Do you think having 100% destruction magic reduction (4 pieces of equipment at 25%) is exploiting the game in a way it wasn't intended? (play on expert atm)

Reasons for:
- without custom magic spells, there is a cap for damage, while with enchanting and smithing, the damage for weapons seems way higher. so instead of upping the damage, mages have to use more of what they have
- the perks for destruction are terrible other than dual casting and extra *element* damage. the ones for making target on fire flee, paralyze, or die, when weak are pointless. they're already weak! i've never even seen an enemy be paralyzed by my frost spells cause they will probably die at that point, nor do I ever with to paralyze a weak opponent. might as well kill him...
- at level 59 and archmage, I DO want to feel like I have mastered magic and be casting fireballs everywhere for little magicka cost. without using the exploit, I can only fire 3-4 dual casted incinerate (expert level firebolt) even at 400ish magicka. Then I wait for the slowest magicka regen ever.

Reasons against:
- against a single enemy, it is just perma stunned due to the perk, kinda ridiculous to never worry about a dragon
- it may break immersion for some people or break the time? frankly I haven't thought about it much since as a high elf arch mage, I want to be that powerful, but lately I've been having doubts

Anyone else have reasons for or against? Deciding whether to cap it at 84% reduction. Maybe I just need to put more levels into mana. Since I'm on the console, if I decide to, I'll just take away my stamina and put it into magic, since I only stopped putting more into magic since I didn't need it anymore -.-

Wishlist: better perks for destruction
- 10-15% chance for freezing (all enemies, lower duration for bosses, ranged)
- 10-15% chance to insta kill low tier enemies with lightning (ranged)
- 10-15% chance to crit (ranged)

And another perk after the dual casting ranged perk for dual casting channeling (flames, wall of flames) that has like 40% chance of staggering every 5-8 seconds of continuous damage

Anyone agree/disagree? Thoughts?

Even with free Destruction spells it's still just a bad version of Archery which is the sad truth.

There needs to be enchantments that increase your spell damage and there needs to be a damage increase of 0.5% for each skill point in Destruction.

This

Wall of Flames is awesome

In monitoring this forum it seems that there will be people that think anything is pretty much overpowered or underpowered. And that everything and/or anything is imbalanced or a game breaker.

Basically if you request those opinions and listen to them, the game is pretty much completely unplayable - it seems.

My opinion is that with whatever the game gives you is fine.

It's not imbalanced, it's a game-breaker.

I agree. Wall of Flames is awesome. Admittedly, I use destruction spells mostly as ranged damage until the mobs come within weapon range. So I'm not a pure mage person. But I would have to agree that the destruction tree could use a little sprucing up.

Casttime reduction perk is what i want. Archery start to get really good upon getting that 30% faster perk.

Hmm to make a comparison to decide whether it should be 100% reduced or not until destruction is buffed...how much damage does a daedric legendary bow do with daedric arrows at archery 100 and all the bells and whistles of the perk tree. I never used archery or played an archer yet.

Incinerate spell does 90 (both fire perks I guess) and dual casting it makes it 180? it has a small stun too, do archery attacks have a small stun?

This. You may as well type /tgm in console. Its a cheat afaik. The magicka bar/stat/gear is there for a reason.


Also even using that exploit doesn't solve the problem of
1. lowest damage scaling, unless you use yet another exploit on top of this one.
2. spell scaling is fubar, can't use the most hyped spell-types of Skyrim for most of the game because they are useless after lvl 25, lower if you play on Master (spray,glyph,cloak,wall, pbaoe, blizzard)

Bows with sneak can crit for well over 1000 damage with high end bows, coupled with enchanting. And there is a 50% chance perk for arrows to stagger an opponent, but this only applies to smaller targets,

Crit = 2x damage? What if % of crit anyway?
50% stagger wow

Seriously...how are archers not one shotting everything? And I thought 100% destruction reduction was imba....

3x crit from sneak, plus 30% chance for critical hit for extra damage on top of that, add blacksmithing and enchanting on top of that for insta win game build.

im not even sure this could be called an exploit. it took less than a day for lots of people independent from each other to figure out that you could use the enchanting/smithing/alchemy exploits to get uber insta kill weapons and easily reach the armor maximum and reduce magicka cost to 0%. i have some serious concerns with bethesdas QA division. i assume that had someone actually playing the game from time to time trying to find exploits. right?

Yup.

I thought you could spam fireball if you stack destruction % and magic regen or magicka? What about magic regen and magicka?

As is there is no reason to put any levelups or resources into magicka because of enchantment to zero costs -> Result: 4-5 + 4 x 5 magic perks are completely useless. ; stacking regen won't offset the amount of magicka you use, probably not even enough to end a single encounter at high levels.

Course, the real consequence is there is no reason to play a mage at all; since any character invested in enchantment can gain zero cost to all schools, might as well roll a warrior and get free magic.

Yes, it is exploiting the game. What is the use for magicka and regen potions if you are casting without costs? Whats the purpose of Apprentice/Adept/Expert/Master perks for each school? Crafting combinations make extremly OP weapons and armours; true.. but even those overpowered physical attacks require stamina. So in conclusion magic reduction should be capped and adding spell scaling to some extend.