It seems the mechanics of being a successful melee fighter is either more complex than I imagined or just not for me. I'm quite good as an assassin / thief (with a bow of course) and I have a lot of fun as a mageling but for the life of me I can't get the hang of a melee character. Sure, just point this end of the sword to the enemy and attack. Heck, I can do that much. That's of course until I die. Again. And again. And...you get the point. Perhaps it's a build issue or perhaps it's timing but I get hit uber hard and my blows seem to roll off mobs. I hit they lose 1% health. They hit and I lose half my health.

I'm playing on master and I'm really trying to get an agile sword and shield fighter going. I put 60% into HP and 40% into STA. I levelled one handed ad a good pace I think but block and light armour is lacking. But it's taking forever to level those compared to one handed. Please help. Level 11 at the moment.

Skills

One handed
Block
Light Armour
Smithing

In a time before I trained in armor, my warrior used unrelenting force a lot to save himself.
I think melee characters pass trough a certain point (lvl 20?) where the game gets hard.

Revisit a few of your old dungeons (With low level enemies) and train your block.
Block is a real life saver, and shield bash is a real killer.

switch to heavy armor and put more in stamina, like 70-30. also, it's not a slash fest. each foe will have a 'pattern'. just block until you figure it out and then use their pattern against them. as you level put stats into heavy armor so it doesn't encumber you and waste so much stamina (plus it allows higher armor rating) and 1 hand so you can deal more damage. also, make sure you make use of smithing. upgrade your gear as much as you can, it helps more than most think it does.

Part of the disparity between damage recieved and damage dealt is due to the dificulty you have it set on. Follow the advice of the others in this thread, and remind yourself that Master difficulty is not supposed to be easy.

I hope you are moving around as a melee fighter. Don't stand there and trade hits like two drunken Dwarves. I'm not sure who you are losing to, but you need to become familiar with your attackers power moves. You can move out of the way before the make the blow. If you have shield bash, you'll want to save enough stamina to stagger them during their power move, this will interrupt their power move and stagger them. I never use all my stamina...I typically only use 1 power attack when I'm around 75%+ stamina, then save enough to stop a power attack with shield. Then use regular attacks while my stamina goes back up.

You can also shield bash casters while they are conjuring a spell, it will stop them.

I've been playing a Master melee character lately, but I've also been using a bow to soften up enemies before I move in with my greatsword. My advice to you:

- Get the "Agent of Mara" magic resistance bonus. (especially good with Bretons)
- Avoid crafting, at least at the beginning. You make the enemies disproportionately strong by training in non-combat skills.
- Use the Warrior Stone so your combat skills grow faster than things like Speech/Lockpicking.
- Move through dungeons slowly so you encounter enemies in quantities you can handle.
- Work with your follower to take out the same enemy at once.
- Use cover.
- Abuse shouts.
- Abuse potions/poisons. (and food)
- Save often!

Melee characters will get creamed by everything on master difficulty from about lvl. 10-20. Then it gets easier...and a lot more fun.

I echo the above advice--you can't just stand there and trade blows. You'll go down first, every time. You need to block, or even better, avoid their attacks. Particularly if the enemy has a two-handed weapon, just get into a regular rhythm of moving in and striking, then backing away. You're quicker than they are. Save stamina for strategic shield bashes, or for sprinting away if you can't handle it.

As for mobs...try to avoid drawing their attention. Followers are very helpful in this regard.

And get the Fast Healing spell. You'll need it. I often find myself sprinting away from battle to do a fast heal (I hate chugging potions).

Finally, good luck! Melee on master is tough but rewarding.

P.S. Don't forget your shouts. Use them at every opportunity.
P.P.S. Getting the blessing of the Lord Stone, or the Atronach Stone, also will help up your damage resistance.

I would recommend you do what I did. Start your sword guy off on Adept ... if / when it's too easy move to expert ... if / when it's too easy move to master. There's no shame in "getting used to the game" at lower difficulty settings. Then when you get the hang of it you just bump up the difficulty and go from there.

Starfe to the outside of the enemies' weapon hand, get in the habit of monitoring your HP/stamina.Unless RPing a character a certain way , sneaking up and scouting te next area isn't a bad idea.Same is true of running away even if it's just slightly like around a doorway or wall etc.If you're dual-wielding your options to interrupt are way fewer and will require more active movement than normal , but the extra dps potentially offsets this in the form of power attacks.Find dummies in the game and take note of different power attack combinations and their animations , the timing actually matters in this game (thank god).

Always take stock of your surroundings and any cover/retreat routes that are available to you.Your enemy isn't going to play fair , so retreating to regain a cover advantage shouldn't be looked down upon.Pick priority targets for a group of mobs like the boss (obviously) or if just normal mobs the ones you have the most trouble with make them a priority to kill ASAP.A mage can be a real bear for melee when they sometimes play smart but usually stepping out of line of sight will make them come to you forcing them into your specialty of fighting.Think of it as the opposite of being a mage and kiting a powerful melee enemy.Big groups of melee , once you get the hang of strafing you can turn their power attacks against themselves by lining your priority up with an enemy that might be closing from behind and side-stepping the attack sometimes results in a freindly face-full and your in position for the kill and lined up to hit the next target.

Use bottlenecks like a stairway , doorway , etc.I wouldn't recommend using stairs for the shouting deathlords but a doorway with a side to use as cover can get you grazed instead of fully affected by a shout simply by stepping left or right.Use your power attacks on dummies while strafing and get the feel of how you want to use it in combat.You'll get used to it and formulate your own style from there pretty quickly.There's some more to it , but you'll start seeing the obvious once the combat goes to your liking.

Thanks for all the advice guys. From reading all your comments I've picked up a few big blunders that I'll need to fix like putting less focus on crafting early on. Luckily I save a lot of different save files when starting a new character just in case I realise a few hours later I'm not happy with it. I kind of wanted to go the light armour route and perk Smithing up to Glass armour. To me heavy armour is more for 2 handed or duel wielding characters but it seems I should at least consider it.

You can wear whatever you want. Light armor should be more than sufficient for someone with a shield.

If you think you might have overleveled (too high level because of smithing), spend money on potions and poisons.

Don't abuse smithing, but don't ignore it either. Without grinding the skill at a particularly abnormal rate, while he was still fairly low level, my Orc was able to make better armor and weaponry than he was able to find or purchase. I mean, we've all made a few iron daggers--we're not proud of it, but we've done it--but if you do, don't use it to go up more than maybe five skill levels (NOT five overall character levels, just smithing levels) at a time.

Right now my guy is about lvl 25, and he's only recently been able to once again tackle dungeons without a follower backing him up. I also thought that melee would be somehow simpler than say, magic-using, but I found the opposite to be the case. I find it takes more skill.

Well, I'm only level 8, but not having any trouble with melee so far. I do like to sneak around with my bow drawn when I explore dungeons, so I can weaken them before they can reach me. Now in Oblivion, ugh. It seems like every enemy attack staggers me for twice as long as mine stagger them, even if they arent using a big heavy warhammer. And I get staggered a lot.

I also svck, and svck too badly to even master the learning the "rhythym" of combat.
I found what worked what best was to go to dual-wielding, and just alternate left-clicking and right-clicking until enemies are dead. Drink healing potions as needed.

I'm L21 now, and it's worked quite well.

I tend to use 'faster' weapons (swords here and SMGs in shooters) because for the way I fight I get better results. For instance, if I miss with a sword the recovery is much faster so a miss isn't as devastating because another swing is right behind the miss, but if I miss with a great sword the recovery takes longer. Same with like SMGs versus shotguns - if I miss with an SMG there's another round coming right after whereas a shotgun takes longer to reload (even a semi-auto). I basically just slash maniacally until they're dead and I do use power attacks every now and then.

Another idea is to fight from 3rd person viewpoint that way if they're behind your left shoulder you know to turn to the left instead of turning to the right (turning 100 degrees instead of 210 degrees). You might also try 'rotating' instead of spinning around. I describe rotating as turning with both joysticks so as you're turning you're also kind of side-stepping - makes it more difficult for the enemy to keep hitting you as you're turning.

Edit: FWIW I play on Adept.

There are some animation optimizations you can do to vastly increase your physical dps by increasing the speed at which you swing your swords.

1. perform a normal swing and follow it straight into a power attack, if done properly you will cancel the normal swing animation and quickly go into a power attack,
then follow up with 2 very fast normal swings. repeat until their dead or shield bash in between for some stagger.

2. eat vegetable soup and shield bash them until they die, nearly guaranteed method of killing almost any enemy without fear of retaliation.

3. Dance, no really, do normal swings while strafing side to side, you can often "clip" foes with your blade edge while avoiding their attacks.

I would advise you ignore smithing or at least ignore using alchemy to create smithing potions as this will make your game trivially easy. You should also put everything into health and ignore stamina complete as it is useless other than sprinting for long distances, magicka almost as useless. Fights are most fun when the enemy can kill you in 2 unblocked strikes. I recently started my second play through with no trade skills on master difficulty and found high risk melee combat very rewarding and enjoyable.

The best advice I've seen in this thread.

Use bash to interrupt casters as well as opponents charging for a power attack. Works also against grounded dragons to stop flame or frost attacks.

I have poor hand eye coordination skills, so I'm not a great fighter. That being the case, I have difficult coordinating the shield sword thing. So I have gradually worked on smithing to get me better armor, I've worn the best heavy armor I could and improved it with smithing, I used two handed swords and axes so that I don't have to swing as often and I still do a lot of damage, and I carry a lot of healing potions to refuel in a battle.

Once you're in heavily enchanted heavily smithed heavy armor you're a lot harder to kill and you have more time to swing (fighting isn't as frantic as it used to be). And do use the shouts. Unrelenting Force and Fire breath is a good addition to the battle as is the freeze target one. And hotkey your bow and sword so that you can get off a couple of bow shots and then switch to sword as they close. And as they are closing give them unrelenting force to give yourself even more time. And carry a lot of poisons to make your sword more deadly.

Have you tried the Slow Time shout?

How effective is that? I've wondered because the spider poisoning never seemed to affect me (Nord), but the Chaurus, on the other hand, I have to watch the DOT.

Poisons early in that you just find like the frost stuff from the spiders can seriously make a difference , then all the suden they just sort of.......... don't. Crafted potions , when you start finding crazy combinations of effects can be devastating and hilarious at the same time.But if you're spending your perks all in the handed tree of your choice , you'll soon be killing things so quickly it's hard to notice if it had an effect or not.After you start approaching the 30's you'll feel a diference in things if that's how you spend your points.Personally I'll avoid the charging crit perk if I'm a heavy blacksmith because it'll seriously trivialize almost everything in the game , same with the standing power attack bonus.

You can find those crazy poison in a wikki , which isn't nearly as fun as going through and clicking in a thrid known effect at the alchemy table to see what it will do.My favorite so far is one that does mderate health damage coupled with a fury effect to start from a ranged stealth attack.

I have both of those. I'm not sure I've ever landed the sprint one (just have to learn the timing), but I like the standing bonus.