I have no idea what you are talking about. I'm talking about balance in-game and that some aspects that are unbalanced also make a whole attribute pointless and up to 20 perks pointless. A game needs to be designed in a way that doesn't make other aspects of the game so unimportant that they could just as easily not have been in the game to begin with.
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nuthinggs unbalnced for me n e ways. I can drop all my mage skills and still have fun with alchemy n archery... maybe get rid of those then...lol

So then what exactly is it you want taken away? You said you wanted this terrible "overpowered and unbalanced" thing taken away, then you immediately say you don't want something taken away. What else were we talking about being "overpowered"? Too bad it's not overpowered for me, as I happen to love it.

Why does there need to be a limit? I know you hate that single player argument, but it's not invalid as you think it is. Why does there need to be a limit? I don't want a limit, I like it how it is. That's our opinions clashing. Do you honestly not understand that some people enjoy it exactly as it is right this very moment and all you're saying is you want it taken away because of your opinion being different? How can you not understand that? What is it unbalanced against? And can you honestly not come up with a better way to balance it that doesn't remove it for me and others? Maybe I'm just doing this wrong. What's one feature you absolutely love? I'm sure there's something you like that I see no purpose for, therefore I should take it away. That's exactly what you're saying, and you're calling it balance. Balance is fine, but you're wanting to take things out that some people like, and that's not balance. Balancing isn't removing things. Even in an MMO setting they hardly if ever remove a feature to balance it.

But you're not asking for balance, you're asking for it to be taken away. The reason I say that is because you've offered no other method of balancing except removal. What you want removed, some people like. You can't fathom it, and you call it broken. But that's not exactly the case. An in your last two posts anyonewho disagreed with you, you simply wrote off as those people who use that terrible and invalid single player argument. You don't even explain why it would be an invalid argument.

Again, I have no problem with balancing things, but removal of features some people enjoy does not = balance, and you've done absolutely nothing to try to come up with a better solution. You either write our arguments off as invalid or repeat yourself.

Mages are clearly billed as support characters in battles in Nirn, otherwise the wars would be fought with fields of mages not soldiers, and they are rarely the first in the battle when surrounded by soldiers, always hanging at the back letting the grunts delay you while they whittle away at you, because magic can be countered, and has its limitations. Its harder to counter a sword through the neck. I like this dichotomy in abilities. In my eyes, Mages are already balanced. Warriors can HIT things, and with good equipment, hit like a speeding truck... but.. thats what they are good at. A Mage can summon a dremora, freeze the opponent solid, come back from the dead, and on top of that they can turn invisible, make people run away, and if they feel cheeky, kill them with a flying saucepan. Their balance is in the range of abilities.

If you define balance as "Damage per second" you are just plain wrong. No two ways about it.

Actually, on one hand I like the idea of optional things.

I had an RPG idea in mind and it worked around "It isn't suppose to be balanced, it's suppose to be an RPG."
And it worked around the skills I had in mind as well.
For example, it would include Throwing, Hand To Hand, Blunt and Blade.

Blade would be meant for assassination, to kill people silently, there would be things like fireaxes and stuff but they can never be as good as Blunt it.
Throwing would never be as viable as Traditional Firearms or Blunt.
Hand To Hand worked like this, that it was meant to fight NPC's in towns without everyone going ballistic on you.
Meant to knock people out and solve arguments in a pacifistic way without anyone dying.

I like that idea, certain skills are far more viable than others. But it isn't meant to be balanced, it's about roleplaying.
Now, I am fully for this idea to an extent.

Where it starts to fall apart is when an "optional choice" becomes far too overpowered.
The idea I had in mind would not leave any skill to be overpowered in terms of the balance with combat.
Some skills would be worse than others and some better than others, but none would be overly powerful.

So I don't mind optional things, even things that turn out to be far superior than others.
But when the balance completely breaks because something becomes too powerful then it becomes a problem.
Not for the player, but for the game.

I think that a game needs to be able to present a challenge, the player should never be able to become some walking god that can take care of enemies by looking at them with an angry look.
Even if it's optional, that option should never be there in the first place.
Being really powerful is fine.
Being overly powerful is a problem.

That's how I see it.

So just like the Weapon Repair Kits from the Sierra Madre Dispenser (Yes Weightaholic I'm bringing that up again.) it was a option that should never have been there in the first place.
Cause it completely trivialized the repair system, why ever bother getting Repair to 100 or picking that perk to repair stuff more easily or use Repair NPC's`?
You can just exchange 40 WRK and never bother with it again.
So sure, being really powerful, fine.
Being too powerful, no.

Yeah, but you've always had methods of becoming that god in ES games, and for some of us it's how we enjoy playing it. You shouldn't just remove it from us. In ES lore average people became powerful enough to kill the gods themselves. Some of us want characters like that. That's the only problem with all these balance arguments. People always want to take something that some of us base our entire characters around away from us and call it balance.

Am I the only one who thinks that magic is balanced and not underpowered?

Nah. I feel the same as you. It was my first mage character in an ES game since Morrowind, so I enjoyed having to relearn how to play it. Now we're working on become god-like, and people want to take that away from us.

Well, since it's Elder Scrolls I can't comment on it too much, I've only player Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim and the former I only played for 10 hours before I got tired of the dicerolls in realtime.

If it's part of the franchise to become that powerful then I guess it is.
ES after all follow a different design.
I just hope it doesn't influence Fallout... For the third time...

It all comes back to opinion anyway. Some people just don't like things that others do. I didn't like those real time dice rolls either. I wouldn't know about the influence on Fallout. I only played very few hours on them. That whole post-apocalypse thing just isn't for me.

It is an invalid argument, because as I've said a million times, it's unbalanced. That is the reason the argument is invalid in a discussion about balance, because the single-player argument automatically sneezes on balance and appoints unlimited freedom as the god of logic.

I have not yet thought of an alternative way because there has not been any interest so far in an alternative way. I've built up the discussion so we'd actually discuss some new aspects and maybe even find the "golden-middle-road" in a discussion and not me pointing out what that would be instantly. First you need to understand why an unbalanced thing is unbalanced to begin with. You've many times said it's not unbalanced because you like it. That is not the definition of balance and unbalance, it's a comparison between different aspects of the game, not your opinion about a specific feature. Basically, with your logic, you can say this "I like being unkillable and have infinite HP, thus it's balanced".

About that feature I absolutely love, I love the backstab animation and I love that the stealth builds are actually playable in this game, but (and this is a big but) I've not said it's balanced and I would indeed want it to be rebalanced. Right now, the easiest way to survive on master difficulty is to never be seen and one-hit kill everything. That is unbalanced. I'm not calling it balanced because I like it.

Well, let's go back to the single-player and infinite freedom thing and 'our opinions clashing'. You accept and love an unbalanced and badly designed feature of the game that happens to destroy, as I've said multiple times but you've never noticed, a whole attribute and 20 perks for the love of azura. I understand you like being powerful, but I do not understand why you want to be powerful in a way that breaks other aspects of the game. You'd surely accept a dagger in the tutorial dungeon that has 100 attack damage to begin with and doesn't get better even though you level up your all your skills. It does, at the same time, make it so you have infinite stamina and equip weight at all times, which means you won't ever need to put points into stamina, now making quite a few skills and an attribute pointless. But hey, it's OK because infinite freedom FTW right? :/

The middle-road would be to balance destruction so it would be solid at higher levels and less powerful early on and limit the spell reduction to 50-60%. (in addition to the perks that already take half of it away)

NPCs Mages and Player Character Mages do not play by the same rules, silly

Well Fallout has always been big on Action And Consequence and generally favors kicking your ass if you make mistakes.

Fallout 3 turned into a lolcat cakewalk with the right build prior to Broken Steel and turned into a lolcat cakewalk no matter the build with Broken Steel.
And Fallout New Vegas started out balanced enough, then they (and while it was Obsidian who developed the DLC's I'm fairly sure Bethesda had a say in this) released DLC's that gave +5 in level cap.
Turning the balance of skills, perks and combat into a farce.
Not to mention Old World Blues which literally "forced" 3 perks down my throat despite NEVER asking for them.

If Elder Scrolls is about being able to become a god then it influenced both Fallout 3 and New Vegas cause their balance got shot to hell.
Could one become ridiculously powerful in Fallout 1 and 2? Yes, in Fallout 1 if you got the Turbo Plasma Rifle and Hardened Power Armor.
And that's IF you got those two items, where as in Fallout 3 and New Vegas you became Chuck Norris without even thinking about it.
And in Fallout I guess the Pulse Rifle + Power Armor MK II could create unbalance, but frankly, I still got my ass kicked with those two items.

So Fallout wasn't about being able to become ridiculously powerful 'no matter the build'.
And uh... Yeah, look at Fallout 3 and New Vegas after the DLC's.
ES most likely had an influence in the balance.

Damnit Bethesda git your Elder Scrolls out of my Fallout!

Speaking about magic reduction, do the 50% magicka reduction perks not stack with enchanted items, so that you would only need to have two items enchanted to 50% for a total of 100?

they don't stack; you need 4 enchanted items.

No, I said many times prior that I don't mind balancing at all. My qualm was that you were calling taking something away balance. In that sense we reprosented two extremes. I said multiple times that balancing the game would be perfectly acceptable as long as things weren't removed. You never offered to explain how you could do it any other way, and that's exactly what I was implying should happen. How can you say there was never any interest in it?

No, because I don't see it destroying anything. If you go to 100% magicka reduction, then yes, it makes the perks redundant. I can see that as obvious, but unless you're looping things you will be stopped at 90%. At level 45 on my mage, with 90% reduction, I have still ran low in large fights. My problem is simply with you wanting to remove that wholesale, and you never gave any indication that you might even consider a middle road. Especially since you replied to one of my comments with how bad you don't like the "singe player" argument, when I hadn't even mentioned it or attempted to use it at all yet. You discounted what I was saying on grounds that were false.


And now we can finally start agreeing. Because now you haven't' removed anything, and instead explained what might work for both us. This I can get behind. Why didn't you mention it before? Those are the kind of ideas that actually make sense. Our two extremes previously weren't doing anything constructive at all.

Destruction could definitely scale at higher levels. Maybe not so much as at lower levels, but that's just my opinion on that. It doesn't feel like it should just stop all together before you're even near finishing all the main questlines. I also like your idea of capping the spell reduction. Anything under 50% would be too hard for some people who don't want to end up feeling like they're playing, "Skyrim: Magicka Management Simulator." But 50-60 or so would be decent. Not too much, at least in theory. Capping the spell reduction would only work if the Master spells were more powerful. As it stands there has to be massive reduction because of the amount you'll use those expensive spells.

Damn, thats a shame, but you can guess what i was thinking

Chameleon 100% in oblivion in a good example of an unbalanced feature that isn't directly linked to damage at all.

On the PC, going into the console and setting the game to god-mode is cheating.
Taking advantage of something in the game for which it was not intended is an exploit.

Anything in the game that allows you do to something within existing boundaries is playing the game smartly.

Just my opinion, but getting tired of others calling things by the wrong terms.

But, it being a single-player game, who cares what you do or what it's called, as long as you're enjoying yourself.

Some people like cheat codes in games.

Some people like challenging games.

The older you get the more you like the second.

Two summons, shields, wards, glyphs, destruction spells, illusion magic oh my!...Oh look, out of potions. Oh hey, Magic cost reduction just saved the day!

It is neither an exploit nor is it cheating.

Reducing magicka cost to 0% is most importantly NOT FUN, thus you want to avoid reducing all magicka cost.

I have a guide for such things in my signature.

Anyone who calls it a cheat/exploit is trolling you, don't feed them.

HOW do you justify 0 cost master level destruction spells from a roleplaying perspective?

WITH THAT GEAR, a child could use master level spells.

It's possible withing the game world limitations:
Make a child a player character.
Make the child wear the 0 cost gear.
Make the child learn the spell.
...
...

...

He will now, with 0 destruction, deal as much damage as a mage with 100 destruction.

Give the same child a dagger.
Will he one-shot bandits with infinite power-attacks?

Why the heck did they not have a 50% reduction CAP?
Why doesn't destruction scale with destruction-level?

My destruction mage will not spend a single point in Mana, because he does not need mana to cast spells, he only needs enchanting.
And why weren't there stamina-cost-reduction gear anyway?

I'd love to see 100% stamina cost reduction for power-attacks for as long as the 100% reduced mana cost exists.

Such a compelling argument. It's invalid because I have an opinion.

Well, I'm convinced, and have drafted up my angry email to BGS.

^

Why people call it an "exploit" rather than specifically "cheating". You're abusing unintended flaws in the enchanting system. Which there are a lot of, sadly.

Yeah... The hardest enemies for me to kill are those who use magic. By a long shot. Melee? Lol no problem. Bows? Np. Dragons? Their melee is NP, their breath is a BAD story. Mages? Oh dear god HELP. I find myself frequently looking for a dragon shout that goes Dont Kill Me!