I've played the two previous versions of Skyrim. I remember the terribly bugged armour treatment for NPC opponents, and the resulting utter dominance of physical damage over magic damage. Any tweaks in the new version to address that, or is is pretty much stealth + archery + summoned bow = disc 1 nuke? IIRC, the armour issues with hostile NPC's pretty much rendered the "AP" on the enhanced crossbows rather... pointless?

Given the amount of distance in the dungeons and the benefits of stealth, pretty hard to ignore the ease of use of stealth archery. Had one in the low 70's level wise running around in nothing but a simple dress. Had a decently leveled elemental/summons/alteration mage, but the inability to make your own spells really hurt late game, especially with the 100 levels spells being so... meh... I kind of miss ye olde... <on target> weakness to "A", "X" percentage, "Y" duration + Damage "a" amount of "A" per second for "Y" duration spells. Still don't get why they took spellcrafting out of the game, maybe because you can get -100% cost to cast? But, you still pretty much get that with a bound bow and it's arrows provided you can cast it.

Then, there is the absolute difference in raw damage. While the dual-casting stun perk of destruction is a stronger stun than the archery one, if the target is dead, you don't have to worry about stunning it.

I have fond memories of by 2H melee chars in Morrowind, hated the Oblivion scaling so never really got too far in that, and wanted to love my silent casting "stealth mage" (I find the concept amusing due to the light show) in Skyrim, but at least through SE couldn't get past the hard, cold realization that stealth + archery was were it's at.

Anything in the AE version that makes Skyrim more melee or magic friendly?