No, it's broken. My warriors/rogues don't need to change the difficulty why should my mage? (They clean house, without exploits!!) Their weapons level, and mages don't maybe? They also continue to hit when stamina hits 0, mages can not cast spells (or "use their weapon") when mana runs out.



Fine, your just a mage then, not pure mage.

I'll stop wearing armor when the xxxxflesh spells become sustained spells that only need to be cast once, like they are in games like Dragon Age. I'll probably implement this as soon as the CK comes out - casting oakflesh activates the spell, which would have infinite duration, but decrease the size of your magicka reserves by a set amount equal to the original cost of the spell divided by the original duration of the spell. Casting it again would deactivate it (the same would go for spells like candlelight and detect life - darker dungeon mods are awesome, but having to recast your flashlight every 60 seconds is incredibly annoying.) There also needs to be a real advantage to not wearing armor. What I'm also considering doing is adding the ability to dodge, like you could in Unreal games by double tapping the directional buttons, but having the dodge speed/distance/stamina cost vary depending on the weight of your armor. Those protection spells as well as magic related enchantments should also be stronger for cloth wearers than armor wearers.

I just downloaded that earlier today after starting my Altmer mage yesterday. (Literally just started. I just got off the cart and saved.)

Why are we mages so nit-picky.

Why are there so many strict rules to play a "mage" without mods?

"take this and that and this and that"

I know, it svcks. That was what I did changing my pure mage into a battle-mage.



:biggrin: I don't know, but I am.

me too :biggrin:

The thing is, overly powerful is easy to attain, too easy really...as long as you're playing some sort of physical build. The armor cap can be reached wearing hide armor and the magic cap can be reached with a few perks, a birthstone and a single enchant. After that it's just a matter of how you want to kill your enemies. I got bored one shotting everything with my daedric greatsword, so now on my barbarian I enchanted a set of armor for 100% cost reduction and just just run into groups and spam flames until everything is burnt to a crisp.

Did you ever consider that destruction is fine, but swords not requiring stamina and slightly overpowered archery is the stuff that is instead overpowered? I have little magic resistance, so dragons and powerful magic users are problematic for me. But for the rest (now that I'm high level), there is no challenge whatsoever. And this is on master. However, on lower levels things were furiously hard (I still loved it though), and countless times did I have to simply run away.

I'm not nit-picky. I'm detail oriented.

And what are these other options that you need to use as a swordsman other than using - swords to improve your damage? Whereas those playing mage-based characters need conjuration to boost destruction and enchanting just to be able to cast the damn spells more than three times?!

I'd love to hear it! Remember, we are comparing damage trees, DO NOT wade in here with any defense bs! It is non-applicable to this topic.

That works.

Well to be fair, you don't NEED to level smithing and enchanting to do more damage with your sword, but it sure as hell helps. You may think you are the uber-badass while wielding your plane-jane daedric sword, but it has nothing on the damage you can do with it fully smithed and while wearing four pieces of 1h damage enchanted armor.

This is why I think Conjuration is a must for mages and possibly the best tree for pure mages. With 2 summoned creatures, you will rarely have to worry about taking any damage. I reached 100 by level 20. But with some skill grinding, 100 can be reached much earlier than level 20.

Thank you for proving the point! You don't NEED smithing/enchanting/alchemy or whatever to make your weapon of choice stronger. Destruction mages do.

Wait... You don't want to use what the game is offering you to use? As a fighter/archer I still have to use a lot of tactics and tricks to survive the best enemies, I have to use potions (found), shouts, but sometimes I get one shotted too, and ancient dragons I can't get close to and they are pretty much guaranteed to take me out in one blow if they get lucky. I don't call this tedious. I call this fun.


No, you're still saying that you're a mage, which you are not. You're a pure destruction mage. You try entering a room full of death lords relying on nothing but your one handed skill and see what happens. You want to compare only damage dealt per skill. That's wrong. You have to look at the total survivability when doing various builds putting perks into various skill trees. That's what matters. Time spent in a fight as a mage (mixed skills put to use) vs time spent in a fight as a fighter (mixed skills put to use). I don't claim that the system is perfectly balanced, because so many builds possible makes that an impossibility. But if you up destruction as a damage dealer, the mixed builds can easily become overpowered and boring, with the exception that they have nothing more to adjust.

Others in this thread seems to be doing mage builds quite nicely, high level on master, and even on relying on the typical things you want to avoid. Tried giving companions some powerful staffs? What about daedric artifact staffs? But you seem to want to avoid absolutely everything else except destruction and still be able to beat the game on high difficulty. Something just doesn't add up for me.

And as I said, I'd be more than happy to see fighters having to worry more about stamina management than we currently do. There are plenty of potions to be found all over the place, and we have the stamina available to carry them around (maybe unlike the magicka potion users).

Oh, and trust me, my first character was severely mismanaged, and I was forced to restart. It doesn't just happen to mages. I got lucky, it happened/I noticed, early in the game. Of course I could have reduced the difficulty, but that hurts my ego. Is that your problem too perhaps?

I hear that the game is a breeze for high lvl melee/archers. If you will permit me to say it, perhaps "you're not doing it right"?

THIS! and the removal of spells ( open lock, feather, water walking, etc.)

I think if they scaled all spells and fixed magicka costs a bit that the lack of spell making wouldn't have been an issue.

But they added neither :sadvaultboy:

My survivability as a new mage is horrible compared to that of a sword and board or even a 2h fighter. New mages have zero going for them, I'm not into mages in armor I'm no huge RP guy but I do draw the line there, so when I have one spell that is only cast far enough to still get hit with a sword it's not much of a spell. I don't want to have to deal with companions because honestly they are more in the way then they are useful to me. I don't want to have to summon because I'm back to having companions. I just want to be able to cast enough damage to be viable and this game isn't set up for that. You will run out of mana before you can deal with anything more then two mobs. (and I'm sure if you trudged through the early game and are 40-50th level it's different, I'm not talking that) Bottom line is mage direct damage is this game is broken. Melee have better defense and better damage, by far. I'm not calling for change because many seem to make it work, I'm just not one of them so I have given up playing a mage.

In any fantasy game I've played magic is stronger then melee, hence the fact mages need "mana" or have a limited number of spells they can cast. When a game comes out that nerfs the damage of these spells and still puts the limits of mana on them it because a problem. I feel like my old school DnD pen and paper mage... I cast Magic Missile.. I cast magic missile.. crap out of spells.. I throw a dart. That is indeed broken.

Actually, you kinda missed my point. For one thing it wasn't really fair because unless you found that daedric sword just lying around somewhere, you had to craft it, meaning you had to raise your smithing. All things being equal, relying on say one-handed and nothing else would have you running around with an iron sword for the entire game, and even fully perked you're not going to be doing much damage with that at all. In order to get the most out of a weapon skill you need to augment it with other support skills. The problem I think with destruction is that even when augmented you're not going to get anywhere close to the same amount of damage output.

That's right, I don't want to use one broken thing to help another. If it was percentage based, not 100%, I might not be so harsh on it, but it's not. Maybe you find sitting there flinging mud at an enemy that can do nothing to save itself fun, I do not however.



Isn't that what I've been saying? Yes, I want to be a destruction (=as your offensive weapon) mage, BUT I CAN"T!!! Not effectively/efficiently.

I feel like a bloody dog chasing it's tale. Are you trying to ignore all the posts that keep repeating this?

It's broken, simple as that. Destruction, as a weapon, should scale, like physical weapons. No if, ands or buts about it! They don't though.

Why shouldn't defense be considered? Destruction allows damage at range, which allows your primary offensive skill to be used defensively. Impact allows for a more flexible defense (along with the near-worthless Deep Freeze/Disintigrate/Fast & Furious Flame perks).

I wouldn't think a 1H/2H build would be very viable if damage alone was the consideration--why should Destruction be any different?

It really sounds like the OP is just using console commands to try everything out.

Bs! My MAGE has found all kinds of great one handers that made me wish that I was playing a melee at the time. Not to mention the many MAGICAL and LEGENDARY weapons and equipment in the game to take care of all your hacking needs!

With all of your perks and the fact that you weapon scales as you level, you do not require anything else.