Ok new rule: You can't complain about destruction being weak when your using things you learned at level 1 up until you're past level 20.

"My level 1 magic spell does nothing against a level 50 dragon! DESTRUCTION IS NERFED!"

Correct me if I'm wrong but dont spells negate armour? So your 90 damage spell would do 90 damage to health. A sword that does say 300 damage would do less damage to health than 300 due to the armour rating. So, depending on your armour your spell could do approximatly the same amount of damage as a powerful sword.

Stop saying pointless comments like this people, you have no evidence to back what you say up. Just the same old monotonous comment. Read the comments, destruction isn't weak on master, it's not as strong as melee can be when you exploit the game mechanics.

Well enemies have magic and elemental resistance, like you do. I assume their magic resist isn't as high as their damage resist they get from armor, the problem is though that at high levels enemies have huge amounts of health rather than strong armor.

Level 32? Playing on the default difficulty level (adept?) 91 hours played. Destruction is at about 75, alchemy is high as well (use to mostly make healing/magicka and get an almost encyclopedia flora knowledge as that's part of the character roleplay, also income source), speech, enchantment is medium high (crafts magical trinkets for sale occasionally - I haven't used it for anything especially self-boosting)

Destruction is def broken in terms of damage output. While it makes sense at lower levels, because it's capped it doesn't work at higher levels. People are complaining that smithing and enchanting breaks non-magic which is why it can't compare. That's not true. Here is a build that you can get from completely random loot at level 45:

You can easily get gear that gives you +100% damage, combine that with the perks for a one handed weapon and you have +200%.

At level 45 you can easily find one handed weapons that do 45 damage (with perks and gear) and 60 points of magic damage.

That's 210 damage per power attack. NO enchanting, NO smithing, random loot ONLY, and it's conservative. You can find gear that gives you more than +100% damage at that level, but I chose to be conservative. So compare that to the next most powerful spell? That's incinerate, doing just 90 points of damage with max perks. That's 2.3 times less damage, with maxed out perks. I think Bethesda intended you to use smithing so let's be ultra conservative and say you have smithing 45 with the double smithing perk. That's 282 damage per power attack.

Clearly magic is underpowered by a factor of 3. Which is what I would have guessed before running the numbers. Worse yet, most of the enemies you'll be facing at level 45 will be Draugr Deathlords, with 1400 hp and similar enemies. Those take 5 hits each with one handed, yet 15 hits with spells. Not only that but they take 800 magicka, each. At level 45 you will have no more than 400 magicka typically. You usually face a few of them at a time. Also you will miss a few spells, guaranteed so you will spend 1000 magicka per enemy.

So that means at base cost it actually takes 2 TIMES more magicka than you even have to finish off the average enemy with 1400 hp. It is not uncommon to face 4 of these enemies at once. If you have 75% spell cost reduction and 200% magicka regeneration, it still take you 1 minute and 15 seconds to finish off EACH of these enemies. It takes quite litelrally 10 seconds to do the same thing with one handed attacks, even without smithing.

To summarize:

Destruction with 75% spell cost reduction and 200% regeneration, clearly exploit territority, takes 7 times longer to kill a typical enemy at level 45 than a one handed power attack from a warrior with only random loot, no enchanting, and no smithing.

Personally I find magic to still be usable at higher levels. However only with extreme exploitation. The only thing that seems to work is to do the following: Slow time > Mass Paralysis > Blizzard > Firestorm > Firestorm > Firestorm >
Firestorm > Firestorm > Firestorm > Chain lightining. Even after casting 7 master level destruction spells back to back, enemies with 1400 HP are at 90% health so I still have to use the disintegrate perk from chain lightning to kill them. it is impossible to cast these spells without paralyzing everyone because I would be interupted. It is also impossible to paralyze without slowing time.

Edit: this is on expert difficulty, not master.

Low levels are fine. High levels are fine once you have Incinerate/Thunderbolt/whatever the ice one is. The problem is everything else in between. The small number of damage increases means big valleys where your relative damage gets lower and lower as your enemies get higher in level. Ignoring fireball and the wall spells due to them being AOE and unsuitable for use with companions, you only get two damage upgrades after the Flames level spells - Firebolt and Incinerate. The elemental damage increase perks help too, but not enough to fully smooth out the curve.

lol I downloaded spell balancing mod, now I feel as strong as any other class.

I agree. The spells are not something that will kill everything in one hit, but on adept it provides a challenge. I find myself using the AOE and wall spells coupled with a ward or a bound sword. Mix in conjured minions and alteration and you are a well rounded, killing machine (not to mention illusion's frenzy/pacify and invis)

Now I know you'll say, "destruction should be viable by itself!!"

It's not, and I'm glad it isn't, but I find double casting (not dual) from afar and then switching to double casting wall spells is very effective.

And finally, know your enemy. Use the appropriate element. Don't use ice storm against frost trolls, use fireball. Use ice storm against bandits and archers (they can't aim as well if their stamina is low). And if you only want one element, (which I highly encourage you to use at least two) go with lightning. Super fast, barely anything resists it, and really hurts mages.

Would you class lvl 30 or so as mid? I'm finding it fine at the moment on default difficulty. Yes, I can't charge in blindly, I have to use a bit of craft to manage fights, use staves and other distractions, but it's all the more enjoyable for it.

Whats it called?

I use this. Gives it a little extra kick.

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=611

Draugr Deathlords, 1400 hp (I assume thats on novice, it will be equivalently more on expert) so that means it will take 7 dual casted incinerates to kill them (1400/220=6.4), so yeah thats not 15, they will also be immobile during these spells due to stagger. Incinerate by the way does 100 damage (if you have the illusion fear perk), so 220 damage dual casted. That breaks down most of your point to be honest. Look at my above post to see how much damage you can do with destruction potions.

At the moment you have to use enchanting to be able to cast expert spells effectively, they will hopefully balance this. The problem with destruction is the cost, not the damage.

The master spells do more damage than stated, this has been tested. I use the master spells with become ethereal or sneaking, allowing me to mass paralyse or blizzard to start the battle of, then I can just use chain lightning or the expert spells to finish. I usually fury the deathlords though, then just use expert spells and mass paralyse. It's not as hard as you're making it sound.

You see, I read something like this and I simply shake my head and wonder.... what, exactly, is the problem? 1 minute and 15 seconds for EACH of these enemies you say? But a one handed attack takes 10 seconds? I cannot fathom the problem, it sounds to me like you need to play the game differently for different characters. Isn't that rather the point?

Why on earth would you wish to simply play the same game the same way over & again, just with different named weapons? Because that's what it sounds like to me. As an archer I play differently to my melee guy, even if the weapons are *approximately* comparable because my archer is a wuss when toe-to-toe. So the mages have to play differently yet again, because their weaponry is lesser, but they have more diversity at their disposal. Different game.

I disagree.

Cheers

Have you played a destruction mage on master? High level bandits taking 15 dual casted spells to die is not weak? I am playing a melee with no crafting at all and I kill most things in two power attacks. Its like night and day, without crafting skills you aren't even to close to being on par with a melee character with zero in crafting. After drinking a +150% fortify destruction potion I could kill things in 3 casts which is why I said master spells need to be looked at. They are currently unusable.

[censored], your saying without crafting you are killing bandits with 2 power attacks from non crafted weapons or 15 dual casted spells? Dual cast incinerate will do 220 damage so 15 of them will be 3300 damage, ancient dragon territory. So you are doing 1650 damage with this power attack are you? Without crafting?

I am only 39 atm but this playthrough is so much easier then my mage. Yes mace spec, mark of death, with two maces that are at 70(found ring and gloves for one handed dmg) dmg + enchant damage are two shotting everything. You realize you do less damage to mobs on master? It may have been an exaggeration but I am pretty sure it was closer to 10 casts on the high level mobs(not talking about dragons).

I think I got incinerate at about level 40 or 43. For 5 or 10 levels before that, firebolt felt like it was getting consistantly more pathetic, up to the point where it got a little frustrating. I looked up the available spells on the internet, saw that you had to be level 70 destruction or so to buy the Incinerate level spells, and trained my way up the last few levels. I thought it was fine after that, my only gripe being that it would be nice to still be able to use Flames since it has a different tactical value from Incinerate. I guess the Wall spells are supposed to replace them, but they really don't do the same thing - in tight corridors you need to wait for them to wear off to proceed, in fights where you need to dodge around you run the risk of walking back over your own spell, and with followers its a lot more difficult to avoid friendly fire.

How the hell do you not see the problem?

Damage boosts that Weapons get:

• Rote skill increase
  
• Base-level ranked perk
  
• Smithing
  
• Enchanting
  
• Power Attacking (Additionally, normal attacks are of no stamina cost)

Additionally, you can attack normally for no stamina cost.

Destruction damage boosters:

• Destruction-boosting Alchemy potions
  
• Getting a bigger spell that drains your limited magicka bar even faster (Said spell has a worse Damage per Magicka Consumed than the previous)
  
• Dual casting for an even worse damage per magicka consumed ratio
  
• Quaffing magicka potions like mead because your magicka bar regenerates at far too low a rate to be useful in combat so you can actually cast another barrage at anything over 1 opponent
  
• Augmentation perks (of which you have to consume 6 perk points to get only 50% on all Destruction attacks compared to 5 perks for 100% for 1H/2H/Bows)

Elemental weaknesses you say? Weapon wielders can exploit them too with their elemental damage enchants. AOE? Like in Fallout New Vegas's initially anemic explosives, AOE doesn't amount to crap if it just doesn't damage. I'm looking at you, master-level destruction spells.

Well I don't really play for the game to be easier, I enjoy playing as a mage with no armor.

So you have two maces at 70 damage due to your skill and the enchants you found. I did mention dual casted incinerate does 220 damage yeah? Do you mean the mark for death shout, that removes 25 armor rating from the enemy? On master IIRC you do half damage to enemies, so the equivalent of double health.

Using the math you said, you should be able to two shot, possibly one shot these foes with a dual casted incinerate.

At what cost to magicka? And can you do it again immediately without quaffing any potions?

I thought I explained it. The problem seems to be: Warrior X can kill Enemy Y with 3 hits. Therefore Mage Z should do the same with destruction, 3 hits. My question - why? So Mage Z can play in exactly the same way as Warrior X? Where is the gameplay diversity in that? A mage has many more tricks up his sleeve and, almost by definition, needs to act more intelligently.

So it takes more time. So it takes more thought. That sounds to me like different gameplay, which is the least I would expect from going from warrior to mage.

How many swing does the dual wielding power attack do I am not even really sure. But there are other modifiers in the tree to make the power attack do more damage I think 100% + the 75% ignore armor if that stacks with mark of death. I wasn't really trying to make the game easier I wanted to try melee and I chose to go no crafting because of how its broken. It seems like melee is just too powerful without crafting so far from my experience with it.

Yeah I have 90% destruction cost reduction and a 600 magicka pool, I never need to use potions anymore. You will say that I needed enchanting to do this, you can buy a peerless destruction neckless and a peerless destruction ring at 25% each, and the master robes at 22%. Thats 72% there, the perk also halfs that, ending up with 14% destruction cost.

You have missed your own point, the point was that destruction didn't do enough damage, which I just proved it does. The problem of magicka consumption, is ridiculous and you need to have huge reductions to use it well, so you are right in that aspect. They will likely balance the cost in the upcoming patch.

Edit: just realised you are a different person ha.

I'm not sure about power attacks damage, at a guess I would say x2. At high levels enemies will have huge amounts of health rather than high damage resist, so those perks aren't really that useful.