Now, if only we had decent mage enchantments and crafting options, we'd be set. Yes, I'm still bitter mages can't craft robes, staves, circlets and so on.

As well as better-looking robes, but that's an aesthetic choice. All the same, the archmage is a Dunmer in a poncho, and master robes look like peasant garb.

How about making sustainables slow mana regen instead? you could have your summons and shields on toggle so they last the entire combat so long as you had the mana to sustain them.

I don't know if sustainable spells are possible without the CK. Right now it's a matter of changing the duration. It could be possible to go dig through and swap an increase magicka, but in a negative direction, for the duration of the spell, but I'm going to start simple myself!

oops. by sustainables i meant those with durations like summons and the armor buff. With illusion reportedly overpowered at high levels, slowing regen and maybe even a constant mana drain could balance those too. likely not before the Ck though as rightly pointed out

I can probably do a constant mana drain much easier than a mana decrease. I'll look into it. Lemme get this stuff working first. Sorry to intrude on the thread, too. Doesn't relate to destruction magic, but it does relate to balancing the mage.

Penumbrel, have you had any issues with casting spells? In my testing, I can change the durations of conjuration spells, but they aren't castable ingame. The description properly changes, but it will not allow you to actually cast the spell. It does however allow it to be equipped.

Edit: Huh. Some work, some don't. Atronach summons don't work, but the familiar does. Weird.

Edit2: Got it working. Never mind. Mistake of my own making - a cross-check with the original files showed where the error was.

I'd like to point something about mage specialisation. While I agree it sounds better to specialise. I think mage shouldn't have to do it.
Warrior have to choose which weapon they take.
But the choice isn't that important simply because the whatever the bonus they take, it won't change by much their balance.
There is no "immune to physical" monster that would require a bleed, nor immune to crit.

However, there is "immune to fire / frost" and lightning is what we use against caster (when we can bypass their freaking ward).
so having to spend 9 point to be able to kill both ice and fire dragon is somewhat, I think, a bad design.

So in order to be effective I'd have to spend 19 point (not counting the rune improve) or, at least, 17 by removing 2 /frost/fire/lightning last talent.

Also, while I love playing as a pure mage. I tried to play some kind of battle mage / paladin or "death knight" (full RP ! leechlife enchant + frost aura + ultimage).
Unless I did something wrong. It's like a normal mage, good early, medium mid, crap endgame.
I found the mana management painfull (like 1 master spell and I'm oom)
The aura is useless (10dmg per sec... omg)

So I tried to make a tree that would actually allow destruction to be played as, a mage, a battle-mage, rogue heavy on trap. But I'm not sure if this should be posted here since it's about your mods.

I don't know I think there is enough points to build all of those builds. Yea, it's going to be tough to get all of the destruction tree and everything a warrior or rogue might normally have to build a hybrid but the way I see it is that a hybrid should be worse at either spellcasting or combat. Otherwise it kind of defeats the purpose of the pure classes. The magic immunities are a good point though and I was thinking about that also. Combat classes don't need to get their entire tree like a destruction mage normally does. This is kind of irrelevant to hybrids though because they have combat skills.

Edit2: One way to solve this, if it needs to be solved, is to decrease Augments to like 15/30 and increase the Expert/Master. This would make casters weaker early game and hopefully still powerful late game, which I think is good, as well as reducing the perk cost back down to two points each.

Finally someone put a stop to the endless debating over Destruction in GD. Just point them to this mod people.

Just read this and tell me what you think about it.


I know all in the picture canno't be done now.

To clarify the idea behind this.
The goal is to make destruction good in more than 1 way (pure class).
Because, I think you HAVE to go hybrid, you canno't simply be "a pure mage" because at somepoint u'll have to get somethign else right ? making you automaticly a hybrid.
Right now destruction (behind the fact that it's bad from root) is the only offensive casting way. (I know summoning pet do A LOT of dmg, but u don't stand like a moron watching them, u need to help them)

So, instead of dooming destruction to be a "pure" mage only thing that unallow you to be creative like other tree allow, I tried to make melee / rogue friendly talent that are actually designed to only work with them creating new gameplay.

No, you don't HAVE to be a hybrid. I'm not even sure of the logic behind those changes; it just looks as though whoever wants to go the pure offensive mage route is going to inadvertently turn into some weird battlemage thing. Why? Rogue and warrior dps perk trees aren't mage friendly; I see no reason mages have to be shafted out of their own pure dps tree just to fulfill some curious notion that PURE mages can't be PURE.

The other two archetypes benefit more from Destruction than mages do, according to your ideas.

So what you're saying is that u can simply put your point into destruction and then u take nothing else but enchant, you don,t use any summon / alteration / illusion ? you just have your 4 key bind 1: fire 2: frost 3: lightning 4: heal ?
And they don't really benefit "more" I don't see where they'd benefit more.
Unless rogue and warrior spend quite some point into magic they won't be able to cast spell as you would.

The mage "side" just combine the 3 actualy specialisation while the other bring something to melee.

What are you talking about? I said PURE mage. Alteration, Destruction, Conjuration, Restoration, Illusion and Enchanting are mage trees. Destruction, for people playing pure mages, is THE dps tree. It's our pew-pew tree. Your changes mean playing a pure mage, as in a staff-wielding robe-wearing sorcerer, less viable than dumping points in Destro, Heavy Armor and your weapon tree of choice. And Enchanting is basically worthless for pure mages other than for money and the -100% mana cost exploit; there's simply nothing interesting enough to warrant it. We don't have spell damage enchants, we can't enchant staves, we can't craft mage robes.

The mage damage tree shouldn't benefit rogues and warriors. Otherwise it's not a mage tree anymore, it's a hybrid tree.

Why should melee get benefits from a mage tree? Your suggested changes mean that to get the most bang for its buck Destruction needs to be paired up with a warrior or thief skill.

Uploaded a fix for the new perks not saving correctly, but if you find your perks are gone you'll have to use the console to regain them (or reload from before you spent the perk points). Sorry about that!

Regarding mage perks: Encountering element-immune enemies is part of a mage's life in my opinion. The best workaround to that is to either specialize in two elements, or just deal with being slightly weaker against one particular enemy. It should by no means completely shut you down, but that one enemy will take you a bunch more hits to take down if you don't dual specialize. I think that's kind of alright.

You should not increase the base dmg of the spells.
The changes should be done via perks.

Also try not to change the number of perks because there will be other mods and this will make it incompatible or have errors.
I would go for Apprentice 5%, Adept 10%, Expert 15%, Master 20% and leave the specs at 25/50%.

Also you should look into changing the modifiers for dual casting.
I think atm they are 2.8 cost and 2.2. dmg which should be reversed.

this seems cool mod, i cant wait what people can come up with when the CK arrives

One thing that still bothers me is the power of the Impact perk. With enough mana, you can stun lock almost any enemy in the game to death, with virtually no chance of retaliation. I really like your idea of making the dual cast take longer (which reduces the potential amount of stuns). What do you think of making the dual cast take longer still? As in twice as long, or something. This would reduce the strength of Impact and also make playing a destruction mage more varied (since at the moment, a dual cast is almost the same as just doing two regular casts at once).

Id change the firestorm Instant cast back to the cast animation time.

Ruins the concept of Firestorm.

http://skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=382 does exactly that, doubles dual casting time. But it also has other magicka related changes in the same ESP (which I like as well).

I felt that Impact was way too cheese as well.

My biggest annoyances about Destruction:

Impact perk needs to be changed into a % critical chance and only then have that stagger effect.
Mana regeneration needs to be applied in full swing during combat and not be reduced dramatically. Otherwise, why even use mage robes (with mana regen) and not a full suit of armor...
Enchantment with % mana cost reduction needs to be capped so the mana will still play a role in this game - otherwise you are better off by leveling up your health.

Anyway, I will try your mod on my next mage play.

Good job

It doesn't help that magic is profoundly boring in this game, speaking as a pure mage. There's no way to be creative with spells; we're always stuck with the same bunch. Enchantment doesn't even support mages that well; our iconic gear can't be crafted or enchanted and we look like peasants.

Yes, it's an old rant, but it's still fairly annoying. Enchanting is perhaps the worst offender.

Uploaded a new version that fixes a bug that prevented some people from selecting the Expert Destruction perk at level up. Also included a .esp without instant cast Fire Storm, for those who aren't interested in that.

About Impact: I'm trying to see if I can swing it to be a % chance to stun instead of a guaranteed stun by essentially looking at Archery's equivalent perk. Barring that, I might replace it altogether with a mana regen perk.

Thanks for all your work on this Penumbral. I really appreciate it.

Good to see someone working on making spell casting not so horrible once you hit level 25+. Felt kinda weird how at lower levels spell casting is pretty viable on the hardest difficulty as you can hit people and not get pummeled to death with the quickness (caster NPCs obviously still a problem), but once I hit 25+ spell casting became a waste of time as it barely dents anything. Going by the description there's not a whole lot changed for mid level destruction stuff though.

I'm about level 27 now using your mod, and I'm finding that once I reached mana-free level - SPamming Rune spells became the most effective way to kill things. Dual Cast Rune spells just do FAR too much damage(75 base+75 from specialization*whatever the bonus is for dual casting.) Setting up 3 of these prior to a boss fight just destroys everything I've fought - including dragons.

Rune spells need to be scaled back a little bit.

Tier 2 spells do a fair amount of damage(that's Firebolt/Lightning bolt). I'm finding things maybe slightly too easy on Masters - but I think that has more to do with destro being good early on to begin with. I'll see how they fair as I continue to go up.

Thanks for the mod!

Or.. The mana-free part needs to go, so rune spells couldn't be consistently casted like that.