Other way around. Skyrims magic is the best as far as Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim goes. I havent plaed the others.

I think we can agree that certain aspects improved, certain aspects are a step down. This is evident in all TES games.

In Skyrim, the lack of variety in the schools of magic is evident. That's magics greatest flaw. Waterwalking, open lock, dispel, summons and a number of other spells were lost from Oblivion to Skyrim, and dozens of other spells have been lost since Arena.

Graphically, Skyrim is the best in the series. Fire looks like fire, lightning looks like lightning and all magic looks fearsome. Bound weapons have their own unique appearance, instead of having the same appearance as Daedric weaponry.

Mechanically, Skyrim has had some upgrades too. This area is a matter of opinion - whether you prefer the wind-up-and-hope-it-works style of Morrowind's magic, the press-to-cast of Oblivion's magic or the two-hands-shared-with-weapons of Skyrim's magic is subjective. I, for one, am a huge fan of dual-casting, especially with the Impact perk. We also have a greater variety of spell types (not effects) - constant stream spells, walls, runes and wards have been added in Skyrim, in addition to the traditonal on-touch, on-target and on-self spell types.

I'd say I prefer Oblivion's magic overall. There's simply a greater variety of spells, but lacks the 'hope-it-works' aspect of Morrowind's spellcasting. If Skyrim had Oblivion's variety, it'd take the cake for the best magic system in the series - IMO.

It is also my belief, by the way, that magic was intentionally left underwhelming because of the Dragonshouts. If you could slowfall, slow time, 'push' people, etc. with magic, then what would be the point of collecting shouts?

That may also be a contributing factor to why I'm not overly bothered. I tend to visualize myself less as "Dragonborn" and more as "Exceptional Dragon Hunter", with shouts representing another facet of magic I'm mastering (if I'm a mage) and only use the ones that make "sense" as such.

Bring back spell making Beth, makes me feel like I'm way more powerful then other mages and less generic. Oh and they got to take advantage of their spell combination system. For example I think it would be cool as fuk to combine to atronarchs together. Imagine a lightning daedra Lord.

I agree with you totally here.
To be fair Skyrim necromancy is good. Some ideas like wards, the magic traps and cast while holding down button are good. However as they are low level spells they become pretty useless at medium levels, it has been an lots of discussion about destruction magic, with spellmaking, not necessarily the Oblivion type but just being able to set power and/ or duration would helped a lot. Yes simply make 3 versions of all spells. Take the simple flame spell, make one who is twice as lethal and one who is four times more but cost more to use and it would have huge impact as you would have far more useful spells.

However it does not replace real spellmaking, the ability to cast an low level heal over time on followers was important in Oblivion. In Morrowind I was able to do escort quests simple with invisibility on touch.
And my old Oblivion favorite turn undead for 10 seconds, weakness to fire for 10 seconds, fire damage 1 for 8 seconds.
Why the fire damage? because I would get an warning before the turn spell timed out and it looked cool.

My username is taken after an crazy Bosmer mage in Morrowind, she was addicted to fortify intelligence potions and was nutty after more destructive spells.
Some who actually crashed my game. Weakness to magic and drain health 100 for 3 seconds was the default spell.
To balance stuff I played on max difficulty with Morrowind advanced who added lots of high level monsters like cliffracers who cast fireball

Repeated this in Oblivion, started as an destruction mage, made some nice spells, weakness was an nice effect to add to do more damage on next hit.
Enables you to push back the daedra attack in the IC at level 30 however it used magic potions pretty fast
After maxing destruction she switched to illusion who was great fun, second last part of SI was fun, watching the priests of order fight among each other was priceless, however my plan of taking Sheogorath though the portal did not work (command humanoid is fun)

If that's the case, I'd still consider that poor design. The magic system shouldn't be contingent upon (or balanced with) some other system in the game. If nothing else, it then forces you to collect all the Shouts with every character you create, rather than just use a particular school of magic that you like.

Conjuration is a disaster. Essentially you have one option: Dremora lords. They beat the tar out of every opponent in the game, and are pretty cheap by the time you get to max level. Storm Atronachs are occasionally useful if you like ranged attacks, but I can't think of any time where the Dremora Lords were not the better choice.

I realize it was similar in the older games too, but it would have been nice if... I don't... they fixed it and made balanced summons for different situations. Like a particular summons who can go invisible when you're sneaking.... or a "tank" summon who deals almost no damage but takes a ton, and a "glass cannon" summon. And where is summoned armor? I loved my Morrowind character who had a custom spell to summon an entire suit of armor and a longsword. I would cast that right after my custom summon spell that summoned all of the undead summons (who svcked but were fun to watch) at once. Those were epic times.

They could have kept all the things that made the old spells great, while instituting nice things like Skyrim's more fluid magic controls.

I've often wondered if Skyrim's magic was intentionally gimped so that more people would use the shouts.

IMO, it's not so much the magic system that stinks, as it is the sheer number of missing spells, schools, and yes, spellmaking. All of this IMO in an attempt to make dragon shout more appealing. Personally, I never really used the shouts very much. Sure I experimamented with them to see what they did, but they quickly wore out their welcome, and I found myself desiring more from the magic system. When mods couldn't fix it's glaring flaws (goes way beyond magic) I fell back to a game that didn't diappoint me in those regards...Oblivion. I haven't touched Skyrim since around July.

This is how I look at it...

The spells themselves are getting better and cooler but the number of spells is lowering...

Basicly, the magic system currently in Skyrim is prolly one of the best but lacks a lot of spells from the older games that we all prolly want... So, really... Bethesda just needs to add more spells.

~Edit~

Personally, I do miss spellmaking but it does makes the game more challenging if you are a mage since now you can't simple make an OP spell anymore... But Bethesda did forgot to at least add an ability so spells can get stronger the more you use them but never too strong.

I also don't mind the removal of Mysticism.. I don't use it anymore anyways since they got rid of teleportation spells.. But I kinda would prefer it coming back.

I opened up one of my old Oblivion saves a while ago, and I had hundreds of personalised spells. I checked my mage character, and he had one, yes, 1, hotkeyed. It was a one touch insta-kill spell.

Personally, spell making was a nice touch...the range of spells available was also a nice touch. But I'm betting that the people who put together the earlier games aren't the same people who put together this game, and I doubt that sitting in Beth's offices is a tome called the Big Book Of Keeping All The Games The Same.

Times move on, things come, things go, and I don't understand the reference to the magic system as flawed, broken, wrong, etc etc. It's just different, same as Skyrim is different to Zork.

Magic has absolutely gotten worse in each game although I wouldn't outright say that magic was worse in Oblivion then it was in Morrowind. Still in Skyrim magic is nothing more then spam the fireball with 100% spell recovery instead of the unique and powerful spells you could use or even better, craft in Oblivion. Alteration is basically cast Oakflesh, we lost so many spell effects from that school the biggest being open lock spells.

"We have lost the Magic that made TES great". Now it's just kill cams, FUS RO DAH, Kinect Shouts, etc, instead of the stuff that really matters. If I want to be a mage I'll play Oblivion, at least I can do damage at higher levels, in Skyrim I have to spam fireballs, that's just dumb and repetitive.

Ditto. The greatest thing about those kind of systems, is that they offer player creativity, which I love.

Oblivion's spell system was a step up actually. Skyrim's is horrible however. Until skyrim there wasn't a fault to the system as much as it was a lack of variety. Skryim would have been tolerable if there was still spell creation, that way it would make up for the fact that there are only a handful of spells left. Most of them useless.

There are good new features but some made it worse. Depends on how you play, but i think the down side is more than the improvement they made

Good:
* Graphic - now it look much better.
* Can have two spells holding at the same time (one hand paralyse, one hand flame is quite good)
* Necromancer really like a real necromancer, cause we can finally raise our own dead corpse

Bad:
* Less spell varieties . I don't think anyone can argue this one. The reduced variations make a lot of role play options gone. oh.. i miss my monk master with restoration that use Fortify Health, Fortify Strength, Fortify Hand to Hand. The witch hunter that master with silence and damage magicka, the night blade that never bring weapons and have full conjured armor that no guards can stop me bring any weapons to assassinate anyone.
* cannot cast magic when having two hand weapons out. this make playing roles like witch hunter with bow more difficult
* no spell making. One spell grant me ebony flesh, summon to start a battle, make micro management much easier (especially with cast time in Skyrim, getting ambush and get the ebony flesh and summon up normally got a few seconds delay
* No longer glass cannon, i like the design that mage have high damage output in exchange of not wearing armor. Skyrim magicka cost is high, damage is not scaling much. the pity damage against high level bandit chief turn to be a stun lock process while compare to my archery with smithing plus enchantment i become a super tanky cannon. Also need to be depends on magicka reduction enchantment heavily to be able to play mage properly or potion spam. In compare to in Oblivion that my mage have no magicka reduction gear at all, and one potion probably enough for me to clear whole bandit cave.

overall the new change made me less enjoying in playing mages

I think its getting better in each game...well except for taking out spellmaking.

There's no way I'm going to let you make that statement without explaining yourself! How can you possibly say that the spell system is *better* in Skyrim than in Morrowind or Oblivion? What specifically is better? And do those "better" things make up for all that was lost, such as spell variety?

Honestly, the only improvement I think Skyrim made was dual casting, but even then I'm tempted to use the same spell in each hand so I can make it more powerful, so dual casting is sort of wasted in that regard. Just have a more powerful Destruction spell and I don't need to dual cast to make it more powerful!