not talking perks and sneak situations. yes, many times. badly worded, i guess.

during combat, with both parties active and aware, i can't remember auto-killing an enemy, unless, on lower difficulties. for me, the lower difficulty levels don't apply so i often disregard them.

My two hand guy does it all the time. My Dark Elf who is a one hand guy gets kill anis on sabrecats and most bandits a lot. I have one shot a Briar Heart with a kill ani with my two handed guy.

Now the two hand guy wields a Daedric Sword that hits at around 180 with the right stuff on. Double for a power attack and again for a critical which must have been what the Briar Heart experienced. The Dark Elf has a an Ebony Vampire sword at about 140 and a dagger at 85. I don't do dual weild anymore, it's too strong.

just to be absolutely clear:

you've auto-killed an enemy on master with full health who hasn't been sneak-attacked or touched?

No I'm playing on expert. This my first non shooter game and I guess soon I'll use master as I play all shooters at the highest level and my sword and such skills are getting pretty good.

The briar Heart was a true one shot animation. I was surprised although I'm used to one shotting with animations a lot of enemies. The Sabrecats almost always give me a kill ani now.

I agree 100%. It would be one thing if the first time they hit you, it takes half your life, then we know "[censored] this guy will kill me in 2 hits". But I have had enemies hit me like 4 or 5 times and by then im at 1/3 health. The final blow, one hit does that last 3rd in one hit. Its stupid, its unpredictable it should be fixed.

It's unpredictable, oh my. You die to a power attack ... you die. It's a feature, get used to it.

The whining about this is very funny. the spelling just helps with that.

1. A min-maxed player can have up to 1000 damage per normal attack. So a direct full health face to face kill animation is possible.

2. A player at 100 of 100 health wearing cloth in master difficulty will get killed by a hammer wielding bandit chief via kill animations roughly 100% of the time. Maxed block skill none withstanding.

3. Ranged kill animation, if implemented, can prevent arrow/spell dodging and make it impossible for some archetypes as the ebony bow wielding Dragur Deathlord deals 260 damage to a character with maxed armor on Master difficulty. This translates to 1300 damage on an unarmored Mage.

NPC mages have no cast time on spells and has been known to fling 2-3 of their cheapo ice shards which deals significantly more damage, compared to the player version, at the cost of single digit magicka, within the space of a second.

If an enemy lands a hit, and if the damage from the hit is greater than your health, you die. I'm not a fan of heads-you-live and tails-you-die rolls, but I am comfortable with the heads-you're-missed and tails-you're-hit system. I don't believe the final hit is unavoidable.

Its all about timing. Once am sure the enemy is gonna acttack i do my best to get them first before they can even land the first blow. Usually this leaves them briefly stunned so i can get in another shot and gets me in deep enough to land a final killing hit.

The problem with Insta-Kills? against the player is that the determination of whether or not they occur ignores all protections and only considers your current total HP when doing the 'to-hit roll' for said attack. Thus, even if you have capped armor and the attack would normally do, say, 40 damage to you, it's instead doing the full 200, which on Master is doubled to 400, and if a critical as well to 800. When the determination is made that the I-K applies, the controls are locked out and the animation plays; this is where the complaints of 'no control' are coming from, since normally you'd have the chance to at least try to prevent it.

The way to fix this is to correct the order of operations to behave like that of normal hits, so that your defenses are taken into account. This would solve the problem of being cheap-shotted, while still allowing I-K hits to occur.

Checkmate in 867 moves!

2 things that I cant decide between.
The dragon eating me when I have almost full health
Being disarmed and spending not being able to find my weapon. (especially when it's a good one)

Just give us the ability to turn off the kill cam and everybody is happy. The main problems I have with this game involve not being able to disable features. I want more options for the map, quests markers, and kill cams. I'd like to see the ability to disable slow motion kill cams and have finishing moves only occur when you pull off a critical hit that will kill the enemy.

I am fine with the auto-kills in Skyrim, but there is definitely room for improvement. Personally I like the assasinate sequences in Assassin's Creed II a lot. They are super smooth and quick, and don't stop the action at all. I think that is what Bethessda was going for, but missed the mark a bit.

Do you have any proof for this? If it's true, it's also a bad thing.

all those fatalities are a pain, mine or theres, they should never have been included in the game (if i wanted to watch me killing my enemys in a fancy way [in a more fancy way than in skyrim, i might add] i would play mortal kombat), they only calculate how much health you have and damage going to you then decided to kill you off even if you can dodge it or are well out of the attack's range (iv been dragged into range of a melee weapon [i was far out of the way] and started doing some stupid little gesture [begging?] while the enemy crushes my skull, im supposed to be fearless!)

I really enjoy this:

http://carnagepro.com/pics/diedragon.jpg

I fight Ancient Dragons head to head to get those shots.

I really don't know what this thread is even about quite frankly. If you believe the game is unfairly killing you then you have other problems.

I turned off kill cams in Fallout3 and FNV because the animations went on so long you could be killed by a bystander while it was in progress. In over 550 hours of Skyrim I have yet to see anything like that and I have been involved in a very large amount of kill animations, both of my kills and my deaths.

The automatic loss when the PC decides that an attacking NPC can kill you with a power attack is indeed quite stupid. I don't have those happen to me often myself but I play mostly very heavily armored character with high health that rarely drop below 50% due to healing spells and their base toughness. However it does happen occasionally and often I feel I could easily have gotten out of the situation. Even if the NPC is too close for you to manually dodge the attack there are still options for you that should stop a power attack such as...

1. A quick one word Whirlwind Sprint
2. A quick one word Unrelenting Force
3. The aid of another NPC potentially staggering the attacker
4. A quick healing potion (yes it may be unrealistic but it's still an option)
5. A quick shield bash staggering the enemy
6. A quick slash to finish the enemy off before it can execute its finishing blow
7. A quick one word become ethereal shout

And I could go on and so could others who may have other game mechanics in mind. Often there are those quick solutions you would normally come up with when you just really need to get out of a sticky situation but then the game will decide that you are in fact not a thinking human being but that you are probably just a poorly designed AI that would just have stood there anyway and taken the blow. Haven't been fond of those kills be they mine or my enemies since I first heard about this feature being in Skyrim and I would not miss it if I could remove it completely and play without those.

What part of "you would have died anyway" is so hard for you people to grasp.

The part that in many of those cases it is not a "you would have died anyway" unless you stood there and took the blow. If Skyrim had turn based combat system I would understand as there you have no quick escape out of a sticky situation, but it is in real time and no calculation can truly make up for human ingenuity.

For me to be happy with those I first have to see the strike hit me while I still am mobile and able to counter it. Then if I fail to counter it and I drop down to 0 health then the game can freeze up my character and do that finishing move.

the game is unfairly killing me (iv been frozen when i was running perfectly just a second ago, i just stoped, turned around and whimpered like a little...while an orc bashed my skull in, if my character did not stop without my input i would have escaped easily) and i am probably unfairly killing the things i fight (although the AI cant make any choices in battle, so maybe not). i would rather have no fatalities at all, they are all boring and those "dramatic" shots are only interesting in a time of dramatic intensity, not when i am killing a random bandit in the middle of nowhere

This is exactly my gripe with the system. I'd be fine with the animations if if they'd play when my health bar ran out, but to cut combat short when I might still have had a chance irritates me to no end.
You don't get it. Try reading the first couple of pages, or the quote I put above, or even the post directly above yours. Sigh.

I have read them. I have over 550 hours in this game and I am satisfied that when I get kill anied it's perfectly fair. I disagree with the people who think that if the ani had not occured they would have lived.

Simple enough?

I get a lot of enemy kill anis and my present character really lives for them. It is his main purpose at level 53 as he owns the rest of the game.

This is why I am still playing Skyrim after so long:

Getting balance after the mount move
http://carnagepro.com/pics/die2dragon.jpg

So it is only by personal opinion but not by having an above average understanding the mechanics of this game that you make your argument ? Then why make the argument in the first place if you do not care to go into detail about why the scenarios presented to you by others are not realistic and why their complaints are not valid ?

You argument for having finishers seem to be that they are cool and you do not seem to have a present argument against them. And then your argument against people who argue they should not be in the game only seems to be "they should stay because I think they should" but when people point out that they have valid reasons for why it is silly in terms of gameplay to have those finishers you don't seem to wish to take the argument any further.

You think it is fair that it may ignore armor and defenses and you seem to think it fair that it prevents you from using quick escape solutions despite them being present and usable if you did not get frozen so that the animation could play. But "why" do you think so ? And if you wish to reply with "because I think it's fair" then "why do you think it's fair given their argument and what is your counter argument against the points they bring up ?" is what I should and would ask.

I am an old man. I have worked on Linux video drivers and written a lot of code.

It is not difficult to arrange for kill animations to occur only when you would have died in the fight/accident/fall/etc and there is no reason to suppose, outside of fairly childish whining, that "it's not fair". It most probably is fair and it sure does seem fair to me. I do have a lot of experience in the game.