I thought the censored tag would have made it okay to swear my bum off.

I just don't get why half of the people I can bash in with my warhammer like nothing and then suddenly i'm on this part that's nearly impossible... If i'm trying to get through a quest killing bandits then suddenly there's 3 marauders. 2 with bows and one with magic. And i'm getting one shot to death all over the place. It's horribly frustrating especially when i've been building my guy around having a good heavy armor skill and being able to take a lot of punishment. Seriously, it's [censored].

You have to be tactical. I'm hoping not to start another Block thread, but Blocking is really useful. Especially the Quick Reflexes perk.

What level are you?

Oh, so this isn't a contest to see how many obscenities we can use in a comprehensible sentence

The enemy level system works roughly like this:
Every 10 levels a higher level enemy can appear.
And this higher level enemy has about double every other stat the previous enemy has.

and this is reasonably balanced in the sense that the player's combat potential also scales in a superlinear fashion.
What you'd want is a mod where instead of there being a new enemy every 10 levels, there is one every say, 2 to 5 levels.

that way the difficulty slope is smoother and less step-like.

I'm sure there has to be one out there somewhere.

I've had bandit dungeons give me rude surprises, too. I took my lumps and learned the warrior's first lesson, which is to never underestimate your opponent.

Tactics. I've been one-shotted dozens of times. When I break it down it always inevitably points to my carelessness and/or overconfidence. Always prepare to be tactical and careful when engaging (even beforehand) enemies. You never know when you're going to run into that onefrigging bandit that is uunpredictably powerful.

Bandit Marauders.

Tactics help, no question. Your WASD keys are for more than just walking around towns. You can, you know, dodge enemy attacks and arrows and spells and stuff, if you're in a dungeon you can kill them with traps by leading them over pressure plates, etc.

All that said, don't underestimate the simple power of having good armor rating (567 cap) and good magic resistance/elemental resistances (85% cap for each). I'm sure you've heard about how smithing and enchanting make you a god among men, well, that's partly because they let you easily reach the armor cap and high levels of magic resistance.

Like I mentioned on the thread that got closed, when you're properly geared and enchanted, you can take arrows to the face, stand right in front of a dragon while he exhales fire on you, etc. and barely get hurt.

I "power-gamed"/"min-maxed"/whatever-pejorative-word-you-want-to-used one of my characters to see just how much of a god Skyrim would let me become. When I was all finished, I could run straight to the end of an entire dungeon without killing anyone, such that every enemy was beating on me and firing arrows and spells at me all at once, and the damage was so little that they couldn't even outpace my natural health regeneration rate.