Magic is overpowered, the 100% stager makes every boss fight to easy. Im only level 28 tho but can easilly kill pretty much anything with mage

Whenever the game gets too hard/tedious for you:
- Raise enchanting to desired amount and then enchant your gear to reduce magicka cost. I would cap at 95% - 97% reduction, since above that makes the game too boring.
- Raise alchemy to desired amount and then make potions of fortify destruction and poisons of weakness to fire/frost/shock. For role-players, the best way to add the poison is to conjure the bound bow and add poison to it, and fire one shot before putting it away. That way, you are still using magic to do what you want.

You can get decently high destruction damage. Without glitches (but doing everything the game designers allowed), destruction does very decent damage. Calculations are pretty simple.

60 (Incinerate) * 2.2 (dual-cast) * 1.5 (augmented flames perk 2/2) * 2.77 (best fortify destruction potion I believe) = 548.68 That would be the highest damage you can get per 1 shot.

Note: I didn't include the DoT from incinerate because I didn't know what it is, but it is negligible.

For an even higher value, put a weakness to fire poison on the enemy, which makes the total 548.68 * 2.06 (best weakness to fire poison I believe) = 1130.2808.

And that is the highest you can get, I believe. Through legit methods. I understand why everyone is complaining about destruction (nobody wants to keep chugging potions), but, meh, it's not a huge deal. And I don't find chugging potions takes significantly away from roleplaying a mage. I mean, potions themselves seem pretty magical (they were in Harry Potter now weren’t they? lol).

Destruction is nothing compared to melee or archery (to say nothing of those two each combined with sneak perks), as these run up into the multiple k's per swing/shot, but it'll do when dealing with what the game throws at you. Easily.

I got potion values from here: youtube, /watch?v=HPjylMugGbA

EDIT: Corrected small mistakes.

Funny how when mods do it, it isn't overpowered at all. Then again, mods nerf impact shenanigans. Magic also doesn't benefit from smithing abuse, so mages aren't going to go around dealing 5k damage with an incinerate.

It's hilarious that people say magic would be overpowered, as if smithing shenanigans don't turn warriors into murder-machines.

Not really, unless you stack them up the wazoo and kite like nuts. Combat regeneration is roughly 33% normal regeneration, so once the mage runs out of magicka - especially with high-health enemies - you start running and the whole thing becomes some twisted whack-a-mole game.

So either you kite like mad or have huge cost reducers.

No, not at all. Being a sitting duck and hoping you don't get one-shot by that angry Forsworn isn't a challenge. About the only decent one is lightning storm.

But hey, maybe your definition of challenge is different than mine. Master spells aren't worth their magicka and do poor damage.

I can raise my magicka all I want; two extra shots of incinerate isn't going to help me any.

Damage per mana cost ratio is 10% with a 40% magicka increase. Armor spells are universally horrible, with the almighty Dragonhide coming in at a whopping 30 seconds.

Of course, the lack of spells means that the mage archetype is also reduced to every cookie-cutter fantasy mage out there.

Obviously.

The issue is that you need mana for everything, since your armor, healing, damage and meatshields all operate off the same resource. Magicka means a lot more to a mage than stamina to a warrior. By the time you've pulled out your defensive spells, called out a meatshield and have a ward out, you're not exactly going to be able to function in any sort of magical damage dealing.

Dremora lords only become obsolete much, much later. Then you have Dead Thrall, which can be abused very easily.

Role-playing a destruction mage at high levels is aweful without mods, you only use 1 spell for 90% of your game.

Its beyond pathetic actually. Thank god for mods though. I don't think I could play 100's of hours with just spamming 1 spell.

So use more than one spell. I do and it works great.

I wouldn't call them nerfed. More like rebalanced.

INteresting, but where's the role-play factor? A mage being an archer just to inflict debuffs isn't very role-play.

I play on master. The other spells don't do anything in vanilla, at all. They don't scale. I like to role-play, but not to the point where it'll get me killed.


For the record, with mods, I do use like 10 destro spells. Master level sprays, usefull glyphs, high damage cloaks ftw.

I can't agree with you that everything magoc-wise is balanced. You can't honestly state that paying 40% more magicka for 10% more damage for destruction spells is balanced.

Other schools where dual casting doubles a spells duration, that makes sense.

Adding a third perk to the "augment" flames/ice/shock (+75% damage at 90 destruction) is a possible idea, but I also like the idea of Garrisons about damage bonuses with the mana reduction perks.

I do agree that -100% mana cost is stupid though. Should cap at 85%, but give destruction a little more power in return.

I wouldn't call them nerfed. More like rebalanced.

They removed spell crafting, they also most of the different powerful spells you could buy,

Now Oblivion and earlier games did not need damage scaling of spells, a 50 hp fire spell did 50 hp all the time, however you could buy 20 other fire spells and you could make your own so it was no need for it.

And yes melee and archers can smith to improve good gear they find or make, and they have fortify damage enchants making it possible to do 500 damage.

I can't agree with you that everything magoc-wise is balanced. You can't honestly state that paying 40% more magicka for 10% more damage for destruction spells is balanced.

Other schools where dual casting doubles a spells duration, that makes sense.

Adding a third perk to the "augment" flames/ice/shock (+75% damage at 90 destruction) is a possible idea, but I also like the idea of Garrisons about damage bonuses with the mana reduction perks.

I do agree that -100% mana cost is stupid though. Should cap at 85%, but give destruction a little more power in return.

They removed spell crafting, they also most of the different powerful spells you could buy,

Now Oblivion and earlier games did not need damage scaling of spells, a 50 hp fire spell did 50 hp all the time, however you could buy 20 other fire spells and you could make your own so it was no need for it.

And yes melee and archers can smith to improve good gear they find or make, and they have fortify damage enchants making it possible to do 500 damage.

I agree with all of this. The magic cost reduction perks seem like "wasted" perks to me since you can so easily get free casting with enchant. Making the cost reduction perks also scale the damage would make those perks more desirable (at least in the destruction school).

You have to give up other enchantments though.

So you want to be a God with your mage? Or did I misunderstand you here?

True, but I am not sure there are any other enchantments that are all that useful for a destruction mage, apart from magic/elemental resistances, but the magic resist/atronach perks and the atronach stone can cover you there. What enchantments do you use for your destruction mage?

A lot of people's frustration with destruction magic in Skyrim may be because they miss being able to be Godlike the way you could in Morrowind and Oblivion as a Destruction mage.

destruction with a heavy emphasis on alteration up to the atronach perk and illusion up to mastermind, dual and kindred, is a beast.

throw in enchant up to corpus and xtra with restore and you have a pure mage that controls and dominates.

add in some combat skills, alchemy and smithing and you have a god.

That's a pure mage, but not a pure destruction mage since you will be relying on your paralyze and calm/fear/frenzy spells. In Oblivion you could stack your weaknesses and be godlike using only destruction magic.