Why is spamming the same spell so bad but swinging a sword or shoting an arrow all the time is not

About -destro cost gear its not really needed to even be an enchanter when you can find good destro gear pretty quick in the game and buy all you need from the mage guild or find it during your journey. Its harder to actualy find one-handed dmg gear and a warrior/archer will need to be an enchanter because hes gonna need 2 enchant slots on his gear for weapon fortification and defense fortification enchants.

Its not the problem of destro being weak its the problem of smithing/enchanting/alchemy having no hard cap on them. If you could only go as far with each tree as a combination of 100 skill and all perks maxed then it would greatly balance the game and make it more of a chalenge. Couple that with fixing the 1 stamina use for power attacks ( should be the same as with magic req. ) and make weapons swing actualy take a small portion of stamina ( same with archery where you should be drained for stamina every second your having your bow fully drawn )

As it is now:
* it totaly negates the purpose of choosing light or heavy armor and they`re relevant trees making even a low health char nearly invincible.
* It negates the chalenge from the game when you can 1 shot everything with your uber weapons without even using potions and racial bonuses.
* It negates the choice betwen magic/health/stamina when archers and warriors just go full health becuase stamina is a pointless stat.

I was responding to another poster talking about using illusion, conjuration and destruction as damage dealing. All you do on Beth threads are troll and start flame wars, I'm ignoring your posts from now on.

Destruction is only balanced once you get ~70% cost reduction through enchants. Without this, all other skills do more DPS.

So either you are going to be doing alot of Waiting infront of vendors, or taking up enchanting...unless you want to play on extra hard. Extremely restrictive for a TES game.

And on top of this, expect to use 1 spell most of your offensive career. Extremely restrictive for any RPG period.

This thought goes against basic all RPG systems and mechanics. Melee has always swing a weapon in every game, while mages have tons of offensive spells in almost EVERY rpg! Even the bad ones!

Dragon Age FREAKING 2 had more useful offensive spells There is no excuse for sprays/cloacks/runes not scaling -> Todd hyped these formats so heavily only to use them for 1/10th of my game before they became 100% useless.




Thank god for mods or I wouldn't have finished the game w/ my Mage.

I'll second that, all he does is be abusive.

I have to wonder why they put a steep cost to dualcasting. Especially since the damage isn't proportionate.

Holy Necro!


Its because impact is effective, honestly I've found paralyze plus incinerate to be effective and far more interesting than spamming dual-cast incinerate.

Destruction damage should scale with skill. Period. If you think otherwise, you're wrong. All other skills scale with skill AND have damage-boosting perks. Destruction's "scaling" is cost discount for skill plus cost-reducing perks. Destruction damage scaling comes from damage-increasing perks and is wholly dependent on the pre-set spells. If there was a "master-level Fireball", it would be one thing; but we are restricted to craptacular master-level PBAOEs that barely do anything.

You need to remember order of operations.

Also, this is a y=mx+b formula. I think that it should be an Ax+By=C.

(amount of time running in circles)*(magicka regen)+(number of times being one-shotted)*(number of times destroying stuff from a distance)=endless kiting.



FYI, this entire post was sarcasm

Hey OP, are you just using one weapon for the melee math part or dual wielding? Because if you are using one weapon, that means you have a shield in the other hand and that opens up another can of worms seing as how you're now the juggernaut.

ALSO, you need to factor in power attacks, and then destruction will get blown out of the water.

As it stands now, if you don't use enchanting, there's a good chance you'll run out of magic after casting merely a handful of expert level spells. The fact is that there are enemies farther down the line (when destruction starts to become a problem) that will eat that handful of spells for lunch, and then start asking for more. Basically, you left out another important aspect of DPS, which is the S (seconds). You have a limited magic pool with gimpy regen ability IN THE BEST CASE SCENARIO, and unless you use enchanted gear, you're going to run out and then get your ass beat down unless you start running around with Benny Hill music in the background till your magic regenerates. Add to all this, the fact that dual casting is EVEN MORE INNEFFECIENT than just casting the same spell twice and you start to see why we are dissapointed in destruction.

Yea, it looks nice when you chain lighntinged a room full of lvl 4 draugers, but when the dragon priest shows up, or his deathlord companion, magic loses unless you think stun locking him while chuggin magic pots is the pinnacle of skill.

I disagree. Destruction seems fairly balanced, probably the only well balanced damage dealer. At master difficulty, you have something to be annoyed with and complain about. As an archer, we don't. You can complain about damage dealing, we can't complain about anything. Which is wrong, on this difficulty level. We don't suffer ANY kind of inconvenience, at all, in the late game. Give arrows weight and equipment more importance wrt what they can do (crush damage ignore armor etc) and/or maybe reintroduce equipment degradation based on smithing applied ("high tech" breaks more easily) and wrong use (sword edge against harder armor i.e.), to name a few. These are rules that "makes sense", and forces us "dumb players" to use the other quarter of our half brain during gaming.

Don't be envious of the other arch classes for being able to deal out "more damage" (with ease and without much work behind it). At least you guys can adjust the game difficulty downwards to match that completely nerfed down "destro mage" class. For the rest of us, well, we have already reached the highest difficulty, with nowhere else to go (except not using what the game offers, which is equally wrong to me, even if I avoid exploits).

My point is this: OP correctly addresses that destruction ain't half bad, as long as you provide the supporting skills. But destruction players are still complaining about it being underpowered. I'm saying "don't touch destruction" (would make combo mages over powered again), but rather make the other arch classes have something to complain about (on higher difficulties). Naturally this won't balance any damage factors, but it would balance the complain factor, of which non destro mages (or other "pure" classes") have pretty much none.

Excellent post, OP, very good.

We will still see continued threads of 'Destruction is nerfed', simply because the complainers won't accept that they need to address the various combat styles as a combination of skill sets, rather than as single discrete elements, and because, well, they can't on-shot kill many of the bad guys.

Certainly, simply non-power striking opponents with an axe or sword doesn't use up stamina, but the other side of the coin is that you can't reduce stamina costs, you can only boost the amount you have and the regeneration rate, plus, if you block with either shield or weapon, your stamina drops every time your block gets struck (granted, once you have high stamina you only really notice this against high level opponents).

The argument that players can boost up weapons using enchantments is also somewhat double-sided...personally, I have a high enchantment level for my main character, but experience has shown me that for a melee character you are perhaps better at using your enchantment slots for defensive and stat boost enchants, such as health and stamina regen, block enchants and perhaps one or two of your combat skill enchants...but those choices are pretty much neutral because they are enchants that are available to all characters, regardless of 'role' or type of character. Further, it's pointless throwing weapon enhancement enchants into the mix, because a. those enchanted weapons are available to all characters; and b. mages can use staves (all players can, but it's not really 'in role' for melee characters).

The main issues with these continued arguments are that simply relying only on destruction magic is a personal choice; comparing a single skill to multiple skills is not a balanced approach (which is why the claim is that destruction is 'imbalanced'); and some people's expectations haven't been met in the game.

As I said on a previous thread, I've now accessed the destruction Master level spells, and as an example, in one situation I was faced with 6 medium level opponents...I cast one of those spells....one cast, six opponents dead. If I had taken a melee combat approach, I probably would have taken a beating, and I would have had to do a lot of work to achieve the same result, and I would have had to rely on the full capacity of my melee combat skill set to get through it (one-handed, block, heavy armour, potions and smithing).

Your dps calculations are way off i think. The base damage of a weapon rises as skill level increases and every warrior is going to wear items which boost damage. My unenchanted steel 1h axe does 110 base damage (using looted jewelry, with no enchanting skill) so there's no way that a daedric 1h axe only does 14 base damage.

But if you don't have Impact assigned, why is it still multiplied so much?

I have to agree. As stated in the Wiki, the greater the one-handed skill the higher the damage. I don't know whether this number is hidden or actually shows. Someone should find out the added value of damage between level 1 to level 100 in one-handed to the weapon value. I believe you are missing certain values in your calculations

In addition, another problem with destruction is it can be boring. Impact is a boring tactic.