I already knew ahead of time that you would be able to create some obscenely powerful enchanted weapons...and you can. Right now you can create a dual wielding setup where each weapon has +80% damage to one-handed weapon attacks, you can add the same enchantment to a ring and necklace and you can add one-handed weapon skill to each piece of armor. This absolutely MURDERS anything you can possibly do with Destruction spells right now. After you pick up the +50% damage (to each school) and Dual Casting, there's absolutely no way to increase the damage you do with Magic after you've picked up your last most powerful spell. It also seems to take 250+ mana just to kill something as simple as a Cave Bear or Sabertooth Tiger, and that's if I don't have to run around for 30 seconds waiting for my mana to fill back up because I only took them down to 30% health.

You can't have more than a single Rune out at a time (can't have one frost, one fire for example) and they never increase in power; they are essentially land mines that are good for two levels. Spell creation might have been "too strong" in the past, but at least there was a lot more variety in what you could do. There are no efficient and long lasting dots or life siphon spells anymore. It's just the same Fire, Frost, Shock junk that feels way too much like Bioshock instead of TES game and they don't scale at all.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwv-iRvyDZg

I don't know how you did it Sanctuary, but you just made me question myself and feel comfortable at the same time. What's the deal with the Runes? I was thinking of putting on Dragon Age PC game to get the Rune magics, but if this game has them maybe I should learn that! I love the ones the enemies can see it and flee (but I'm a Breton, my special ability is absorb magic

It literally takes me a full minute and a half to kill an Orb guardian using any elemental magic...yet I can punch it to death in around ten seconds.

Yeah, pretty sure they did not consider someone playing a caster class without investing heavily in Conjuration for terrible AI pets to take hits for you. I started over as a dual wielder with bow backup, and it's stupidly powerful in comparison to Destruction magic. On top of that, you can actually enchant each weapon to do 75% more damage with that weapon type and add the same enchantment to both a neck and ring. Melee also doesn't use stamina for the basic hits, only the power attacks, and the power attacks are almost always enough to outright kill everything but a named elite just by themselves. The left/right spamming of two one-handed weapons is also enough to put most everything in stunlock permenantly so they can't even hit you, and deathblows happen more frequently than you might think.

atm i am mostly at destruction magic....
lvl 10-13 or somewhere there

with destruction magic like 64....

i just chain lighting everything to hell with a few shots....on normal dificulty... so bored i am thinking of rerolling a new char becasue i am so OP

Single target spells cap out a few levels after you were able to pick them up. Around level 20, you'll notice a significant drop in "power". You're also hitting enemies that are rather low level. There are already people making weapons that hit for 500% more damage than base and it's theorized that you can potentially get as high as 5000%. Destruction has nothing anywhere near that capability.

Why haven't I been able to destroy an enchantment for skill boosting effects? Perhaps because it's not possible and you are talkin' bulls.?

Runes do increase in power when you dual-wield them and make a single rune to a more powerful version. I think magic is more balanced than ever. Perhaps it's actually too powerful, because my sister has been playing as an archer/one handed guy all the time and now at level 16 started using destruction and thought it was very powerful.

I'm a battle mage.

I conjure my dual swords up after I summon something. Charge in and fight like a warrior, It keeps it interesting as I can fight and use spells when I need a change.

Being a mage is over powerfull I think. Use your abilites right and you can blast everything back to oblivion.

At level five as a starting mage my destruction magic seems pretty powerful. I kill most enemies pretty darn fast

You can't just max one line of spells and own everything like you could in Oblivion and Morrowind. This game actally makes you do some work as a Mage if you want to be good (if playing on master difficulty). You have to combine various spells and dehabilitating effects, conjurations, etc if you want to dominate. Using a bow (with poisons) helps out a ton too, every mage should pick up a bow imo even if you don't build the skill its still effective if you use poisons. Overall, I like the fact that Skyrim makes me think on my feet as a mage in comparison to the easy mode we use to have with Oblivion and Morrowind where you only needed to cycle 2 or 3 spells at most to kill anything in the game.

Magic should be powerful but it should also be fun and challenging to use. Cycling the same 2 spells all the time is [censored] boring.

Because you're using a high level spell against low level opponents. When you get to a higher level you will find that the chain lightning spell is quite useless.

They should have made spell effectiveness scale up with your skill level. I wanted a flamethrower spell in TES since Morrowind and now that I have it it feels so underpowered.

"Playing a mage isnt mind blowingly easy like in the past. MUST BE UP"
-OP

Yeah, it's bull. It's also not like vendors actually sell items randomly with whatever you need.

http://i43.tinypic.com/2e1sxup.jpg

Your anecdotal evidence of how your sister plays doesn't mean anything to me either. I've already gone up to level 30 with my first character and had 100 in Destruction. I then started over and melee is obscenely more powerful, and this is long before you can even enchant your gear with anything good. You can also have triple the damage from sneak attacks with a bow and have a suit of gear that gives +100% bow damage. Suggest to your sister to try out dual wielding and to use power attacks. You're basically going up to your target to loot them, but have to hit both attacks at the same time once before doing so...

Guys you know they can just patch it if a whole lot of people agree with you

lol, well enchanting is definitely borken. :/ Next patch, balance and glitch/bug patch fixer. I hope.

Hmm I've always hated enchanted weapons, but I might have to check them out. Playing as a pure mage seems really brutal compared to my roommate who went rouge and the other who went warrior. I got owned in a dwemer ruin more than 20 times during a mage's guild mission at lvl 8 on expert. Almost every fight I had to kite like crazy, set traps and run around the entire dungeon. I just kept running out of mana....Every little fight was as tough as a boss battle.

I don't really mind since I like thinking on my feet and getting through impossible situations........but magic (destruction) does seem slightly UP right now.

Bring on Midas!

I also agree.. Lvl 11 here and I have Dual casting but I kill things so slow :/ Playing Expert Difficulty..

Magic is in fact rather overpowered, but the lack of spell books to buy in towns except in Whiterun and Winter Hold means it's at least slightly difficult to get the best spells.

If you are referring to the Dwoemer ruin that has you looking for an item for a Winterhold quest, that is the same place where I realized just how subpar Destruction really was. It's like there were some "tough" things like Cave Bears and Sabertooth Tigers, but for the most part the game wasn't all that difficult. As soon as I went in there though (level 20), the difficulty skyrocketed in a very obscene way. I'm not sure if that ruin scales somewhat with your level either, but I died over and over again in there against those Reaper type enemies, while the spehere guardians took forever to kill...unless I simply punched them. Your situation is exactly what I went through as well. It was almost like some of those "regular" enemies were as tough as the dragons!

The biggest disparity between Melee vs Magic is that until you spend a massive amount of time on "end game" enchants, your spells still cost you mana, and you'll need to forsake health/stamina to get it. Melee on the other hand do not need stamina at all except for power attacks and can simply go 4:1 health/stamina. If you pick High Elf, you already start out with five levels worth of mana over everyone else, and you may as well since the racial powers may not even be there they are so situational, and once a day anyway.



Nope. The vendors sell items based on your level/skill level. You should be able to buy every spell in the game (eventually) from Whiterun alone. When I went to Winterhold, I was assuming I'd be able to finally upgrade and get some awesome spells. NOPE. The only thing they had was everything I'd already picked up previously. It's rather stupid that you can enchant items to increase melee damage, but the only thing Destruction has is lolmanaregen. That 72% in the screenshot is actually on the low end of what is possible. Now imagine that on two weapons, both of which affect the other.

Melee > Magic > Stealth

This game has suffered Mass Effect Sequel Syndrome. Where the developers assume we're all a bunch of meat heads who wants to swing axe's around and drink beer, so in the interest of not wanting the lowest common denominator to feel left out they nerf the other methods of play so that the classical warrior archetype is way more effective. And to highlight their new combat system. If they even put half the work into magic and stealth that they did on the melee the game would be astounding. Even the dungeons show a bias towards melee/frontal assault style play. Hell even persuasion is screwed up beyond all belief. I can't find any easy way to level it up and it's so random it may as well be removed as a factor. They did a lot of good things, but made some critical mistakes in the simplification process. Namely they went beyond streamlining to dumbing down.

There's just no love for anything other than the meat head archetype in games this last decade. I wouldn't have a problem with it if it weren't so proliferous and making other roles inferior for the sake of it.

Edit
Often the ridiculous pretense of "balance" is foisted upon the loyal fans. It doesn't make any sense though given the fact that there's no competitive environment. Other than the rules of the fantasy world each character type should be allowed to become as badass as the setting allows without it becoming a cake walk. (two types of balancing for two different situations/games). I wouldn't care that warrior's are overpowered if Thieves and Mages got as much as warriors. Then it just becomes a matter of designing the NPC's to be a fair challenge. IE not supremely over powered efficient build a human might make. My point is this game is definitely the most meat head entry in the series (It's still good, but any designer knows you need to know your weak areas).

I don't know what you mean by Stealth. It's by far the most broken (as in brain dead powerful) compared to anything else. Because of the way the AI is, you basically get a free "vanish" each time you are detected, so you can literally snipe everything to death, including giants and dragons. It just starts out much slower, but breaks the game infinitely faster than anything else. It's exactly the same as playing with 100% Chameleon from Morrowind. Backstabs are even stronger than that, but there's no need to use them.

Eh? Stealth has been amazing from what ive seen. Dont know what youre smokin.

40 Sneak, most of the lower perks +35% sneak. The silent light armor perk. I backstab one random bandit for 6x damage and it took him down a quarter health. Wow, don't spend it all in one place. Then every enemy in the cave instantly knows where I am and bull rushes me. As a Warrior I can just go in axe swinging and be infinitely more effective, laughably easy compared to all the preparation needed to set up even one stealth attack that won't kill anyone anyways. I'm also on the hardest difficulty where stealth and magic just don't scale. Then I reloaded, set the difficulty to adept and lo and behold the scenario played out the exact same way. I don't know what stealth video's you've been watching but odds are they had the best gear and were playing on the lowest setting and with a super high skill to make themselves look badass. At that point though as mentioned any class will be badass.

This is why I am balanced. Some creatures, races, etc are more resistant to certain spells or spells in general. I remember my first troll fight -- melee wasn't the smart idea. And even though I am balanced in destruction, block, and one handed, destruction overcame it. But I think after level 20, you can just punch everything. Box a bear haha