Before you start saying "Patch 1.2!", I reverted back to Patch 1.1.

So yeah, might be intended as I'm not sure how damage scales with Difficulty. Here's the Bandit's stats:

Level 25
72 Marksman (Archery)
Using Imperial Bow + Steel Arrows (I checked his inventory)

My Stats:
Level 20
150 Health
160 Armor Rating
No diseases, etc.

So with an Imperial Bow having a base damage of 8 and Steel Arrows adding 10 to that shot, he's doing 8.4x base damage to me excluding AR. That seems a bit high.

Now if the 85% reduction cap is at 576 and assuming it's a linear increase then my 160 AR should give a 23% physical damage reduction, so that bumps up the damage he's doing even higher up to 10.25x base damage (at least).

Honestly I have ways of getting past this encounter, I just found the scaling odd. Other NPCs don't usually one-shot me unless they're much higher level or bosses. This is a BANDIT so it seems a little odd.

Edit: Bumped my health up to 200 with items and he's taking off 185 health per hit, so 185 * 1.23 = 227.55 185 / 0.77 = 240.26 damage

Edit: On further testing with different difficulty levels it seems each level of difficulty increases damage done to the player by around 30%-50% over the previous level.

Master -- the bandit does ~240 damage (5.45x damage from base of 44 damage)
Expert -- the bandit does ~183 damage (4.15x damage)
Adept -- the bandit does ~120 damage (2.71x damage)

This is WITHOUT respawning the bandit, so he's at the same level, same stats, same weapon.

So there we go, our hidden multiplier. That's all I wanted to know

Welcome to the bizarre failures of level-scaling.

Why are you level 20 with only 150 health?

And Imperial Bows have a damage of 12 at 72 Archery.

Had a bandit at level 15 with an iron war axe beable to remove 75% of my hp with a single normal swing, using 1.1 too. Of course my improved steel sword was lucky to remove 2% of her hp...

Playing a Sneaky Battlemage silly. And going from 8->12 isn't even a 2x increase in damage. I'm experiencing a 10.25x increase in damage.

Like I said, I got past the encounter, I just found the damage scaling odd and was wondering if anyone else was encountering this. This one bandit was one-shotting me every single time while the other bandits around him are doing about 15% of health damage per hit with spells and blades. It's like I have some specific weakness to arrows.

I have to repeat this one too. Even playing a battlemage, master really really needs a health buffer. 150 health at level 20 is extremely low. 5 levels out of 20 to health? I have seen your problem happen in my games though, Occasionally there is a super archer out there that sends me panicking.

Maybe he has "perks". I think companions can get them,i see no reason why a (strong) bandit can.

Arrow damage seems to be able to bypass armor to some extent. This would make sense as its a different damage type akin to piercing damage. I dont know myself but It could be the case that arrows have a base % of armor bypass. Plus the higher level of the enemy coupled with your low health means an arrow would cut through most (if not all) of your armor rating.

These are the only two perks that effect damage:

- +20% Bow Damage (5 ranks)
- +10% Critical Chance (3 ranks)

Let's say he has all 8 ranks and does +100% damage and has a 30% chance to crit. Let's also assume he's always getting a critical hit despite it being a 30% chance. That's 2x damage + 2x damage for 4x damage. With 72 in Archery that 8 base damage should be 12, so he's got 22 damage (with Steel Arrows) going for him. 22 * 4 = 88 damage. Let's further assume he's somehow "piercing" my armor and it gives no reduction. He's still doing 185 damage, not 88 damage, in one shot. We're still missing a 2x damage multiplier (or a 4x damage multiplier if you believe as I do he shouldn't be critting with EVERY shot)

Obviously we're missing some multiplier here. Maybe higher level enemies or on Master difficulty they do 2x-4x more damage to players?

Edit: On further testing with different difficulty levels it seems each level of difficulty increases damage done to the player by around 30%-50% over the previous level.

Master -- the bandit does ~227 damage
Expert -- the bandit does ~174 damage
Adept -- the bandit does ~113 damage

This is WITHOUT respawning the bandit, so he's at the same level, same stats, same weapon.

So there we go, our hidden multiplier. That's all I wanted to know

Wait... you didn't know that master increases enemy damage against the player? That is common knowledge I thought. They do - so does expert level to a smaller extent, sorry I should have read your post more thoroughly.

Think fallout NV if you played it: hardest added a 150% damage increase against the player. It is a much better solution than giving all enemies giant health bars IMO.

This may explain our posts about your low health earlier. You will need more.

Are you unclear on the concept that playing on the highest difficulty buffs enemy HP and damage by a very large amount?

I'm confused about what you're asking about/complaining about, but if you're asking whether Master difficulty causes enemies to do a lot more damage, it does.

If you play on master difficulty then you better invest at least half your level ups into health, or else plan on never getting hit.

Yes I knew that was the case in Fallout 3, but I thought they might have changed it to make it so they just get higher Skill Levels in TES. But it seems skills don't really scale that well, so it's just a flat damage multiplier.

Note I don't have any trouble getting past the encounter, I was just curious as to what the mechanics are.

Also 5x damage seems a bit high, if my numbers are right and he should be doing 44 damage per shot with 72 archery and 2x damage from 5/5 in Overdraw. And the game still isn't impossibly hard even with everything doing 500% normal damage.

185 * 1.23 = 227.55 damage

my answer was a little bit different.
his damage x, after a 23% reduction, is 185. mathematically, this looks like this
x - 0.23 x = 185
this simplifies to
0.77 x = 185
we divide both sides by 0.77
x = 240.

this also checks out, reducing 227 by 23% yields 174 damage.
reducing 240 by 23% yields 185. not that it makes a huge difference but thought it might be helpful if you decide to invest in armor upgrades. if your displayed rating is 160 and you're wearing armor for every slot, then your actual armor rating is 260. this means that your reduction is 31%. the bandit is actually doing 268 damage. 567 displayed rating is actually 667 actual, which results in 80.04% reduction.

regardless, it seems as if the difficulty slider is 50% increase on expert and double damage on master.

so we have countless threads complaining that the game is too easy and then we have these threads asking y bandits do too much dmg?

lolwut?

I didn't think the encounter was "too hard", I just wanted to know the mechanics behind how he was doing so much damage, as I said about 5 different times and 3 different ways. Specifically I wanted to know all the multipliers involved.

Of course, I should have guessed from someone who uses "lolwut" that they didn't actually read the original post.

Anyway...

Sorry, I'm overly tired here and my math skills seriously suffer...despite being a programmer =/ I keep using stupid shortcuts that are plain wrong when I'm tired.
Wait, why is it the case you get bonus +100 to armor rating? Are you talking about the "Matched Set" perk? When I check with "player.getav damageresist" I get the same number as what I have in armor rating.
Well unless I screwed up my math again, his base damage without the damage multiplier from difficulty should be no higher than 44 with an Imperial Bow + Steel Arrows and 72 in Marksman/Archery. So that's an increase of about 500%, not 100%. Even if we add +100 Armor Rating we still get well over 100% increase.

Reload the save, change difficulty, see how much damage he does. Repeat for each difficulty. Do Math and you'll know what the effects are. You can't tell what the damage multiplier is if you don't have a base number to work from, and assuming that number wont help your accuracy.

Edit: Here, ran some numbers. One hit from a bandit thug on different difficulties along with his skill and equipment.

Bandit Thug

37 Marksman

Hunting Bow (8)
Iron Arrow (8)

550 = base
530.42 (19.58) * .5
520.64 (29.36) * .75
510.85 (39.15) = base
491.27 (58.73) * 1.5
471.7 (78.3) * 2

For reference, with the same weapons and skill, on normal difficulty I hit him for 17.05 damage while he had 9 armor wearing boots, or 17.66 base damage.

Well...Master level is supposed to be extremely difficult, and it is. *shrugs* Higher difficulty = enemies always do more damage than you're able to, and you'll always do less damage than you would at lower difficulties.