I've come to the conclusion, after levelling several characters to the mid 30's, that the primary challenge setting of the game is NOT in the difficulty slider but in the roles you choose to play.
By this I mean mage, thief or warrior.
I thought this was an interesting discussion point but wasn't sure it was 'gamey' enough to be in one of the RPG forums.
IMO, the easiest (by a large margin), character style to play is the archer-thief. Aiming takes a bit of practice but between Pickpocketing, Stealth & Archery, you're essentially guaranteed LOTS of gold, easy kills, and almost never having to face an enemy in melee. By 47th-level my khajit archer-thief had 100 in Archery, Stealth, Pickpocketing, Lockpicking and Speech, could kill 90% of monsters with one arrow, had the best gear he was ever going to get, and had 300k gold and nothing to spend it on. I stopped playing it for two reasons: 1) there was a massive bug that prevented me from completing the thieve's guild quest line, and 2) it just got boring.
The second easiest has to be the two-hander, heavy armour warrior. Two hitting a dragon and coming out barely scratched is pretty much par for the course. Money is tighter, but with Smithing you're not really ever wanting for better gear anyway. And even though the swings are slow, they're also very wide arcing, allowing for gross inaccuracy on the player's part whilst still tearing through multiple foes and barely getting dinged in the process. Magic is their one weakness but since you can one-shot any uppity mage that dares fireball you (and survive the fireballs since you're pumping health anyway), the only issue is closing the distance to them.
Then there's the mage. Their damage has awful scaling so for some levels you massacre everything in sight and then others you're running out of mana whilst hitting things with your biggest damage spells and they're still coming at you. The mage requires a LOT of thought and a LOT of spell-switching, running, strategic targeting and strategic spell selection. And then you have to aim the damn spells accurately at targets that can predictively dodge your spells. Ironically, other mages are your biggest weakness because they can block all your damage whilst still damaging you and they have infinite magicka.
Now I realise that there are different builds like the battle-mage or the spell-sword or the assassin, etc. and that these change the above landscape, ie. an assassin (always stealth attacks with daggers) is on the surface thief build but is even more difficult to play well than the mage, but at it's core the system seems to be built around in inherent difficulty that heavily favours the thief class. Not that I'm complaining, I love rogues.
By this I mean mage, thief or warrior.
I thought this was an interesting discussion point but wasn't sure it was 'gamey' enough to be in one of the RPG forums.
IMO, the easiest (by a large margin), character style to play is the archer-thief. Aiming takes a bit of practice but between Pickpocketing, Stealth & Archery, you're essentially guaranteed LOTS of gold, easy kills, and almost never having to face an enemy in melee. By 47th-level my khajit archer-thief had 100 in Archery, Stealth, Pickpocketing, Lockpicking and Speech, could kill 90% of monsters with one arrow, had the best gear he was ever going to get, and had 300k gold and nothing to spend it on. I stopped playing it for two reasons: 1) there was a massive bug that prevented me from completing the thieve's guild quest line, and 2) it just got boring.
The second easiest has to be the two-hander, heavy armour warrior. Two hitting a dragon and coming out barely scratched is pretty much par for the course. Money is tighter, but with Smithing you're not really ever wanting for better gear anyway. And even though the swings are slow, they're also very wide arcing, allowing for gross inaccuracy on the player's part whilst still tearing through multiple foes and barely getting dinged in the process. Magic is their one weakness but since you can one-shot any uppity mage that dares fireball you (and survive the fireballs since you're pumping health anyway), the only issue is closing the distance to them.
Then there's the mage. Their damage has awful scaling so for some levels you massacre everything in sight and then others you're running out of mana whilst hitting things with your biggest damage spells and they're still coming at you. The mage requires a LOT of thought and a LOT of spell-switching, running, strategic targeting and strategic spell selection. And then you have to aim the damn spells accurately at targets that can predictively dodge your spells. Ironically, other mages are your biggest weakness because they can block all your damage whilst still damaging you and they have infinite magicka.
Now I realise that there are different builds like the battle-mage or the spell-sword or the assassin, etc. and that these change the above landscape, ie. an assassin (always stealth attacks with daggers) is on the surface thief build but is even more difficult to play well than the mage, but at it's core the system seems to be built around in inherent difficulty that heavily favours the thief class. Not that I'm complaining, I love rogues.
