What difficulty do you play Skyrim on?

Post Reply New Topic

For me it's expert. I enjoy it more that way. Most encounters are somewhat of a challenge to very much a challenge. I also enjoy the view much more, since I have to play smart, it takes more time to get from destination to destination, and I find myself paying attention to details a lot more. Shortly before going expert I played on the normal mode, and after switching to expert I won't ever go back. I have been thinking about Master difficulty, but that seems suicidal...

Master isn't hard at all if you do it right. (I don't have my xbox with me) I didn't do any side quests yet and am on my way to the greybeards, and I am level 32. If you level up and get your armor rating to 567 (80%) then it shouldn't be to big a deal. And if you smith up your weapons then it won't take very many hits to kill anything. Damage wise swords and in a way daggers are the best. And light armor is better in the long run defensive wise. There is no point in wasting level ups on magic, destruction isn't useful in the longrun, gets weak on higher levels. Conjuration if you use a thrall spell then as long as you have clothing that makes the magic cost nothing then you might as well put al points into health or stamina.

Then are you a mage? Otherwise it isn't very practicle to not smith at all. And just so you know The ironflesh and stone flesh type of spells- don't buy the perks for those. Once you get dragon flesh those don't count for it.

The archmages robes are really helpful, breton is the best race overall, if you don't like smithing or toehr stuff then high elf is also good. The boss at the end of the mages guild is a b***h, find resist lightning stuff.

Conjuration- getting that to level 100 right away is REALLY helpful, having 2 storm atronachs follow you around every where. They are as strong as dremora lords but have range.

Dual casting for destruction is not cost effect, it is only useful for stunnig, if you don't need to stun then it is better to not dual cast.

Were wolves are not very strong later on, vampires are awful in this game.

Other questions?

And if you have specific stuff like for certain quests UESP is really helpful, you can pm me or whatever if you want.

i just play it on the normal level but i just got the game like 2 days ago although i love it

Master

after one shotting everything with 30x backstab damage, and being able to vanish right infront of enemies with 100 stealth, I switched to master and made an archer, so atleast If I made a mistake with my approach, or missed a shot, I was in serious trouble.

I made him a glass cannon, only getting 150 Health, and maxing stamina the rest of the way.

that's a good way to make the game interesting, but then dragons just eat you.. I still haven't beaten the game on this profile.

Master. Skyrim's way too easy on anything less if you min-max the way I do in any RPG. Even Master is too easy once you have decent alchemy.

A way I found to keep the game consistently challenging yet fair is to scale the difficulty up as you go.

Novice: Levels 1-5
Apprentice: 6-10
Adept: 11-20
Expert: 21-40
Master: 40-81

If you scale it up as you level up, the game will not BS you with 1-hit kills and you can still get that feeling of hanging by a thread during tough combat situations. That's how I did it though.

i play with multiple magic rebalance mods, makes magic far more dynamic.
i also play with some crafting enhancements and some general difficulty rebalancing mods, (non tiered difficulty, hate it when monsters scale, if its fearsome let it be fearsome, the first dragon took almost 40 minutes to kill, had to hide as a single breath would kill me)

so when i say i play on master i dont know how that translates.

I play on adept, but I'm only around level 14 since I haven't had much time to play. I have a compulsive habit of collecting food, which wastes a lot of play time. Not found anything too hard yet, except one of the dungeon bosses which I had to abandon as he kept 1HKOing me...

Even master is way too easy when you get to a high enough level. Bethesda sucks at making games hard. I suggest getting Dark Souls if you want a challenge.

My Breton battlemage character is at level 64 and I play on expert, but even on master the game's gotten less and less interesting in terms of gameplay at this level. Granted, there are a few noticeable difference: things like mages and vampires are better opponents on the higher gameplay levels and require you to fight smarter and not just longer. But these isn't the case with all opponents. I wish it was. I just can't get that excited when the gameplay difference is TWO frost trolls as oppose to ONE, especially when I've at the level that I can take out a frost troll with a sneak attack with a single arrow.

I really like the smithing, enchanting and alchemy skills. I use them a lot. Smithing is the skill I've gotten to 100 the fastest in both my characters. It's actually TOO easy to level up with smithing: kill a bunch of animals, use their pelts to make leather, then make leather armor over and over--you'll level up in no time, plus killing the animals lets you level up in Archery and selling the leather armor lets you level up in Speech--a little too easy, IMO. Same problem with alchemy and enchanting--you can level up fast by just doing small time stuff over and over. They should require you to produce more variety of smithing, enchanting and alchemy items in order to level up as you progress.

I will say this--at least the higher you get in these skills, the better products your produce either for your own use or for profit. once you start making really powerful enchantments and get the Smithing perk to improve enchanted items, you can make a ton of gold plus awesome weapons and armor. I heart the double enchantment perk. My favorite one-handed weapon is an ebony war ax with a powerful dual absorb health an absorb stamina enchantment. All my armor pieces have double enchantments too. Fortify archery enchantments are a must-have IMO when you face off with the more powerful dragons.

One problem I've having is filling soul gems, because the non-dungeon animals aren't respawning very quickly. Don't know if it's a glitch or something to do with my character's level or level of gameplay, but I didn't have this problem with my previous character (although I only went to level 52 with that character). At this point in the game, deer, mammoth and giants are critically endangered, and there's only so many Falmer and Draugr I can kill before that gets boring. Always plenty of bandits and Forsworn though--if only finding black soul gems wasn't so damn hard. I know I can always buy filled soul gems from Enthir at the College of Winterhold, but I love my little soul gem hunting trips. Very relaxing way to spend an afternoon. LOL. I'm tempted to start a new character just so I can have some game to hunt again.

When I first started playing, I was playing at Adept level. I think I ended scaling back to Apprentice just recently. My character is a level 13 or so Imperial. When trying to decide her character concept, I thought of the "Arcane Archer" class from Neverwinter Nights, and decided to build her character along those lines. In other words, she's your typical mage in the fact that she's not very strong physically and relies on spellcraft to deal heavy damage, but the one physical weapon she can wield competently is the bow.

I designed her with the idea of long-range combat in mind. She could take out enemies at a distance with the bow, and then switch to dual-wielding various spells once the enemy got a bit closer. She's also skilled with alchemy, and I've been using this to my advantage. I found a set of three ingredients that make an awesome Potion of Regenerate Magicka - it gives you a small amount of Magicka immediately but also boosts the regen rate for a full five minutes. The only downside is that your defense against hostile spells is weaker for the first minute and a half of the regen period. Poisons are also a good idea. I've been working on perfecting poisons that reduce either the amount or regen rate of an enemy's Magicka or Stamina, as well as ones that weakens the enemy's resistance to magic. This way I can slather a poison onto my arrows prior to combat, it will weaken the enemy with the first hit making them more vulnerable to magical attack when they go to attack me after being shot. I use stamina-weakening poisons against physical fighters and other archers, and the magicka-weakening poisons against other mages.

Anyways, when I decided to lower the difficulty level, I was traveling through The Rift on the way to the ruins of Mzulft for one of the College of Winterhold quests. Basically I had saved after killing a dragon while passing through the area, then got ambushed by two bears halfway through the wilderness and died. It sent me back to the save point, which was about the fifth time that had happened, so I lowered the difficulty slightly to try and make it through a bit easier. (I did.)

Ironically enough, I had Lydia with me when I did this - I kept her around because her melee fighting ability complemented my magic, and if nothing else she served as a nice distraction for enemies while I backed off to heal and recharge my mana. I had her with me the whole time up until Mzulft, which I explored after changing the difficulty setting. While inside we got ambushed by a nasty Falmer mage and his bodyguards, Lydia went to tangle with the mage and got hit pretty bad - she was collapsed but not yet dead. This had happened before, usually when she gets below 10% health she will withdraw to try and regenerate, and I could always use Healing Hands to speed up the process. However, in all the confusion I shot an arrow at the Falmer mage but missed and hit Lydia instead; she was already at about 2% health and that unfortunate arrow was all it took to send her straight to the gates of Solengard. I'll admit I had a bit of a sadface at that point. Lydia may have been annoying at times but she was useful. At least now I can ride a horse to places without having to stop every two minutes to wait for her to catch up.

Anyways, I might change it back to Adept soon mainly because my character is a bit better off as far as skill goes. I completed the College of Winterhold arc, and my first act as the newly instated Arch-Mage was to raid the former Arch-Mage's massive store of alchemy ingredients and make some kick-ass potions and poisons. Now I'm off to the one tomb that the Greybeards mentioned, where you have to retrieve the horn of Jurgen Windcaller as a test to see if you are worthy of further instruction.

I have no idea what level I play lol... Now that I think about it, my husband adjusted it after I had a panic attack during a dragon priest fight, but I wouldn't even know where to look for that information. I'm not good with technology. I can boot up my laptop and turn on the Xbox, that's about as far as I get lol

I am now playing master difficulty. The game after a couple playthroughs on expert through level 10-20 became much too easy and I was wealthy fast even with buying tons of potions for health, magicka, and stamina potions, plus no use of alchemy, smithing, enchanting, speechcraft, or any other craft skill if I'm forgetting any. I am hoping it is much harder at master, so far so good. Not that hard though. I will still not use any crafting skills, since they make the game super easy, I will also not increase sneak or pickpocketing very high, or use any other game breaking skill/perk. Instead I will buy, steal, or loot all of my things.