Im imagining some mage hiding behind a rock and throwing out random lightning bolts. How effective is it? And (this is a subjective question) how fun is it? Because there's no bonus damage for sneak magic attacks, so im basically throwing out spells at a normal rate, except that im hiding behind a rock. I like the idea of lightning bolts out of the blue though

I havent had a really good experience with destruction; i often find the magicka to damage ratio to be too high.

Yes, but I'm an illusionist. I can't see how sneak would work with destruction, since you're discovered the second you cast the spell and there's no critical damage. Sounds more like classic kiting strategy than stealth.

+1

I have a level 75 character that's morphed into a lot of different things, but through the early game, it was a sneaky illusion mage with conjure as a backup. I have every perk in the illusion tree, and despite being overpowered, it's a huge amount of fun. Sneak into a room and cast frenzy at a group, then watch them beat the snot out of each other. With quiet casting, they'll never figure out where it came from. Eventually I got tired of the micromanaging of countless spells for different situations, and morphed into archery (and later, warrior skills), building those illusion skills was a complete blast.

In Oblivion, I used to make custom spells that combined things like Frenzy with Invisibility, and disappeared into the shadows after every encounter.

I kinda did a magic-archer with more emphasis on the mage.

several.... some used illusion, some used conjuration, but i never used destruction for this. does not enough dmg without a sneakbonus

I guess technically you could use runes to sneak around and drop traps, then arrows to lead them into each one. But it would probably get tedious. More for softening up baddies before you take them on.

I used to like sneaking around using paralyse and then wall of flames. So really only partly destruction. You just paralyse people and then cast a wall of flames on them when they're down. You don't even have to wait for them to die, you can just move on knowing they will burn to death before they recover from the paralysis. The elite enemies like deathlords need to be reparalysed (on Master) while in the fire but the wall spell doesn't need to be recast. It's a very magicka effecient way of disposing of enemies.

With quiet casting, sneak and invisibility spells or potions it's a fun way to play.

Absolutely. I have done it twice, both time were majoring in Illusion and Conjuration, with a bit of destruction thrown in to kill off the remaining foes. I thought it was alot of fun, but could've been more fun with a better balanced magic system.