Am I just doing it wrong?

With a weapon, I can make it hit harder with my skill level, perks, smithing, enchanting fortify weapon, dual-wielding for a 250% bonus, poisons, fortify potions, sneaking, gloves that multiply the sneak bonus, Berserk, enchanted-on effects and extra damage, and of course power attacks of various kinds.

With my fire spell I can drink a fortify destruction potion or dual-cast for a 20% bonus, and take the elemental perks. I have nothing to add, nothing to find, no item I can make, no skill level I can reach, no complementary skill, no choices to make that will cause my spells to hit any harder. I have nothing to gain. There is no item in any cave or quest, nothing I can make or choose that will be remotely useful. I can add more Magicka...for what, I have no idea. I barely use any now.

I don't just want to hit harder. I want to earn it by skill and choices and items found or made. But they all reduce costs. Everything reduces costs. I am just stunned by this. I guess I didn't think it through, and invested a lot of time in a mage, and now there is nothing more to get but some bizarre useless master spells.

I just don't get it. Is there something I am just missing? Is this really how it's supposed to be?

This is the way it's supposed to be. You can increase your spell effectiveness by a 50%, 10% more per hand if dual casted with the right perk, and that's all. Buy stronger spells; as you level up, the magica cost naturally goes down: a certain spell casted al lvl 100 will take 60% of the magica it takes at the beginning. Invest into the perks that halves the magica consumption. The Lighting storm spell you get once you reach level 100 and complete the training session with Faralda (college of mages) is very effective and costs less than some high level spells. Use electricity based spells: very few enemies are resistant to this type of magic and it's also good to quicken the foes magica depletion. The disintegrate perk is also useful. Second is the fire magic because many of Skyrim inhabitants are weak to fire (beasts, undead and creatures).

Weakness to X poisons. They're a bit of a hassle to manage, but they can (together with fortify pots) improve your damage enough to one-shot most things.

Having the Necromage restoration perk while being a vampire will make your fortify pots stronger, and make your spells hit harder against undead.

Do you feel underpowered with pure destruction mage? With alchemy, Fortify Destruction potion is amazing for destruction. You can more than double the damage (162%) when you need it. With cost reduction gear through enchanting, you don't have to worry about magicka. This is amazing benefit. Dual cast thunderbolt does 235 damage normally and 615 with potion. If that's not enough, shoot them with one weakness to element poison arrow. You don't have to be any good with archery skill, you just need to hit once. then 1200 damage with your dualcast thunderbolt.

I've heard of people complaining about destruction mage in two ways. Some people say it's too weak, and other people say it's too boring. Boring, maybe, but I have found that it's not weak once you get impact. I've been trolling with alteration/destruction mage last night. Paralyze room full or draugr death overlords, kill them at your leisure.

In all honesty, the only destruction spell I use these days tends to be Lighting Storm, and that's only to Kamehameha Wave dragons that refuse to land after initiating battles.

If you are on a PC then you can fix this issue with a mod. Destruction doesn't scale, and it has been the source of much complaints.

Saying you should chug potions is a faulty argument. One does not need to chug a 1 handed fortify potion every 60 seconds to use a blade effectively. Yes it "works" and yes you could also poison them with a weakness pot, (talk about a hassle - I think Ive killed 500 Deathlords... if I had to pre poison each one? HA!) ,but really it just needed to be scaled, and it isn't. Fix it on a PC or do the aforementioned annoying workarounds if you are on a console.

Really since it doesn't scale you are pigeonholed into massive spell reduction enchants to make your magica last, and (if you are pure destruction) chugging pots constantly and hunting for ingredients.

These are the facts on master anyways, on lower difficulties it probably will not matter nearly as much.

It is a shame there was not included a "fortify-damage-destruction" enchant.

There's a lot of complaints about how underpowered Destruction is. The above suggestions are good but none of them solve the Magicka regeneration problem because Magicka regenerates at a handicaped rate during combat. What good is rapid regeneration of magicka when you're not in combat? Beats me.

The only viable (and simplest) solution I've found is to carry bucketloads of Restore Magicka potions. On my pure mage character I always carried between 30 and 40 of them and during any decent dungeon crawl, I'd use most of them.

All the other schools of magic stand on their own without excessive supplementation, but Destruction doesn't. Hopefully they'll fix this someday.

To be fair I'll add that I play exclusively on Master difficulty, which really de-nuts Destruction. On lower difficulties Destruction works fine with everything everyone else has suggested.

True, Magicka regenerates more slowly in combat - but does that mean increasing your regeneration rate doesn't have any effect while in combat? I haven't tested this, but my feeling is that it does have an effect. Granted, not as big of one as most would like.

My experience is that it's useless. Enemies don't wait for that blue bar to creep back up before they attack you again. You get maybe one more spellcast if you're lucky. And with Destruction the enemy has to be almost dead already for it to matter. Rapid regen is good for spamming. I'll give it that. If you want to raise your Conjuration and you have lots of regen gear then you can soul trap a dead animal a lot of times before the magicka runs out. But again, that's outside of combat.

Regen is nice to have when you're trying to run through dungeons and don't want to wait for your mana to come back. That is about its only use. :/

I'm surprised that magic doesn't get slightly stronger like weapons... simply using the formula for cost reduction and applying it to damage would be appropriate IMO. (I.e. at 100 skill, your spells are 40% stronger than at 0 skill.)

On my latest guy I've really gotten into the destruction magic.
Got all the perks and lots of magicka (that seems to regenereate quickly).
Yes as mentioned all my spells are practically free, and I'm partial to frost spears heheh...
I can basically send them indefinitely, and that's the expert spell I believe?
I'm waiting to learn the Master destruction spells, I've never been this high before, my destruction is 96 or something.
But yeah, still seems underpowered - I always fall back to real weapons when I'm fighting it out.
Was hoping the Master destruction spells would be awesome...

Make some destruction equipment to fortify it. You can get your magic cost to 0 and effectively cast spell after spell with using no magic at all.

Reduced in combat regardless of the rate you have. This on the PC is a game setting, thankfully.

Right, while in combat, regen is reduced.

But what I'm saying is that the increased regen rate effects may still apply - they're just not as noticeable as outside of combat.

No one is saying that it doesn't apply, just that it's so negligible as to being worthless. Destruction not scaling at higher levels is a long standing complaint, one that is best fixed by mods at the moment if they're available for you as while it's possible Bethesda will actually balance this out in a future patch that seems unlikely at this point. The design for their entire magic system seems based on the flawed theory of requiring reduced spell costs at high levels rather than scaling power output to skill level. A very bad idea to myself and many other players.

I am 230 hours into my first playthrough, and I am a pure mage. You need higher level spells to cause more Destruction, and you can also take fortify destruction potions that more than double your statistical damage.