After installing patch 1.9 I played Skyrim on Legendary difficulty and have formed a somewhat mixed opinion on it. The enemies surely hit harder and it makes the combat more tense. However the lowered player damage makes the fights with stronger enemies long and tedious. I don't like the fact that on that difficulty almost any NPC will do more damage with the same gear as you. So I'd like to ask have you faced the same problem and what difficulty do you enjoy playing Skyrim on altogether?
I haven't tried Legendary yet, but am tentatively excited to do so. I've played on Master a lot recently.
I wish there was a difficulty setting/mod that made the entire game play like Master at end-game for me: I can kill humanoids and animals with a few good swings, but they can return the favor if I let them touch me. Sort of a "realistic mode", where a sword blow is a sword blow is a sword blow, instead of trying to make "You do .05 damage, and enemies do 3000x damage" feel anything but tedious.
The realistic mode will be nearly impossible to make, they'll need to check the armor damage negation, exposed points, armor condition, blocking...
I just think the whole "lower player damage" thing is ridiculous! If they've made the "You do x1 damage, and enemies do x5 damage" mode it would've been far more interesting. Now if you dn't have crazy daedric bow with 800 damage, you have to circle around enemy filling him with arrows for 20 minutes to kill him.
Yeah I enjoyed Master but this Legendary is a pain! You know I've been using Deadly Combat for some time, and really enjoyed it. It has some neat features like timed blocking and warding (reflecting Fus Ro Dah back to the draugr was very fun)
;) Well, I haven't installed any other combat mods because I'm about level 44 and doing so causes tremendous problems, especially when I have other overhaul mods already present.
My next playthrough will definitely increase the combat difficulty among other things. I plan to use a couple of followers and see how high I can crank up the difficulty before things become impossible!
Starting a new archer on legendary has been a chore, not enjoying it at all. My noobish hunting bow and iron arrows, I'm doing something like 5 damage per shot and the level 9 bandit thug has over 200 health...it's crap basically. My poisons are now worthless so there's basically no use even training alchemy any more and if I happen to run across a mage, they can heal themselves faster than I can do damage (and screw trolls on legendary lol).
Difficulty can add a lot to a game (extra mobs, more traps, etc) but this damage slider that makes almost all forms of combat outside of melee virtually worthless at the beginning of the game is just sucking the fun out of skyrim for me. At least in heavy armor and a shield you can probably survive a 1v1 fight but in basic hide armour if I take any hits I'm toast. Almost forced to train all of the crafting skills immediately to even have much of a chance.
P.S.
I can't imagine trying to start a destruction mage character on legendary, you'd have just enough magicka to piss off your enemy but that's about it.
Yeah exactly. At the start of the game you need to waste a lot of arrows if you want to clear say a mine full of bandits. And hagravens are the worst, when you finally manage to make decent damage the just heal themselves to almost full health I'm actually running a pacifist character now, just not to bother killing enemies