Revered and Legendary Dragons

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Well, evidently Bethesda wasn't too happy with people walking around with their triple crafted equipment, kicking the crap out of even ancient dragons with ease. So, with the Dawnguard expansion, Bethesda said, "You want tougher dragons? Fine. Try these on for size."

It is with mixed feelings of happiness and sadness that I relate the following encounter I had with my first ever Legendary Dragon (which are apparently orange colored). I had already killed a Revered Dragon (bluish purple in color - hard to tell exactly at night), and it wasn't that bad. Yes, it had a LOT more health - it took four power attacks dual wielding to take it down, and the one time it bit me it took about half of my health, but overall not so bad.

The Legendary Dragons are tough. A little background to put this in context. My character is level 71, with 500 health, and dragonbone weapons that do about 300 damage per pop (and I don't have the 5th perk yet in either Armsman or Overdraw). I'm at the armor cap. So this Legendary Dragon - he doesn't fly around trying to hit me with his breath weapon, he lands right next to me, as if to say, "Let's go!".

The first thing I noticed was that my dual wielded power attack only took about 15%-20% of his life away. At first, I think, no big deal. I'll have to do about 6 power attacks on him, and he's dead. Then he bit me. He slivered my health bar in one hit. I don't know the exact amount of damage he did, but the "Avoid Death" perk immediately kicked in. So, with 80% damage resistance, he did upwards of 450 damage to me. That means the base damage of that attack is well in excess of 2000, possibly approaching 2500. Also of note, since power attacks do double damage, and my weapons hit for about 300 each, a power attack is about 600, and with two of them that's 1200. As I needed at least 5 possibly 6 power attacks to take it down (I was a little busy to make an accurate count), that also means that Legendary Dragons come equipped with 6000+ health.

If the fight lasted about another 5-10 seconds longer than it did, I would have died. Because every time I got hit, I had to spam health potions like there was no tomorrow, and I was running low by the end of the fight. Legendary Dragons must be a real joy to fight if you have 400ish health or less - they would one-shot you even if you were at the armor cap. So to everyone who said dragons should be harder.... Happy now?

 

Sounds like a move to balance melee and ranged. Melee does a lot more damage but you run the risk of being bitten in half now.