If you've ever wandered into a bandit camp around level 30 and watched some Forsworn cut you in half in two hits, you've run into Skyrim's most misunderstood system. The game doesn't punish you for being high level. It punishes you for being high level the wrong way. Let me explain what's actually going on under the hood, because once you get it, you'll never build a paper-tiger character again.
Your level isn't a measure of power
Here's the core thing. In Skyrim, your character level goes up when your skills go up. Every skill, from Two-Handed to Lockpicking to Speech, contributes experience toward your next level, and each skill contributes more the higher it already is. Raise enough skills and you level, full stop. There's no XP bar fed by killing things.
The problem is that the world levels with you. Enemy difficulty, the gear bandits wear, the spells mages throw, the gold in a chest. A lot of it scales to your character level (within caps and minimums per encounter). So the moment your level outpaces your actual combat ability, the world gets tougher while you haven't gotten any better at fighting.
Why crafting skills wreck new characters
This is the trap almost everyone falls into. Smithing, Enchanting, and Alchemy are all full skills that feed your level exactly like combat skills do. So a brand-new player who discovers they can grind leather bracers at the forge, or make hundreds of cheap potions, will rocket from level 5 to level 25 without ever swinging a sword in anger.
Congratulations. The world is now level 25 and your One-Handed is still 18, your armor is mediocre, and your health pool is tiny. You out-leveled your combat power. The crafting skills aren't bad; they're some of the strongest in the game. The issue is leveling them in a vacuum, divorced from the gear and perks that are supposed to come with that power curve. A level you earn by hammering iron daggers buys you a harder world and nothing to survive it.
If you do lean on crafting, the fix is to actually use the output. Smith and wear the better armor, enchant it, brew the damage potions, and take the perks. Power that you bank into gear keeps pace with the scaling. Power that just inflates a number doesn't.
The health/magicka/stamina split is where survival lives
Every level grants you exactly one choice: +10 to Health, Magicka, or Stamina. That's it. Three attributes, one pick per level, and this single decision matters more than almost anything else for whether you feel underpowered.
Health is your margin for error. Dumping every point into Magicka because you're "a mage" and then dying to a single power attack is a rite of passage nobody enjoys. Even a caster wants a chunk of Health so one bad hit doesn't end the run. Stamina governs your power attacks and carry weight, and it quietly raises your stamina-based damage perks. My rough rule for a new player: heavy into your primary (Magicka for a pure mage, Stamina or Health for a melee bruiser) but never let Health sit so low that the scaled world one-shots you. A 2:1 split favoring your main stat with Health topped up is hard to regret.
So did Legendary skills fix it or make it worse?
When the system launched in the original release there was a soft cap. Skills topped at 100 and your level effectively plateaued. The Legendary skills update changed that: you can reset any maxed skill back to 15, reclaim the perks, and keep grinding it for infinite levels.
I genuinely go back and forth on this. On one hand it's a fix for the old over-level trap, because you can dump a skill out of your level calculation, which is great for builders who want a tidy 50-ish "true" level. On the other hand it removed the ceiling entirely, so the temptation to grind your level into the stratosphere, far past where your gear and perks can carry you, is worse than ever. Legendary-ing Smithing five times to chase numbers is the modern version of the iron-dagger trap.
For more on how the scaling actually computes per zone, the UESP leveling page is the reference I keep going back to.
So here's my honest question for the room: do you treat Legendary skills as a discipline tool, resetting to control your level, or as permission to grind forever? Because I think which camp you're in says a lot about whether you find Skyrim's scaling broken or perfectly fine.