One of my biggest grievances with the changes from previous ES games to Skyrim is the inability to get better at many skills out of combat. Namely, I'm looking at Magic skills. If you successfully cast a spell (say firebolt for example), it shouldn't matter that I cast it at a person, a training dummy, or a wall. This is especially irritating with shield spells and the like.

Then, I see the reason for the change: magicka regen. With regen as fast as it is (especially out of combat), leveling up a spell group out of combat would be trivial. In previous ES games, you had to rest in order to regen magicka, so spending your entire magicka pool for training purposes was met with the need to spend several hours in a bed recuperating.

Really, I'm just curious as to how people feel about this. I do not want to return to a MW style where casting a trainer spell 2000 times got you to 100 destro in 20 minutes. There was a mod in that game (can't remember the name) that scaled XP gain from casting to the amount of magicka the spell cost to cast. I would also advocate that at certain skill levels, low level / low (base) cost spells would return 0 XP. Perhaps the ideal situation would be a happy medium, though. Maybe you gain more XP from casting spells in combat as a compromise. Of course, this has to go along with very much reduced magicka regen, very much reduced base magicka cost for spells, and a slightly buffed magicka pool, so that you aren't forced to rest after killing a single enemy.

Thoughts?

Magicka Based Skill Progression (MBSP). I think someone also did the same for Oblivion via OBSE.

Higher level spells give you more experience when you cast them.

Fireball levels destruction faster than firebolt for example, and incinerate is even faster.

Considering that Skyrim is not meant to be a life sim, I like the way it is done now.

It is already scaled (though by your target and not by the cost of the spell) and I find that it works fine in my experience.

Though I find spells to be is awfully under-powered on higher difficulties. You pretty much need potions to make it comparable to normal weapon/attacks. A Mod that adds % dmg to spells would go a long way to repair this gap.