Wow, seven pages and still no videos.

Would the people who are claiming destruction is fine "you just don't know how to do it" please post some videos (level 40+ master) or link to some that are already up that demonstrate how destruction mages fight high level enemies "properly" with destruction spells (not other schools).

I see a lot of weak damage and stunlocking on Youtube, I'd like to see the effective alternatives in action.

Thas like saying "there were no videos at the time of the concentration camps, so it didnt happen"

I dont have a good camera, should I really go out and buy an expensive ass camera just to say " HEY LOOK, I TOLD YA SO", no, I know it works for me, and so do others, if you don't believe us, thats your choice.

I didnt say it was made without smithing and enchanting. Comprehension failure on your part. I stated that was after smithing and enchanting it. How the hell else could I get two seperate weapon enchantments.



Who says I have less defence than a warrior or less health? There are no restrictions to a mage wearing armor, I can if I want to. And I can easily spend points in to level health instead of magicka, and use zero casting gear.


Seriously people stop making class destinctions and gameplay theorising. The math does not lie. Destruction can not do as much damage as melee without resorting to exploits. Using the system as intended is not exploiting. Using glitches and broken potions that should not give the effect they do is exploiting.

Is this with smithing? If so then you can't really say destruction is worse, just that when you combine two skill trees, the result is stronger than one on its own, which is to be expected. What is the highest damage you can do without smithing, enchantment or alchemy? Like literally just an unimproved weapon?

I read it right. You wrote it wrong.

ETA: FWIW, I knew what you meant. But the impression you gave was altogether different. You said, "Oh, I do 493 damage with my sword. And that's before I add in my bonuses/weaknesses. And that's not even counting my enchantments" giving the impression that your straight-up melee damage would be greatly increased by your bonuses and increased by potions' weakness effects. Oh, and btw, I can do enchantments too!!! No. You get your damage bonuses and then if you want to consider enchantments, then you consider that you can use poisons. However, and this is kind of significant, the poisons would only factor up the enchantment damage, a relatively small amount of your total. The poison for a destruction mage, however, would be increasing their entire damage output.

Umm.....no. It's like asking to see what some claim is possible that others are saying isn't. I'm not saying anyone is right or wrong either, I'm just saying show me. That's usually what happens on game boards where battle tactics are in dispute.

Are there no really good videos up already where a destruction mage takes on high level enemies with destruction magic where the mage doesn't have to slowly grind down the health or stunlock the enemies?

Double post ignore.

Someone answer me this, what is the damage from a daedric longsword with 100 1-h, and NO smithing, enchanting or alchemy of any sort?

The whole point is not about battle tactics or gameplay style though. Some people are just not understanding the maths involved and keep jumping to the same incorrect assumptions about destruction in correlation to other combat skills. They then use hyperbole, deliberate obsfuscation of facts, and nonsense or illogical arguments to try and "get around" the real facts that mathmatically destruction is inferior to other combat skills when they are improved upon precisely BECAUSE destruction has less means to improve it.

Not exactly.

There's one contingent of people who say, completely incorrectly, that destruction mages cannot exist without zeroing out their magicka cost or relying on spamlock to freeze their targets.

There's another contingent of people who say, arguably, that destruction does less damage than the other ways to kill things.

The second group of people could be right. There's all sorts of arguments people make and throw around and whatever. But the first group of people are definitely wrong. And frankly, I don't care whether or not the second group are right. Because as a mage who relies primarily upon destruction, I get along just fine. And if you guys can make your uber sneak orc that can frenzy and backstab for 4,800 points of health, good on you. If you think that's what makes the game enjoyable for you, then have at it. But this isn't a dike-measuring contest. It doesn't matter if you can go do 4,000 or 40,000 or 400,000. Destruction is still viable. And it's not made non-viable by some other guy 1-shotting mammoths on Master. It still works for me. And for me, that's all that really matters.

And thats the point I keep making, that while it is viable its still mathmatically inferior. And on higher difficulties this inferiority comes to the fore and is extremely noticable. People stating as I am, dont want to one-shot everything in sight from 2 klicks away. They just want a even playing field when it comes to damage output.

I have played 2 mages, both destruction mages. First had tons and tons of magic, still ran out all the time, had a hard time killing a single higher leveled enemy before running out of magic, and having nearly no health died easily. Second character went in knowing that by level 40 I would have 0 cost spells, so has tons and tons of health. Playing on expert with dead is dead, and yes I don't 1 hit most enemies, I 3-4 hit most enemies. I am not having problems, currently Level 56.

The problem with destruction is not just the damage. Dual cast any of the expert spells w/ all the perks for that element and you are doing 200 damage per cast. Most top level enemies on adept have 400-600 health, YES I know that deathlords, dragon priests, top level vampires, and dragons are in the 1k-3k territory, but high level mortals, animals, giants, etc are in the 400-600 health area. So on adept most enemies go down in 2-3 hits, then deathlords/vampires are 5-6 and dragons 10-20. So you can play on adept no problem especially considering the stun lock. I'm also having no problems on expert, but I see how it would be tedious on master. Sure melee attacks do more damage, but you also have to get close enough to get hit back. And bows can also pump out more damage but I find that the attacks are slower, and holding the attack slows you more... in other words the mage is more agile.

The biggest problem with destruction is the cost vs damage. Anyone else noticed that the base cost of the elemental cloak spells is higher than the base cost of summoning the atronach of the same element... which comes with an elemental cloak spell? Someone please explain how that makes sense? 0 costing, or even cutting the cost by 90% fixes this.

Look, I don't disagree with you at all, I have a pretty set opinion on the state of destruction magic particularly on higher levels and on the master setting. I'm just trying to be open minded and fair by asking people who say "destruction is fine" to show some videos that demonstrate this. Hey, maybe I'm wrong.

But I've looked for videos on Youtube myself and all I ever see is stun locking and the whittling down of enemy health at what can only be described as a grinding rate.

people are saying they got on fine as a destruction mage on master - show me what that looks like.

I've never seen a gameplay dispute go on this long without people backing up their arguments with videos - never.

The thing is, the same differences apply in lower levels. A low level 1-h still does 5-10x the damage a low level destro - the difference however is that at low levels 1-h does 5-10 times the DPS, not the DPH (due to mage constantly running out of mana). And at that time it the difference between clearing a room in a few seconds or in a couple minutes, and not simply pointles comparison of if you can take 2, 5 or 10 times the max health of an enemy in one hit...
Destruction was never non-viable, it is as viable as the other 3 + 1 damage skills. After all, as long as it can do some damage, anything is a viable offensive skill. But it is much, much, MUCH slower. It's not any more or less exciting, any more or less challenging or any more or less useful - it is just slower. If in a supposed future zombie invasion, between a tazer, a chainsaw, a shotgun and a pen you choose the pen as weapon because you feel it's more satisfying to kill zombies with it, then sure by all means go for it. But you can't deny that it is inferior to the rest of the weapons, and in a real situation no sane person would choose it over a real weapon.

Base weapon damage is 14, multiply by 150% from weapon skill, 200% from skill perks, for 42 damage total, or about 47 dps. What was your point?

No, newb. Know more about build types. A third of my builds are gone from no spell creation alone. Of which have been listed ad nauseum even before release, if you care enough, go search them. Much less just the cut effects. No builds were really added either. Almost anything that can be made in Skyrim, can be made in previous games. Its not however the other way around.

Destruction damage output may be weaker then the other combat skills. But you can get boost it up a lot with poisons and potions. To me though the main problem with destruction and magic in general is just the sheer lack of spells. When I heard they removed spell making I was expecting a bunch of new cool spells and effects. Something along Neverwinter or Dragon Age. Bring out the Cone of Colds, Burning Hands, Save or Die spells, Life Draining Spells, Psyhic Crush spells or Insect Plague Spells. Something cool. Not this.

Second thing Destruction needs is to lower the spell mana cost. It is just too high. I think someone pointed out earlier that Destruciton spells cost the same as Conjuration spells of simlar level. This is just wrong. Conjuration was not meant to be spammed, destruction is.

Not the same... MORE. Destruction is more expensive. Well the start novice spells are cheaper, but destruction spells go up in cost far faster than conjuration. Flame atronach: base 132. Flame cloak(which a flame atronach uses): base 254 Even the firebolt a flame atronach casts is 36, she only has to cast it 4 times or have an enemy get close to her flame cloak and she has more than made up what the cost would have been for you to cast the same spells.

Most expensive conjuration spell: 1057 Most expensive destruction spell: 1257. And a storm thrall is far more useful than firestorm.

The problem is that weapons get boost by the same things that boost destruction, but by more. And on top of that they get boosts by things destro is anaffexted by.
And that is the point of the whole discussion. The game was designed with the weapon power in mind when they were doing the balance. But destro is way too weak compaired to that.

To me it almost seems like the game was balanced with destruction damage in mind, given the way the difficulty plummets at higher levels with melee characters.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYGZ_G2_NWM

No 0 casting gear, no magica gear, no racial for magica regen, 1:2 magica to health ratio, no capped MR and ER either.
Only used one poison - vendor 100% weakness to magic and a custom 164% destro pot but could just use two vendor 100% element and magic poison and a vendor 100% destro pot.

I have a problem with aiming at moving targets but when I finally managed to hit it it took 5-6 second to destroy an ancient dragon (3,5k health) on master difficulty with non-dual casted spell (lightning storm) 112 dmg ( 56 dmg on master ) easily.

Post limit.