PC Gaming

Morrowind's combat system is... if you're feeling generous: weird. if you're not: bad.

You click on an enemy and it rolls dice to see if you hit. Your chance to hit is determined by your skills and stats, and your fatigue. yes, fatigue. If you've been sprinting and your fatigue is empty, you'll probably miss more. This combos badly with the glacial movement speed of the game.

You also want to hold the attack button a little longer to do more damage.

If you start with a good axe skill (like 50), you can often hold to attack and knock people over, then finish them off. You might want to set "always use best attack" to true in the options- weapons typically have like a few moves, but one is usually better.

The "bound weapon" spells are also good- they're kind of cheap, and give you a high damage weapon that also boosts your skill by 10. There's a merchant that sells a couple weapons that turn into bound weapons in Balmora.

Blocking is also just a dice roll. I think it's better to just get a giant two-hander and kill them faster, but opinions differ.

Also fun: If you damage someone's strength to 0, they can't move. If you have a spear, your reach is probably longer than theirs. You can kill almost anything this way.

also, while i'm here, the native leveling system is bonkers. You gain levels when your major skills improve. You get three stat increases based on any skills that went up. You can get up to +5 for each stat increase. This is not retroactive. If you level up and pick a +2 in strength, that's what you get. This creates some utterly bizarre incentives. People would pick skills they don't want to use as their major skills so they can control leveling, and pay trainers to bump skills tied to stats they want to increase. It's horrible. You can kind of ignore it, but you'll be much weaker than you would be if you play into it.

That's just how low levels work in Morrowind, unfortunately. The first few Elder Scrolls took heavy inspiration from tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons, including making you roll for everything. Internally the game rolls after each swing to see if your attack hits, so you need to both hit an enemy physically and win a dice roll based on your skills.

You'll want to make sure your character starts with at least one weapon skill at as high a level as your class and race allow. At 40+ skill you'll hit most of the time rather than whiffing 90% of your attacks. There is also a massive penalty to hit chance when your fatigue is low, so spamming attacks will get you nowhere.

(I believe there are mods to make it work more like Oblivion and Skyrim where you only need to hit them physically and skills only affect damage, but I don't know the names of those mods off the top of my head.)