I love reading all these post about people claiming mages need to be buffed and how magic is not effective. My highest character is a magic only user and I couldnt be more happy. I think people are failing to realize being a mage doesnt mean spamming destruction spells 24/7. If you incorporate all magic spells such as Charm,Fear,Fury I think you will be more than pleased with your character. It is about using different spells for different situations. Stop your crying.

I blame mmo's and the meter monkeys

A good warrior build centers around ~3 skills. For instance: Heavy armor, Block, Two-handed.
A good rogue build centers around ~4 skills. For instance: Light armor, sneak, one-handed, ranged

It's no different for mage builds, but it's just easier to get sidetracked. People pick up ~8 skills and expect to be powerful. That's not now this game works

Yep, I'm also getting the impression people are just spamming destruction spells while willfully ignoring the other schools of magic.

Yep, this game is wonderfully full of depth and complexity. I love my mage, too,

You must be on normal and not past level 30 where your spells stop scaling.

Level 12 and I'm tempted to re-roll as a mage.. getting kind of bored of slashing with my duel weilds and archery is only effective if you can score the sneak bonus. I need some diversity in my skyrim life.

I haven't played on higher difficulty levels. I'm sure the challenges increase. Do the rewards increase proportionally, too?

I use destro, resto, alteration, enchanting. 4 magic skills. My damage scales extremely poorly compared to theif/warrior.

What say you?

Flame+Healing= GGOGOGGOOOOOOOOOODLIKE

I'm not sure I agree with that. The more skills you take, the slower you level and the less difficult the mobs you face. The fewer skills you take, the faster you level and the higher mobs you take. Theoretically, this should balance out. But the advantage of taking more skills i the diverity you get in choosing particular skills for a particular situation. Destruction and Restoration will only get you so far, whereas having the control and subtlety of Conjuration and Illusion can let you focus your damage more effectively. While it may be true that damage doesn't scale well, it' is also true that control also scales and should be enough to compensate.

I'm not very far but I've been mainly destro-spamming with great effectiveness. This thread is somewhat good news to me. I was hoping this was not going to be the whole game.

My first character was a rogue/archer, whom I skilled up in Marksmanship, One-handed, sneak and pickpocketing. I played this character to level 19, and completed the thieves guild, and focused on exploring the world, while I didn't focus on the main quest at all.

This got boring after a while, so I decided to make a new character.. This should be a mage. Since level 1 I've used only two skillsets, Destruction and restoration... and it's awesome!
Kill entire cities if you will, and if you get damaged, you'll heal to max hp in a few seconds.
I completed the main questline, and the academy, and I'm currently level 16 or so with my mage, so still a lot to do, I hope

And for the record. I played as a stealth-archer in Oblivion, yet, Skyrim has so much more to offer for a mage IMO