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Modded Skyrim playthroughs are arguably the main factor behind the game's decade-long lifespan.
Thanks to an expansive modding library on Nexusmods, Skyrim becomes a blank canvas to be filled in as the player sees fit. As one side of it is dedicated to turning up the eye-candy factor of the game, the other side addresses functional gameplay demands.
Many mods that try to spice things up with more player control, however, run the risk of powercreep. Many popular perk overhaul mods and spell packs, for example, make the dragonborn much more powerful than they would have been by default.
To even the playing field, here are 5 mods that buff up enemies to keep the game interesting at higher levels.
Top 5 Skyrim mods that add radiant high-level encounters
1) Enemy (R)Evolution of Skyrim
The main reason that the dragonborn tends to get more powerful in a modded playthrough is due to extra perk mods like Ordinator or powerful endgame spells like those found in Spectraverse. The Enemy (R)Evolution of Skyrim (EEOS) is the most direct way to even out this player vs. NPC asymmetry in the most obvious way.
Through the functionality of SPID (Spell Perk Item Distributor), many of these goodies are introduced to the NPC's pool of instruments via EEOS. EEOS covers a wide variety of community favorites through its modular installation system. Spellcasting NPCs can be given, for example, any number of spells from Arcanum, Apocalypse, Mysticism, Triumvirate, or Forgotten Magic Redone.
2) High Level Enemies Redux
Although the Skyrim enemies vary enough to warrant potentially several hundred hours-long individual playthroughs, their scaling more or less halts after lvl 60. Individual endgame bosses like Miraak and the Ebony Warrior can scale beyond this, but the vast majority of lower-tier enemies such as bandits do not scale or add anything new beyond gear improvement after mid-game.
The highest level of a bandit chief in vanilla Skyrim, for example, is 30. Many encounter zone mods address this by rebalancing the numbers. Dalquist's High Level Enemies, one of the older gems first made on the legacy 32-bit build of the game, takes a more comprehensive approach. It injects all-new variants into tiered level categories, adding a total of 874 new enemies, the majority of which can scale well into a modded endgame.
3) Real Bosses
There is usually one boss enemy in every Skyrim dungeon - including bandit chiefs in bandit hideouts. These unnamed 'boss' creatures stand out from the crowd with their higher level cap, the Nightmaster Vampire being at the top with lvl 65.
The 'Real Bosses' mod, however, specifically focuses on buffing up named NPCs, those noteworthy enough to warrant a higher power gap. Other than obvious targets like Karstaag or Harkon, this also covers human NPCs such as Ulfric Stormcloak and Mercer Frey to make these encounters more difficult and more memorable.
4) The Sinister Seven
Contrary to what the 'quest and adventure' tag on Nexusmods might imply, the Sinister Seven does not have a close-knit backstory. The mod unleashes seven assassins into the leveled list, attempting to hunt the dragonborn down one by one.
The first of these encounters can trigger automatically anywhere when the player reaches lvl 10, including within an already ongoing encounter. They also tend to out-level the player by a factor of at least two, making all of these encounters memorable and, depending on the situation, near-unwinnable at times.
5) SRE - Strange Random Encounters
In the same vein as the previous mods, SRE is a random encounter mod that adds all-new boss enemies who confront the player once they get to a high enough level. All of these use the vanilla Skyrim radiant encounter system in the wilderness.
True to its name, SRE adds a touch of flavor of 'strangeness' to the two types of enemies it adds. The first is lore-friendly Animated Statues, featured on Elder Scrolls: Blades and Elder Scrolls Online. The other type are metallic skeletons whose material will scale with player level, from Brass Skeletons at lvl 21+ to end-game Stralhim Skeletons.
Note: The article reflects the writer's own views.
