Interesting that some are saying it is definitely bugged and some are saying they haven't seen any change. I can only say what happened to me. My bow went from around the 150 mark to 420 damage with the patch. It was a shame because I was building a nice archery sneak type, avoiding using any magic. Because he became a one hit kill on almost anything I lost interest and retired the character. I've kept the latest save so if it wasn't intended I can go back to him.

This is such [censored], you have no idea. It could be boosted a little, but the main problem is the insane magicka costs.

If you get around the magicka problem (which can be done without enchanting your own stuff, you can find fortify destruction gear), destruction pretty much outclasses archery every time in a non-sneak situation.

Dual cast perked incinerate is 220 damage (with illusion fear perk) or 198 with just the destruction damaging perks. You can fire those spells much much faster than you can fire a bow. Or dual single casting 90 damage expert level spells (which is usually boosted by the enemies weakness if you're smart) can take down a deathlords on master in seconds.

If you want to hit insane damage with destruction, you can outclass bows as well. Drink a 100%+ destruction potion, hit them with a weakness to magic then weakness to fire poison, you will then hit for over 1000 damage easy, which you can fire much faster than archery.

Yeah, I switched from Iron to Ancient Nord I think, and instead of +2 damage I got +5. The difference between arrows was reapplied to the bow itself, since that damage value changed, and then an addtional point, possibly due to rounding values. Tried it with different bow/arrow combos, same thing happened. Difference in arrows reapplied to the bow, and then additional damage. The difference between low level arrows like Iron, and higher level ones like Glass was massive.

Sudden big changes may be due to unexpected mod interaction, if you are a PC user. But if you use crafting, 420 damage is not an unusual damage number at the end game. With enchanting/smithing/alchemy you can achieve 562 damage without using the potion of fortify restoration exploit. If this feels too high and makes the game not as fun as it could be, one can choose to use less powerful weapon or wear fewer fortify archery gear.

The bug some other people and I were talking about in 1.5 here and in other thread is that the damage display went up 10-24 points on the bottom right side of the screen, under damage next to weight, depending which arrow was selected. It's very noticeable at the beginning of the game because your base bow damage is quite low at that point. But not really noticeable at high level. The actual damage was not changed. And the damage number in the inventory screen still displays correct damage.

The bow damage is:

= (base bow damage + smithing increase + arrow damage) * ( 1 + 0.5 * archery skill / 100) * ( 1 + perk effect) + ( 1 + enchanting effects)

In the beginning you will typically be using a hunting bow with steel arrow, and your skill will be pretty low so you should be getting around 20-30 damage.

If you are using a daedric bow with smithing and enchanting at the end game, you should be getting around 400 damage. If you use alchemy, you can get around 600 - 800 damage.

I'm confused. You are complaining that archery is too OP but you are worried that destruction will be too weak? Are you looking for that delicate balance between being too powerful and too weak?

You want to combine destruction and steath? Those don't go all that well together, since destruction spells make a lot of noise and you do not get any sneak damage bonus for destruction spells. Pick up the quiet casting spell from the illusion tree and you can make your destruction spells silent, but if you don't one hit kill things (which is hard with destruction) you will still alert your enemies, even if you have quiet casting.

Stealth combines better with illusion and conjuration than destruction, but that is not to say you could not make a stealth destruction mage. I am sure you could do it, but it would be a challenging build without some illusion (invisibility/muffle) or shadow warrior perk from sneak tree to get hidden again after your destruction spell alerts all the NPCs in the area to your presence.

The rune spells are particularly bad for stealthy characters because when one of those things goes off, all the nearby NPCs will be alerted to exactly where you are, which makes no sense, but that's the way it works for some strange reason.

Oh! So you're saying that for Orcish arrows (12) The actual damage dealt is + 25? 12 for the arrow, and then 12 for the bow damage, because you are using the arrow, +1? Instead of simply being 4 more than 8 (iron)?

So the damage added to bows is whatever the arrow does, but the arrow does that damage too, making orcish (12) causes the bow to do 24 more damage, and iron (8) only causes the bow to do 16 more damage?

There is a good chance I mis-understood this. Please explain it if I did.

My archery got bugged after 1.5. It triples the damage of the arrows and adds it to the base damage of the bow.

I think it's because you can't craft spells, like you can swords, and no potions added to spell damage, just reduces spell cost. So spell damage increases statically and controlled. But crafted weapons, with Alchemy, Enchanting and Smithing, and the perks of all 3, have so many modifiers and multipliers that they become "overpowered", killing Dragons in one hit (never happened to me, but I have killed dragons in 3 hits).

It kind of seems like 1 dev was determined to keep magic from being overpowered, while a second dev was concerned that the production skills and perks wouldn't be fun to advance (remember production skills and perks is a new concept), so he put damage modifiers into the crafting process. And that ended up with weak magic, powerful melee and bows. Perhaps they didn't communicate well. How many devs are there? Like 30 in the credits. Must be hard to get everything worked out "perfectly", espcially with untested concepts.

Hopefully Bethesda will see this as an important problem and release some small hotfix soon. I can feel the problem can be fixed like with 5 lines of coding.. Archers Unite!

Is this happening on Xbox? Because I (finally) patched my skyrim game to test spell & archery killshots, and I ran around with my archer whom I've had forever and noticed no real change in the damage she was doing.

Do some research, OP. The damage that is DISPLAYED by your bows is wrong, but the actual damage is correct. The damage that arrows do is being counted twice in the tool tip that displays how much damage you do, however, you don't actually do any more damage than before.

Archery still works the same, I read some where(don't remember where) that the damage for arrows is being displayed twice so instead of reading 4 it will read 8,but I still haven't noticed anything extra in the damage department when testing on bandits it still feels the same. Arrows still go a little higher and just a hair to the right of where you put the cross-hair and the miss kill cams seem to only happen once and a while to me and if I force one to happen.I cannot speak for magic due to me not liking it this time round in TES so perhaps some friendly mage here in the forums will be able to answer you question on that subject.

and, that still means its bugged. bigtime.

unless, being told an incorrect number and not knowing the actual damage output is now considered bug-free.

Yes, but it doesn't make archery broken as the OP stated. The tooltip is broken, not the whole skill.

i agree that it doesn't make it a broken system.

good call.

Actually, potions do make destruction spells do more damage. By a lot. Fortify Destruction potion makes destruction spells do 162% more damage. Then there are poisons that makes target more susceptible to destruction magic. Weakness to Magic Potion (100%) and Weakness to Fire/Frost/Shock potion (97%). Dualcast thunderbolt does 235 points of damage. Which is quite respectable by itself. With the fortify destruction, you can get 615 damage for 60 seconds. With added weakness poisons you can do effective damage of about 2400 points per shot after 2 poisoned arrow shots. Once you cap destruction magic and alchemy, it's pretty awesome.

Source: http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1342463-complete-character-design-freedom-damage-resist-caps-and-ridiculous-damage-thread-10/