No they dont scale to your level - they scale to their location. Scaling to level was done in oblivion, and we all know what trainwreck that was.
That means that guards in fort joy might be level 5-8, and guards in driftwood might be 8-12 and such.
So if you wanna beat them, you have to get on their level first, which is standard gamified challenge. Unless you want to fight weird monsters only all the time, humans must be done this way. You are just looking at it way too strictly from realistic point of view, but as I said, this has no place in classic RPG, where you have complete character progression during one adventure.
@Gilrael How do you adreess this difficulty tho? There are only bad options, some just worse then others. I like having steep power curve, because it is much harder to be excited for new sword when its going from 55 dmg to 57 dmg, than to from 55 to 75. Also I dont want to spend 3 weeks practicing swordskills, so I can beat one guy slightly easier.. thats just boring as fuck. If I was to do that, I would do it in RL, not in game
