why would you want to play it on nightmare? the endless wavess of paratrooper fodder isn't annoying enough when you have to fight them on normal? XD

If you want to compare Destruction with Melee and Archery, do it raw - pure Destruction, pure Melee and pure Archery. No additional skills and no synergies.

Otherwise what's the point? Unless you want to prove that Enchanting/Alchemy/Smithing combo is broken. But I'm fairly sure everyone with half a brain noticed that by now.

It's simple logic: in your graphs, the Destruction player relies on one skill for DPS - Destruction. Your Melee/Archery player relies on three skills for DPS - Melee/Archery, Enchanting and Smithing.

So why is the Destruction player not allowed any support skills while Melee and Archery are allowed two?

How about this - for Destruction player, we will also give him Conjuration and Alteration. Two support skills for two support skills, isn't that a fair trade? So now we have two permanent Storm Atronach Thralls and 10 seconds long Paralyze.

I agree, and I made this very same post earlier in the thread. I got shot down because apparently conjuration is a damage dealing skill, so it does'nt count, and apparently a mage would'nt have enough magicka to support multi-casting....go figure :/

Because melee and archery characters can also use conjuration and alteration. We're looking at overall game balance, not trying to play "fair is fair." The player has enough perk points available that they aren't a suitable counter to being able to massively boost your damage via a couple of other skill trees.

What should happen is either destruction needs additional perks that can let it keep up with melee/archer plus crafting, or it needs to be able to benefit from crafting. I'd like it if there were fortify destruction damage enchantments and maybe a spell crafting skill that provided similar bonuses to smithing.

I did post numbers for melee without any crafting in the OP (the last 2 plots). Without crafting, non-magic has horribly low damage.

Storm Atronach Thralls don't even use Magicka per se as they're permanent summons. Technically there's little difference between them and a weapon enchant/smithing bonus.


There's also another option which I'm sure you're aware of since you used to advocate it yourself - nerf the crafting bonuses.

Yeah, given its already high base damage, if you gave magic the same kind of crafting bonuses that melee and archery get, it'd be even worse than they are. But it would be easy to add in fortify destruction damage enchantments, which would mean having to spend a few more perk points to max out destruction, and, coupled with nerfs to crafting, things start to look a lot better.

Yay no destruction changes in patch 1.4! Oh wait...

Yeah, kind of a bummer. Less so for PC players, we get the CK shortly after, but that's only what, 10%-20% of the people playing Skyrim?

A lot better how?

We all know that you can kill Ancient Dragons with but a few swings if you invest in Enchanting/Alchemy/Smithing.

Why people automatically assume that's the norm and want Destruction to be on equal level?

Wouldn't it make more sense to assume Bethesda didn't want the players to kill boss-class enemies with a few hits and that Melee benefits from crafting way too much? And nerf crafting instead of buffing Destruction?

Anyway, if you allowed only enchanting of 0 Def Apparel, the problem would be mostly fixed - Melee/Archery would have its own crafting skill(Smithing, on its own nowhere near overpowered), Mages would have their own crafting skill(Enchanting, since most warriors would wear armor, and because you can't boost Destruction damage via Enchanting it wouldn't be overpowered) and then there would be Alchemy benefitting all three, but less than either on its own.

Adding in just a heavily nerfed enchanting bonus (like +60% total vs. the vanilla +160%) has a lot less of an effect than the full +160% from direct damage enchantments, and +200% or so from enchantment and alchemy fortified smithing.

I've also been messing around with numbers in a spreadsheet in anticipation of the CK, trying to come up with some smoother, more balanced dps curves, and it includes major changes to the magic damage itself (the end result though isn't much different from what it is now, just smoother and with a broader selection of viable spells.) I posted some http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii167/bl3count/rebalanceddamage.jpg earlier, though I've made a number of changes since.

In my own game I'd allow half strength damage enchantments for light armor, third strength for heavy, and that would probably apply to all enchantments, not just destruction damage, so that there might actually be a reason to make a cloth and armor spell melee character (I'm building up my current character in such a way that I'll be able to try it out, boosting dual wielding and alteration.)

Question: Lets say Bethesda recognizes Enchanting is creating the rift but doesnt want to change too much. Would changing the Destruction enchant to 25-40% damage increase balance it out?

Enchanting could've been renamed something like Magecraft, and split off into branches, with one being spellcrafting and the other enchanting. Would've made a lot of people happy, I think.

It really depends on personal preference - in my opinion the available destruction damage is just about fine, but the melee damage is too powerful. The easiest thing to do I think would be to reduce the strength of the +damage enchantments from +40% max per item to about +15% max per item, but apply them to destruction magic as well (though this might make magic overpowered in some people's opinion, especially when coupled with the 100% chance to stun from dual casting.) The other problem with melee/archery damage is that fortify smithing potions and gear can boost smithing by more than 200% total, which adds a huge amount of damage (they will raise the smithing bonus from +11 damage at 100 skill to more like +30 or so.) Reducing the fortify smithing gear from +25% per piece to maybe +10% per piece, and removing the fortify smithing potions or reducing them to maybe +25% rather than +100% or so would help a lot. I'm using a mod that makes those changes to enchanting and alchemy in my game right now, and it seems very well balanced.

The big thing that would need to change as far as destruction goes is magicka costs. In my opinion a mage should be able to get through a fight using moderate damage spells without having to resort to potion spamming or -100% magicka cost gear. That would require a big reduction in spell cost, and/or an increase in magicka regeneration rate.

The major change to destruction that I made in that plot I posted was to greatly increase the amount that a destruction spell's damage increases as you level up and add perks. It makes it so that even flames will still be useful at high level, so there are no wasted spells (incinerate becomes unneeded since firebolt scales up enough to still be useful, so it could be reworked into a different kind of spell.) It requires a lot of edits to perks, and changes to the base damage of spells, but overall wouldn't take very long to implement - its mostly just tweaks to numbers. The problem though is that it makes the base damage of spells extremely low, so if NPC mages do not have the appropriate perks, their damage will be pathetic.

I know the question isn't directed at me but I'd say no to this. Spell cost is the main problem, destruction's damage would be completely fine(although a scaled version of the novice spells would be nice) if they'd have given destruction a mechanic appropriate for a main method of damage, but instead they treated it like any other spell school and just seem to've given things random costs nowhere near appropriate for what you get for that cost. This is an issue with the magicka system in general but a destruction mage obviously has it harder than most as you have to cast to deal damage and you end up burning through magicka far too fast if you don't (ab)use enchanting for cost reduction. High level spells being far less effecient when it comes to damage:cost ratio just makes no sense when your magicka is nearly finite when in combat(regen svcks in combat).

The way I'd personally go about fixing it is this :

Introduce a perk, maybe even build it into novice/apprentice/etc., which allows you to regain 75% of a spell's cost over 10 seconds after casting it. This would encourage more involving and creative use of the variety of destruction spells instead of spamming the most efficient or most powerful depending on whether you've got 0 costs or not. You'd still be limited by your magicka, but you would be able to manage it in a better way than running in circles helplessly while you slowly regen. For it to be relevant you'd of course have to get rid of the cost reducing enchants though, and some tweaks to existing spell costs would still have to made.

There's another sort of sticky problem with magicka management - magicka doesn't regen while you cast. That means if you're casting Flames continuously, you're going to run out of magicka no matter what your regen rate is, so you'll always have to stop attacking and start hopping around unless your magicka pool is big enough to get through the fight. If you're taking time to aim spells like firebolt or incinerate, the entire time that you're keeping the spell charged is wasted magicka regen time. I've tried to see if there's a way to change that, and there is a gamesetting that will enable regen while casting, but apparently it only works for NPCs.

I've noticed this as well, hoping it's a bug/oversight that'll be fixed because it doesn't really make any sense.

Perhaps have it "stored up" and and allocated all at once after the spell has been cast?

In past Bethesda games its been difficult/messy to tell when the player is doing things like swinging a weapon or casting a spell, so it would probably be easiest to set the player's regen rate to 0, but use a script to continuously restore their magicka whether they're casting or not. There are two actor values that effect a character's regen rate, MagickaRate and MagickaRateMult. MagickaRate is always the same, and its 3 by default, meaning 3% per second. When you take a +regen speed potion or wear +regen speed gear, it effects the MagickaRateMult. So you could set MagickaRate to zero, then have your script monitor MagickaRateMult when determining how much magicka to restore, and the potions and gear would still work.

Destruction can be beefed up by using alchemy.
Swords, axes, bows, etc.. can be beefed up by using alchemy, enchanting, and smithing.

You can make a sword far more powerful than anything offered through Destruction magic because you have more ways to improve it. Conjuration can be used to support Destruction magic, but it can be used to support a melee warrior or stealthy archer as well. Destruction pretty much has nothing going for it in Skyrim.

Its very simple what is wrong with destruction.

Not enough perks to show your dedication to it...

Not enough spells by far...

And it just doesnt feel right for those who want to play a dedicated destruction mage. You just never feel very destructive.

The destruction tree has pretty much the same number of perks as one handed and two handed, but to make melee as destructive as destruction you have to develop either smithing or enchanting, meaning more points overall. Invest in both and you end up seriously out-damaging it. It would probably be fair to add more perks to the destruction tree, like a 5 rank perk that boosted damage.

As say a fire mage I only need 6 perk points in destruction one of which is wasted on that blasted first perk. With melee im upping damage over quite a range of skill AND I have 3 ranks of special effect perk AND I have some other stuff too.. With archery its even better with all sorts of interesting perks.

In short I dont need much investment to be as good as I can be and it stops fairly low skill wise so I spend my later levels not changing much at all. This is doubled when you realize alot of high level spells svck.

It just feels wrong.

So much for balance fixes.

That most recent patch was exclusively quest and bug fixes. I'm sure rebalancing (which is more a matter of taste than an actual bug) is a lower priority. Still, a rebalance could be the big surprise that's coming with the CK (though my money's on the high res texture pack.)

I'm wondering about that. When I looked inside the Creation Kit, I couldn't tell what exactly governed that kind of scaling.


I don't really think Vancian magic is a hallmark of good design.