Hello, It's steelgold11.
I am hearing everybody say that destruction is broken, and that is preventing me from playing a mage. Can anyone elaborate on how it's broken for me?

It is not broken, it's just not as overpowered as going for swords or bows, or whatever other weapon. If you feel like making a mage, go ahead, your character should do just fine, just don't expect to plough through everything within a second.

"Physical" offensive and defensive skills scale with your skill score AND perks.

Magick (of any kind) receives a rather flaccid discount for the skill score, and the damage does not go up until you pick up appropriate perks. In the endgame, damage delivered by melee weapons and bows vastly outstripts that of destruction magick, because weapons themselves improve, and they benefit from the double whammy of damage-increasing perks (like Barbarian) and damage increases from skill score.

Of course, enchanting gear with Fortify Destruction mitigates this issue by giving you mana-free spellcasting, but that is considered an exploit.

I enjoy playing destruction.. not broken for me. Impact makes it easy to kill mostly anything though.

I think it's because destruction solely on its own with no other schools in magic isn't as powerful as it was in Oblivion. I find my mages need a back up magic school to be a bit more viable in combat. I think the removal of spell creation also is what gets peoples knickers in a knot since they cannot improve upon the existing spells. In all honesty, I enjoy it for the challenge and the different tactics I use compared to my archer.

This doesn't mean its a borken feature it's just different from the Oblivion magic system. In oblivion I normally went mage since it was quite easy to to destroy enemies with a fireball, even though I might of started with a sword, and archery wasn't a great ranged skill, skyrim much improved on that at least.

It is pretty much impossible to use Destruction against more than two enemies. Any two fast moving melee enemies [Falmer, Forsworn, Dwenmer Automaton] can require you to switch to melee too because they get right on top of you quick.

The casting animation delay's effect on accuracy doesn't help any either.

I think it goes like this: If you want to play your main tactic as nuking, then you have to take Impact, and then you tend to run out of Magicka, and you have trouble with groups.

My feeling is, well, change your tactics up a little bit beyond just trying to nuke everything while standing there in robes. However, this apparently would be restricting people's freedom to play how they want.

Because you'll be drinking mana potions 24/7


I'd recommend getting a Magic mod from Nexus.


It really made it worth playing as a Mage :>

In master, destruction is IMHO performing less than optimal (performing as in, from a good gameplay point of view) :
- killing stuff eats FAR too much magicka unless ...
- you use incredibly strange alchemy potions that increase your magic damage by a LOT (weird gamedesign, if you don't use consumable type grinding powered alchemy school, you cut in more than half your damage potential)
- or you go for greatly reduced magicka cost, up to 100% reduced allowing to cast spells forever
- 100% magicka cost reduction awhich llows you to perma Impact most targets (up to 2 at same time and 3 they are practically fully disabled too) which turns destruction from a "weak magic unless you use something else to do the real work" into "unstoppable force that kills everything even Alduin with little effort"

As for other smaller details :
- Master spells svck except lightning which is only a little bad. I heard that you can use Blizzard in town and the damage is so weak the people won't even complain
- all spells other than the single target Expert which are your bread and butter, and the multitarget Adept if you really feel the need are useless once you get those. It means you lose more 75% of the different spell types (no more streams, runes or wall types)

It is considered broken because experts on "Arena", "Daggerfall", "Morrowind" and "Oblivion" are not yet experts on "Skyrim".

The magicka system in "Skyrim" is not yet fully understood by most people commenting on it and because it fails to meet their preconcieved expectations the system is considered flawed.

There's nothing wrong with Destruction magic.

Much like everything else in the game it works the way it does for a reason but in an internet world where the answer to everything is supposed to be at the push of a button there is consternation caused when you can't immediately 'Wiki' the ultimate build.

Azrael
The Nord with the Sword

First, it depends on the difficulty you play at. It's much more obvious on Master than on Adept, so if you normally play Adept, you may not even notice any issues.

Destruction is viable as a "primary" skill, i.e. battlemage type character, if you like kiting and long fights. For example, with a level 20 pure mage with ~45 destruction skill and ~ 25 1H skill, fully perked to the level on destruction, no perks with 1H: I often got the impusle to stop casting spells, pull out my sword and start swinging. Why? Because I could kill things faster with a sword even though I had no skill in it. It gets worse at higher levels, because as a previous poster pointed out, melee and archery skills scale with level, magic skills don't. You get more powerful spells and the old ones become useless, but without scaling the new spells slowly become less powerful, too.

If you're a mage who focuses on Conjuration and/or Illusion, then no problems, and with Conjuration you actually become more powerful (relatively) on higher difficulties.

Also, Destruction has one OP aspect to make it even more bizarre. Once you get the impact stun perk, you can more or less permanently freeze a single opponent as you slowly whittle down their health. IMO this is not fun and not challenging, but some people think otherwise.

Because Skyrim is a bizarro world where getting cut with a knife is more grievous than getting struck by lightning or lit on fire.

It's because people try only using destruction and nothing else.

When you play a warrior you don't only focus on one skill do you? Playing a pure destruction mage is like trying to play a sword and board warrior without a shield and no armor.

Mages are good, you just need to make use of the other spell schools as well.

Also people aren't always paying attention to what they're doing and are blaming the game before they realise they are trying to burn a Dark Elf who has a natural resistance to fire.

Swap to shock and watch the health drain like you pulled a plug.

Az

No that's... absolutely wrong even though it's what everyone who is inexplicably opposed to any kind of balancing says. Destruction is the primary mage skill for COMBAT, using alteration and illusion and all that doesn't factor in to how much damage you do. Sure, you can make some retardedly broken enchantment so that you can at least spam your spells ad infinium but not everyone wants to waste perks on crafting skills, they should be an option and not a necessity.

I see people post these comments once in a while, and I don't think you understand the "pure mage" concept. The idea is that you use any school of magic.

To fix your anology, it's like you're saying: "One-Handed skill is fine, because you can just use a bow to do damage."**

**I've actually seen people seriously make this "argument" about Destruction, saying it works great, when it's supplemented with a bow.

Just play the game. Form your own opinion.

Most things on these forums are highly subjective anyhow.

A lot of it has to do with the disparity in power between NPC destruction mages and a player character destruction mage. The NPC destruction mages are some of the most powerful opponents you will face in the game, way outclassing Dragons and Giants in how much trouble they can be to put down for most players.

So after getting owned countless times by NPC destruction mages, you think to yourself that you will start up a new character and play a destruction mage so you can be uberpowerful like the NPC destruction mages. They you are disappointed because your spells are not as powerful as the ones the NPC destruction mages cast. Then you feel weak and puny and complain that destruction is underpowered, relative to swords and bows (which is true). The problem is more pronounced on higher difficulty levels.

If you master either illusion or conjuration, in addition to destruction, however, a mage can be every bit as powerful in the end as a melee fighter or archer, and probably moreso at higher levels of difficulty, since illusion spells are unaffected by the difficulty slider.

It is difficult to reduce the power of an illusion calm or frenzy spell to a pure damage per second number, but illusion and conjuration are ultra-powerful at high levels on master difficulty. Destruction, not so much, since its pure damage per second numbers are less than what you can achieve with a sword or a bow.

Sure, you can spam potions or create free destruction cast gear and dual cast (impact) your destruction spells on any one enemy slowly whittling him down, but that doesn't feel powerful. In order to make destruction feel powerful, there would need to be some spells that let you drop strong enemies with one or two casts, and such spells just do not exist, especially not if you move the difficulty slider right of center.

I play a pure mage that specializes in illusion and destruction on expert level and have no problems, but if I did not have the ability to calm/frenzy enemies, it would be pretty hard to rely on destruction alone without using a whole lot of potions or moving the difficulty slider to the left.

destruction is pretty much balanced up until about level 40ish, by the time you hit 50-60 the only way to kill enemies is to stagger lock them (using a perk so that when you duel cast on an enemy they stagger backwards) .. also its pretty much worthless at those levels if you dont have some enchanted items to give you a TON of magicka and/or spells cost 100% less to cast.. that sounds overpowered but if you don't do it chances are you WILL NOT survive as a mage..

It's simple.
Destruction damage does not scale with your skill.
Bows, 1h swords and 2h swords do.

A warrior can do quite well focusing almost exclusively on, say, two-handed and heavy armor, and do very well. A mage focusing on destruction for offense and alteration for armor will struggle without the use of conjuration or other spell schools.

its not broken but it does lack some punch at mid levels, once you're leveled up and reduce magic costs it gets good, but compared to swords or bows, shot for shot it isn't as strong..the maximum magic attack does about 200 damage and swords and bows can do like 800 damage per attack..magic can be very powerful if you take the right perks and level the right complementary skills. if you utilize it a certain way it can be super powerful. but thats once you're leveled up and if you use other schools of magic combined, overall magic is good.

I think one issue many have with playing a mage is they feel that they can not wear armor for some reason. I play I destruction mage with light armor and have worked my way from adept difficulty to expert still working on trying to get to master but those darn forsworn just rip me a new one when I take it up to master. It took me awhile to get used to playing a mage as I am normally either a stealthy killer to a up in your face with a sword type.

Its not as bad/broken as everyone says.

I was put off making a destructo character because of everyones comments at first but when I finally decided to give it a go it wasnt actually that bad. It certainly isnt as over-powered as the other classes, but it is fun to play and a much better challenge.

Give it a go and judge for yourself.

If you put a few perk points into smithing and light armor, that would make playing a destruction mage much easier. Personally, I don't like to wear armor when I play a mage but that's just my own roleplaying choice. There is nothing in the game stopping a mage from wearing armor. Unlike Oblivion, where there was a penalty for casting spells in armor, the only penalty in Skyrim is that the mage armor perk won't work with armor on, but if you are wearing armor, then you don't need mage armor.