Okay, there is definitely some kind of issue with the difficulty level. It seems that if you leave it at 50% from the beginning, you're going to get raped eventually. However, if you move the slider down to just 49%, that's a difference of about 500%, not the 1% you'd expect.
In any case, I've been completely owning everything in the game now, at level 17. Also, finally some good loot is dropping, and ofcourse, with the loot adapting to my level, EVERYTHING is now dressed in Ebony armor, and wielding Elven and Glass weaponry.
In space of about four hours, I've made 75000 gold from weapon sales. But oh well.
For those of you interested in the location of a VERY powerful weapon (this isn't a random spawn), read the secret text :
Go West out of the Imperial City across the bridge, then follow the road south. Just keep following it. You're looking for an Ayleid dungeon called Vindasel. It's at about 7 o clock on the road, approximately straight southwest from Lakefront. (the slum area).
The dungeon itself is a cakewalk, but there's a woman at the bottom, dressed in Ebony Armor, wielding a VERY powerful sword, Umbra. You may remember it from Morrowind.
In any case, she won't talk to you, but you CAN attack her.
Be warned, she is EXTREMELY tough. Even in my pwnage state, she was close to wiping the floor with me. She uses a lot of different power attacks, and she either has some weird kind of disarm, or she disintegrates your weapon, so BRING SPARE WEAPONS.
She vanished my Daedra longsword, and suddenly I was doing fisticuffs against her. THen I remember I still had a dagger of shock, I used that and it killed her pretty quickly. Her armor doesn't protect against the 15 points of shock damage on every hit.
In any case, after she's dead, and you get her armor and her sword (called Umbra), you get a journal entry about a Daedra shrine quest. You can't start the quest until you're level 20, but you can ofcourse go get the weapon much earlier than that, if you think you can handle her.
(Btw, if you've never done so yet, killing Umbra counts as a murder, and you'll be visited by the Dark Brotherhood next time you go to sleep.)
Umbra does 19 damage so far, though that's with strengh 80+ and blade ~67. It's probably base 14 or so, which is a damn sight more powerful than almost anything. Definitely better than glass swords.
It also has soulstrike charges, which ofcourse you expend soon, but the sword still kills easily without charges. Once you're ready to capture monsters for your enchantments, the sword comes in handy.
Here's another tip. Once you're a member of the Fighters / Mages guild, you can rob them blind. 99% of all items will NOT show as red, and you can just take them. Especially the mage guilds are full of loot, on average you can get a bunch of potion equipment and 500+ books from there. I cleared out the guild in Chorrol, and it netted me around 4000 gold, the one in Anvil was about 6000 I think. Easy money.
Creston
This comment was edited on Mar 26, 04:20.