One thing people seem to forget in this discussion is the synergy between different skills. No skill in the game is exclusively used in detriment of all the others.

Any warrior will use weapons and armor fortified with smithing and enchanting. Any archer will make use of sneak perks and bows fortified with smithing and enchanting, not to mention alchemy. Why mages are supposed to use only destruction? There are illusion spells and alteration spells and you can conjure minions to help you in battle, not to mention enchanting and staves.

"Oh, but we're not comparing different classes or archetypes, we're comparing weapons and destruction".

Sorry, but you are comparing gameplay styles here, and I don't see why a gameplay style which makes use of weapons fortified with smithing and enchanting is intrinsically superior to a gameplay style which makes use of destruction spells fortified by enchanting, illusion and staves.

Synergy is the keyword.

Nope. Didn't have any conjuration skills at all. Fought with shock damage. Tried fire one time, that did even less damage. I suppose I could have tried ice but I didn't have any frost spells because I was a derp and forgot to buy some.

The cost wasn't really the issue. It was the idea of having to go out of my way that I didn't like. I wanted to get that quest over and done with, it didn't seem worth it to go out of my way just to buy some stuff.

After consoling my current character into a mage, I have to say that Destro isn't "broken" on adept but merely not very fun. I'm now level 52, I've got all the spells up to expert levels, all the destro perks, and I can kill enemies. I don't do tremendous amounts of damage, but I can kill them, even if it makes a dent in my magicka pool. I haven't tried using destro vs a boss yet, but normal enemies aren't immortal. On adept. Scattered groups of enemies requires me to use potions or wait for regen.

With my current sword and shield setup, I can simply sprint towards each member of the group and kill them in two hits, then move on to the next. If I were to take destro cost down to 0 with enchantments then the stagger from Impact would make most fights trivial but it would be horribly, mind-numbingly boring on the higher difficulties. And bosses will shrug off my fireballs like they're nothing, I'm guessing.

How this would be on expert, well... And once the CK is released and enemies start playing by the rules with proper amounts of magic and elemental resistance, I can't see destro functioning well at all.

For those who want math, fireball does 40 damage normally and 60 with perks. Dual cast it and it does 2.2 x base damage, which means 132. Without potions, that's as high as it gets. Incinerate will do about 200 when dual cast but isn't a group spell and dual casting it will deplete your magicka rather fast.

All in all, I'm definitely not feeling stronger than if I'd simply used melee to take out enemies. Even comparing against archery, I still don't feel that I come out ahead and with an archer I could go into stealth mode and pluck enemies before they know I'm there.

its not overpowered for sure, and its probably the weakest school at high levels, but pair it with another school like conjuration and it might be funnier

I can't see where Destruction is broken. I've taken the appropriate perks to make it strong and am able to handle everything I run into. That's just part of building the character you're playing. There's nothing like the sound of a dual-cast, augmented Firebolt firing off from your hands. I'm loving the sounds in magic and archery too.

I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but you're spewing crap. You get your smithing to 100, then you enchant a smithing suit for yourself and THEN you drink a potion. At enchant 75 with perks, you can easily make four items with +20% smithing each. Then you're at 180 smithing. Drink a 50% potion and you're at 230. Mind you, at max enchant you'll go even higher. At max enchant + normal potion of enchant, you'll go even higher than that, but let's ignore that for now, since smithing 230 is enough. An ebony bow has a base damage of 17, it can be made legendary at smithing ~90 for another +10 to base damage, and I believe every 20 points after that adds +1 base damage, so at 230 smithing it adds up to a further +7 points of damage. Thus the base damage of your bow ends up at 17 + 10 + 7 = 34. And remember, smithing could go loads higher if we milked alchemy and enchant, but we're not.

Now it's time for the archery perk. If it follows the other damge skills then 100 skill gives +50% damage and perking it adds another 100% damage. Base damage +150% damage means 2.5 x base damage. Now we're at 85. But we're not done yet, because there's this nifty enchant called "Fortify Archery" that there's no reason whatsoever to not use. With 100 enchant and perks, it peaks at +40% archery damage and you can have four items equipped with this enchant, so that's +160% damage. 85 x 2.6 = 221.

Effectively, every point of increased base damage turns into 6.5 damage after modifiers. Thus for every 20 of extra smithing you can dig up, you get another 6.5 damage. If you can dig up another +100% to smithing then your bow should do 250 damage instead. But even at 220, you can always add two enchantments (once your enchant reaches 100) for probably another +50 damage, possibly more. If you take the damage enchantment perks, drink a potion, and have the damage augmentation perks from Destruction then you'll easily get +50 damage. At that point you're doing 220 damage from the bow alone, 50 damage from the enchantment and 10-20 damage from the arrows.

Not impressive enough? Well, do a sneak attack. Without the Deadly Aim perk, you'll just do double physical damage + enchantment. That's a mere 230-240 x 2 + 50 or on the good side of 500 in one hit. With the perk, you'll do 230-240 x 3 + 50 or 740-750 damage in one hit. Please don't tell me that this isn't impressive. And remember, that's WITHOUT any looping whatsoever. If you start milking enchant and alchemy for max smithing and max damage enchantment, then... AUCH!

No, it's not overly fast to sneak attack everything but at max sneak + muffle, it's fairly easy to sneak around and it's also fairly safe. And enemies are dumb enough to let you hit them for 700+ damage and forgot about it half a minute later. How does a 200 damage incinerate match up against that? And mind you, I've got over 2000 arrows that will do that much damage. How many incinerate spells have you got?

This is true. Alone it's a bit of a grind to kill things with Destro at high levels, particularly when you up the difficulty. On adept it's not bad but you're also not feeling god-like. But where Destro really comes up short is if you can't blast your enemies in a relatively short time frame. Then you'll run low on magicka and things will get annoying fast.

However, it's really quite impressive what a quick dose of pacify or frenzy will do to a group of enemies and having your friendly neighborhood force of assorted atronachs and dremoras take point is always a good way to buy yourself all the time in the world to target groups. And it's not like there's any problem with your kill speed if your damage output is aided by a couple of dremoras.

Personally, however, I'm getting more and more inclined to go with a Bosmer summoner / illusionist / archer sneaky type. Sounds contradictory, but imagine sneaking about with the previously mentioned bow of death and killing enemies left and right, until you get to a large chamber with a lot of enemies in it. At that point you use your stealthed magic to summon an atronach to distract them and while they're busy killing your atronach, you snipe two of the enemies. Then you decide it's time to go all out, so you drink a potion, summon everything you've got, and suddenly there's a small army rushing forward while you're staying behind and sending 200+ damage arrows left and right.

Maybe because some people would like to eventually become and roleplay a powerful mage? Not everyone thinks the same in terms of what is fun or challenging in a single player game. It's fun for some to be badass and steamroll all of your enemies late game once sufficient power is gained.

They don't stack like that. Each bonus "type" is multiplicative. You got +40% from 100 skill (yeah, it seems it's +40% and not +50% at 100 skill), then the perks do +100% on top of that which combined total of +180% and not +150% as you said

And don't forget to add +24 points of damage to the end from Daedric arrows. Not sure if sneak multiplier works for that though.

You can do that already though.

The post I responded to did say mages are less protected when will you get that the world doesn't revolve around you?

EDIT: Actually after reading your other responses to other people, I've realized that you're an ass and only post things to illicit an emotional response.

Nothing is going to stop you from using Dragonhide either and you won't have to use any perks in Heavy armor to reach unencumbered and armor cap. I'm tired of debating these issues if you want to use heavy armor on your mage go for it. However back to my original point I don't find Master's difficulty impossible or even that much more difficult than archer or melee because I don't level my character up to level 50. If you level your character to level 50 or even past 40, you've leveled damage skills other than Destruction.

^THIS

I actually love the IDEA of impact and wish they would have expanded a bit on more realism. Let's think about the mechanics of a fireball for example. If someone like you or I were blasted by one, not only would we be knocked back like bowling pins but I'm almost sure that we would be writhing on the ground in agony and on fire if not right out killed and we certainly wouldn't be bouncing right back up any time soon. This is part of what the actual power of a mage SHOULD be but I realise that not everyone would enjoy that experience in their game but I think it would be VERY cool - or - hot! With mods and the ck, I'm sure such would be possible. On the flip side, you can also adjust the difficulty to make your experience more challenging.

Impact is a bad idea because it gives amazing CC capabilities to the Destruction branch which should be focused mostly in causing damage. As a result, destruction magic becomes mostly self sufficient which is part of why it is broken.

i can agree with that, illusion is more for CC and destruction is for nuking targets

Bull.

Assuming a Breton.

25 Conjuration -> 100; 75 skill-ups; 7.5 levels.
15 Destruction ->100; 85 skill-ups; 8.5 levels.
15 Enchanting ->100; 85 skill-ups; 8.5 levels.
20 Alteration->100; 80 skill-ups; 8 levels.
20 Restoration->100; 80 skill-ups; 8 levels.
20 Illusion->100; 80 skill-ups; 8 levels.

=48.5

Let's assume bartering and selling gave him 10 skill-ups; 1 level.

Let's also assume he messed around with alchemy a bit; so 5 skill ups: .5 level.

There's your 50th level character, without touching any other armor or weapon skill.

Illusion is an offensive skill
Conjuration is an offensive skill
You only need one defensive skill so you only need alteration or restoration
You only need one majicka sustaining skill so enchanting or alchemy however you can choose both as I did and still be under 50

EDIT: FYI Speech is in the 60's and my play time is over 200 hours.

I suppose it depends on whether you prefer the "hack-n-slash" genre, or the rpg/adventure genre games. For the record, Bethesda have at no point (to my knowledge) claimed that Skyrim would be a hack-n-slash type game, which means there is no reason to expect, that you should be able to one- or two-shot anyone.

And to whoever said destruction was meant for dealing damage, not CC... Skyrim is NOT WoW, TES have their own rules (and in my mind, TES rules are better )

Too bad you missed the part about the comparison of DESTRUCTION magic to other combat skills. We ALL know that conjuration is the bomb but it's not a combat skill - it's CONJURATION... Of course if there is something taking the hits for you destruction WOULD be fine no matter how much it svcks.

You're presumably right. I didn't consider that there'd be a multiplicative merge between the skill and the perk, but everything else is multiplied so it would even be more consistent if it was the case here as well. Thank you for letting me know. As for the Daedric arrows, I'm fairly sure they're added after the archery damage multipliers but before sneak damage. Which means they do 48 damage on a normal sneak attack and 72 with Deadly Aim.

Okay, so updated math. Base is probably still around 34 damage x 1.4 (100 skill) x 2 (Overdraw 5) x 2.6 (+160% archery damage enchantments) = 7.28 for each point of base damage. Without any looping. So that's 248 damage from the bow, at least 50 from enchantment, and then as much as 24 from the arrow. Basic sneak attacks end up at ~550 + enchant, DA sneak attacks end up at ~815 + enchant, and things start dying left and right regardless.

By the way, my numbers are somewhat conservative, as I didn't have a max enchant character to test with, but since I've been consoling so much for this topic already, I decided to do it just a tiny bit more. At 100 enchant, all relevant perks, you can do +25% to smithing, +40% damage, and a single damage enchantment can reach 46. If you're making due without the Destro augmentation perks then the enchants reach 31 damage. If you don't have fire / frost / storm enchanter, then it's 25 damage. Which means at least +50 damage to a double enchanted weapon but +90 damage if you go all the way.

What this means is that the bow would reach 255 damage without looping, the enchant could be as much as 90 damage, and those magicka poisons that mages can abuse? Yeah, so could an archer, though of course the target just might die simply from the poison being "applied".

In my opinion if you can kill your enemies solely using a skill, then its a combat skill, you could conjure and go hide in a corner at defeat your enemies so under my opinion that is a offensive or combat skill.

I hate to say this, but that's not how levels work. Every time a skill levels up, the value of the new level is added to your character experience pool. Every time that pool reaches certain thresholds, you level up. The formula for character levels is 75 + 25 * old level. So to reach level 2, you'd need 75 + 25 * 1 experience. To reach level 50, you'd need 75 + 25 * 49 exprience. That's 1300 experience.

Now, onto your example. Taking the magic skills to 100 with a Breton, as well as getting 10 levels of speech (which is very little but let's suppose this isn't a character that collects much loot) and 5 levels of alchemy, you'd get the sum of the numbers from 26 to 100 (conj) + 16...100 * 2 (dest & ench) + 21...100 * 3 (alt, rest, illu) + 21...30 (speech) + 21...25 (alch), which totals up to 29475. That's just barely enough to reach level 46 at 29250. For reference, level 50 is 34300, level 47 is 30475, and level 45 is 28050. Level 40 is at 22425, which means you can't master all the magic skills and stay below 40.

Realistically, your speech is probably going to end up at least around 45-50 and unless you love leaving locked chests behind, it's going to reach the 50-60. Adding speech 45 and lockpick 15...50 to the above example, you end up at 31200 and thus rather close to level 48 (31725).

Needless to say, I also think it's a wussy min-maxer strategy to intentionally keep your level low because you're afraid of the big bad leveled monsters, but that's just me.

Enemy magic ACTUALLY scales to give you a greater "challenge".

Don't be so square in your skill categorization. Destruction, one-hand, two-hand, and archery are all about direct damage. Illusion and conjuration are mostly crowd control, though of course they can both deal damage as well. Alteration is crowd control and defense. Restoration is healing and, if you like wards (but personally I don't), defense. Obviously light and heavy armor are both strictly defense. Block is one of the best defense skills around, even if it can do damage. It's great defense because it disables your enemies with very little effort on your part.

But ultimately, as far as direct damage is concerned, there are four skills that deal with it. The rest mainly do other things and suggesting that a pure mage type character shouldn't level them up because it presents a redundancy, well... Let's just say that a little bit of redundancy is great in emergencies situations and adds variety to the game in general. And it would seem weird to intentionally not use other spells simply because they'd level up skills that would take you well past level 40.

Where I save levels is illusion and conjuration. If I level those skills I'd expect to use them in combat. I haven't touched them and haven't picked up books on them or other skills I don't use because I want to use destruction as my sole damage dealing skill. How can you justify leveling combat skills and then not using them?


I respectfully disagree with your catorization, I think if you level conjuration and you are using conjuration you shouldn't have any problems with the game on master because conjuration is so strong. I want to rely on destruction, alteration, enchantments, some potions, and shouts. From a RP perspective it makes sense my mage never had the aptitude to excel at conjuaration or illusion and from a gaming perspective I don't want to fall back on using conjuraion so I don't touch it. My character is versatile enough as is, if I get surrounded I have shouts or paralyze to give me space.