Level 47, Without gear - 100 HP (lol) 560 Magicka 100 Stamina
All spell schools @ 100 (w/Master spells), perks focused on Alteration(lol), Conjuration, Destruction (lol). Lockpicking/Speech/Sneak/Enchanting is fairly high. Also ALCHEMY.

Summary - Destruction is garbage, Alteration is garbage, Restoration is garbage, Use Conjuration, Illusion and Alchemy (potions) instead.

>>>>>> Destruction Magic - At low levels destruction is fine. Since a lot of people are complaining about destruction magic, let me reiterate.
At levels 1 - 15ish, (I think), I felt that destruction magic was Strong with a capital S. Even at master difficulty

Problems start around the time you try for the Master level spells. Problems REALLY start when you hit 25+

To put it simply Master level destruction spells SSSSSUUUUCCCKKKK at high levels. 2 of them are point blank aoes to boot (although you can get around this problem with one of them).

They all require about 5 seconds of cast time, in which you are rooted. So if you didn't plan ahead for each and every battle, you are dead. Firestorm at the higher levels is the single most useless spell in my repertoire.
Blizzard is a basically an over-sized time constrained rune. Albeit a really good one. Lightning Storm is your finisher or trash smasher
(Blizzard is technically better at this if you know they are all going to rush through a chokepoint). They along with runes and the cloak spells do an awesome job of clearing damn near everything.
Until you hit about level 25ish (I'm really sure it was around then).

Then @ 25- 30 you find out for some reason the chieftain/wights start making it through. And at level 47. Well lol. It takes quite literally (counted),
10 seconds to down a Snow Bear, not counting the 5 second wind up time, and about the same amount of time for the Draugr Wights and equivalent strength mob. One mob.
If he has friends, you are screwed. If there are two chieftain/wights w/e you are screwed. If you get ambushed by one or more of these, you are screwed.
Forget dragons, elder dragons take a good 15-20 seconds of constant pummeling from Lightning Storm (good luck trying to get it to land in a blizzard if you get attacked in an open area).
I'm glad I encountered a the majority of the dragon priests/liches before I hit 30, cause it would probably be impossible to beat them now.

I can imagine even with 3x the HP that I currently have (yeah didn't think that one through), I would still be dead, considering that I literally die in 1 swing to strong mobs.
You get 300 Armor from max out mage armor ebonyflesh, and that still won't save you if you don't plan carefully.
In fact a lot of the time I find that if I have to depend on it at all, I'm pretty much dead anyway, since even with hypothetically 3x the amount of HP I have, I would still go down in about 2 - 3 seconds.
Or I would if not for alchemy. I love pots. The various kinds of hp/magicka pots and the wonderful resist pots.

Without pots, I can see why people are complaining about the destruction school even at normal difficulty once you get around to using the expert spells.
Cause at level 12+ the game is going to start being considerably nastier to you, (15ish if you really get all of the easier quests/encounters out of the way).

All in all destruction magic is pretty bad. Not even compared to melee - which is a hell of a lot stronger even if you don't do that stupid alchemy/enchanting trick, but compared to its superior brother - Conjuration.
Destruction also has bad synergy with other schools as well until you deck yourself in solid magicka spell cost reduction gear (which I don't have...).

The Destruction line probably needs a serious buff in terms of damage scaling at later levels. Especially considering how stupidly strong melee can be.

>>>>>Conjuration - Conjuration is the school you want if you want damage and survivability in one. You get a tanky (2 tanky) mobs that deal solid damage while you stand way back with some calm/fear/frenzy spells just in case.
Illusion is the other line you probably want to spec deep into first if you want to optimize your mage, being able to control any aggressors that aren't focusing on your summons is a big help.
Considering that you can summon stuff before a battle begins, and use your magicka for other spells in battle makes things a lot easier. I'm not a fan of melee as a mage
(cause I was stupid and maxed out magicka instead of putting at least a bunch of points into HP), but even with my garbage hp/stamina pool, the bound weapons pulled my ass out of the fire a few times.
Plus they get somewhat useful buffs from the conjuration tree. All in all I found this school of spells to be excellent. I do wish I had more spells to play around with, but then again that goes for all of the schools.
It would be really nice if we had some control over what our summons did, but we've never had that ability anyway with the ES games, so I don't mind that much.

>>>>>>Illusion - Illusion is the other offensive school. Sort of. I have a love/hate relationship with this school, but then again, I admittedly only use this school of spells as a backup when things go wrong,
and never really tried to go through several encounters just using the calm/frenzy/fear line. Also didn't put enough perks in this one. Will have to reroll prob.

>>>>>>Alteration/Restoration - One of the most disappointing things about Skyrim regarding magic - other than the lack of spellcrafting and the garbage destruction school,
was the ton of spells they removed, even though a lot of them were there simply for lore/fun/drunken bets, many of the other spells helped flesh out the other schools.
Like Alteration and Restoration, which are now solely support schools. And pretty terrible ones at that. Both schools can almost be entirely replaced by potions. The end.

>>>>For those that want to roll a mage, especially if you insist on using destruction as a main source of damage and want to play on master difficulty and want to progress through the entire game.<<<<

****LEVEL ALCHEMY****. Pots are your friend. You are dead if you do not have pots. Like 20 of health and mana pots, the good ones, made with alchemy bonuses. For each encounter.
You are going to be drinking them like water in a desert. The other ones are helpful, but especially the hp/hp regen/hp regen and the magicka equivalent ones.
Alchemists probably have mansions and daedric plated armor for their horses from all of the reagents/recipies and training that I've bought from them.

Magicka regen bonuses are terrible, they have little to no effect once you are in combat (you know when you actually need them). Don't bother with them.
Enchant your own set (working on mine atm, embarrassing at level 47), to have flat magicka cost reduction bonuses.

Plan ahead, no really, use runes, target specific/critical targets (npc mages/archers) and use frost spells to sap/slow the enemy down, while kiting like mad. If you want ezmode, go roll a warrior.

Open spaces are generally your friend. Small enclosed areas, even with rune spells and blizzard is not. All it takes is for one or two enemies to slip through while you are dealing an enemy caster.
Even with pots you are probably screwed as they'll chew through your pitiful hp pool and armor, and stagger you if you try to cast any of the master level spells.

I actually kinda like Alteration, the 80% reduced physical damage and big spell damage reduction are nice. Paralyze also comes in handy.

None of them are as bad as Destro though, I agree with you on that.

I stopped reading after you said resto svcks. 1 adept resto spell and my char is fully healed with only 5% magicka taken away. Much better than using potions.

I wish people would read this and stop arguing that Destruction or the many other trees of Magic are fine. It's like they are 1 of the 2 other classes and don't want Magic to be brought up to be on par / slightly worse (not the craptastic difference we have now) with Melee/Archery.

1 decent pot with alchemy bonuses and I'm fully healed.

0% magicka taken away.

With my (expansive) magicka pool, Blizzard takes up about half of my entire pool, if I was stupid/suicidal/bored Firestorm takes up even more.
You need all the magicka you can get in the middle of a fight.

Pots cost nothing, restoration spells do. Wards are even stupider IMO. Cause the longer you hold up that ward, the less magicka you have. Meanwhile you are dealing even
less damage over time. In other words you are delaying the inevitable.

I know I read somewhere than this game is unfriendly to folks trying to be very focused on a "pure" type character. My mage char keeps the blade skill handy. Just in case. Can use illusion, restoration and destruction, but still has a blade and poison to fall back on.

Now< I haven't reached level 25 or anywhere csoe yet because I keep getting killed. I only am saying I read somewhere than min/maxing might be real hard in this game. We;ll see soon enough. 100 health is not good for level 25 methinks.

do the expert and master destruction spells carry on scaling at high levels? is there damage based on destruction skill? and/or level?

You get a set of perks that give a flat 50% increase in damage, which costs 6 points in total for all 3 types of damage.

And thats it. Destruction skill/level doesn't count. Or if it does because of some hidden math, nowhere near enough.

You gotta take time in-game to use that heal tho. You can stop everything so that you can use a potion. Potions make the big bucks too.

I feel pretty damn good when I have 30 health potions and a good buffer of health to make sure I don't die instantly. Restoration becomes almost moot except it can perhaps save you some money.

I agree with this. In the beginning of the game, Flames is where it's at. Then you get frostbite and you're rolling in the DPS. Then you get to combine the two into a big stream of damage and a higher leveled spell, They see me rollin'. Then it all crashes down around you. You find your first Draughr Wight and suddenly, destruction spells just don't cut it. The damage difference between the runes and the regular spells is also ridiculous. I just switched over to runes at one point and that pretty much destroys things. Then that stopped working and once that stopped working, I picked up an enchanted sword and suddenly, things die quicker. It's like all the mobs have an ungodly level of elemental resistance and nothing against weapon damage types. The axe of whiterun quite literally destroys a lot of things with a single power strike.

And quite frankly, the only useful perk in the entire destruction skill set is impact, which gives you a chance to stagger and rehit with a leveled combination spell, which even then, usually ends up just being a flashy determent. So yeah, I started out pure mage, then realized I was getting my butt kicked, moved over to one handed and found out that the conjured weapons are boss along with the summoned creatures. And revenant? That's a beast. being able to revive a mob as an ally - because also apparently the mage mobs have higher spell damage than you ever will and somehow also have the worst resistance - how does this work? Shouldn't the wights be bad against cold? we need to go back to morrowind up in here and re-balance resistances and bufffs.

Do you think you can spec heavy armour as a mage with full enchantment? increase magika with stamina to increase inventory to hold heavy enchanted armour ?

Technically the only reason why you would use robes is for the supposed bonuses to regen and decrease in spell cost.
But you have a gazillion potions and you have the (lol) spell cost reduction perks. Plus you could always enchant the armor to have even better spell cost reduction.

So yeah, if you are willing to put in the time and gold , that would probably be the way to go.

Which is what I'm doing at the moment actually. Just gotta level smithing. =/

It is possible, the only problem is that you will have to enchant the items yourself. Virtually no one in the game supplies heavy armor with magicka related enchantments. Well, that isn't a problem I suppose. The real problem is that the enchantments won't be worth anything until you really raise the enchantment skill; which means you're going to be neglecting your other skills early on.

The game is extremely biased for mages being in robes, and you will be hard pressed to find any actual armor not hand crafted that boosts magicka until you are an adept or expert enchanter.

As for OP, I agree with most of what you said. Destruction doesn't scale, so it is flat out not useful when the scaling turns against it. I'm also glad I'm not the only person who doesn't like alteration. It cannot compare with crafted armor, and that's what the majority of the school is supposed to do. Granted, it does give paralysis and dragonhide, but those are two rather high level spells that you will have to suffer through crap to get to.

Conjuration and illusion are the best schools as they do something quite useful that both scale. I have a little more respect for restoration, but I agree that it is weaker this time around.

And if you're going to Enchant, you might as well take Smithing up, also, spending even more perks on just armor and being unable, once again, to do no damage. :/




But if Destruction is that good in the beginning (I wouldn't know because I've only been playing warriors/thieves), then it shouldn't make too big a difference... Theoretically, in the mind of someone who has no idea... Lol.

found non-enchanted heavy armour not good enough?

i wonder if the increased armour of heavy armour to robes will negate the lack of hp.. hmmmmmm

thinking tis just a bit more survivability.. so u dont get 2/3 shot.

deep enchantment = 2x enchant on 1 item...fotify destruction(lol)?

The only comment I really have is that level 30 isn't even half way to the theoretical max, I would consider it fairly low in level.

Yeah well, I didn't want to go full derp and go hurf blurf I'm level 47 (well, 52 now) bow before me scrubs.

Although seeing as how those are the titles/threads that seem to get the most traffic. Maybe I should have.