I just wanted to praise the Skyrim mod "Intense Difficulty" which has really made a difference to the game. I tend to be a power-player, so I like to level and max my gear out. The problem is that at Master difficulty, I'm one-shotting with my bow and its getting a bit too easy.

I used the Intense Difficulty Mod X2 which is effectively twice the difficulty of Master. Boy oh boy, it took me 15 minutes to kill a bunch of vampires and the Master Vampire was a huge pain in the [censored]

Goto mod section for that >.>

I just use ASIS that increases enemy spawns and gives them approriate perks, potions and healing spells, and a bit more smarts. Quite effective diffculty increase with just such simple tweaks; couldn't survive without Lydia anymore.

ASIS and its predecessor are preferred to raw difficulty increases above Master for me too.

SkyRE makes a huge difference for me. All that added weapon variety (broadswords, longswords, etc) really adds depth to the combat too, since different kinda of one-handed and two-handed weapons have different handling stats and range. They also made a big distinction between shortbows and longbows. Then there's the ESP that gives stronger enemies perks, so a bandit chief with a battleaxe can bleed you. Also trains the AI to handle melee combat a bit more intelligently when blocking is involved.

I really prefer that kind of difficulty instead of Bethesda's lazy "you hit for less, they hit for more." Do it like Crysis did on delta. Make the enemies smarter and better equipped without making them walking tanks or you a piece of paper.

ASIS, Real Wildlife, Deadly Combat, Deadly Dragons, Dynamic Injuries, Occupy Skyrim, Frosfall and IMCN have been a lot of fun and seem to work very well together to make the Master setting gameplay much more challenging compared to vanilla.

ASIS can run alongside Deadly Combat? What about SkyTest?

I will have to check out ASIS - looks good. I must admit the 2X Master mod is a bit of a hamfisted method.

Haven't tried SkyTest, but Real Wildlife is kind of similar and it works fine. For ASIS, you have to add the PISE Deadly Combat patch at the end of your load order, after ASIS.esp

So far I'm just using the vanilla Skyrim launcher, haven't needed to install Wrye Bash, BOSS or NMM yet.


The amazing part of ASIS is when you have a lot of spell mods installed, and it assigns some of these powerful spells from your other mods to NPCs to use against you. Also they use healing potions, etc.