Maxed should be just to the point of Legendary. Sadly, the game lets you continue way past that point. People will continue to do this and then complain that the game is too easy. I am not fully convinced that it was initially intended to work that way. It seems to me that there should have been a cap. Then again, there are a lot of things that seem to me.

You're preaching to the choir, my good man. I smithed up the weapons on my main using all of the vanilla smithing abilities and items built into the game, before I realized there was no balance built into the game, and that even Master diff provides no challenge once you've done that. Yes, there should have been a (much lower) cap, and there shouldn't have been a huge (supposedly a bug, but who knows) boost to your smithing results from using normal +smithing potions. And other stuff I've heard of that boosts it even worse, but which I've never bothered to try to figure out. Oh yeah, potion stacking was another one. Just careless of them to even have allowed that.

Nobody can look at the insane way in which the crafts were made and consider that they were done well, or with any remote thought given to game balance after they were tossed in. If they had just made a hard limit of, say, +50% being the most you could improve any kind of item, regardless of what combination of things you used or wore while improving it, then blacksmithing would still have been a perfectly useful skill, without being stupidly unbalanced.

Plus the damage enchants you can add to gear to really send damage into the stratosphere.

Agreed.

I had a lot to add to that, but realized it was getting too OT, so I just settled for...agreed.

I thought the whole point of the game was go online and find perk exploits and then brag how lame the game has become.

Some people say"try the game on master difficulty"...It's not that hard to play the game on master difficulty.I dont know but if all you get is enemies with larger health pools and higher damage output from a higher difficulty,that's just laziness in my opinion.
Instead the AI should become better and more of a challenge when you turn up the difficulty.
But Beth is not known for their supirior AI..They are good at making large sandbox worlds,which are beautiful and fun to explore and experiment within.
I also think that some Boss type monster could help here.The one unique big bad monster you fight and get a real reward for it.Not like the dragons.I have enough dragonscales and bones to plaster whole skyrim with it.And they are very perdictble.
Better,more challenging AI and more big high level monsters.That's what i'am hoping for.

when i think of dungeons and dragons. fantasy. tes. lord of the rings.
the elfstone of, chronicles of, etc.
i think of tons of enemy types.

and, we get very few additions to the enemy list with skyrim.

well if you want a hard game you shouldve picked one of the previous generation games where everything wasn't as 'accessable' as now. or thats their word for dumbed down

but,

the game is as hard as you make it for yourself.

for example, you could use weaker items or spells to increase the difficulty for you if the slider doesn't give the desired result

theres also tons of mods out there to overhaul everything

its up to you in the end, make the most of it

nope.

the point is to have the 'master' difficulty level be difficult to play past midgame.

Not everbody has access to mods(console players).Also why should i be forced to make a game difficult by myself with artifical ways.If some stuff like a bad AI is not my fault.That's just

That's the way of these forums.

We're supposed to do everything ourselves and not expect the developers to develop a game.

With all due respect, these threads about things being too easy at high levels are getting tiresome. Because....

1. At higher levels you should be more powerful. Unless you want the world to adjust to your level, in which case I recommend you try Oblivion without mods, which does just that. Then at higher levels the game can become waaaaay more difficult if you don't level properly.

2. At higher difficulty levels you can still get "one shot" killed by "boss" or higher level enemies (ie Master Necromancers, Bandit Chiefs etc). And most enemies are easy, except for the higher level enemies. But there are still challenges at last up to level 40 or so. After that the game is supposed to be easy because you've presumably built up a powerful character. That's the point of leveling up.

Level 40 or so. In a game with 81 levels.

Not good design.

Oblivion went far too extreme. Skyrim has equally gone too extreme in the opposite direction. Not every enemy needs to scale with the player, but nor should the game become complete cake when you hit level 40 or so.

It's only a game with 81 levels if you max out every skill. Which is not role playing, and contrary to the design. The game is not intended to get difficult only for power gamers that max everything out. It is intended for roleplayers.

In my opinion, the game is very well balanced as is. At level 40 or so things should start to get easy.

Although I have played characters on Master difficulty, my current thief assassin character is playing on Expert. And at level 35 it is difficult to kill a combo of Master Necromancer and Ascendant Conjurer. Lots of challenges even at level 35.

I thought the way of these forums was to "role-play". Like pretend your character doesn't have a left arm so you can't use it?

It actually has replaced "immersion" as my most hated word on this forum

But Savlian has a point. Even the most strongest enemies stop scaling at level 50, so any levels beyond that are unnecessary.

I'm not sure where you're getting the meaning that the game should only be difficult for people who reach level 81. The game provides the player with the ability to reach level 81, regardless if you think that's role-playing or not, the game therefore should be balanced to include what it offers to the player, that's Design 101. As a designer, if I give the player the access to do something then that something should be balanced and in this case if the player can reach level 81 then the game needs to include that in its difficulty balance.

There is little point to striving to reach the highest level in the game if everything becomes like moist cake when you only reach the halfway point. What's the point of getting to level 60, 70 and 80 if I'm already backhanding 99.9% of the opposition at level 22?


Yep, and that's bad design.

That they stop leveling, or that you can keep gaining levels? Knowing TES players, artificial level cap at 50 wouldn't be too popular feature.

That they stop leveling. If the player can obtain a level, i.e. level 81, there should be some enemies in the world that can follow suit and, in very small cases, surpass that level to continue an environment of challenge throughout the entire gaming experience.

A standard Wolf does not need to touch anywhere higher than level 15 or so, but a Dragon Priest? Why is a Dragon Priest capping out much sooner than the player? Why are the Dragons, the main enemies of the game, not hitting level 75+ when the player can dance around at 81?

Propably due to the reception Oblivion had, enemies kept scaling with you, and leveling poorly could mean enemies could become too powerful to defeat. Allowing players to overlevel enemies prevents that possibility in Skyrim.

Looks like Bethesda just can't win the level scaling battle

Because having all the enemies, most or even half of them scale to the player is a terrible idea in an open world game, especially if you make it so that with the scaling they also upgrade their gear.

The best way to do it is have most enemies have varied caps throughout the game world, for example Wolves would be capped at levels 3, 5, 8 and 10, but you would only encounter level 8 and 10 Wolves in the Winterhold and Windhelm area while all other areas are 3 and 5.

Then some enemies should always be exactly equal to the player's level, such as maybe some of the higher tier Bandits and Spriggins.

Finally some enemies should always be scaled above the player, always, to give constant challenge as players may find enemies that are equal to their level potentially easy, especially with the questionable AI. Enemies like Dragon Priests, Alduin, Dragons should all be scaled to be at least 3-5 levels higher than the player.

To go along with that, especially in the case of enemies that are always equal to the player, only some should be as well equipped. Just because the Bandit Marauder is level 50 right along side you doesn't mean he has to be decked out in full Daedric gear, said Bandit could be wearing Elven or even Scale based on the region they are in or simply by random determination.

I was getting that meaning from the post above mine, post 41.

My point is not that the "the game should be difficult for people who reach level 81"

My point is the complete opposite. Please re-read my post. My point is that the game can be difficult with bosses until you reach about level 40 or so. Then it because easy due to power gaming.

My point is the complete opposite of "the game should be difficult for people who should reach level 81". It should be difficult up to a point until you reasonable max out your character which is way below level 81.

So it is a good design. It appears you misread my post.

The combat is weak so they wouldn't be fun anyway.