Best difficulty to play on?

[GardenData61371]

I have 120 hours in Oldrim so i have some experience. Im currently playing on adept and thinking if I should maybe raise it?

[Stormsong]

Entirely subjective. So thoroughly subjective that this thread will be derailed into madness, or utterly ignored. You've been warned.

For what it's worth, I prefer Master.

[Sinsling]

You should play at Avrie's difficulty!

[Jjp7123]

I usually play on adept difficulty, until I reach level 50. Then I put it on legendary. If I install a ton of gameplay mods, I always play on legendary because they make the game too easy.

[Sinsling]

Originally posted by Jjp7123:

I usually play on adept difficulty, until I reach level 50. Then I put it on legendary. If I install a ton of gameplay mods, I always play on legendary because they make the game too easy.

Stop installing easy mods and get some of the difficulty increasing ones?

[Duneman]

For Bethesda games I usually recommend one step above Normal/Adept. So Hard/Expert depending on the franchise. On the highest difficulties the enemies feel too spongey, which is by design for people who like to exploit the system for maximum damage. For everyone else, combat feels a bit closer to equal between the player and enemies.

[jancawa55]

A long time since I played other than Legendary, I forget the others.

[mikk011]

I usually play on master due to a Conan-esque playstyle. On legendary I have to use "strategery" as the old SNL sketch phrased it.

[the noob]

Been playing Legendary ever since i bought SkyrimSE. It is difficult especially at the start of the game but it is very rewarding late in game since you have overcome all those difficulties.

[258789553873]

I prefer expert. For one, its punishing enough where you have to actually think about what you're doing. And two, higher difficulties just get unrealistic. At master a bandit can one-shot you with an arrow, even if you're wearing a full set of heavy armor, but it takes you 50 arrows to kill that same bandit even if he's not wearing armor!

Also, some races and 'classes' become unplayable at master. Stealth characters are overpowered because you can so easily avoid getting hit, while melee is borderline unviable. Also, only 3 or 4 of the races are really usable on master. The only one I can recall is orc, because their ability effectively lets you turn the difficulty back down to adept for 30 seconds. I believe the orcs are considered the most overpowered race in skyrim.

If you want to play what you want without having to think about its viability, but also want to, you know, actually have to avoid getting hit, then expert is the best.

But there is ONE issue with expert. When your level gets to be around 15, bandit chiefs will automatically do a kill move on you, even if you're at full health. You won't be able to do bandit camps again until you get around level 20, even though you can easily handle them when your level is 10 or lower.

But even then, expert has far less illogical nonsense than the higher difficulties do.

Of course, I play for immersion (as in roleplay), so if you want a challenge, well, turn it up as high as you can handle it. Though I wouldn't suggest jumping all the way up to master. If I was ever inclined to even attempt that, I would ease into it by gradually increasing the difficulty over a length of time.

[SpeedFreak1972]

well I let it depend on my mod load really some mods are kicking your butt regardless

[gnewna]

Adept, because the vanilla slider just nerfs the PC (or buffs if you turn it down). I find it pretty silly that the Dragonborn is somehow only doing a fraction of the damage that an NPC with the exact same stats and gear would do, and taking far more damage than they would. If I don't want the game to be a cake walk, I install mods that make combat harder, usually something like Vigor or Wildcat/Smilodon, and at the very least something that increases damage dealt and taken for EVERYONE (so combat is immediately more deadly, no more chipping away at each other's health for half an hour while yelling bad insults, one or other of us will be dead sharpish, so I have to make sure it isn't me.)

I also mostly limit my crafting to one or zero skills, which helps. Eventually you still get OP, and then I might turn up the slider a bit to balance things back a bit.

[SqualAce]

I play on Legendary, so that there's an actual chance of things other than gravity killing me.

[Nexim95]

Legendary.

[Felwalker]

Skyrim difficulty lvls are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ all because of the killcam. You can set it to master/legendary and be able to dance around in melee. But being locked into the kill animation from full health to 0 ruins all aspect of challenge. Since you can’t let people like bandit chiefs dragons etc. anywhere near you.

[Janthis]

I think I started out on Master/Legendary but got tired of being one-shotted by mages and occasionally dragons, so I went down to Adept and it's much more enjoyable. In the end it's all about what feels best to you.