Well kiting is normally the term used when your manouvering while attacking a target from range, but is also used for breaking away from melee engagements and then attacking again in a more favourable position repeatedly. Its used a lot by MMO and RTS gamers.

maybe you should turn down the difficulty instead of whining about it. your character is obviously not ready for it yet

Here is a way I played Skyrim, at an even higher difficulty than Master. I started the game on Master and never took any perks.

Hate to be the bearer of bad news but... that's exactly how Oblivion's difficulty slider worked. Only in Oblivion it was a slider and here you have specific settings containing specific numbers. For example, in the Master difficulty setting the player deals 1/2 damage to enemies and takes 2 times more damage from enemies.

If a strike from a player to an enemy deals 10 damage on Adept, it deals 5 damage on Master.
If a strike from an enemy to a player deals 10 damage on Adept, it deals 20 damage on Master.

Just educating the mislead masses.

Right.

It made conjuring OP since the daedra scaled with the other NPCs.

I've been playing the game on master difficulty for a while now, because I enjoy a challenge, and I think it's much easier to judge the balance of a game when you pit various play styles against the toughest possible scenario, as opposed to an easy one. (For example, lots of people maintain that shields are useless and melee is easy because they play on easy difficulties, where your armor easily does all the work, or that destruction magic is overpowered, because on easy difficulties it burns through any number of foes with ease)

The issue I see with Master difficulty is that the way the difficulty is raised in the game is in the absolute lamest, most unimaginative, and cheesy way possible. All the game does is simply increase the damage and hitpoints of enemies, in many cases to an absurd degree.

This leads to two things happening:

1. Enemies can shrug off blows like they are nothing, you can smack them with a power attack from a great hammer and they just don't really care all that much, it takes a couple millimeters off their life bar, but they keep right on rolling. That completely screws up the game however, because it destroys the way a lot of mechanics work. For example, shield bashing someone to open them for a flurry of attacks - useful if the enemies is gravely wounded as a result, pretty much pointless if they still have a mountain of HP left, but it still costs a good chunk of your stamina. Using Fus Ro Dah on an enemy is even significantly cheapened by their inflated hitpoints, because while lying on the floor helpless for a few seconds might be a big deal in regular difficulty, on master difficulty the enemies will simply get back up and keep fighting, since they can take a couple dozen wacks from a decent weapon.

2. Enemies do insane ammounts of damage. This is also gamebreaking in a lot of ways. For example, the first "miniboss" you will encounter in Skyrim on a usual play-through is the big spider in bleak falls barrow. It has a poison attack. Poison attacks ignore armor and blocking. On regular difficulty this spider is a pretty mean foe, no doubt, but on master difficulty it's one bite and you're dead. The only way to survive its poison attack is to instantly pause the game and throw half a dozen health potions in your mouth. The same is true for dragon breath, enemy mages, and high end enemy fighters as well. They end up doing so much damage that your defenses become meaningless.


The result of those changes are that certain play styles become infinitely more potent than others. Stealth becomes incredibly powerful, since the enemies are no better at detecting you. Conjuration becomes an easy way to avoid taking blows, and of course all the various cheese and exploits with alchemy, smithing and enchanting can easily turn master difficulty back into a cakewalk.


I think it's a shame that the difficulty setting in Skyrim are so uninspired. Sure, they make for much harder fights, trying to play through master difficulty as an unsubtle fighter without ludicrously enchanted gear is damn near impossible, since every other enemy takes a minute long beating to kill and can do more damage to you through your shield than you can do to them with a well placed hit. Ultimately the difficulty setting utterly fails at making things more difficult in all areas though. The vendors have the same prices, locks are equally easy to open, enemies are still unable to detect a semi competent stealther.

I really hope Bethesda will take a look at the difficulty setting and reevaluate how they work. Master Difficulty should be more than just making fights absurdly hard for characters that aren't made of cheese and lols, it should make the whole game harder. Bribes should be steeper, vendors prices harsher, locks harder to pick, enemies harder to trick. Playing through master difficulty should mean that skills are more meaningful as a whole, not that everything is skewed towards characters with high DPS and avoidance. If you want to be rich on Master difficulty you should have to invest in some merchant perks or lockpick skills for example. Every individual aspect of the game that is confronted by a skill should be harder to some degree, not one singular aspect that is best confronted by only a hand full of skills harder by an insane amount.

Perhaps we can get the moders on creating a "Genuine Challenge Mode" and not just an "Inflated Enemy Numbes Mode".

This, master dificulty is for two groups of people: 1 the ones who want an serious challenge and 2 the one who powergame like using alchemy, smithing and enchant to create overpowered gear.
You don't have to play on master, I don't, it's hard for an reason.

3: People who think it's something worth bragging about on the forums.

1 is arguable though, like many others, I find master difficulty doesn't provide a serious challenge, it just makes enemies absurdly durable and makes combat a comical affair of exploiting the game's poor AI or various overpowered skills to circumvent the absurd health and damage of enemies. Master difficulty is quite the opposite of serious for me, it just exacerbates the flaws of Skyrim's poor combat system.

Disclaimer: Since you didn't elaborate, I'll go ahead and make some assumptions. If you're not okay with these assumptions, please go ahead and make your posts more thorough next time.

Anyhow, here we go. I find it funny when people think that it's somehow considered exploiting the AI when players just don't sit there and mash their buttons hoping for the best. Much like with humans, there are things called strategy, tactics, skill, execution, etc. and all of these are a far cry from exploiting the game's poor AI as you would put it.

And the absurd health that you're claiming is just 2x the health of that of which is normal. That's a far cry from absurd health if I ever heard one. Toodleoo.

Getting enemies stuck on terrain is not exactly an achievement of the player, it's a failure of the game. Killing enemies with summons that they almost automatically attack instead of you isn't hard either. Hit and run against enemies that won't chase you beyond a certain distance is also pretty simple. Using abilities that completely incapacitate enemies for long periods of time, which they cannot counter in any way...well that's obvious. And so on and so on. Certainly, these are things that could technically be considered tactics, but they're not rewarding or challenging, you're simply taking advantage of bad AI and you know it. The nature of the kind of AI used in video games means it can always be taken advantage of, the difference though is that good AI makes it fun and is more effective at masking it's limitations while bad is, well, like Skyrim - obvious, predictable, easy to exploit.

"Absurd health" might be a simplification but that's how it actually feels like in practice, regardless of the mathematics behind it. It's absurd health relative to damage you deal. It takes more than 2x the number of strikes it does on normal to kill a master difficulty enemy.

I wouldn't say OP compared to other intricate things like Spell Making, however, it made them a far better choice over other choices because while everything else was hit by a handicap, your summons were not. I'm not sure if it still works that way, but I imagine it does.

It does.

By the way, here's where the 'absurd' descriptor is coming from as it regards opponent HP on Master:

Opponent health is doubled
Player damage is halved

Result? Four times as many hits (barring criticals) needed per opponent. Can be multiplied up to twice that or more in some circumstances (usually bosses, but not always). When you go from needing 5 strikes to needing 20+, it can feel pretty absurd, especially given that opponent damage is doubled so they need half as many hits to down you.

I agree that just lowering your damage and upping enemy damage is the cheapest, dumbest way to increase difficulty. But show me a game of this size and scope in which each enemy has successively smarter attacks and strategies for each level of difficulty. I mean, your criticism is valid, but I suspect you're comparing Skyrim to perfect games that don't exist.

Getting enemies stuck on terrain is not exactly an achievement of the player, it's a failure of the game. Killing enemies with summons that they almost automatically attack instead of you isn't hard either. Hit and run against enemies that won't chase you beyond a certain distance is also pretty simple. Using abilities that completely incapacitate enemies for long periods of time, which they cannot counter in any way...well that's obvious. And so on and so on. Certainly, these are things that could technically be considered tactics, but they're not rewarding or challenging, you're simply taking advantage of bad AI and you know it. The nature of the kind of AI used in video games means it can always be taken advantage of, the difference though is that good AI makes it fun, provides some degree of challenge, and is more effective at masking its limitations. Bad AI is, well, like Skyrim - obvious, predictable, easy to exploit.

"Absurd health" might be a simplification but that's how it actually feels like in practice, regardless of the mathematics behind it. It's absurd health relative to damage you deal. It takes more than 2x the number of strikes it does on normal to kill a master difficulty enemy.

For example, the first "miniboss" you will encounter in Skyrim on a usual play-through is the big spider in bleak falls barrow. It has a poison attack. Poison attacks ignore armor and blocking. On regular difficulty this spider is a pretty mean foe, no doubt, but on master difficulty it's one bite and you're dead. The only way to survive its poison attack is to instantly pause the game and throw half a dozen health potions in your mouth.

Achievement Unlocked: Unrealistic Expectations Lead To Disappointment

It was stated well before the game was released that the difficulty settings would only effect combat. I believe it's even stated in the manual.

People complaining that difficult settings are difficult. Ok, now I've seen it all.

Oh, they said ahead of time it would be bad? Guess it's fine then.

Not sure what you people are talking about, the difficulty settings works just as intended

Someone being deliberately obtuse. Yeah, seen that before.