My pure mage is now 34 and the only issue I had so far was the the entire system is incredibly boring.

Bethesda did not manage to properly balance the spells you get, therefore the mana vs effect ratio is borked for most spells but the first ranged damage spells you get. Yes I know there are the other schools and I frequently use them, but:

• Alteration armor buffs are broken and currently have no effect
  
• Summons are nice, but there is only one useful pet until your skill is high enough (and that took be about 30 levels) with an AI that spends half the time shooting walls or getting stuck. Pretty boring.
  
• There is exactly one useful healing spell given the cost/efficiency ration.
  
• Dual-casting destruction spells will cause the enemy to stagger back, literally rendering them helpless if you just cast often enough.

So a common fight (if you play for efficiency) looks like this: summon pet, then dual-cast Firebolt till all enemies are dead, probably throw in a heal if required.
That is by far the most boring magic system I have ever seen in any game. Yes I know I could use the other spells and ignore the fact that they are less efficient, but heck you don't stab a knife in your knee just because you are so fast at running.

Although I can't confirm this, I would say that despite what my armor rating says, I never saw any difference in the amount of damage I received after casting spells that increase armor.

Can anyone else comment on this?

I find fire the least efficient at my level. The extra damage is pretty much meaningless at this point. Stripping stamina and Mana is far more important. Freezing and disintegrate will get you much more control of the situation. 30's are your peak. Play how ever you want but at 45+ you will meet your doom if you stick to fire. Mobs just become too resistant to magic. 45 is where the real challenge begins. CC/Stuns/Stagger/Knock Downs/Debuffs become far more important. You can't just burn down anything you meet anymore. I am trying to get to 80 before the final boss.

Of course your magician setup is destined to fail. Do not blame the developers or other gamers for your fail fit setup. Behind Orcs, Nords are the second least magically suited race in the TES fantasy world. If you want to impose your own limitations on your game play, such as the above bit of fan fiction suggests, that is great and I wish you the best of luck with it. You do have a responsibility to yourself to accept the fact that you are intentionally working against the game's intentional framework (which is a valid way to play if you're looking for role-playing immersion and increased difficulty), and it is outright daft to start complaining when your intended setup collapses upon itself. Maybe you should conclude that your obstinate Nord novice was simply not cut out to survive in the harsh wintery world of Skyrim, and let the next death be his "true death". In other words, throw him to the junk pile and start anew.

There are three races that traditionally lend themselves to magic in TES: Altmer, Breton, and Dunmer. My Breton wizard has been chilling, roasting, and shocking his way across Skyrim; and I am constantly changing spells to keep from getting murdered by baddies. You also (ideally) have to plan on how you're going to enter into a fight before it actually happens as a wizard, and not be afraid to fall back on something else (I keep a Steel Dagger) in a real crunch. If you're not going to use Conjuration, which is making your hard setup even harder (but that's your choice), make sure you have a mercenary tagging along that can take away some of the aggression. There are plenty of ways to make a very effective and powerful Mage in TES V -- start getting creative.

I have played "pure" wizard characters since Morrowind, and I recall how annoying it was when Oblivion cut out a great number of spells (losing Levitation made me very sad). A number of people have mocked Water Walking on this thread, but I can also say that this was another one of those heavily used spells I relied upon which I will now have to give up. Of course, people exploited Levitation so that they never needed to walk anywhere and could avoid any nasty NPC encounters between caves (for those of you who do not know, fast travel was introduced with Oblivion; and one of the biggest annoyances -- besides Cliffracers --- was getting ambushed by some NPC death squad 15 seconds away from your Quest location after spending 45 minutes trekking through the wilderness and needing to do it all over again). Water Walking allowed me to move quickly on the water routes if I wanted to skirt an area in likewise fashion. Aside from an official complaint by the Vatican or the lobby group Catholic Gamers for Holy Christ, I'm not sure why it would have been pulled out ....

I've always played casters in TES games and never used mods to adjust the vanilla mechanics, but if the devs don't expand, fix, and rebalance, I'll certainly be looking for a mod that does--and that really saddens me. Why would they think we'd want fewer undertuned abilities? I assumed that the deal with removing spellcrafting was that they would provide a wide array of well-balanced spells--and that when we outgrew one spell we could buy an equally (or more, since we're more skilled) efficient replacement. Definitiely not the case. I love the world of Skyrim, but the magic system feels unfinished.

I keep wondering whether this is the result of their reading all the warrior pleas not to make magic too strong this time. Exact balance doesn't matter in a single-player game, but constantly feeling limited is unfun. I notice that they didn't do the same thing with stamina. The weapon skills don't start with perks that reduce the stamina cost of swinging by a percentage. If they thought resource starvation would be fun, why didn't they let everyone share the joy?

No.

I planning to max out perks on Destr, conj and rest.leaving me 6 perks at lvl 50.

The very best thing about ths thread are "I play on Easy, I'm already level 4 and I see no problem with being pure mage. The OP is just whining." posters

rofl yeah they are pretty funny



when does the Construction Kit come out? ?

double post*/oops

Your magicka regenerates faster in this game that any game before. There are robes that increase your magicka regen by 100%, plus hoods, and jewelry that you can add. Use every school of magicka at your disposal, not just destruction and restoration. I personally find the most productive school to be conjuration.

Conjuration certainly is the most powerful school from what I've seen. Then its alteration after that.

A mage with maxed alteration/conjuration using summoned bow is probably a far better choice than using destruction at all. Hell with some bow perks you'll probably be doing far more damage and end up saving your entire mana bar for emergency recasts of dragonhide, summons,bow.

While at times my character feels a bit weak, there are other times where my mage feels incredibly powerful.

Fire Wall for example, something like 50 damage per SECOND? Considering how cramped the dungeons are, anything will be dead in a few seconds. With some good gear and perks I can fill an entire room with Fire Wall and still have well over half my Magicka left...and the enemies are taking 50 a SECOND. Combine that with a few fireballs (which at Full Magicka I can shoot off about 6 of those before I'm OOM, and things die quickly.

The thing with being a Mage is you need to be versatile, use ALL the magic available in the game, not just PURE destruction. Destruction is for killing things, but there is more to being a mage then that. Perk up restoration, some great perks in there.

The only problem I have with being a mage is that even at something like +300% Magicka regen, I still have to sit there for 30 seconds to recharge during a fight. They need to increase the combat regen a bit.

Also, USE STAFFS!!!! Staffs cost no magicka and are a very mage like weapon. If you complete the College quest line, you get the Staff of Magnus, and you never worry about Magicka ever again, lol.

Even as someone who usually played as a conjurer when conjuration was much-maligned (for reasons I still don't fully understand, but which apparently wound up making conjuration overpowered in this game), this doesn't seem like a satisfying answer to me.

The answer shouldn't be "Destruction is supposed to svck", the answer should be that destruction should somehow scale with the player in a way that the enemies and melee and other forms of magic are capable of doing.

Simply having some sort of mechanic to make the damage of your destruction spells scale upwards along with level just like everything else isn't a crazy idea.

I gotta agree with this, some way to increase your damage through gear would be a nice addition.

I think the base damage should have been based on how much total Magicka you have.

Would give a use to those +Magicka items that are fairly useless. +regen is always better.

Would make High Elfs (what I rolled) naturally a little better at dealing damage too, since they are with higher magicka.

Doing it now would likely be impossible to balance, but it would be nice to increase damage SOMEHOW outside of the flat perk upgrades.

erhm... well my mage is in his late 20's using dual casting powerup for it and mobs lvl 10-18 attacks barely scratch me, some power attacks are a menace if hit multiple times in a short time, same level ones I have to kite but my protection against fast swings is more than adequate, power attacks are a menace, two hander sprint charge attacks can take about 60-70% of my health, but they can only use those if I neglected to target them with my frost spells.

all in all I feel close to as hardy as my warrior in heavy armor without blocking/shield, I think alteration is a must have for any type of pure caster, and it provides much better stuff than any armor, needless to say I still dont have all the armor multiplying perks in alteration (mage armor)

200+ posts

I haven't read any of this thread, beyond the OP, but Skyrim is the first time I've ever played a pure mage in a CRPG and I'm loving it. There have been maybe three or four times I've had to resort to melee, and only twice (one being a dragon) I've needed to use magicka potions. Magicka consumption does start rather high, but with a few perks and some novice equipment this is reduced quite a lot. By the time I reached the College at level 5 I had largely left melee behind me.