Lately I've been doing a lot of research on these two topics. The game does look amazing and I am on the side that destruction magic is fine as it is. However there may be some evidence out there for those who were dissapointed with either department.

I did some fiddling with character levels and it appears that when I artificially force my character skill level to 100 in destruction magic, it does indeed seem to scale. Don't know why that is exactly. All of my spells were more powerful after I artificially leveled and I hadn't taken ANY perks in the school (since I just used the console). Don't know exactly what that means if anything but it only took me around 6 fireballs to kill a draugh highlord or whatever. Only took one firewall to do so. I got the idea to test this out from someone on another thread I had started (which reached post limit )

Again I have no idea what that may correlate to but either consol leveling screws something up or something is srewed up in the game itself. Secondly the bad "close-up" textures could be an issue of bad dynamic streaming, which includes textures due to a bug. Some people are already working on this but files appear to make use of tesselation and yet don't in the game?

I don't know what this implies either. I'd be fine if the game stayed exactly the way it is personally but this may be addressed in the future.

It's also notable to note (hehe) that the first day one patch also attempted to correct the same texture tesselation issue. But only seemed to do so when the player is outside of a certain distance. The game seems to have trouble switching to it's close resolution textures. Don't get your hopes up but there is some evidence that things aren't working as intended for a few of these systems. Further pointing to this is the fact that the first patch was literally only for textures, hinting that there was, and probly still is, significant problems in getting them to appear correctly.

Although there is a minute compilation of evidence for both of these cases we should not conclude that these things are "broken" so to speak. Its quite possible that the textures in skyrim are just more noticeable because the macro view is so grand. Contrast makes everything stand out far more whereas oblivion has pretty much consistant graphics throughout. (At least I never noticed any jarringly worse textures then others while playing it). So that could be the problem right there, skyrim being TOO graphically grand on a large scale, thus calling them to attention when you get close.

Its also possible that destruction magic works as intended. Being that magic reduction costs seem to be scaling appropriately.

bumping it as I think it was swept up in the sea. Really looking for either some insight into this or some confirmations

anyone on this? I would think this would be pretty large news for people talking about this...

Care to provide some examples?

If Flames takes X magicka per second and does Y damage at skill 15....

Are you saying those values are different at skill 100? I'm curious what the exact numbers are.

I didn't actually buy a lot of spells for the test. It was very quick. I simply consoled myself to skill level 100 and level 50 (to make the world scale accordingly). Got myself the most basic destruction spell in the game, fireball. From level 16 (I believe it was started at) it did around 10 damage. After skilling to 100 it did 28.

Both values were different yes. It seemed that the magic cost went down and the damage went up when I consol leveled. It does seem to work this way for NPC's since their spells clearly are level dependent.

Still can't tell which one isn't working properly. Whether its the artificial leveling or the game itself.

As far as the texture issue goes. There seems to be quite a following that now believes the same around the internet. Naturally all of these people could, and maybe are, completely wrong. There DOES seem to be an issue with the dynamic streaming though. A serious problem. For those who may not be quite as aware the dynamic streaming has an almost direct effect on close up textures. Still not enough evidence to tell if the streaming is restricting close up detail but the possibility is there. Many people are pointing towards the last patch for confirmation. Considering that it, too, tried to deal with dynamic streaming in the game. It seems it is still broken, however.

Interesting, indeed. I would love to see some other people test this (I'm playing as a rogue assassin, but would like to do a mage in the future).

Yeah I'm hoping a lot of people will see this as it hasn't really hit these forums yet it seems. Although its virtually everywhere else.

There are some modders out there actually hoping to beat bethesda to the punch in fixing the dynamic streaming portion. I'll be curious to see what that yields. Don't know exactly what that will change but its pretty clear bethesda tried to fix it on release day but it just didn't work. That first patch was pretty much useless as it was hoped that it WOULD fix dynamic streaming but didn't really do very much. Bethesda did anounce a patch for all platforms "comming soon". The most interesting part about the graphics issue is the evidence of tesselation inclusion though.

The fact that some of these items in the game (such as snow covered walls in windhelm seem to be designed to make use of tesselation. And yet when the game is running it just doesn't happen for some reason.

I have a theory that the dynamic streaming is stopping tesselation from comming through. Obviously though its impossible to test since the problem is extremely complex. I'm majoring in computer science and specializing in programming and am still baffled by this issue. Not only do I have no idea how one would fix it but how this happened in the first place is beyond me.

The magic thing:

This is interesting to me too. It could only be one of two things. Either consol leveling works around a bug in the natural progression and is working as intended. Or that by consol leveling I have essentially become an NPC in the games eyes and thus they scale my spells by some percentage.

Either of these could be rational explanations.