Two great ways to make Skyrim harder!

[Narusuke2787]

I originally started playing Skyrim on normal. As a mage that wore cloth the entire time up until when I stopped playing the character (36), I figured that it would be a decent challenge. I was more of a spellblade really. I would conjure allies, buff up with flame cloak and stoneskin, and go in swingin with dual (unenchanted) glass maces. That and elemental fury alone broke the game for me, even going melee wearing cloth. It was too easy. I moved on.

 

My next character was an unarmed Khajiit. Since I never really took advantage of smithing, enchanting, or much alchemy on my first playthrough, and considering I set it to expert this time around, I figured I'd need these advantages. Boy was I horribly wrong. Once again, around 35 or so, my character was gamebreaking good using potions to make enchanting better to make potions better to make enchanting better to make smithing better. I crafted a set of Daedric and upgraded it to have a total armor amount of around 600. My character required "Fists of Steel" to make damage with fists viable. Unfortunately my 130 damage (+15 claws, +115 armor gauntlets) per swing were far too much for anything my level to be a challenge. Immediately upon realizing that the crafting systems break the game, I changed it to master. Still too easy. I moved on...again.

 

This time around, I'm not taking any chances. I'm a sneaky rogue, on master. I'm exclusively NEVER going to smith a damn thing, and there's still one more thing I required to make the game harder--and boy have I been enthralled by the finality of difficulty I have found after long seeking, experimenting, and 3 playthroughs.

 

I'm sure many of you may know of these sole console commands that can make things so much more challenging, and are ADJUSTABLE to suit how much additional challenge a player may want past master.

 

The first is: "player.modav healrate x" where x is any value less than the 0.7 vanilla Skyrim grants you. I have mine personally at "player.modav healrate 0.2". This allows for me to still regen when out of combat or when resting, but when in combat, the regen does nothing for me.

 

The second is: "player.advlevel". This will allow you to "level up" your character strictly for the numerical value. You WILL NOT gain any perk points or stat points from this approach. Instead, it will simply put you x amount of levels above your "true" level, thus making enemies scale up to this imaginary level, and therefore making the game as adjustable in difficulty past master as you wish!

 

I hope this has been some assistance to those, who like me, found that master difficulty was simply not challenging enough. I am blessed that I stopped playing the first couple "broken" characters before I ever did any of the major content in such a wonderful game. Now, at last I can enjoy the game for what I feel it should be. Thanks for your time and happy gaming!

[Narusuke2787]

It's also important to note that one can use these two commands (btw console commands can be inputted by hitting the "~" key in game) on any difficulty to find an "In between difficulty"....like something in between adept and expert and so forth.

[wait what]

using player.advlevel for the purpose is a brilliant idea

[Narusuke2787]

Thank you. I realized there is a great lack of mods that provide enhanced difficulty so I turned to my own devices to find something simple to remedy this. I hope it helps any who view this and sympathize with the difficulty issue.

[Deleted1217574User]

Wow, I feel like a terrible player because I have so much trouble in this game xD On Adept difficulty, even. For example, any quest or dungeon which requires fighting more than one enemy at once... On every character but my heavy armor wearing, sword-and-board Nord, these kinds of rooms are a death wish. Even with a companion, they die quickly and then I have to run like a madman trying to kite a pack of Draugr. Never thought I was the only one to do have to do so, either =P

[stars2heaven]

I had difficulty on adept as well at first. Once you figure out the perks and the items that are optimum for use it gets super easy.

[Narusuke2787]

The game can be easy if you choose one of many exploits the designers clearly didn't care about you having. I swear they just ignored their entire QA team and was like "Meh, the Modding community will take care of it for us". I'm glad that so many of you find this game to be challenging. I'm having a TON of fun now that I'm using this console command to make my "fake" level 25% higher than my "true" level with

 

player.advlevel on master. It's definitely a FIERCE challenge. Dragons take like 75 arrows to kill, and they can 2 shot me. haha.

[ferus]

I rather like the reduced autoheal idea. Is it enough to enter this command only once or do I have to issue it every time I restart Skyrim?

[tyson277]

nice post

once you enter it the game will save it to your config ,so it should be there every time you play ,

the add a lvl is a great work around i used it a lot on fallout 3 the enemies got harder and harder,lol

[Narusuke2787]

Ya. haha. It kind of does just get perpetually harder as long as you persist to calculate whatever gap you want between you and the enemy and keep adding levels to account for that. I decided ultimately I'm stopping the increases at "level 60" when my "true" level is 45 then progressing to 80 from there. It's be crazy. Every foe is has the due amount of respect they deserve.

 

I'm glad this post is almost at 1000 views! Cheers and happy Skyrimz!