@dreadfulsanity I got obliterated on the first dragon fight, which made me realize that the whole fighting thing was waaay too hard for some reason, while I was on default setting.
...and apparently the reason was that I was trying to do it on console. Idk what you are using, but with console (on pc at least) you are about 3x slower than with a mouse/keyboard (or in my case, xpaddered console) pairing. It did the animation in almost slow motion for me so in a boss fight I simply didn't have the time to fire off any spells whatsoever, OR a staff attack either, because even immediately hitting it after a dodge I'd get hit again before it finished.
I put the dodge on scroll down and now I keep forgetting I have a shield too lol! Can still die but it's user error now...
I didn't see anything about this bug anywhere tho and it's not in the bug fix they rolled out either unless in the general balancing fixes section.