As the title states, Magic is fundamentally flawed. First, let's get the most obvious cat out of the bag.(who puts cats in bags anyway? Cats hate bags!) Scaling. I personally LOVE the continuous destruction spells. Flames, sparks etc. It's a shame to see them die horrible deaths later on. Hell, even ice spike is cool! Who doesn't love shoving spikes through people's eyes? In case you didn't know, enemy magic scales. Wonder why ice spike is so deadly even though that's an apprentice(I think) spell? Why don't you see master destruction spells? Also, master spells are pretty useless IMO. I DON'T WANT A GIANT MASSIVE AOE FROST SPELL!!!! I just want Ice Spike! Seriously, this has to be one of the most stupid game decisions ever made! Seriously, look at it from this perspective. If you choose One Handed, you have a selection between maces,axes swords,daggers and civilian equipment. You don't get that with magic. I'm not including the differences between the 3 different destruction elements. That's not the point here. With One handed, you can get fast moving, low damage weapon, slow moving, high damage and a nice mix. This is variety. This is what destruction lacks. Variety in terms of spells. As you level, you have to surrender your streaming magic spells, you got to give up on your projectile magic such as ice spike and fireball. You have to move up to the collateral damage spells. I think it would be nice to talk to a person respective to your magic school and "hone" your spells. In a giant war, you do NOT want to cast a giant frenzy spell or a blizzard. You need a spell that can effectively take out a single target or frenzy just one or two enemies. Could you imagine the outrate if swords were considered weak eventually and you were forced to move up to axes, and then by end game you got to stick with maces? THat'd get awfully boring quite swiftly.

Okay, onto my second reason. Magic cost. Spells are almost physically IMPOSSIBLE to cast! Most of these Master level spells cost a ridiculous amount! The Storm Thrall spell costs 1200 magicka! You are going to have to invest perks in Conjuration or enchanting to lessen its cost(if you only use master level spells, you have to waste so many good perks on apprentice/adept conjuration etc. Rinse and repeat for other magic skills and BAM, there goes most of your perks that could have been spent elsewhere, just to cast the stupid thing! I think the Dragonborn should follow the same magic rule that the Champion of Cyrodiil followed. For conjuration anyways, the formula for determining the cost of a spell is
Cost = BaseCost * (1.4 - 0.012 * Skill)

Let's use Storm Thrall here. Let's say I have a 100 in Conjuration, which I do atm. If you replace basecost with 1200 and did the math, your answer should be 240. By the time you master Conjuration, you should have a feel for it and should be able to effectively use the spell with ease. See how natural that felt? One reason why Oblivion's magic system was better. Would you prefer that, OR spend 5 perks?

On the topic of perks, I thought perks were things to give you an edge, to give you a boost. Magic seems to rely 100% on perks and I find it annoying. Not in this game it seems. That is why I was truly hoping for perks Fallout style because their version of perks are NOT purely numbers based. Sure, yes are, but many are just abilities or cool things such as Child at Heart which gives you better dialogue with children, or Terrifying Presence which allows YOU to initiate combat through dialogue and possibly make some enemies flee as a result.(not always, more of an RP thing.)

All in all, those are the reasons why I feel magic is fundamentally flawed. Yeah I'm a known spellcrafting enthusiast, but I was very pissed off at its removal. Deep in my heart I had an inkling that Beth knew what they were doing, but truly I tell you, they had no idea what they were doing. Bethesda logic. They take the terms streamlining and simplification and stretch it. Somehow, someplace, streamlining and simplification meant dumbing the game down and watering it down so much that some random 8 year old can play. That's not what it means. Armorer needed fixing in Oblivion. Repair hammers made no sense, but it would have made sense to make Smithing the successor to Armorer and be able to repair weapons at a grindstone or armor at a workbench, but nope. Attributes could have used some tuning because it created efficient leveling and that is just lame, so instead they just axed it rather than deal with it(probably because they can't.)

So instead of fixing magic, they just broke the whole thing and gave us Enchanting to let use get a 100% reduction in spell cost. Pfft, like that's what I honestly want for an enchantment! Sure, if we were going by Oblivion formulas, that would be alright. Make my Storm Thrall go from 240 and shrink it down even more to perhaps 120. 50% reduction. Cool! However, since the game already reduces mana cost by default, I could use a better enchantment, like resist magic and fortify health.


Thanks for listening. I hope I conveyed everything I needed to, but the comment box is at your disposal so feel free to add or critisize.

Can I get a TL;DR? It's not that I have a problem reading, it's that when individual text blocks go over 5 lines without a space, it starts to get really difficult to maintain reading flow. To say nothing of the physical strain on someone's eyes.

The only thing I can really point out is, Magicka cost is sort of pointless to argue about. All spell costs can be reduced to zero by gear alone, independent of Skill and perks.

This is where Spell Creation would shine. You'd be able to pick a spell type and then customize it, you can't do that with Skyrim. All you have is the mediocore spell that does garbage damage and that's not including the bugged Killcam involving Destruction.

I think Magic is amazing.

Yeah, I'm having trouble reading your giant wall 'o text. Care to summarize your rage?

I only got the top bit but if you don't like AOE spells and love Ice Spike more why don't you just not use AOE spells instead of ranting about how stupid they are? They have their use, a niche use in dealing with large groups of baddies and such, so your not going to use them much anyay. That said you'll get more use out of your much loved Ice Spike unless you LIKE collatoral damage.

I should also point out, the Concentration destruction spell "Flames" Is the most powerful spell in the game with the right perks. Most notably "Aspect of Terror" In the illusion branch.

But that's probably a bug, I agree that spell effects (Concentration, Missile, AOE, Radial) should have existed all under one experience level. (A novice Missile spell, and an Expert concetration spell, for example), but I do like how differently each element behaves, especially in the AOE forms.

Ice Storm -> Directional AOE - DOT

Fireball -> Massive AOE burst

Chain Lightning -> Limited AOE but immediate impact.

If spellmaking means it's necessary to make each element behave the same, I'm not sure I'd favor that.


The Skeleton of the Casting system in Skyrim is very good, I just wish it had more "Meat" so to speak. Spellmaking and more unique spells. (Similar to how there's Unique enchatments like Fiery Soultrap, or Nightingale's talon)

Aspect of terror?

Umm, you do realize at later levels it isn't ice spike but icy spear, right?

I agree w/ OP. There is a Balanced Magic mod on the Nexus, I hope they implement something along those lines for patch 1.6/DLC. Really, there's no reason why magic shouldn't scale.

Since all flames have a hidden "Terror" effect on them (activated with Intense flames), Aspect of Terror, the Illusion perk that boosts the effectiveness of Fear spells, enhances the power of all Fire Spells by 10 points.

This doesn't have much effect on Firestorm, or Incinerate, but with Fireball and Fire Bolt, the damage increase is around 20-30%. But with flames, the Damage is over double, turning 8damage per second, into 18 damage per second without any flame perks. Fully buffed, Flames will do a whopping 26 damage per second for less than 10 Magicka per second.

Nice. Thanks for that info, didn't know Flames could be that powerful.

His point is that you are essentially forced to stop using the lower-tier spells if you want to kill higher-tier opponents in a reasonable amount of time, and that some of their types do not carry over to higher-tier spells. There are no high-tier spray or rune spells and only a couple of high-tier bolt spells (Incinerate and Icy Spear), so about all that's left is AoEs, some of which will kill your allies as well as your enemies due to either insane coverage radii, lack of IFF detection, or both.

Also, the few that do carry over have ridiculous base costs and can really only be cast if either 1) you engage in heavy -cost% enchanting or 2) take a lot of -cost% perks and invest heavily in magicka. While the latter is actually good practice it's also forced selection, and the lower-tier -cost% perks end up being a complete waste of picks since you're no longer using the associated spells. Even then, you'll never have enough magicka to cast even one Master-level spell unless you employ a ridiculous level of Fortify Magicka enchanting, since even at half cost they're still 500-600 magicka a pop.

Destruction, especially, gets hosed in that department; you have to constantly re-cast if you want sustained output, which practically forces the use of -cost enchantments unless you don't mind becoming a potion addict. Which seems to be what they assumed everyone would do, since it's possible to stack 100% or more reduction by using 3-4 enchantment slots and high-end Fortify Enchanting potions.

There are so many of these posts on the forums. It's not like I don't read them and participate in them, but the general community consensus is that Magic, while being VIABLE at later levels, is essentially gimped in comparison to other play styles and needs some TLC from Bethesda in the upcoming DLC (cross your fingers).

Destruction SHOULD scale, but it doesn't; Cost recusing perks ARE stupid and lazy; but they are what we have to work with; Master level spells (despite being AMAZING concepts, I mean they are cool as hell!) not only cost waaaaay too much for too little a bang and casting one successfully is near impossible (50% stagger reduction while having a "Flesh spell" active perk is GREATLY needed); but for the moment these are the Master spells we have to work with.

I only hope that magic will be improved in the upcoming DLC, and while I can agree with the OP on some issues the AOE spell rage is not one of them, I even wish we had a cone of cold. Skill level should dictate cost and grant access to the next level of spells, spellmaking and staff making should've been vanilla, etc. Most of us agree on this at least

The fundamental flaw is that spell damage don't scale with skill level. Instead the cost is reduced.

1. This makes low level spells obsolete, even though you like the delivery method very much. (trap, flame thrower etc)

2. Perks and items reduce cost. It does not actually make you more powerful, just more spammy.

3. Impact makes boss fights infinitely less epic and infinitely more cheesy.

You can try this mod. It fixes magic so you still get the vanilla feel, unlike other mods which tends to be not lore-friendly or overpowered.

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=4374

Pretty much agree with OP.

I think you missed the OP's point. The OP doesn't want an "Orsimer warrior" casting Storm Thrall unless they were a master of Conjuration. The cost is too high, -cost enchants/perks were a bad design choice, and if you truely mastered a school the cost of spells would go down as your skill increased...no need, or less of a need, for -cost reduction.

And it would be nice that you had low level aoe, mid level aoe, high level aoe. Low level rune, mid level rune, high level rune. Low level flame thrower, mid level flame thrower, high level flame thrower, etc...so you can use niche spells in certain situations and common/heavy use spells viable thru all levels of the game.


This^


Nice sum up.

What you really mean is that Destruction magic is fundamentally flawed. Magic as a whole is just fine. In fact Conjuration and Illusion are overpowered once you pick up the right perks. With the right gear Magicka is no issue. The main issue is that Destruction spells don't scale and most of them become useless later in the game. It should have been balanced better so that all spells retained their usefulness through out the game. That would give the mage a much larger arsenal to choose from and make playing a mage primarily using destruction spells much more enjoyable.

I agree with the point about perks. There not really "perks", there more of abilities. I feel a perk is a small reward for reaching a certain goal but isn't really needed. You need the "perks" in most of the skill trees. Lets say you reach level 25, then maybe you choose between a permanent 10% prices decrease or a bonus to speech. You dont need these things, but they are bonuses to being level 25. Now that I think about it almost the entire speech and lock picking tree are things that you would choose for perks.

Now on topic, Magic is a bit flawed. Spell get undermined too often. Enemies out level your illusion spells, other enemies absorb your fireball spell like a soft, soothing breeze. Now my level 40 mage can cast about two firestorms in one go, but Id rather have damage increases than cost decreases. I know Bethesda was trying to go for the cast more spell approach but its obvious people dont like it because there is no spell creation. You cant have high level stream spells for some reason. WTF

Anyway those are my two cents.

What was it... I think I got my Destruction Mage to level 20 or so, I think, an had taken Perks in Destruction but Flames only did something like 8 damage per second, maybe 10, couldn't have been 20. Was a level... 40 Destruction if I remember right, and I found Flames to be absolutely useless.

You obviously didn't read Criminal Scums breakout Eric.

Not a big fan of having to pick a Perk from one Magic School I wasn't touching just to make a spell in the Magic School I was using effective.

original poster, I could not agree more. bethesda really missed the boat on magic with the game. glad I don't play spell casters.

I started a mage, and once I realized that the better destruction spells were AOE I was pissed. I hate HATE HATE AOE, most of the time. I literally quit playing my mage once I realized what the destruction magic was going to go down like. I COULD have played it, but it would have not been any fun.

I agree that all magic should be scaled to your level in the appropriate school.
Flames should hit 40 damage a second by the time you hit 100 Destruction. Ice Spike should hit 100 by that time.
Thankfully for PC users, there is a mod for this.
Hopefully for console players Beth will patch this

bethesda please do something: VOX POPULI=VOX DEI

The real difference is that you could have Destruction in Morrowind/Oblivion, and be able to rely on that skill. In Skyrim, you're forced to use Enchanting (for skill cost reduction) or Alchemy (for the ton of potions you'd need for magicka without reduction) and branching into other trees just to have effective attacks. That's wrong, damnit.

I have much more fun with melee than I ever did in Morrowind or Oblivion, but with Destruction so pitiful a straight mage is a lot less enjoyable.