Skyrim Master Difficulty Experience

[abija]

Probably it means 1 guild + main quest. Somewhat it seems Bethesda also balanced the game for that length )

 

[Qwertilot]

Very plausible - Oblivion was certainly 'balanced' around that sort of game length/character.

 

[Rhalle]

Just discovered the sprint button on my 3rd playthrough.

How the fuck are you people finishing this game so quickly?

Yeah. I guess just plowing through the main quest?

I'm avoiding Mage, Theif and DB lines, and I've played a ton since Thanksgiving. And I mean a ton.

And I'd guess I'm about halfway through with the main quest/s, and have uncovered 60% or so of the map.

Not that the game lets you be a completionist. If you try to clean up the quest log, you get stuffed with more quests.

 

[shiggidyshwa]

It feels weird to be a member of all four guilds. I think the Companions might have a thing or two to say if they found my Thieves Guild member card. Also, spoiler but there is a member of the Dark Brotherhood who used to be a member of the Companions. Interesting. It screams FACTION WAR but from the NPC dialogue I don't think it leads anywhere.

I used to have a lot of trouble with bears and sabre cats but my warrior at level 37 now solos them with ease. I even dropped the companion I used for most of the game. I only run into trouble when packs of mid-tier enemies have a boss-level leader. I don't understand why I used to have such trouble with giants. It's just a matter of dodging their ground pound and then hitting them while they recover. Become Ethereal shout makes any tough caster characters super easy to destroy, and Mark for Death shout turns the armour of any boss into cheese. I was fighting a bandit chief, chipping away a sliver of health per hit. I used MfD and I was doing 1 / 5 hp with each swing. WTF.

I started a dest/conj mage the other day and find that I could also easily solo with pure destruction if I wanted to.

 

[Kaol]

1st playthrough i did main quest + sided with stormcloaks in the civil war.

2nd playthrough did dark brohood quest line.

3rd playthrough isnt happening yet as i'm bored with the game but actually didnt realise there was a sprint button

To me it makes no sense from a roleplaying point of view to do more than one major side quest line in a playthrough, plus i like having limited skills and equipment not lvl 99 with everything maxed out.

 

[Marsal]

You people are such console trash. You didn't check the button configuration? Next you'll tell me you didn't change the FOV and turn off the V-sync.

 

[Gerrard]

Turning off the frame synchronization (which is built-in into the engine, and not a hardware function like vsync), will cause the game speed to change depending on your FPS.

 

[Wyrmlord]

My cousin keeps reducing the difficulty to Adept whenever he plays the game.

FUUUUUUUUU...

So I'll be halfway through a dungeon, I think, "Why am I not getting beaten up badly?", I check the difficulty and I realize I was playing on little girl difficulty.

I ask him why he keeps lowering the difficulty for such an easy game, and he says, "I don't want to bother with these awful dungeons. I want them finished ASAP." Very Jennifer Heppler-esque.

 

[Raghar]

Why don't you play ironman? Every saber cat would be oh fuck moment. Also these potions of invisibility and healing would be in short supply.

 

[Heresiarch]

Why don't you play ironman? Every saber cat would be oh fuck moment. Also these potions of invisibility and healing would be in short supply.

I'm playing on adept because I have a constant mind imaging I'm playing on ironman mode. And not surprisingly I think I would have replayed the whole game more than a dozen times after level 30 if I was really playing on ironman.

While the game is mostly easy when fighting random fodder mobs, one shotting them with incinerate and what not, it is a pleasurable surprise when you suddenly meet a nasty elite monster like arch-spellcaster and got slammed by 3 fireballs in the face, got the whole screen shaking and blurring with fiery explosions, then die. Not to mention all the damn insta killing traps.

The game difficulty is ok if you don't exploit metagame knowledge, as there are quite a few of nasty surprise mentioned above; for example, during a certain fight in a big hall with several mages, I was happily one-shotting them one by one, then suddenly got two shotted by someone out from a corner. It took me two reloads to realize there's a high level storm mage sitting on a platform and took me another two reloads as I died fighting him. Finally I won only because I drank a potion of fortify destruction and gave him a first strike even though without metagaming knowledge, my character won't be able to realize among the 5 similar mages in the hall, one of them is like 4x more powerful than the others.

It comes down that what really makes the game easy is the dumb AI. Like warriors often stand still doing nothing, necromancers resurrecting civilian or even GOAT corpses instead of spamming spells, mages casting ice spells at my nord, all enemies prefer to attack summons instead of me, and last but not the least enemies not spamming attacks like a player would clicking his left mouse key.

 

[Ovplain]

Level 40 Nord Axe/Shield warrior. Not using magic at all, apart from healing every now and then and the shouts. Also been using Lydia as my follower for pretty much the entire game.:S Probably should've picked a caster to replace her, but so far so good. Like many have said before, the hardest fights are definitely against the harder caster types and even these aren't that hard.

I'm also still ignoring the mage college, bards college, thieves guild,... seeing as I'm this heavy-armor clad warrior only interested in hacking shit apart.:S Probably best if I just huried through the main quest line now.

I'm having a blast playing this thing.:S I wanted to like both Morrowind and Oblivion in the past, just couldn't. Tried playing both several times, always just gave up after a couple of hours. Couldn't stomach playing Oblivion with Guns for more than a few hours either, I still hate Bethesda for that shit.:S And I was pretty fucking sure I would hate Skyrim as well, but fuck me... I'm enjoying myself.

 

[Xi]

IMHO, adjustable difficulty is just as retarded as level scaling. It's bad design. I can understand things like Iron man, but the game's overall difficulty should never change. It should be designed with a specific difficulty in mind based on all the different play styles. Sandbox or not. Difficulty settings is fucking retarded.

The next thing they will add is an adjuster to set what part of the main quest you are in. "I just want to skip to the end" says joeblow moron gamer.

 

[Ivory Samoan]

Well that 1.2 patch took me up the anus pretty hard, Magic Resistance is gone all-together, Lydias getting cooked by 2 fucking fireballs near her vicinity now, so she can suck a dick.. and Master difficulty just got a whole shtiload harder when going against shock/ice spellcasters. I'm not rolling with much magic resistance gear, but the little I did have made a noticeable difference vs. magic.

Bethesda got a fix coming next week... games turned off till then, not keen to compromise shit etc (aka i'm stubborn and grumpy).

Guess it's back to my Melee FO:NV playthrough with spats of BF3 for good measure.

 

[Roguey]

IMHO, adjustable difficulty is just as retarded as level scaling. It's bad design. I can understand things like Iron man, but the game's overall difficulty should never change. It should be designed with a specific difficulty in mind based on all the different play styles. Sandbox or not. Difficulty settings is fucking retarded.

System Shock and Thief are going to punch you in the face and steal your wallet.

 

[DraQ]

Well that 1.2 patch took me up the anus pretty hard, Magic Resistance is gone all-together, Lydias getting cooked by 2 fucking fireballs near her vicinity now, so she can suck a dick.. and Master difficulty just got a whole shtiload harder when going against shock/ice spellcasters. I'm not rolling with much magic resistance gear, but the little I did have made a noticeable difference vs. magic.

Bethesda got a fix coming next week... games turned off till then, not keen to compromise shit etc (aka i'm stubborn and grumpy).

Guess it's back to my Melee FO:NV playthrough with spats of BF3 for good measure.

Bethesda:
"Even our patches are broken."

IMHO, adjustable difficulty is just as retarded as level scaling. It's bad design. I can understand things like Iron man, but the game's overall difficulty should never change. It should be designed with a specific difficulty in mind based on all the different play styles. Sandbox or not. Difficulty settings is fucking retarded.

System Shock and Thief are going to punch you in the face and steal your wallet.

 

[shiggidyshwa]

My level 40 warrior wearing ebony armour with 85 in heavy armour still gets one shotted by the Zeus mages.

Haven't found a tougher enemy than two of them working in tandem.

 

[Monocause]

Purchase or craft a resistance potion, get an amulet/ring that boost your resistance. Also if you're on 1.2 wait until the next patch/fix, I heard 1.2 broke all the resistances making everyone taking 100% of magic damage regardless of skills, potions etc.

 

[Wyrmlord]

Quick question.

How many of you fought the game's ultimate dual wielder: Knevel the Tongue? On Master difficulty, of course.

He wields weapons called Eduj and Okin. Something like that. One is a sword and the other is an axe. Each does 10-12 points of normal damage and 10 points of Frost damage. He is also very fast, doing these swinging power attacks on the player character or Lydia. Even as I wore Superior Dwarven Armour and even though I had 200 points of health, he manages to take me down to 25-30% health after one single round of attacks.

I had to use a glitch(?) to beat him. I built a wall of pots, prevented him from reaching me, and then Lydia kept swinging at him from the back while I swung at him from the front behind the pots with my Wuuthgard battleaxe. Come too close and he still takes out most of my health.

Did you also know you have to fight this dangerous madman alongside a Frost Atronach and a Draugr Scourge? What a damn near impossible fight!

I love this game. This game puts a lot of the old action RPGs, such as Lands of Lore or Anvil of Dawn, to shame by making them look super easy by comparison. Skyrim on Master - it's really really hard.

 

[halflingbarbarian]

Quick question.

How many of you fought the game's ultimate dual wielder: Knevel the Tongue? On Master difficulty, of course.

He wields weapons called Eduj and Okin. Something like that. One is a sword and the other is an axe. Each does 10-12 points of normal damage and 10 points of Frost damage. He is also very fast, doing these swinging power attacks on the player character or Lydia. Even as I wore Superior Dwarven Armour and even though I had 200 points of health, he manages to take me down to 25-30% health after one single round of attacks.

I had to use a glitch(?) to beat him. I built a wall of pots, prevented him from reaching me, and then Lydia kept swinging at him from the back while I swung at him from the front behind the pots with my Wuuthgard battleaxe. Come too close and he still takes out most of my health.

Did you also know you have to fight this dangerous madman alongside a Frost Atronach and a Draugr Scourge? What a damn near impossible fight!

I love this game. This game puts a lot of the old action RPGs, such as Lands of Lore or Anvil of Dawn, to shame by making them look super easy by comparison. Skyrim on Master - it's really really hard.

Think I mentioned before in this thread but if you have trouble even approaching melee enemies that deal too much damage, consider using werewolf form (if you have it) and do the sprint powerattack. It knocks them down for 3-4 seconds giving you time to put in some normal rakes and running out of range. Rinse and repeat.

 

[Edwin]

Quick question.

How many of you fought the game's ultimate dual wielder: Knevel the Tongue? On Master difficulty, of course.

He wields weapons called Eduj and Okin. Something like that. One is a sword and the other is an axe. Each does 10-12 points of normal damage and 10 points of Frost damage. He is also very fast, doing these swinging power attacks on the player character or Lydia. Even as I wore Superior Dwarven Armour and even though I had 200 points of health, he manages to take me down to 25-30% health after one single round of attacks.

I had to use a glitch(?) to beat him. I built a wall of pots, prevented him from reaching me, and then Lydia kept swinging at him from the back while I swung at him from the front behind the pots with my Wuuthgard battleaxe. Come too close and he still takes out most of my health.

Did you also know you have to fight this dangerous madman alongside a Frost Atronach and a Draugr Scourge? What a damn near impossible fight!

I love this game. This game puts a lot of the old action RPGs, such as Lands of Lore or Anvil of Dawn, to shame by making them look super easy by comparison. Skyrim on Master - it's really really hard.

I remember looting 2 named 1 handers but thats all.He didnt pose a threat

 

[shiggidyshwa]

Purchase or craft a resistance potion, get an amulet/ring that boost your resistance. Also if you're on 1.2 wait until the next patch/fix, I heard 1.2 broke all the resistances making everyone taking 100% of magic damage regardless of skills, potions etc.

I'm playing 1.1. I do use resistance potions and equipment. It's the lightning bolt spell that really hits hard. I don't know how it manages to get so high. The same enemy casting ice spike barely takes 1/4 of my hp even with my shield down.

I managed to kill both by baiting one into a corner where the other lost line of sight. Then used the become ethereal shout until I got in range for stun lock to victory.

How many of you fought the game's ultimate dual wielder: Knevel the Tongue? On Master difficulty, of course.

Haha ya I remember fighting him. This was after I pretty much understood the standard warrior formula. It's harder to do in dungeons, but it gets easier to sidestep their power attacks (especially with the slow time block perk). Marked for Death is a good shout to use against these bosses, lowering their armour. I usually load up on stamina potions so I can stunlock them, then use poisons and stamina degen to make sure they can't power attack. BTW, the damage stamina/magicka poisons are almost useless in Master on a boss because it seems they have a huge pool, but if you stop their regen, I find it more effective.

 

[Wyrmlord]

Quick question.

How many of you fought the game's ultimate dual wielder: Knevel the Tongue? On Master difficulty, of course.

He wields weapons called Eduj and Okin. Something like that. One is a sword and the other is an axe. Each does 10-12 points of normal damage and 10 points of Frost damage. He is also very fast, doing these swinging power attacks on the player character or Lydia. Even as I wore Superior Dwarven Armour and even though I had 200 points of health, he manages to take me down to 25-30% health after one single round of attacks.

I had to use a glitch(?) to beat him. I built a wall of pots, prevented him from reaching me, and then Lydia kept swinging at him from the back while I swung at him from the front behind the pots with my Wuuthgard battleaxe. Come too close and he still takes out most of my health.

Did you also know you have to fight this dangerous madman alongside a Frost Atronach and a Draugr Scourge? What a damn near impossible fight!

I love this game. This game puts a lot of the old action RPGs, such as Lands of Lore or Anvil of Dawn, to shame by making them look super easy by comparison. Skyrim on Master - it's really really hard.

Think I mentioned before in this thread but if you have trouble even approaching melee enemies that deal too much damage, consider using werewolf form (if you have it) and do the sprint powerattack. It knocks them down for 3-4 seconds giving you time to put in some normal rakes and running out of range. Rinse and repeat.

I already cured my lycanthropy, because every time I went to werewolf form, my character had a spell or a staff ready in his hand, no matter what I did to avoid it.

 

[Carrion]

So, two-handed swords... Are they any good or should I just stick with the shield/sword combination? The Ebony Blade is just way too cool to not use it but blocking with it doesn't seem to protect you that much. I'm also already level 29 or something so I'd rather not waste my time and patience on training my two-handed skill if it's going to be useless anyway.

 

[dibens]

Two-handed weapons are boss. Blocking isn't really an issue, since you want to interrupt not soak up the damage. And while you do lose ability to resist elements and block arrows, everything dies much faster, meaning less hits taken. Being able to kill multiple foes with one swing is also sweet. Furthermore, all +dmg items give +%, which means that the bigger the base damage on weapon, the greater the boost. With few +dmg items and/or pots, you can easily push the base damage on ebony hammer to 190+. This will one-shot most humanoids and draugs on master difficulty. Just remember to get frost resistance and you're good.

 

[Rhalle]

If you're playing on Master and it's your first playthrough, you'd probably better have a shield.

The extra armor is almost a must. The block skill itself, however, isn't as important as the bash interrupt; and you can do that (and the power bash and disarming bash) with a two-hander.

Ebony Blade is a weird item.

Its damage benefits from one-handed skills and perks, and it has the swing speed of a one-hander; but it's wielded like a two-hander (no shield) and you get two-handed skill-ups for using it. It's definitely the weapon to use once you've filled-out what you want in the one-handed tree, but you want to switch to two-handed. Only sad thing is that it can't be upgraded at the grindstone.

Quick question.

How many of you fought the game's ultimate dual wielder: Knevel the Tongue? On Master difficulty, of course.

He wields weapons called Eduj and Okin. Something like that. One is a sword and the other is an axe. Each does 10-12 points of normal damage and 10 points of Frost damage. He is also very fast, doing these swinging power attacks on the player character or Lydia. Even as I wore Superior Dwarven Armour and even though I had 200 points of health, he manages to take me down to 25-30% health after one single round of attacks.

I had to use a glitch(?) to beat him. I built a wall of pots, prevented him from reaching me, and then Lydia kept swinging at him from the back while I swung at him from the front behind the pots with my Wuuthgard battleaxe. Come too close and he still takes out most of my health.

Did you also know you have to fight this dangerous madman alongside a Frost Atronach and a Draugr Scourge? What a damn near impossible fight!

I love this game. This game puts a lot of the old action RPGs, such as Lands of Lore or Anvil of Dawn, to shame by making them look super easy by comparison. Skyrim on Master - it's really really hard.

He's rough. You know who's worse? A Forsaken Briarheart I encountered last night while doing The Legend of Red Eagle quest at level 50. I have 600 armor and 500 hit points and he literally two-shotted me. I was like WTF!? I thought: Is he using some uber poison or something? And, sure enough, I took a poison immunity potion, and he did very little damage, and even took off running after a couple hits.

The game cheats like that-- it knows what your current resists are and the enemies adjust before the encounter accordingly.