Weapons do various levels of damage. Most spells are an all-or-nothing effect at the higher levels. You've can't 'kinda' paralyze someone. If you did it'd be an intermediate spell called Slow. The point being, Weapons can scale with each point. Unique Spell effects cannot, and therefore have to have a hard threshold between can and can't cast them. Requiring a player to reach a minimum skill level doesn't seem unbalanced to me at all, especially given some of the unique spell effects out there.

Also, a two-handed user without any perks isn't going to be nearly as effect as one with the first five. They'll also be much better if they put points into smithing, and improve their gear. And since they'll be in melee, they have to pump points into Health to make the skill viable. Sounds balanced to me.

That aside, this is all a bit off topic. The OP asked if there were ways to cast huge mana-cost spells without using the 0-mana cost enchanting setup. Yes, there is; get your skill higher, and put a reasonable amount of points into Magicka. If you reach 100 skill, and that's still insufficient, then you may need to spend perks, and buy or make enchanted gear to improve your Magicka or reduce spell costs a little. My tests show that perks and enchanting do stack, although maybe not as intuitively as you would expect. If you're not happy with how long it's taking to be able to cast a spell, I'd advise biting the bullet and spending the perks and/or buying the gear earlier. A little bit of demand-based organic character development isn't going to ruin a concept.


99 spells in the game. 6 have a cost over 1k. 14 have a cost over 600.

Greed: Your point about destro magic is that it doesn't scale with skill level? Get a mod. As for the other stuff: what Cheshyr said.
-Loth

Bethesda designed the game to be like that, which means they could have done something entirely different as well. I'm saying the system they have in-place is flawed. You do not have to rely on anything other than weapons to do damage with weapons, and you have five different ways of making those weapons far more powerful than they originally were. You only have two ways of making spells more powerful, and you're also limited in what you can actually use unless you invest perk points, stat points, skill points, or gold -- just to be able to cast higher level spells, not even to make them better.

The same spells, mind you, that have a very long casting time and are incredibly inefficient compared to lower level spells when using alchemy. It just doesn't make sense to me.

Lothario, I play on a console.

Ah, man... I'm sorry. Nevermind then.
-Loth

I agree they could have approached certain spells another way... I would have liked to see Destruction damage scale with skill. I am sad that enchanting and alchemy effects on the various schools are so limited (sometimes I want bigger numbers, not longer durations).

I disagree with you on the magic vs weapons discussion; I think the relative player investments into magic vs weapons is fairly well balanced. A player has to get to a top tier weapon tree perk to get a chance to paralyze with weapons. Skill 75 for a near guarantee of the same effect seems fairly trivial in comparison, and requiring a few perks to reach the mana cost is still a smaller investment.

The rest is open to debate, except... turning an honest question into yet another IMBA thread isn't doing anyone any favors, and isn't going to change the underlying mechanics we have to work with. I'm not even certain simple mods can change this; the spell effects appear to be hard-coded. So let's talk about how we can make the best use of the system we have.

If you talk about the time it takes to level it up, then yes. But when you get high skill in it and know the good recipes... Boy, can you kick some ass! And earn heaps of money!

I'll like to revisit this topic with some of the formulas applied. Let's take Firestorm with a base cost of 1426:

@100 Destruction: -41% to cost, that's 841
+ Master level perk reduction (50% reduction): 421
+ Archmage's Robes (85% cost): 358
+ Nahkriin mask (-20% cost): 274

Am I doing this right?