prolly because defs assumed you would be done playing by that level

This stuff I keep seeing about having to use other schools to deal damage alongside destruction makes me wonder what the melee users would be saying if the game was made in such a way that after a certain level using 2-handed weapons was no longer viable, and they had to switch to using 1-handed and a shield. That's sort of how I see the situation if it's compared magic to melee, using destruction to deal damage being a bit like using a 2-handed weapon, and using conjuration with destruction to supplement it being like using a 1-handed weapon with a shield. In an Elder Scrolls game, both should be viable at all levels, and indeed being able to further specialise should be viable in both, just like it's viable to use either battle-axes or war hammers exclusively.

I'm at level 14 Nord Warrior with 1 perk in novice destruction and my feeble sparks spell took down some imperial gaurds not instantly to be sure but enough to get me threw Thieves Guild quest Hard Answers in the Understone Keep . I can't imagine how powerfull it would be if i actually played as a Mage. I am playing on Apprentice setting.

The chess anology is bad. Chess is a fine tuned balanced game. This is not. You said warriors are queens? [censored] no, more like Queens that can shrug off the first 8 pieces to try and take it down. Pawns meanwhile have been limited to only moving by going and taking another piece and after the first few are taken they can't move meaning no becoming a queen for your hard work traversing the board. You think people just got around and chess was invented? [censored] no, it took hundreds of years of perfecting the rules into a balanced form of play. Your anology is your worst defense ever.

Chess is balanced. Skyrim is not. Flawed logic is so flawed I can't believe I just read something so insufferably wrong.

Exactly! If bows are weak, then bows are weak. It's not a multiplayer game, there doesn't have to be balance. If you want to play with the weak bows, you can. If you find it difficult, turn down the difficulty. Problem solved. There's no reason to make bows stronger just because someone out there just feels like it.

Like I said, I really want to use only torches as weapons. They don't do much damage. So... I maybe we should boost those too? It's silly to argue that every attack strategy should be equal. If they aren't, they aren't. That's part of the trade-off. If you don't like the strat you picked, pick a new one. Or better yet, learn to adjust the one you have.

That's how games work.

Chess is a multiplayer game.

It does, but given the ease at which you can obtain potions the mana cost is mostly irrelevant, the problem is that even the best destruction spells in the game are very weak at high levels. (Spellcrafting solved this in earlier TES titles)

Why wasn't I forced to use conjures in oblivion or morrowind?

Obviously just adjust the Difficulty level untill your results are more in line with your attack strategy.

Seeing these threads made me feel like rolling a mage to see what the fuss is all about.

Though personally I feel a mage should make use of "CC" to stop mobs from coming to you. I saw a trailer where you can freeze people into ice blocks. I don't think warriors or rogues can do that unless they are very deep in the 1H or 2H skill tree where you can do a backwards power attack to have a 25% chance to paralyze people. So mages have to use all possible spells to disable enemies and pick them off one by one, instead of playing like a warrior that swings wildly.

But I feel the real problem is not that magic is underpowered. It could be that enchantments and blacksmithing are too powerful that they trivialize content. I read that can even make gear that dwarfs daedric lords' rewards. Dovahkiin or no dovahkiin, you cannot possibly be better than all-powerful daedras in making gear.

Because spellmaking was a player driven scaling system. Now that we don't have that and Destruction does not naturally scale, we get this thread.

Except there is no trade off. Your assuming they are in some way better. Also there's this thing we call verisimilitude a quality of realism in something. IE in real life we can reasonably expect if destructive forces existed people would use them to destroy. Bows, Swords, Axe's all of these things are logically made to fight and should be good at their job because hey real life example. Torches can be improvised, but there's no basis for them in reality as a functional weapon. Your argument is completely false.

Now you might say hey magic doesn't exist we have no basis, except we do have a basis. In the lore of the game, and in the name of fair play. Magic is potent, we know mages are feared. They are wanted by courts for their skills. battlemages can turn the tides of battle. Then we get in game and we see no such thing. So why spend decades (lore wise) learning magic if some dunder head with an axe can do what you do better. Perspective, you need it.

Edit
WRONG! Skyrim is a multiplayer game, we were promised the ability to play how we want. We share this amongst ourselves. Sure there may be no direct competition, but here we are. We can measure, we can compare, and we can fix. Again your logic is false. If Skyrim was singleplayer we wouldn't be here, it's not in some closed universe where only the player experiences it. We can all share our experiences. And when people who play warriors get everything better we realize the experience we were told and sold might not be living up to expectations. Favoritism appears.

Its obvious that the lack of scaling in destruction magic, and magic regeneration only working outside of combat makes a "pure" mage less effective than a pure 2handed warrior.

I have a brother and he is just obliterating everything with a two handed weapon, while I run, hide, and try kite everything I come across as a mage.

Mages need a boost, and its not going to hurt anyone (besides NPCs). This isn't an MMORPG, there is no competition (PvP) going on.

The word is balanced. It's more balanced than ever.

Sure, all spells could follow a formula where the bigger the skill the more damage they do. That would mean magic is a bit less powerful early on and later on gets more powerful than it is now. I'm all in for that, but tbh, I think it's more balanced than in any other TES.

Spell creation was horrible and over powered. I guess it is different mentalities. Some people like walking through a dungeon insta melting everything they come across while other people such as myself (playing on max difficulty) rather have each encounter be risky and dangerous. When I walk into a room with 3 enemies i'm going to use illusion to turn one of those guys on my side, necromancy to revive whoever dies, alteration to tank, restoration to ward, destruction to do my own damage on the enemy. Using "Just destruction" is like a warrior using "just one handed" (no armor, no shield, no blocking) and complaining that the game is unbalanced when he dies.

You guys that come here with your numbers of raw damage are what we in Eve call..."EFT warriors." You have your fit and on paper it says X Y and Z but in practice things turn out differently. But maybe yes raw damage output wise a warrior does have a higher number. But a warrior is a one tricky pony. Walk up to you, slash away. With magic, destruction alone, you can hit from range, set up rune spells as traps, and most importantly choose specific type of damage depending on who you fight. (frost for warriors, shock for mages, fire for general damage.) If you are just that uncreative that you can only look at raw damage numbers, you're doing it wrong.

"but teh numburz dont liiieeee wahhhh why cant i kill everyone i meet before my magic bar runs out! "

Do you know any warrior class that kills everyone before their stamina hits zero? And with magic you have healing spells that keep you alive and alteration spells you can use to tank that won't slow you down at all. A warrior to be effective has to spend his leveling on both health and stamina. A mage can more or less rely mostly on magic with a little bit of health.

And who the hell is spouting this non sense about "enchanting furthers a warriors DPS even moaarrr "

Enchanting while it does that is first and foremost a tool for mages to cast spells by way of mundane objects. A mage that can't do jack with a sword or bow suddenly becomes viable through enchanting. Using illusion and enchanting now i can rain death with a bow from afar all without even really dipping into my magic reserves.

So in the end let me get this straight... as a "pure mage" you want to do the raw damage that a warrior does AND be able to summon allies, turn enemies against themselves, go invisible, heal yourself, tank like a bull unencumbered, all while doing your damage from a safe distance? Why don't you just turn on easy mode? Or HTFU.

What about the "pure thief" character? None of the thief skills actually do any damage since archery got moved to warrior. And quite frankly I agree with that. (Using a bow is not some nimble "stealth" based skill but rather something that takes a lot of strength to do. Get yourself a 100 pound bow...classical not the modern stuff they have today and shoot off a few arrows. Mind you 100 pounds is toward the lower end of what was actually used.)

In short character "classes" aren't suppose to be the equivalent of one another or else we'd all be doing the same thing with different animation. It's about using different abilities to approach the same situation in a different manner. You can't just look at the raw damage number and flip out. The lessening requirement for magic is a big big boost allowing you to cast the same spells over and over much cheaper. Honestly though if your way of playing a mage is running in and casting destruction spells at everything you see, well someone that unimaginative probably shouldn't touch magic. Quit wasting the dev's time with this non sense whining and let them fix real issues like bugs and crashes.

In the Lore they just turn down the difficulty slider.

Simplification. You need it.

Honestly when I heard that spellmaking was gone, I loved the idea. It seemed like we'd get a ton of cool spells and we'd get to use them for different situations. I thought they would all just scale.

Well we certainly have cool spells, its just that most of them become useless at a certain level. At high level you're left with using very few spells and even those start getting weak.


If you don't expoit enchanting or use conjuration , things get rough on Master. Very rough.

Torches were not an effective source of damage output in previous TES titles. Destruction spells however, were. To be honest, this wouldn't even be a problem if the CK was out, I would just whip up something to fix it. That still doesn't address the woes of console players, however, who I feel bad for.

And yes, single player games do need balance. Not sure who taught you game design, but it's become fairly apparent that the lack of balance has upset a large number of Betheseda customers who enjoy the mage archtype. Generally you don't want to upset your fans.

@Nubius, it's generally not a complaint about magic as a whole, but rather destruction itself doing pitiful damage output at higher levels. Alteration could use some more utility I think, but conjuration, restoration, and illusion are all fine.

I know you guys are saying you can mod it in eventually, and that's all well and good, for PC players.
What about us who own an xbox or a PS3? Do you think gamesas will realize that they made end-game mages gimps and possibly fix it with a patch, or DLC?

When I first read of this issue, i was heart broken. I decided to save my mage for my second play, and now, I'm having doubts, extreme doubts.

It seems like the only chance for a mage is to play on novice, and that is not cool.

So simple that I can't follow a thought process? IN every post you make your confusing arguments, situations, and settings? Are you using some sort of proto-brain? Simple might do the trick, but only if it solves all of the problems. And it doesn't. Occam's Razor, deal with it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

spell making was useful... k

You wanna throw Occam's Razor at me? Really? Name 1 problem the slider won't fix. Go.

How in the hell can you honestly think that the development team sitting down for weeks to tweak game settings that throw off the entire system they built, test, test, and retest, is the simpler solution than you just changing one damn setting?

Really? You went there?

It's fun up until the late thirties!

Also, Varus's arguments seem to be degenerating into opinions that I find less and less believable that an actual human being possess over time. Notsureifgettingtrolled.

And that is very not cool. The ward spells, for example, cost waaaay too much magicka for anyone but a heavy restoration mage with restoration enchantments. I can't keep a ward up for even 5 seconds without losing all my magicka.

Yes, very rough.

I think my opinions are becoming twisted because I'm tired and I have to respond to rageheads. I'm not against the idea of something simple, like adding more spells or enchantments. However, I don't think the game is terribly unbalanced. I do see that some classes are stronger than others and I don't think that matters. Some things are stronger than others. I also believe the difficulty slider makes the game as easy or hard for any build you want.

Add all that up and I just don't see why it's worth it to waste huge development dollars and hours rebalancing a system when core stability or UI issues abound. Maybe in a few years, when all the real bugs have been sorted out, it might be worth it for Bethesda to rebuild the destruction chain. But by then maybe TES VI will be the focus of their attention. It's just not worth it. And I love magic.

Pretty sure enemy spell damage increases past the point where wards are useful, too. Fun, eh?