Most of the time I play on Master, although Expert is probably the most balanced if you aren't a smither/alchemy/enchanting nutjob. Legendary was fun at first, but now it is just stupid. I would much rather have MORE enemies present in a fight than them just doing more damage and me doing less, kind of like my lrvious reference to Doom's Nightmare difficulty, coming out of thw woodwork!
I did try to make an Orma character, where I lowered the brightness all the way down to simulate their blindness. That was weird, but the detect spells was cool to use for it.
There's a mod for that kind of difficulty, basically everyone does 200% damage including yourself.
I play on master now but I have to say, the first levels are really annoying. Bandits 1 shooting you with iron weapons, and instantly locking the kill move animation right off the bat, it's just horrible.
I'm playing a tanky character in heavy armor and using a shield... was in block mode, and a bandit marauder still managed to ignore the block and skip straight to the kill move. There's nothing to be done about it.
Though by level 40-50 you're completely overpowered no matter what build you're playing.
I'll also echo what many others on here have said, Expert is the most balanced difficulty setting of the lot. I often gimp my character out of certain skill trees (enchanting and alchemy, I'm looking at you) just so I can have fun on that setting. Master with no crafting is certainly possible, but it's a chore more than a pleasure.
I haven't touched Legendary Difficulty at all yet myself. Not really looking forward to it simply because it sounds like a great way to increase tedium rather than difficulty.
I normally sit on Expert, but, in addition, use a few mods to alter enemy difficulty/AI, such as ASIS , Deadly Dragons, and High Level Enemies. So far, it feels like a good setup, as I can explore all the perk trees as much as I want, and still have enemies who can kick me in the face, but not just because it takes a billion years to kill them.
I play on Insane and Master, from levels 1-30 Insane and 30+ Master because once you hit bout level 30 you start becoming overpowered.
With that mod "Hardcore Mode" you guys would be amazed at how much you can do with the scripting and Creation Kit in Skyrim, there are mods that turn a singleplayer game into online, there are some that add ALL of Morrowind (Skywind) and all of Cyrodil (Skyblivion) Skyblivion stopped development though.
I play master most of the time, I have played legendary from the release with a couple of characters and find the over reliance on companions to be a tedious and non enjoyable yet necessary element (unless you are playing a sneak character). I don’t think legendary is that spectacular it just forces you to re-evaluate what you can and can’t take on. I would have preferred it if they over levelled the enemies and gave them additional skills rather than give the player 25% damage and scale the enemy to 300% it doesn’t add anything to the experience. Imagine a bandit flicking an ice storm at you right off the get go that would make life interesting.
Adept unless I'm making a "power character"... Fact of the matter is I wish I had mods so I could adjust the combat to be more deadly all around. As I've said on here before, novice damage output for everybody would be ideal. An easy to kill easy to die difficulty.
Gopher is doing a let's play with a load of great mods, including one that does locational damage such as headshots, which sometimes instakill. Makes sense, eh?
For me, the difficulty depends on what character I play. There are characters that are very awsome and exciting to play, but aren't viable on Master or Legendary. With Conjuration-based guys I play on Master or even Legendary, as the damage input-output modifier only applies to the player but not to summoned minions.