Dragons are too weak!

[Tropxe]

Playing on Master difficulty, Frost dragons are pretty challenging. If I'm in the open when they do their breath attack, I'm dead - no questions asked. In the image below, that's how much damage a x3 sneak attack and critical hit did to a snow bear's health.

 

 

 

Now imagine what a non-critical non-sneak attack does to this bastard. And don't forget one direct hit and I'm dead. The damage you see to my health there was done by a glancing blow, and notice his attack also drains Stamina too.

 

 

[legendaryred]

Depends on what difficulty. I'm playing in expert and it takes me a while to take out a dragon. It only takes them 3 direct hits on me (frost breath or fire breath) to take me out. Giants take me out in 1 hit LOL and i'm wearing Dragon Plate Scale upgraded to the maximum level. Early in the game i saw a dragon own a giant so I'm sure this is difficulty dependable.

[Zachcuden]

Yeap. Dragonrend to dual wield plus elemental even on master is like a 2 min fight. They are lame to me. I hope modders take them to an extreme Edited November 16, 2011 by Zachcuden

[Tropxe]

Yeap. Dragonrend to dual wield plus elemental even on master is like a 2 min fight. They are lame to me. I hope modders take them to an extreme

What? It's really hard to figure out what you're saying in that sentence after "Yeap". But really, on Master with all my level ups put into HP, I get killed in about 2-3 seconds of getting hit by a frost dragon's breath. Even if I drink potions to reduce ice damage, I still can't take a breath attack from start to finish without getting into cover. Could you maybe use Fraps to record yourself fighting a non-standard dragon on Master difficulty? I want to see what you're doing differently.

[Zachcuden]

My bad im on my phone so im trying to simplify haha. Oh yeah sure. But basically I am a nord so the frost does 50 percent less damage. My boots do 70 percent fire resistence also. The sword I have in one hand is dragonbane which is very strong plus extra damage to dragons and I forgot what the other sword is. Armor is basically all dragonscale. Gloves do extra one hand damage. Cuirass does extra health and I've invested most of my leveling up into health. I also raised a lot of damage output perks in the one hand category. So what happens is I use dragonrend and it comes down. I go kind of between the tail and wing (because being bitten or tail smacked still hurts a lot. I use that one shout that increases swing speed. And avoid tail and mouth and swinf away fast as possible while using as many of the double click power attacks as possible. And yeah thats pretty much it :)

 

Oh I forgot to say I carry around potions more than I use restoration because healing takes too much time away from fighting

Edited November 16, 2011 by Zachcuden

[NAPALM13092]

The bite and chomp they do hits like a truck but yes the breathe attacks are lacking. I don't think there are too many as I am always in need of souls to unlock s*** so I jump at the chance to fight them. I also think they can take quite a bruising. I have seen one attack a bandit fort and fight 15+ guys and wreck them. Everything about them is fine minus their shouts could use a buff by like a factor of 2 or 3. Actually all shouts could use that buff. I have Frost Breathe maxxed out and it hits pretty hard but for a mythical form of superpowerful magic on a 80sec cooldown no less it should one shot weaker foes. As of right now the only really useful shouts are the utility ones like Unrelenting Force, Whirlwind Sprint, Elemental Fury, etc.

 

Edit: I play on Adept (normal) difficulty which feels just right for my lightly armored skirmisher character. It's not so hard I hate my life but if i am stupid or get overwhelmed I die and bosses provide a decent challenge. I don't want to have to turn the difficulty up every time I fight a dragon I would rather just balance my game around Adept. Also traps could use a buff they tickle at best.

Edited November 16, 2011 by NAPALM13092

[VBlackfang]

I've only played to 20th level yet, and encountered regular and blood dragons, and they sure seem too weak. Almost weaker than cave bears I'd say...

 

I don't really care about difficulty, as the middle difficulty is supposed to be the one, where neither you, nor your opponents, get any bonuses, and so should be the most balanced, and challenging ENOUGH mode to play. And, after all, I did encounter opponents that were a lot more challenging than the dragons (let's say, along the mages guild's questline, to avoid spoilers).

 

So, I'll have to see how challenging the higher level dragons get...

 

P.S. As a side note, I think such early introduction of the dragons was a mistake. IMO, even a 20th level character should have a hard time escaping any dragon, much less defeating one. Maybe starting from about level 30-35...

[Kiyasumeni]

Playing on Master difficulty, Frost dragons are pretty challenging. If I'm in the open when they do their breath attack, I'm dead - no questions asked. In the image below, that's how much damage a x3 sneak attack and critical hit did to a snow bear's health.

 

 

 

Now imagine what a non-critical non-sneak attack does to this bastard. And don't forget one direct hit and I'm dead. The damage you see to my health there was done by a glancing blow, and notice his attack also drains Stamina too.

 

 

 

Thats how I feel it should be, but I don't find it to be that way. If a monster weighing probably over a ton, with fangs the size of daggers and a breath weapon that could destroy anything in its path attacks I just expect the affects to be more devastating.

 

As a sidenote it feels like bethesda also made them unintelligent, I expected them to be mentally superior beings who didn't attack for no reason. Maybe bosses in quest chains.

[Tropxe]

Well I don't know if this is another difficulty scaling glitch, but as I've said, whenever I've encountered a dragon other than the basic ones, if they do their breath attack on me, and I can't get into cover in time, I'm dead. The only way I've been able to defeat them so far is if they get distracted by NPCs or wildlife. It takes countless arrows to kill them, too, and that's with the archery damage upgrade on level 3, a ring that adds 25% to bow damage, and poisons applied to the arrows.

 

I don't really care about difficulty, as the middle difficulty is supposed to be the one, where neither you, nor your opponents, get any bonuses, and so should be the most balanced, and challenging ENOUGH mode to play. And, after all, I did encounter opponents that were a lot more challenging than the dragons (let's say, along the mages guild's questline, to avoid spoilers).

 

That's not how difficulty settings work. It's not about who gets what bonuses (that's just a matter of perspective, you could say Easy is the standard, and then as you go up in difficulty they take away from you and add to the enemy, or that Hard is the standard and lowering the setting just gives you more and more bonuses while weakening the enemies), it's about adjusting the game for all levels of player. It starts on the settings that most people shouldn't have any trouble with, bearing in mind "most people" is taking into account little kids and the millions of people who only casually play games, or will be approaching it more as an action/adventure game. If it gets too easy, you scale it up; if it gets too hard, you scale it down. I find Master to be the right setting for me for the most part, since it makes wandering around in the wilderness actually feel like a genuine risk and can make sneaking up on someone and starting off with a x15 backstab quite necessary, but sometimes it seems to be weirdly unbalanced where my attacks are doing like 1 pixel of damage to their health bar and they can kill me in a couple of hits.

[VBlackfang]

That's not how difficulty settings work.

 

That's how they worked in Oblivion/F3/FNV. (So in fallouts a 20 damage gun made 20 damage both fired by you and your opponents on middle difficulty, and 10 damage when fired by you and 40 (or was it 30?) when fired by your opponents on top difficulty.)

Do you have any source of info, that suggests that in Skyrim it's different?

Edited November 16, 2011 by VBlackfang