Unfortunately, sneaky one shots are people using daggers (I use war axes from time to time as well) for the most part, not bows.
However, assuming the confirmed knowledge that you will never be able to drop all your targets in one hit has not stopped you from wanting to pursue an archer here are some pointers to consider.
- Sneak attacks are your openers.
- Just like an assassin doing a backstab, picking your initial location to start an engagement is key.
- Being able to slow your target is going to give you that much more time to deal with them. Consider the poisons that Eriuzo mentioned but more so, consider enchanting your bow with the highest charge lowest duration Frost you can get. With fast draw and good aim (which will get better the more you use it), you should be constantly pelting your target.
- Also consider the Paralyze enchantment in similar use to the frost above, you might want to fiddle with charges vs duration a bit more with this one however.
- Still go max sneak perks, as you will want to often be at range the entire time and being able to drop into a sneak to break targeting will be very helpful.
- Remember that Mobility is going to be very key for you, do not neglect stamina!
- If you find running around and shooting too tedious and just want to stare them down with your bow, remember you can block/bash with your bow.. Consider getting some of those perks to make your shoves matter more.
- Just as the mages' Impact perk is important for staggering, so too is the archery 50/50 stagger perk.
- Seek out +Bow gear as soon as you can, every little bit helps. (There is some in the Dark Brotherhood and its fairly short to get to, unlike the horse which seemed to take forever to get the second time around :))
- Consider high perked pick pocketing.. The best arrows in the game are fairly annoying to come by. Some of the ways to generate these arrows better are to go to places where people practice archery and steal all their arrows, especially their active one, and then give them a single Daedric arrow.. They will then shoot out an infinite number of these that you can simply pick up off the target. Note that I am still torn about this as this is -a lot- of perk points just to get arrows... Id almost say go to the fletcher, buy the arrows, save the game, kill the fletcher, reload the game and start the loop over as a more 'acceptable' way to overcome this.
Because possible enchantments on your weapon can play a pretty big part of how your character does what it does, consider doing the quest for Azura's star and turning it into the Black Star. Right now it can accept any soul and if you are taking out a bandit camp you can recharge every weapon fairly quickly with a grand soul they give you.
EDIT: Technically, there is a way within the game rules to make a bow powerful enough to one shot anything... but it is rather game breaking if you abuse the loop too much. Through Alchemy and Enchanting you can boost your smithing skill in an infinite loop. People have made weapons and armor with stats so high that it flips the internal value into the negatives (so, higher than 2.1 billion).
The technique to do this is commonly called the Restoration Loop
Is there anything that I've done incorrectly for my build, in that I shouldn't have tried to get the best gear midway through the game?
This is very subjective - what is considered an "incorrect" build by one player, may be "optimal" for another. If you want to make the game harder, focus your skill points and perks on non-combat skills: Speech, Pickpocket, Lockpicking, etc. You can also put skill points and perks on combat skills that you won't be using in combat. This will level up your character (which will make enemy level difficulty scale to your level), while at the same time, not make your character stronger for combat.
With the Dragonborn DLC installed, perks may be undone and redistributed at the cost of one dragon soul per skill tree.
At the end of the At the Summit of Apocrypha quest, you will have access to different portals (one for each skill) which allows you to clear and regain any perks in that skill tree, at the cost of one dragon soul. You remove all perks from a single skill perk tree and can use these reclaimed perks on unlocking any perks you wish, including perks taken from said perk tree. By reading the Black Book, Waking Dreams, you can return to Apocrypha and alter the skill trees whenever you wish.
Are there any hard quests that I've completely missed, or do you think that now if I start new questlines with my increased stats, the game would level up the difficulty for me?
It is subjective to state which quests are "Hard quests". Just have a look here for a list of all quests and see which ones appear to be hard for you. As for the second part of your question, the unmodded game only checks your current level and the difficulty settings in the options to compute how difficult the enemies will be for you.
Excerpts from UESP wiki's "Leveling - Effects of Leveling" article:
Various aspects of the game are leveled. This means that as your character increases in level, some enemies become more challenging but also the quality of the items you find becomes better. However, the leveling system in Skyrim has been altered from that used in Oblivion, in response to criticisms of Oblivion's leveling system.
Different locations in Skyrim have different inherent difficulties. In other words, some dungeons are designed to be too difficult for low-level characters to enter. More challenging dungeons are generally located at higher elevations, meaning that early in the game players may want to avoid mountainous regions. However, more difficult dungeons contain better rewards. In addition, some high-quality items can be randomly found even early in the game.
... Bandit NPCs are always a fixed level for their name (Bandits are level 1, Bandit Thugs are level 9, Bandit Highwaymen are level 14, etc). The player's level affects the range of possible bandit types generated within a bandit dungeon, and probably the frequency, but does not seem to affect the resulting stats except in a few rare cases. Lower variant bandits remain reasonably common even when more dangerous bandits are available.
v1.9 Patch - 'Legendary' difficulty
Patch 1.9 adds a sixth difficulty level: Legendary. It reduces damage dealt by the player to x0.25 and increases damage taken by the player to x3.
Mods
If playing on the PC, you could also make the game harder with mods:
The mod, Pluto's Improved Skyrim Experience (PISE) has a "More Intense Level Scaling" component. It makes enemies more stronger relative to your level, compared to the vanilla enemy scaling. PISE also features harder sneaking, more enemy spawns, harder enemies and an overhauled enemy AI. The mod, Path of Shadows, a major stealth overhaul mod, also makes sneaking harder.
Other mods that may make the game harder:
- DFB - Random Encounters - adds different random encounters from vanilla: Vampires, Falmers, Werewolves, Dwarven Spiders, Spheres, Centurion, etc.
- High Level Enemies - has a feature that allows certain or all enemies to scale with your level
- Deadly Dragons - overhauls dragons to make them more challenging to fight
- Balanced Magic - designed to 'balance' the game's magic spells - make the spells do damage and consume mana appropriate to your magic perks, and lessens the effect of abusive perks like the 100% stagger change of the 'Impact' perk. It also affects enemy mage NPCs, making them more challenging
- Auto-cast Racial Powers Plugin - "Auto-cast racial powers will activate for NPCs, both enemy and friendly, making fights much more interesting and adding a new element to prioritizing targets in larger fights!"
Creature mods that increase creature spawn points, number of spawns, and also improves creature AI:
(I recommend using only one creature mod, to avoid conflicts and other issues.)
Best Answer
I've found that the easiest way to stop your character getting dominated in big fights is to pump up your health each level increase.
On my last character, I was playing an archer whom I assumed would rarely get into a close-combat situation that I couldn't just kite out of. I spent each level increase on stamina so I could run further (as part of the hit-and-run tactic I was trying). It was great, except for every so often when I'd come up against something that pinned me down or shot at me from a distance. I was about to restart, but instead started investing in more health. All of a sudden, the game started to get easier. That character got to level 51 with over 300 health.
Other tips would be:
Invest in skills that increase your base damage for your weapon type. For example, maxing out the base skill for one-handed doubles your damage every single hit.
If you're looking for superior equipment, invest some skills in Smithing. If you go along the RIGHT hand side of the skill tree, you can craft the strongest weapons/armour for a light or heavy fighter or archer and improve them to legendary quality.
For fights against dragons and powerful enemies, keep some potions of fortify archery/one-handed/two-handed/destruction or whatever you're using to increase your damage. The sooner they die, the less damage they can do.
Carry potions of restore health attached to a hotkey so you can quickly restore health if you need to (if on the PC version, "favourite" them in the items menu, then press Q when out of the menu to open your favourites list. Move the selection over the item and press 1-8 to attach it to that hotkey).
Carry potions of resist frost/fire/shock/magic. A resistance of 40% almost halves the damage an enemy relying on that type of damage can do.
You can save money if you make these potions yourself. Consider investing some points in Alchemy (just the base skill, physician and benefactor is enough. Print an alchemy effects guide to find out what ingredients do, or just eat one of each ingredient to find an effect, then discover the rest through trial and error). Restore health, for instance, can be made quite simply with Blisterwort or Blue Mountain Flowers and Wheat.
If you rely on melee weapons, consider carrying a reasonable bow and some arrows (the arrows are weightless, the bow is fairly light too). In some situations, jumping on top of some rubble and shooting that warhammer-wielding master vampire is the smartest choice.
Let your companion attract the attention of nearby enemies and take the hits. They sound like a jerk for letting you die so often anyway. Target an enemy that is attacking your companion, so that you get a few hits in before they even realise they're being attacked by someone else.
If you let us know what character type you're playing, we can give more specific advice. Hope this helps for now.