One handed or two handed skills and perks make dragon priests easy once you have uprgraded weapons, Add a powerful onehanded skill up potion and two hits will finish any dragon priest and that is with difficulty set to master. They are really far too easy if you are prepared. Bow works just as well with perks and potions and with stealth it takes one shot, kinda lame really. Potions can make all the difference in difficult battles.

Say what? You have a 19 Skill in Archery and you killed a dragon in one shot with a bow? What the heck bow and arrows were you using?

In one of my first playthroughs, the Stray Dog pinned Krosis against the Word Wall, and my character chopped him up with an axe. They do not like getting boxed in, and many of them lack an attack that they can use when cornered. The staffs some of them carry can make cornering them very difficult, and some of them do like to summon Atronachs.

Oops, forgot to elaborate further.

I shot an arrow at it while standing really far to get its attention. Obviously it got angry, and I just stood where I was, waiting for it to land in front of me. I was also lucky that it was an ice-breathing dragon, which my Nord has resistance to.

Finished it off with my sword.

On a slightly unrelated note, does anyone notice that dragon priests don't seem to scale properly, difficulty wise. I mean, on apprentice difficulty, the enemies are supposed to do .75 damage, and on novice, they do .5 damage (so a 66% percent drop). So, when my character was fresh out of helgan, I immediatly went to the nearest dragon priests, and, on apprentice difficutly, he could kill me in three hit. This would mean that on novice, he should kill me in five. (1/.66=1.5. 3x1.5=4.5. Round up to five.) However, I noticed I could sustain much more than five shots. Is this a fluke, or what

Spellbreaker is extremely useful for my sword n shield nord. The elemental resistance increases it's usefulness even further. I may get staggered when it's ward spell is broken, but it still blocks the attack.

I avoided dragon priests until my sneak archer character was level 40+ with 100 sneak and 80-something archery with every perk available. The first one I fought was, for me, the hardest fight in the hardest dungeon in the whole game - Rahgot in Forelhost. There are four levelled draughr deathlords in the boss room with him. Good times.

Some of the dragon priests can be shot while you are hidden as they emerge from their sarcophogi - you enter a big room with a prominently placed sarcophogi and as you approach it opens and he flies up. Maybe you need really high sneak levels, but as he emerges you are undetected and if you are fast you can get off a shot (or two) before being detected. I have killed a few when I could not use sneak by shooting as they emerged and then continued shooting at them as fast as possible, which seems to keep them from casting. It usually takes 5-10 hits to kill one because my weapon, the Bound Bow, does about 250 damage per shot when you have all the perks.

There's no shame in avoiding them - I think they are supposed to be the hardest NPCs to fight in the whole game. All of the dragon priests I have fought had a health level of 1490. You need to know how much damage your bow does; if you are on a PC, shoot something and after only one shot, use the console command "getavinfo health" to find the health and damage levels. Then divide 1490 by the amount of damage and you will know how many hits it will take you to kill a dragon priest. In comparison, Draughr deathlords and Dwarven Centurions have only 1000 health points.

Being master of Destruction and having virtual unlimited supply of magicka (a lot of MP + large MP regeneration + ~90% MP cost reduction = I can keep going until I melt every single chunk of ice and snow in whole Skyrim and then freeze it again), I just go nuts with my spells until everything stops moving.
Since I'm a stealth mage, there are times where I have the privilege of making a surprise attack which gives me an edge.

I watched two videos today. One was the top 10 most deadliest enemies in a Free-For-All Match... It was in two rounds.
1st Round Winner: Ancient Dragon
2nd Round Winner: Dragon Priest.

Then there was another video with one of each enemy in a Free-For-All Match.. Two rounds as well.
1st Round Winner: Dragon Priest
2nd Round Winner: Werewolf (It slaughtered the Dragon Priest some-how >.>)

So... Yeah.. Dragon Priests can be very deadly specially if they can take down Ancient Dragons while other times, not so much. Depends on what spells they got.

Managed to take down Krosis with sneak and archery and in my next quest had to fight Hevnoraak which i used the same strategy for and it worked quite easily, with my sneak at 100 with all perks and archery at 80 with most perks theres not many things i cant kill with a bow!

Its a shame my Dragon helmet is far superior to the dragon priest masks as they have some decent enchantments i could use

I just beat him & I'm at Level 20. I use the Dwarven Bow of Fire (or flame) from the sneak position & duck in & out from behind some large rocks so he has trouble hitting me but I keep nailing him with fire arrows from a distance. I also take a Resist to Fire potion as soon as he appears. Taking the potion that adds extra to your health for 60 seconds doesn't hurt either. When my Shout power is recharged I hit him with Ice Form.


When he tried to move in on me to close the distance, Lydia charged & fought him, delaying him long enough for me to move to a diffent position. He didn't kill her, he just hurt her so she couldn't fight until she recovered but that gave me enough time to relocate.

Besides my fire bow (damage 34 & fire damage 20) I also had "gauntlets of minor archery", "helmet of archery" & had taken archery lessons several times from Findel so my archery skill was way up there. Doing this, it took about 2 or 3 minutes to kill him.

Whatever power they're using, you use the opposite. He was using fire on me so I used ICE FORM on him. Using the opposite power on them damages them even more. (If they use ice or frost, you use Fire Breath, if they use Fire then you use Ice Form on them.

The first time I fought him (in my fisrt game) I was about level 12 ro 13 & was going toe-to-toe with him at the edge of the high cliff so I shield bashed him & knocked him over the edge. It didn't kill him but when I looked down I could see him moving back & forth trying to find some way to get back up to me.
I knew I wasn't powerful enough yet to take him out face to face but for now he was out of my way so I just left him there & cleaned out the dragon shrine & Word Wall then left.

For a lot of extra info I got the Guide Book. Most Guide Books are 1/4 inch thick but Skyrim is 1 1/4 inches thick. & has tons of info & maps.
It DOESN'T tell you how to fight them (you're on you own there) but it does help you find everything & it gives you a "Recommened Level" rating for various areas, (caves, etc).
If it recommends level 8 & you're only 6 you're probably going to be slaughtered but if you're level 10 you'll probably massacere every thing there.