Ok....

is all TES games caster skills scale by alowing you to cast more, as in more skill = less mana cost.
spells are base line more powerfull than bows or melee, and limited at start, heavily by their high mana costs, you use gear and skillup so you can chain cast the more powerfull spells.

I won't complain if destruction gets buffed in a patch, but honestly, have some dignity; the people complaining are acting like spoiled brats. Don't insult people who disagree with you. I find Destruction very useful, more useful than any other TES game. It has utility that other combat damage skills don't have, I don't rely on it completely but I do find it a useful skill and it's easily my most used combat ability.

It's funny how a bunch of children think they know more about balance in video games than the guys who have been around playing them for the past 30 years.

You ever think they did it on purpose?

On one side of us are those who are annoyed by this whole 'I can't kill everything in one shot mentality.' On the other side are 'We're weak and you don't understand' people. Vocal portions of both are being complete a-holes (myself included) and then there are a few rational people discussing the issue.

If we're not going to talk about it rationally, zip it and let Bethesda do their thing.

This video must be faked, because according to everyone here, mages can't do anything like this.

see this is what I mean, people complain when they dont even know what they are talking about....
frost spells and their stamina drain is not to slow them down.... if you had paid a bit more atention to what was written... you would've learned, since you cleary dont know, that draining stamina's point is to prevent enemies from using power attacks.
and I can assure you it works because at lower levels I was tanking mobs of the same level has me (20ish) with double casted ironflesh buff, their normal swings barely scratched me and they couldnt use power attacks, wich is the only real threat when you have high armor (normally)


and yes mobs ARE 20X more ffective than me, I play on master difficulty... leaders and above ranked mobs are a utterly unfair fight, yet this has nothing to do with the destruction skill being bad, because the exact same can be said when I play my warrior

ps: please stop flaming other people because they disagree with you.. especially calling them clueless when it is you who clearly doesnt know what hes talking about...

Yeah so use magic in mid to close range, when you can time it. Then change to a weapon (maybe improved or poisoned), or a long range weapon (like sneak, archery, speech).

I should get as far as I can from these forums www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbxqtbqyoRk , But I can't help but feel there is some cool with some gamers.

Seriously your name is Sanctuary, and you down trod random effects n [censored] when you could finish 'em off anyway. Just delete your pretense

Interesting thought, did they drop a school or two of magic? Perhaps part of Destro took up a chunk of the more control-based magic which lead to a decision about dropping the damage to keep from becoming imbalanced the other way?

So people are complaining that spells dont get stronger the better you are in that skill? Isn't that the point of a spell though? A spell is a spell and will always do the same amount of damage. If it did a different amount of damage then it would be a different spell. Cant you keep buying better spells? I mean im only around lvl 15 and am using only electric destruction magic. Do the wizards stop selling better spell books? Lvling your destruction skill isn't supposed to affect the damage of a particular spell but it is instead supposed to mean you are more knowledgeable in this type of magic and are therefor able to cast stronger spells. Its the opposite for warriors because it does not matter whether you have knowlege or not on one handed weapons or two handed weapons, you can still hold and swing the weapon. You dont have to be smart to pick up and swing a sword... anyone can do it. What changes when you lvl that particular skill is your ability to use that weapon more skillfully in order to do more damage. Which is why as you lvl a weapon skill your damage increses with that weapon. And when you lvl a spell skill the damage doesn't increase but you gain access to more powerfull spells. (or rather the way they made it in skyrim is that you can cast more powerful spells for less magic cost)

The damage does kind of scale though if you're smart about it.


What is an echantment? A buff to your weapon to make it stronger.


What is the School of Destruction? A school focused around damaging your opponent.


It would seem to me that if you can't boost your weapon because you don't have one (using destro magic) you need to weaken your opponent. A melee fighter does not stand a chance against a mage who has made them overencumbered to where they cant move. Or a mage who has drained their stamina to the point of not even thinking about power attacks. Or a mage who is slowly svcking the health out of his opponent while his opponents buddies are up in his face.


But but but, you want to simply scale your DPS in the school of Destruction. You don't want to use strategy you just want to spam Fireball's in the dudes face till he's dead? There's a spell in the School of Alteration which lowers your opponents resistance to magic. Go learn some Alteration.




The thing Beth has done here is make it where you can't just learn one school of magic and become [censored] central, you have to branch out and learn other things, like a real mage does. If you're only looking to learn Destruction Magic, you're not a mage, you're a spellsword or a sorcerer. Go grab and axe or a staff cause that's what you need.


And there's no shame in that either. I made a sorcerer. I use an assortment of spells in my left hand while wielding a staff of fireballls in the other. So I'm spamming fireballs at dudes with my staff while casting things like soul trap and ice spike with the other.

wow... he seemed low level too no alteration using heavy armor.. prly to save perks for enchanting.... hmmm

How about Landslide?

Yeh because previous games really make a difference when judging a completely different game

I think you hit part of the issue.

There are people that don't understand that you have to keep upgrading to your next spell every 25 points in destruction. You know, they want to be able to keep using the stream spell or the direct damage ranged spell.


There are some people that are complaining about the damage. Which is a legitimate complaint when you get to level ~45 or above. Against opponents that are of about the same level (which that video obviously did not include), destruction becomes extremely weak. I think that a lot of people in their 20s and 30s feel like it's at least fine in the damage department. But it starts to get really low later on.

But I'm not even really complaining about that.

I am complaining, really, about variety within the system. The fact that I'll never be able to use a stream spell or a rune spell effectively again is bothersome. Instead, I must only use the newest spell which often doesn't work in quite the way I would like. I would rather scaling existed so that those other spells are usable at later levels.

This is not a multiplayer game. There is absolutely no need for anything to be balanced they way the OP and others are arguing for. As long as a user playing as a pure or mostly pure caster can complete the game without inordinate difficulty, there is no problem here. You are not competing with other players. You did not roll a "gimped" character that is now useless or frowned upon when partying with others. Its a single player game, period. Crying about the power level of destruction or casting compared to melee compared to archery...let me let you in on something here, all those people that get paid to balance MMO's like WOW can barely get it right, a company like Bethesda or Bioware when working on their single player rpg's is not going to be concerned with "balance" as you perceive it. All that matters is that the gameplay works and is fun. If you are having that much trouble with destruction, perhaps summon a creature to aid you. Yes, users who work on smithing/enchanting and craft melee weapons and armor can become exceptionally powerful, but there is absolutely nothing to stop you from doing the same.

I have not played nor heard of a single player video game RPG that cannot be powergamed by those who wish to do so. The very mechanics and systems we attach to "RPG" are often the very reason why every single one of them can be manipulated to the power gamer's advantage if he/she chooses to do so. In this game, it seems, the way to powergame is via melee weapons and armor. In many other games it is magic, or stealth or summoning or whatever. As long as the gameplay works, there is no issue, no matter how many fireballs vs sword swings it takes to down this or that.

Also, this is only the way magic has worked in countless RPG's since 1990. Every new spell is a massive increase in power, but the spells themselves do not become more powerful. Even WOW had limits on spell ranks back in vanilla. Guilds would implode over the drama of the max rank Fireball spell book drop from Ahn Qiraj. Even Diablo 2 pre LOD, a Sorc was only useful in nightmare or higher for their static shock ability. The maxxed rank Meteor spell in an 8 player game did almost nil damage. But those are multiplayer games, games where "balance" between classes and damage/survivability can actually impact your play with others. In Skyrim there are no others. No matter how much it matters to you that your Fireball "scale" and output the same kinds of damage that a well equipped melee character can, I don't know if it matters/ed much to the Bethesda staff.


I'm pretty sure they spent most of their time on world building rather than on fine tuning every perk/spell/item in the game to be perfectly balanced. Which it clearly is not, but I don't think its the giant problem you are making it out to be.

His armor clearly said "Light Armor", but it was Dragonscale, which is obviously some of the best if not THE best in the game. He was very well geared.

When you talk about balance? Yeah, they do.
Partially do to the fact that without previous games, this game wouldn't exist.

However, I do find myself using Firebolt for pretty much the entire game.
That and Dragonrend, because I need them mostly stationary to be able to cheese Impact.


Just a good sign of Enchantment still being horrible abusable .
Much like 100% Chameleon in Oblivion.

The POINT is as a MAGE you get weaker not stronger. There IS something wrong.

I know how TES games work (and don't work), and that is the problem. This skill doesn't work like previous games.

When I say that raising the destruction skill make no difference, I mean it. It has no effect on damage..AT ALL. The effect it has on mana consumption is so negligible, the difference can't even be noticed between 10 and 100. There is no reason to raise the skill other than perks.

I'll test this (again) when I get home, but I suspect if anyone here who has a high level mage were to use the console to lower his destruction skill to 10, yet keeping everything else the same, he would notice no change with the performance of his character. He might notice a slight decrease to mana efficiency, but that is it. He will do no less damage and will be equally effective in combat.

The skill only exists to limit which perks you can buy and which spells you can purchase. It seems to provide no other function.

No other combat skill in the game is like that. Even conjuration scales, since the level of your summon matches your characters level.

And regarding gear upgrades, there aren't any. Not for damage. Around 80-90dps is the highest damage you will ever do in the game. EVER. This works fine until you get to around level 40, as other have said. Then you will encounter creatures with 1k-2k health that can kill you in seconds. Then you have to fall back on another skill. Destruction loses its purpose, because its ineffective and other skills are blowing it away.

Using your summon as a distraction is fine. But when it is doing 5-10 times as much damage as you are, it becomes pointless to waste your mana on destruction spells at all. All that time and energy wasted on something that could have gone to a skill without an expiry date.

...No, you don't. Destruction is amazing. You're doing something wrong.

I can see this being a much more valid concern than the other posts in this thread. A melee character doesn't outgrow his/her native swing. But a melee focused character likely doesn't have the magicka to summon a Deadric lord. In TES and other systems magic is usually about variety, not necessarily power. And Master level difficulty isn't really supposed to be balanced...

Balancing in previous games doesn't need to be taken into account when deciding if different elements of THIS GAME are balanced though. Archers have bows as offense, warriors have swords/axes, thieves have daggers and mages have destruction magic. They have always been the main source of attack damage for those categories in every rpg of this type in history. But crucially destruction is massively underpowered compared to it's sister skills. This is the problem

Nope it's not. My mage is running around in fully upgraded Daedric armor with 4 x -29% destruction cost enchantments. My Magicka bar doesn't even show up any more due to using none.