After MUCH looking into the whole debate throughout the depths of the forums, the one striking piece of evidence of overpowered melee is the video someone posted in another thread. Given that, I still don't feel that casters need to be given a boost, but rather melee needs tamed down a notch.

If they boosted destruction scaling, they would have to improve the health of every npc out there significantly. The smallest fix without chancing any overkill on the gameplay would be to tame down melee bonuses. There is absolutely no reason an elder dragon should die in one hit, regardless of buffs, items, and perks used. That is just ridiculous.

I have started a couple big threads on the topic and I still side with my original argument. I think casters should be required to rely on other perks just as much as melee does from enchanting and blacksmithing in this case. I just don't think that any character should have that kind of ability.

Back in the days of Morrowind, everyone seemed set on tweaking out massive stats to gain these powers, but in todays time everyone is resenting it. The reason I stand by the whole point of this thread is because at what point does the game become too easy to play and you must start over? You can always create a new character, but knowing how to do it in it's own will kill the experience as an adventure.

All of that aside, I think any single player game will have an ending point. It's not an mmorpg where pvp is integrated, so at some point it will come to a stand still. I just don't feel that it should be as easy to do as some people have found ways of actually doing it.

That is all.

Well, I think that Enchanting should benefit the actual damage output of Magic. I also think that Blacksmithing/Enchanting benefits to weapon damage/armor needs to be toned down.

why? your not competing against anyone but the environment... Some players are not as skilled as you are at the game you know.

The game is only becoming to easy because the people who one shot elder dragons choose to. If you did not want to one shot a dragon then you simply wouldnt use blacksmithing and enchanting to break the game. You do not become terribly overpowered normally without these buffs. It does not affect YOU when another personis overpowered in a single player game so why do you care? I would love magic to have a bit of a damage boost (not much but a bit would be nice) but it works fine the way it is.

Actually, you don't have to do everything as either "buffing" or "nerfing" in one go, you can do both at the same time.

I would actually like to see magic magnitude based off of maximum magicka (which would functionally be based off of player level, as modified by how much they invest in magicka compared to anything else), and they could simply make destruction magic weaker at the lower ends of the spectrum to compensate.

Alternately, or perhaps additionally, you can give mages some sort of off-hand weapon (I prefer something like a book, but hey, an incense censor, an orb of power, a wand, magic token, protractor, whatever, can also be used) that can be enchanted for magic magnitude increases, as well.

This isn't just for destruction, either, there's no reason Illusion should have a set limit to the level of the enemies some spells can affect, and then just make the spells become obsolete and waste away in your spellbook forever, you can simply scale your illusion spells up, and only have to buy one spell that just increases in power.

You can also balance this with increases in casting time or magicka consumption as you rank up, but then give players an option to use some sort of slider that says to use a half-power shot to conserve energy or fire faster.

Conversely, with enchantment and smithing plus alchemy, what this game needs is a logarithmic growth rate instead of a linear one when it comes to enchanted equipment power. If you take the square root (or some similar power) of the effective skill level instead of just the outright skill level, the diminishing return on investment will take care of your problem itself.