I have always been playing on Master. I recently made my new Nord Warrior to complete the Main Quest. He only focuses on One-handed, Block and Light Armour. No Potions, Magic, Enchanting/wearing Enchanted gear, Alchemy, or Ranged attacks. I only use gear that I have found. I do use shouts as I'm playing him as the Dovahkiin and doing the main quest just so it fits in. I've never tried shouts on my other characters so it's my first time and it's fun blowing things away and off of cliffs.
The only problem I'm having on Master is that I'm getting bored of fighting. Every enemy is taking like 20-50 hits each to kill and I'm starting to find it more tedious than challenging. At first when I started I would die by anything in 1-3 hits, an arrow would kill me in one hit along with some Destruction spells. And I would take forever to kill something. At first it was fun as I found it challenging but as I got higher the enemies got more health but didn't get harder. I'm still dying in a few hits but now I'm taking three times longer to kill something. I was recently fighting a Thalmor Agent and I was slashing away for so long just to kill one. When I went into a place with 3 of them it wasn't any harder as I was good at dodging and hitting and I could shield bash or knock them down.
Now that I have learnt how to dodge attacks and such I rarely get hit, but it's becoming a chore to kill something not a challenge. A Dragon hits quite hard with the AoE stomp and I do little damage to it, which I actually enjoy as it's supposed to be a tough Dragon (It's annoying waiting for it to land because they seem to be airbone all the time and I cannot hit it, when it does land I get 5-10 slashes before it takes off and I'm left waiting again).
I guess you can blame me for being so weak damage-wise because I don't use enchanted gear, potions, or any ways to increase my damage output.
what i've definitely learned is that offense is the most important thing on master. you're just not going to be able to do to much to reduce the number of hits it takes before you die.
damage output and battle control are how you survive on master without exploits or reloads or playing DiD.