill these dragons with 0 resistances on master with ease.

The elder, ancient dragons are fine. The regular dragons need to be buffed a bit, not drastically to make them a bit more challenging. One thing I would like to see is more varied attacks so they are more interesting and challenging to fight and not always predictable