Everyone elses skill must be WAY better than mine! I'm at level 46 and in a period of two hours I encountered a Frost Dragon and THREE Ancient Dragons while I was trying to complete a few side quests. Ancient Dragons are a pain in the butt, especially when you're in the middle of something. I used up so many health potions.

It got to the point where another dragon would show up and I'd think "REALLY?" I walked out of the Dawnstar Sanctuary and one landed right in front of me, practically pinning me on the doorstep. I would've thought there might be a few less dragons after defeating Alduin...but no.

Actually if you are on PC and look at the creation kit., You'll be able to see dragons have a 50% resistance to all damage except against the Player. Seems like a special advantage to me.

They should come equipped with their own dragon armour tbh! Forged and ready for battle, possibly this is something that could be added as DLC along with the ability to fly on them, after all there is the tale of the dragon being captured and imprisoned within Dragonreach.

As OP said, they should definitely have more shouts available to them, to make them more interesting to face.

The main problem I see with the dragons is that it is very hard to get the balance right. My idea of a fearsome foe is not necessarily a dragon that I can kill in one hit, but neither is one that can kill me easily. The battles should be epic, and last for more time than they do at the minute. This might get boring I suppose though, just putting my ideas out there.

This^.

Who thinks that Ancient dragons are easy? At level 48 they can still take me out in one breath. I know I sound like a broken record but if the dragons are too easy, then up your difficulty level. If you're exploiting everything in the game so that by level 10 you have Daedric armor and a weapon that causes 600+ damage in one hit, then maybe stop doing that.

This is a very good point, if people just level crafting skills for instance the game becomes much easier than if they don't. Sometimes it's not about the difficulty at all

I'm at level 81 on Master, and Elder and Ancient Dragons still give me a run for my money. The lower three tiers are a walk in the park though. Like I said, I don't feel that dragons are quite as easy (or annoying) as a lot of other people on this forum, but I still would like them to be tougher, or at the very least have more shouts to use.

It doesn't make you run 10x faster. It just briefly throws you forwards suddenly enough to break every bone in your body.... at least if physics mattered, which it doesn't.

As for fixing dragons...
Removing that dumb Nord chanty "hoya hoya" music every time a dragon decides to fly down and start belching fire at me would be a good start.
Dragon fights in Skyrim are NEVER epic.
They 90% consist of the dragon flying around in circles being a pointless nuisance and blasting villagers while you run around trying to catch up with it, only for it to land on a building or something out of reach. And then finally, once you've lured it out of town and encouraged it to land in an open space (or finally hit it with Dragonrend after the 6th try), you run up to it and smack it with your weapon of choice sword a few times until it flops dead like a rag-doll and turns into a skeleton (along with yet more "hoya hoya" nonsense).

The only good thing that can come of this is that in the midst of an open battle in the middle of town, you can walk up to someone and one-hit-homicide them, and it doesn't count as a murder because it is an "accident" in the heat of battle.

Anything could improve them really, I think the dragons are truly pathetic. They're awesome the first few times you encounter them, and when you kill your first one, especially alone, there's a genuine sense of achievement. The trouble is they're much too common and they don't scale up with you. Also, as you said they need to use more shouts, and they need to switch up their breath attacks. Also they should be reluctant to land. I mean why would they voluntarily land so an enemy can hit them?

I really can't see the devs doing anything to them though. Listening to Todd in some of those pre release videos they're obviously very proud and pleased with them (as they should be for the most part). And presumably the developers play the game so they know all these issues, but they chose to leave them like that.

They haven't changed any game play issues in any of the patches so far have they? They'll just continue to fix bugs and add new features.

By lore dragons are supposed to be almost "god like" and very intelligent, I agree with OP. Yes they do pose a challenge but not enough of one IMO, if you compare Alduin to any other dragon from lore, he comes off like a gecko in comparison. If your interested.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_dragon. You should be running from dragons until Lv.30 IMO and should still be weary when engaging them in combat at high Lv's. dragonborn or not.

Dragons get off on going all YOL-TOOR-SHUL at me, and I go all EAT-MY-SWOOORRRDDD at them....

Actually, that is a good idea.
I'm going to carry around like 20 iron longswords in my next playthrough..... and try to kill dragons by throwing my swords at it with telekinesis.... >_>
I've already got bored of having a YOL-TOOR-SHUL-off with every dragon that comes along.

I think the biggest thing they need to do is prescribe these reptiles some ridalin! Have them focus on the dragonborn! Maybe not immediately but perhaps once they hear/get hit with your shout they then attack only you. And instead of facing you and dying EVERY TIME they should retreat to lick their wounds... in fact I'd be pleased not getting a soul and warding the beast from a town, the inhabitants praising you thereafter.

Dragonrend pretty makes Dragons useless

Even then, they are still pretty weak, if they stayed in the air, and not land, while taking pot shots, it would be much tougher. Once they land, they are toast. They would only land when their Hit points fell below a certain level!

I had 2 dragons attack at once(never had it happen before or again), and they were easily taken down, while i was fighting with a couple giants.

The dragons should be less common we fight they way to frequently, they should have locked levels. They should use shouts other than their breath attack. It seems to me I fight a dragon every three days that makes the dragons less of a special encounter.

Dragons are way way to predictable and everything in skyrim is dragon proof. I defeated the last one by popping into a wooden shack that is somehow 100% fire proof and popping out to shoot some arrows then ducking back in. It couldnt even kill my horse even though it landed right in front of it there more like giant butterflys than death dealing monsters.

I play on expert and at higher levels they are NOT easy. If you arent challenged I would suggest a higher difficulty, because it spawns higher-level dragons sooner.

It would be nice if they used more shouts--I mean, how come Dovakiin can use all the shouts but dragons cant use any except fire/frost?

I would love to see a mod for blue storm dragons, green poisonous dragons, and undead dragons. The ai is pretty lame. I've seen them shoot the balls of ice or fire rather than a stream, and that is cool, but if they varied their patterns more it woudl be cool.

Yeah, in real life, if you weren't careful, you could easily kill yourself with all that inertia thrusting you forward.
But if dragons used the Sprint shout, what would it do them? Would it thrust them forward through the air super fast and cause them to fly from one end of the screen to the other?

Actually, it'd be pretty cool if they used it as a sort of charge attack to trip things up with their wings when flying low to the ground, essentially creating a giant wall rushing at you at 88 miles per hour or something like that.

An army of Luis Letrush can't go wrong.

That last thing just made me laugh.