Oh, I'm sorry, I missed the bit in my game where a spell caster can't use a weapon...could you explain that anomaly to me thanks?

Edit:

Sarcasm aside, I think the big problem isn't that destruction is broken...it's working as it was intended by the developers. The problem is that some people's expectations don't match what was provided in the game.

Just because you have to hit something a number of times with a spell doesn't make the system broken...it might make it boring for you, but that isn't 'broken'.

Because your magicka runs out, and you don't want to use enchants to boost your regen rate, or you think swigging potions ruins the flow of a fight, well, melee characters have to do that too, and probably more often than spell casters because they can't run and dodge if they want to do damage. This doesn't make destruction 'broken'.

If you choose not to wear armour because you believe you should be able to spell-down opposition with one-hit wins, well, that is your choice, and again does not make destruction 'broken'.

anolytical comparisons between upgraded melee weapons and destruction magic does not prove destruction is 'broken', otherwise alteration is also broken because I can't one-shot kill a dragon using telekinesis and a spoon.

That's a rather excessive conclusion. In fact, I'd say you're talking out of your ass when it comes to the potential for bow damage. The level ~44 character I talked about previously has a ~90 damage bow currently. It's just a glass bow, not a Daedric one. The enchant on it is soul trap so no damage there. I haven't maxed the perks in archery yet, my smithing isn't maxed... With max smithing, +100% or so from 4 x +25% smithing gear, a further +50% from a potion, maxed archery, and +160% archery damage from item enchants, I'm sure damage will climb a fair bit. Make the bow Daedric and add damage enchants (x 2 once your enchant is maxed), and 300 doesn't sound too far off.

And then invest in stealth.

How is Destruction broken?

Its costs are too great for the damage it does. The other three Kill Skills (skills that are involved directly with damage-dealing implements) have far more bearable costs.

Melee weapons? You can do normal swings for zero stamina cost till the end of time.

Bows? Arrows are freakin' everywhere. If you run out, you either svck at aiming or are purposefully limiting the number of arrows you carry.

But Destruction? Their cost/damage ratios only get worse and worse as you climb up the expertise ranks with it, and also if you use dual-casting (1.4x more magicka used over just tandem-casting, versus... whoo, 1.1x effect). The master-level ones are the worst. So you are either stuck emptying your magic bar with a few heavy attacks, or paper-cutting your foe to death with lower-expertise attacks. This, as well as all other magic skills, are hobbled by the agonizingly slow combat magicka regen crippling. When you're out of stamina, you can just keep on belting off normal attacks. When you run out of magicka, you better have potions, or else all you can do is run away or resort to one of your more practical kill skills.

While the other three kill skills are bolstered by secondary skills boosting them but can stand on their own (perk tree included), Destruction pretty much requires other skills; either coating yourself head to toe with fortify destruction or fortify magicka regen enchants, or downing restore magicka potions as if you were trying to get drunk off of watered down mead.

And then there's also damage boosters.

What do weapon kill skills get for damage boosts?

Smithing
Skill increases
Higher tier weapons
Elemental enchantments
up to 100% from perks
critical hits (applicable only on swords, daggers, and bows though)
sneak attacks (up to 16x for daggers!)
alchemy

What does Destruction get?

Higher tier spells that are even more magicka-inefficient than the previous tier
Alchemy
up to 50% from perks

Do you see the problem now?

No, because you missed the point completely like most people in the thread.

Just because melee/archery can out-DPS Destruction doesn't mean Destruction is broken. The only question is, can Destruction reliably kill enemies at level ~50? Yes it can. Therefore it's neither broken nor underpowered.

I've played four mage-type characters, and I've never noticed any problem with the Destruction, as long as you upgrade your spells, and remember to choose the magicka-requirement reducing perks.

Taking formulas from the UESP wiki:

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Weapons

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Smithing

Asumming all 3 crafting skills, all relevant one handed perks (100%, power attack perk etc), 160% enchantments and smithing, a Daedric sword Base dmg 14 + 47 smithing (see wiki linked above) will have the following damage numbers:

Normal attack: 476 damage (displayed in inventory and actual damage per hit)
Power attack: 1190 damage

Dual wield power attack: 1338+669+1338 = 3335 damage per "3 hit"

Sneak attack: 476 * 6 = 2855
Sneak power attack (not sure if a sneak attack ever registers as a power attack but.. ) 1190 * 6 = 7136

If you assume a more "sane" level of crafting skills, i.e only smithing at 100 and the daedric perk for "normal" legendary smithing bonus of 21 instead of 47, and "only" 80% bonus from enchants, you'd still be doing 189 damage per hit with a Daedric sword.

I guess attack speed for a sword is about 1 every second (more or less). I've seen the figure 180 dps for chain dual casting incinerate and i suppose that's comparable to the figure above.

So, for very high levels of trade skills (read: all 3), the system "breaks" in favor of melee, with just a moderate investment i tradeskills (read: smithing to 100 with relevant perks) you get comparable results to destruction (which realistically requires also one tradeskill, enchantment, to get the -100% destruction cost). This is consistent with IMP of the perverse's results i suppose.

It only takes like 25-30 hours max to get 100 enchanting. Now, I usually am bored to death at that point, but seeing ppl who have clocked in hundreds of hours on one character, and seeing how at that point I usually haven't touched most of the questlines, no, that's not endgame.
Why would it be unethical? 2 extra followers are 2 extra followers, no matter if you have a sword, a bow or fire...#

One last time, hope you get it: noone's talking about warriors vs mages. We are talking weapons vs destro magic. Don't bring the stereotypical classes into the arguement, they are irrelevant. If need be, just think of 2 mages, one with destruction and the other with a sword as direct damage skill.

Destro users have more mana? No, they don't. All-around Mages have more mana, because they don't have enough enchantment slots to reduce the cost of all the magic schools they use. Destro users can get 100% cost reduction in that particular skill, maybe one more support school, and put all points to health. If you choose not to, it is your choice for your own reasons, not what the game offers you as best option...
Also, mages doesn't need smithing and enchanting? Yes, they do, because the ideal way to play a mage in Skyrim is in full enchanted Daedric, otherwise you're again just gimping yourself to be closer to the stereotypic RPG mage... actually, there is no build in the game that is not helped immensly by those 2 skills...

Destro tree reminds me of Diablo 2 sorc elementral tree's. useful if skilled fully, pointless if only a few points. In fact in Diablo2 you only go for a single SPELL, everything else is just for synergy. Destro skill tree is not far away. It shows typical signs of usual MMO games. You either specialize in Destro completely, with gear and all, or dont touch it at all. This goes against everything TES stands for.


Every skilltree would look like this if Bethesda would listen to fans crying for so called "balance".

Balanced Magic Skyrim mod- magic now scales with you, I've got it and I don't feel to weak or powerful. I imagine if I abused the heck out of enchantments with this mod on I would become the god mage of Skyrim but because I don't (1. hate grinding 2. Why intentionally do something very un-RPish in an RPG!) destruction works out very well for my pure mage.

Pssshh. I'm at 53 on master with health of 70 and I have no problems with multiple targets. Get on my level brah.

So Destruction isn't broken.

It's just not playing out the way you think it should.

I have no trouble accepting that.

Azrael
The Nord with the Sword

Exactly.

Why do people think that if something is a challenge it's broken.
Just because you don't like the way some things in this game function doesn't mean they're broken.

Nothing in this game is broken... but their are several things in this game that are different than what many players are used to.

Adapt... or don't..... because the game isn't going to change.

The other question is: can destruction reliably kill enemies at levels 10-30? (ie where you are pretty much supposed to be playing, and most ppl don't even bother to get to level 50 before they reroll) The answer is NO - it costs a ton of magicka and it does pathetic damage, you are honestly better off trying to punch your enemies to death...
And that is why destruction is underpowered, and blind [censored] can whine all they whant but they can't change the fact that it is a completely broken skill...





It is not a challenge, it's simply weak... using destruction does not make the enemies any more dangerous, does not make them hit harder and does not make them any less dumb than they are already - in fact, impact does the opposite. Destruction just makes battles last much longer. That's all it does. If you want to believe that Skyrim suddenly becomes a better game if you take ages to kill an enemy that was never able to kill you anyway, then I pass... It's your life, you can waste your time however you want...

How is Destruction broken?


simple, it's not

also, most people usually complain about everything in this game is overpowered, but as soon as they find something a little less overpowered they gonna cry like little kids, weird nuff

+1

Exactly.

It seems like nobody cared to answer my question. If you, for whatever reason, decided to not take Impact and thus could not stagger-lock enemies, would you steel be comfortable taking on anything using Destruction on Master? Can you kill enemies without stagger-locking them? Obviously, if you use conjuration, alteration, or illusion to tie up enemies then the answer is yes, but then that's down to the power of those spell schools. I'm asking about destruction.

The challenge isn't the problem, the boredom is. The only effective destruction strategy is to stun lock opponents and It's incredibly boring, uninspired and contrary to your opinion not challenging at all.

Wow this thread again, I have a character on Master's difficulty no companions that has played through 200 hours of game play and is only level 34, (speech is my 4th highest skill.) Pick destruction and use it, pick a defensive skill like restoration or alteration and use that, pick a mana sustaining skill, like alchemy or enchenting and use that, level out those three skills. You'll pick up incedentals sure but don't power level them and stop picking up books you won't use.

What a terrible post. You're generalizing, you're saying that all who see a flaw in a mechanic are whiners, you're insisting that seeing a flaw is to "cry like little kids", and you're not explaining why a seemingly flawed mechanic isn't actually flawed. You offend a lot of people and you bring nothing new to the topic. If flaming was allowed, rest assured that you'd be ashes at this point.

I don't know that Destro svcks because I haven't tried it yet, but math would seem to indicate that it's by default a bit weaker than it should be. Mages have crap defenses so they should do more damage to compensate. My Breton warrior has a good defense and it will only get stronger with loads of health, loads of options to disable enemy attacks (fus roh da, shield charge, slow time, and eventually you can add illusion to that mix), maxed magic resistance (Breton, Lord stone, Mara quest, 2x Alteration perk), elemental resistance from a shield perk, more elemental resistance from remaining enchant slots on equipment, and of course armor that ends up reaching the cap.

Helm: Fort Illusion, Fort Archery
Armor: Fort Illusion, Res Poison
Gloves: Fort Archery, Fort 1H
Boots: Fort 1H, Res Shock
Ring: Fort 1H, Fort Illusion
Amulet: Fort 1H, Fort Illusion
Shield: Res Fire, Res Frost

In other words, there's just enough room for crazy resists, +160% to one-handed damage, -100% casting cost for illusion spells, and +80% damage for bows. And mind you, I'm not even exploiting alchemy for that. I've got a mind-numbingly strong defense already and it's only going to get worse. Which begs the question of why my main offensive skill, one-handed melee, is doing more damage than wizard spells tend to do? True, I'm only hurting one enemy at a time, but that enemy definitely is hurting and he's not hurting me back at all. Complete safety is only a shield block away and that shield is out at all times.

To be even more blunt, my warrior build is very much a safety first defense build. I'm going 5:3 health and stamina, so eventually I'll even have a ridiculous 600 health behind all that defense. It's the equivalent of a D&D tank. It makes no sense that I can out-damage a magic artillery build. Find me any other system where the max defense build isn't also low on damage while glass cannons actually do less damage than max defense.

Now you might suggest using potions. Yes, you could use a bow to apply first weakness to magicka and then weakness to an element. A bow... Right. And while you're fiddling with your bow and applying weaknesses one at a time, I'm simply walking into combat and start killing the enemy. You might use a potion of fort destro, which would boost your damage. Then I'd use a potion of fort one-handed damage and still do more damage. In other words, potions or no potions, as long as you only use Destro for damage and I only use a sword, then I'll do more damage because there's a vastly higher number of passive boosts to weapon damage than there are to spell damage.

Fixes? There are quite a few. Let Destro skill affect spell damage, let Destro enchants affect spell damage, or let players upgrade spells so old novice and apprentice spells don't end up being useless and adept spells can be raised to expert or master level. Obviously, this would have to be balanced somewhat, but having your old firebolt and flamethrower spells end up doing solid damage as you grow better with destruction would go a long way in making people feel more powerful, and upgrading the current stables to master level damage outputs while remaining at original efficiency levels would probably solve the complaints about Destro.

because "being a little weaker" is different than "broken" ??
if you didn't get it the first time i can state it again: "it's not broken !!!"
people here is whining because they can one shot kill dragons with a sword but can't one fireball kill one, so? is that really some big deal? use magicka consumption reduction enchantments and spam tons of fireball and you win with destruction too

I don't agree with this, Mage Fleshspells are great and Dragon HIde is equal to armor cap. You can't sit in front of someone while they warhammer you but shouts help especially eretheral adn unrelenting force

Dragonhide also lasts for 30 seconds and guzzles magicka.

Sure that's a negative but you can use dual casting, stability, and potions to increase duration and magicka increases and enchantments to cut costs. The other benefit is that it doesn't count toward your encumberance.

It doesn't take 100 in an armor school to have your armor not count toward encumberance though.