December 1, 2011 9:43 AM EST
I originally set the difficulty to expert, simply because the earlier a game becomes challenging the longer the hours you're gonna spend on it.
However my early confidence was shattered to pieces when I reached the 30-40 level bracket, where the leveled mobs updated themselves to "evil deadly badass" mobs and were simply too much of a challenge and I found myself burning all my potions, magic and endurance ( my character is a spell thief-assassin) within the first few fights of a dungeon. Shamefully I had to go down to apprentice and novice the occasional mess-up/ unexpectedly hard to kill foresworn ravager (which i still don't get).
However after entering into the 40s, everything went too easy and reverted back to expert. By level 50, it had to be master...and now I freshly turned level 70 last night =D I'm seriously contemplating getting married to a farmer, leave all of my boss gear at her house, grab a hide armor on my way out and join the legion (haven't done the civil war and it's my last big questline in Skyrim that I haven't done yet).
Since I have only really focused on one handed and archery for the warrior tree, I'll be able to get a real challenge on Master, with 30-50 skill sets for block, heavy armor, etc... Imagonnabeasoldiaaaaa ! xD
But yeah, was pretty pleased with the difficulty settings as a all. I was expecting having to turn it to master by the end levels anyway, but was a bit taken aback by how high the difficulty steps up when you pass from a certain level to another ( as I said before, I passed from throat slicing and murdering my paralyzed victims like a boss at level 32 to run like a maniac through a dungeon in desperate search of potions and/or places to hide at level 33). But all in all, good fun.