What? Should i ''just deal'' with a broken game? That was the dumbest comment EVER in these forums...

I totally agree. I just started a Pure Mage (no heavy armor and weapons, just robes, daggers and staves) and I'm disappointed that the only thing that I get with levels is more Magicka. My Flame spell is just as useless at level 20 as it is at level 1, I just get to use the useless for a longer time. At level 18 I hit a cave that had regular trolls in it and I had my [censored] handed to me using the Firebolt or whatever spell that is. Sure the game difficulty is set at Master, but at level 20 there should be SOME increase in the lower spells power.

Fire, which according to one of the Troll books, is the biggest enemy of the Trolls, didn't do jack-squat to them and I had a Fire Atronach helping me too. I must've used about 30 magicka potions, my Elf power to regen magicka, a blizzard scroll, 2 firestorm scrolls, a Fireball staff (which I depleted), to clear out a cave of 5 Trolls. At level 18 with my Destruction skill at 41, all perks for destruction available at that level, a Novic Destruction robe and a circlet of destruction with 12% bonus... Pretty dang sad.

If it is true that a Warrior at level 50 does more damage than a Mage at the same level then that is seriously jacked. A Mage should be the hardest thing to use as a player gets started, because of all the kiting/evasion you have to do (if you're a purist like me and don't use armor). But, as the Mage gets higher in levels s/he should become nigh invincible and just about yank Dragons out of the sky and squish them.

The mage is underpowered at higher levels and this should seriously be fixed. Can't wait for the creation kit so people fix the damn perk tree for destruction bonuses.



That is simply not true. I was a Warrior that occasionally relied on Archery to do damage. I don't expect a bow to do massive damage. I find that a bow is 5x more effective than most of the ranged destruction magic. I had no problems with Archery and did NOT invest in ANY perks for the bow and there were plenty of times when I'd use it on ranged targets.

As a matter of fact, most of my Dragon killing was done with a bow!

If I compare first 10-15 lvls of destro mage, sword&sheild war and bow&dw war, mage is the worst. Very low survivability when you can't kite and poor sustained dps. If you replace destro with sword&shield or bow, you solve sustained dps problem. By not focusing on destruction you free enchants and level ups for survivability. Only advantage destro mage has at these levels is you can kill frost troll at lvl 7-8 with it.

That's on solo master.

In my opinion that's right though. You're an apprentice mage that doesn't know his head from his [censored]. At level 25 you should see a turnaround where spells start becoming more powerful and melee creatures attacking you have major issues getting close to you. I think the stumble on dual cast destruction magic is a good start, but spells seriously need a damage buff. Maybe the perk's bonuses should be buffed at bit after level 50 in a magic skill.

A cave of regular trolls kicked my butt at level 18.... maybe the level scaling is a bit off for a mage?

I have to agree, i'm enjoy my assassin and warrior more :/

Only effect that has any real consequence is dual casting impact stun.

Is it good and useful? Yes. Is it fun? You tell me after using thunderbolt spamming everyone all day long.

You brought up runes which suggest that you are utter new player. Runes don't scale and are completely useless even when you get them. Might as well as cast another fireball/chain lightning/frost orb for more stun and about the same damage.

It's like telling a warrior that combat in this game has so much variety because he can choose to use his unupgraded iron dagger instead of his 2h weapon with all the perks in it. Oh yeah, they are different.

Edit: nobody is saying that destruction isn't "viable", because at the end of the day having zero mana cost with range stunlock is very very good. Problem is that there is zero flavor in it. The three element is a scam, as lightning covers everything the best with its instant hit detection and least resist among all enemies. Sure, you can kill a troll with 3 incinerate instead of 5 thunder bolt, except it'll be stunlocked either way.

I addition to different ranks of current damage spells, I'd like Weakness to spells, Fortify spells, Resistance spells,Open, Water Walking, etc. A good place to start would be to look at all the effects that used to be castable that are now alchemy only. In particular it's a problem for mages that debuffs are now all poisons that can only be applied using a weapon.

Exactly! And why in the world would they remove spellmaking!? It is the dumbest idea ever!

I really like the fact that there a fewer spells to get, I NEVER used magic in Oblivion because I was too afraid of my spell list reaching insanely cluttered levels from so many spells that become redundant in a few level-ups, Skyrim averts this even in the school of Illusion, so now I can finally bring myself to play as a mage. I would still like to see more spell EFFECTS though, perhaps DLC will add some more, but right now, I'm satisfied.

that's like me saying i NEVER used swords and would like it if there was only one sword, one mace etc because i didn't want my storage to have an abundance of swords. who cares it the list of spells are long and somewhat redundant, that's what the favorites list is for. if you dont want depth in a game go play call of duty, this is an RPG and needs more depth especially when it comes to mages

Exactly... What kind of wizard would only have these few spells? This is afterall a roleplaying game...

Warlocks aren't spellswords. Just saying

Yes, and the correct way to deal with that is less spells, instead of the ability to delete spells.
For crying out loud.

That's what i said?

i agree 100%

I'm at a bit of a loss here. You want the spellmaking back, which I agree it should not have left. I think mages are just fine. I have one up to level 20, and I don't have trouble with anything. The destruction problems are negated by more powerful conjuration, alteration, and illusion spells.

MMOs svck. ALL of them. They're not games. This isn't one of them.

My experience also.

It's almost as thought they felt they needed to balance the power of mages, and did it over and over and over again with each facet of the class (gear, variety of enchants, variety of spells, resource dependence, inability to deliver debuffs without using a weapon, armor that requires significant time and mana to apply, etc.), forgetting that they'd already implemented limitations, and then topped it off by taking away the power the other limitations were supposed to balance.

A fireball with 80 destruction should hit harder than a bow with 80 archery because:
You can’t smith your hands to launch fireballs harder
You can't enchant a fireball to do more damage
You can't poison a fireball to do more damage

Even ignoring these arguments, fireballs currently do LESS damage than arrows and, by this same logic, why should an arrow with 80 archery hit harder than a fireball with 80 destruction? Well according to the current mechanics it should and does.
Your destruction skill has no effect (yes, NO effect) on your spell damage, where archery skill increases arrow damage
Destruction gives access to perks for 150% damage, archery gives 200% PLUS 30% crit chance


Notice I have yet to use the argument that a mage dies more quickly, though I will say that no, alteration/restoration are not as good as armour/pots. The 'skin' spells do not give close to the armour of equally perked armour (50% reduction tops as compared with even light armour which can hit the cap of 80%) and again, cannot be improved. They also have to be recast every minute which eats into your offensive power. The final armour spell which does give capped armour (and makes three perks obsolete) has to be recast every 30 seconds eating even more magicka! Same goes for restoration, no other skill group needs to use it's main offensive resource for defense and utility as well, meaning that a mage using all of these skills will also need to use pots to replenish their magicka.

Having said that, I personally don't believe that squishiness is a valid reason to give destruction more damage than archery, I stick with my first three above and will throw in that I believe impact is a poor excuse to balance it out which should be nerfed down to 60-70% chance to stagger (higher than the archery perk, as this is the only utility given to spells where bows have 15% stun on top of slo-mo and bash). I do however think that they are reasons to buff alteration to be able to give armour cap if perked to the same degree as light/heavy armour, can’t comment heavily on restoration.

Simply put, create two characters with equal defense/utility skills and with equal perks in damaging skills they should do similar damage. This is not the case, not by a longshot, and THIS is the problem with destruction. I don’t care whether or not it’s viable to play destruction, I care that it doesn’t have nearly the feeling of power that shooting fiery death from my hands should give, when I know that it’d take half as many arrows to kill any given thing in the game.

Took you this long

Cheers

I think my mage is mid/high 40s. Altmer, stamina and health around 110,
very high magic. I typically wear the archmage robes and 100% regen mask.
Which translates to no mana problems. Illusion/enchanting 100. Very high
conjuration/destruction/sneak (no sneak perks). Sort of high restoration, but
only one perk. So far I've only enchanted plate boots for 40%sneak/40% 2 handed.
The 2 handed thing is for humorous kills.

Indeed. My mage is rediculous. Rediculously fun! I play on the default
setting. Dragons and some bears can easily one shot kill me if I'm not careful.
I aggressively chase down dragons, involving random NPCs, spewing conjured
defenders here and there if the situation becomes dire. Sure, I sometimes die,
but it's spectacular! I only use the first healing spell, but spam it 2 handed if
a dragon is spewing whatever directly at me. Mostly, that barely allows me to
survive. Which is exciting!

When I use a follower, it's mostly there as mobile storage. That's probably due to
the default difficulty setting. The fights become too easy if I add a follower with
staves or strong gear. Anyhow, I'm finding destruction to be really great with
high sneak and various shouts. Really interesting, and highly varied battle sequences.

I purposely avoid chain stunning. But with my high fragility character, do fall back
upon it from time to time.

For the highest difficulty setting, I'd alter my character a bit, and maybe involve
my follower more. But frankly don't see the point in a single player game. If things
get too easy, I can just raise the difficulty, if they get too hard, I drop it. It seems to
me we have the tools to play however we want.

My only complaints are the limited number of keybinds available, and that I have to
use autohotkey to alter any available keybinds to my taste. Also I guess the resistance
bug, though I'll probably adapt by leveraging a conjured bow in some situations.

How are you level 18 with only 41 in destruction? I don't even see how that is possible.... I'm level 11 with 40 destruction, and that is because I use conjuration as my primary (Conj at 53 I think)

Are you also swinging swords or wearing armor? Or sneaking everywhere? Because some other skills must be leveled up for you to be at that point.

I love my mage lol... pure destro too. Haven't had any problems, not sure why everyone hates it. Is it cause it's not TOO easy like on oblivion? I was kind of happy about that.... It's actually a little challenging, makes it funnn.

Few simple tweaking could have made destruction so much more rich in options and just plain old fun.

First, remove magic cost reduction enchants, reduce high level spell's cast cost by at least half, and create enchants that add flat damage (adding percentages always end up breaking, flat numbers can be balanced better). Something like 20 extra damage max per slot.

Second, I would've changed rune to about 3 ~ 4 times in size, and change their function so that they lower resist of all those who are inside the rune. Top it off with really high mana cost, maybe even percentage mana cost, like 25% of your total mana. This will add spacial advantages/disadvantages to every fight.

Third, impact has to go. Sorry, but perma stun lock is just blatantly not fun. Ice should be the source of enemy movement control. Instead, dual casting would bring element-unique effect to the table, like fire cause secondary explosion for 30 ~ 50 extra damage to targets that were already on fire, frost cause ground beneath the target to freeze over, causing other enemies to slip and fall in that area (if that's too hard, then just another 10% snare on top of frost's regular snare), and lightning would add visible charge to the enemy, and at max charge on out door, the enemy would be struck by lightning for 100 damage or so.

Fourth, add more flavor to the perks. Fire perks should let the fire burn for longer duration (both fire on target and on environment), frost one should increase the snare, with something like base frost being 20% and 2 perks bringing it up to 35% and 50%, and lightning should exclusively get stamina and magicka drain. So fire for maximum damage, frost for movement control, and lightning to reduce combat capabilities of the enemy.

I think most of those could be tweaked in since there are many in game stuff of similar effects.

Read the previous posts... they explain WHY the mages/destruction tree are so bad and underpowered...

What I don't understand is how come NPCs mages facestomp me easily with destruction magic, but people playing pure mages seem to be having difficulty with it?