Magic is terrible.. even with perks its so bad I don't even know how it got in this way.

I deleted the character I was going to use for my mage playthrough at lvl 6.

Who would want to go through that Hell?

Players that are tired of the OP Range melee type characters? Magic is bad but it's good when those are the only skills you've trained, for example get all your magic skills up maybe alchemy and enchanting and stop leveling.

Many of us think the magic is good and a lot of fun. Perhaps you weren't playing it correctly.

Magic in a sense is nice but in a terms of using it to kill people it's bad. Illusion and alteration are good, along with conjuration and restoration but desrutction at high levels is just ridiculous.

Ok ok destruction magic is bad.

And I shouldn't have to lvl up other things or buff things to not have to waste half my magicka killing one thing.. with perks.

Define "magic".

I believe you don't like Destruction. I agree it was handled very poorly and is weaker than melee. However, other magic schools more than make up for it - Illusion and Conjuration, when maxed out, are extremely powerful.

Level 6 is way too early to decide magic is useless. You have only 5 perks, that's nothing!

You don't want to level up other skills? What skills? Warriors need weapon and armor skills, at least. So that's your Destruction and one other: Alteration, Restoration or Conjuration, depending on what kind of protection you want to use. Then there's Smithing and magic equivalent: Enchanting. With high Enchanting you can decrease magicka cost of a chosen magic school as much as to 0. Is this not enough?

All magic schools got simplified in Skyrim, so if you compare the amount of spells in Oblivion to Skyrim you will notice Skyrim has far less spell.

Destruction is very ABC, you use fire against ice, and Ice ect. It is just not very enjoyable, I never feel like my mage is powerful. Also with the perk system if you take a few schools of magic you sort of have to pick what you want to be. I am currently a Ice mage with conjuration and Alteration.

With mods you can balance magic, such as the alteration shield spells lasting longer, but this is no help to console players. So I really hope they do something about this and add more spell and a scaling system for magic, into the default game.

Conjuration took the biggest hit of the 11.11.11 release date, they rushed it hint hint. We now have 5 unique summons, compared to the 10-20 in Oblivion. I can understand not putting the Shivering isles ones in, Morrowind only had about 2 summons from their; but not having Scamps in a elder scrolls game is wrong. I think they either ran out of time and magic paid the price or they just decide early on to butcher the spells in this game by removing them and simplifying the system.

I was a higher lvl I was just exaggerating. Haha. - I should of been doing way more dmg at thet lvl with the perks I had.

A destruction mage imo should do the most dps out of every build in the game..

On the other hand, there are many of us that feel Skyrim magic is atrocious.
Myself, I think magic was done perfectly in Daggerfall and Morowind, and then went from slightly awful in Oblivion to completely generic in Skyrim.

Too many spell effects cut for no reason, too many arbitrary hardcaps and what really turned a flagship feature into a thirteen a dozen, ill balanced banolity in Skyrim is the removal of spellmaking.
I can live to be 100 and I still will not understand why this fantastic feature needed axing.
It is what gave magic versatility and diversity and it put the magic in magic.
Now, everyone is an apprentice.
For ever.
Lame.

Let me refresh your memory

SPell 1:

Weakness to magicka 100% for 3 secs on touch


SPell 2


Weakness to fire 100% for 3 secs on touch
Weakness to magicka 100% for 3 secs on touch

Spell 3
Weakness to fire 100 for 2 secs on touch
Fire damage 10 for 2 sec on touch
Drain health 100 for 2 secs on touch


The last spell would drop a an ogre flat.

There are ways to cut the exploits without gimping the whole system. Also, They sure don't seem to have a problem with people making bows and melee weapons with damage in the thousands...

I'm doing a destruction mage playthrough, and it's pretty fine so far. It's quite different from my usual warrior. So far I don't feel too weak, or bored yet. I'm playing with Lydia as my follower. I haven't used a follower in quite a while. It's a bit annoying at times, but it's different and kinda nice at same time. And I often conjure an atronach to be my second meat shield. I'm also using alchemy and enchanting. I'm Level 39 now on Adept.

Flame spell is quite good in early game to level 20 or so and it was my main spell. It's effective and cost effective. It's easier to not get hit as a destruction mage than as a sneak archer, because you can move around freely while dealing damage.

In this playthrough, being a mage means not using smithing or armor. I don't get damaged that often, so I don't get many chance to level up armor skills anyway. Giants can still one-hit kill me at level 30, but most of the time, they don't come close to touching me. I think people call this nature of mage glass cannon. I have 0 armor and I occasionally remember to cast stoneflesh. But it really doesn't matter. This playthrough has been a lot about not getting hit.

I started to mix in firebolt and fireball as my mana pool got higher and cost went down. I collected magic related enchantments as the game went on. At some point in midgame, after level 25 or so, I started working seriously on leveling up enchanting to get to dual enchants. The process was pretty slow, but fairly smooth and generated a lot of cash. I used the cash to level up destruction with training. When I went to enchanting level 80, I crafted myself 90% + cost reduction gear. After that I've been using apprentice and adept level spells freely. I've also been using Bound Bow for sneak situation like in Falmer caves. Bound Bow has beautiful effects and it's a lot of fun to use, and it's quiet when capturing souls, which was strange but nice.

I was worried about dragon encounters, and it was sometimes hard in the beginning, but fire dragons are weak to frost spells and frost dragons are weak to fire spells. Also, they seem to be vulnerable to impact effect. It's strange that you can stun-lock a dragon, when you can't do that with a Mammoth or a giant. I don't know if I will be able to stun-lock bigger dragons. I haven't met them yet.

So, Level 39. Not feeling too weak or bored yet. Having fun. It's weird not having armor. It took a while to get used to that. But with crafting at 100 I'm about to be able to become seriously OP. I will need to be careful to keep the game interesting.

Level 39:
Magicka 310
Health 270
Stamina 100

Destruction 91
Speech 74 (lots of buying and selling with alchemy and enchanting)
Restoration 43
Alteration 42
Conjuration 41
Enchanting 100
Alchemy 100
Smithing 46 (all from making iron daggers)

The problem is, you had to power level your enchanting up early on (25 is very early) for it to become viable. You shouldn't have to rely completely on a crafting skill for what is considered a standard class to become viable. I have a lvl 69 mage and didn't get my enchanting to 100 until about 45 or so. Dwemer ruins were exercises in extreme patience. In fact, much of the game from the late 20s until I got my 90% reduction in mana cost involved dying a LOT. Then of course you are basically a god. Add to that the fact that even master level illusion and raise dead spells don't work on most of the high level creatures you are fighting when you actually have those akills at 100, and you see why the quality of gameplay is much much lower than a warrior or stealth character.

I should add that even close to 50, it took a lot of forced levelling to get my enchanting up. That is not balance.

Which is awesome, an excellent use of game mechanics, very magical in nature as one had to think about the actual combos and far, far more interesting than the generics of Skyrim magic, which is thirteen a dozen and has absolutely nothing special.
Dragon Age 1 has more varied, utalitarian and useful magic.

Magic is good once you've maxxed it all out because you can use it at its full potential, but it's ruined because the only upgrade mages really get is 100% reduction, but if you don't want that, you can't do ANYTHING since all the spells are priced ridiculously high and are VERY inefficient.

It's not that bad. You can only cost reduce 2 schools to 0. Destruction benefits the most because of the high spell costs and repeated nature of it's use. But for alteration or conjuration, I get by with 40% cost reduce.

I was waiting for someone to post something like this It′s pretty similiar to my character. Only Destruction I′ve gotten are the fire spells. They do highest damage from Destruction spells + Skyrim is cold place so many enemies weak against fire. Cold is often resisted.

Instead of mana cost decreased I use rise health enchantments. The extra HP helps since I have no magic resistance. Light Armor helps with warrior type enemies.
One handed Axe in right hand.
Max HP at about 430 and Mana 250.

If enemy doesn′t notice me, I cast Alteration with 60 armor rating, then blast 2 - 3 Fireballs (They cost much less mana to cast with 1 hand) and then I′m outta mana and the enemy is just close enough for me to make that last finishing blow. Axe has also fire damage and extra damage on targets in flames. (Which come from enchanting).

Perk trees I use are Destruction, Restoration, Alteration, Smithing, Enchanting, Alchemy, One - handed. Same difficulty.
Also playing first time, so few perks were wasted on Bow. Class is Wood elf... If that′s the one who starts with 50 extra magika?

Also, Stamina is only 130, I never use power attacks, never! - edited

Destruction is horrendous. It's terrible underpowered if you aren't using magicka-reducing enchantments, and if you are using magicka-reducing enchantments then it's terrible overpowered.

With 60% magicka reduction you can kill everything everywhere, without the enchantments you drain your entire magicka bar with a couple of spells.

Try using more than one school possibly?

Illusion can be quite handy, restoration more so in my opinion.

All it requires is variation in the end.

Destruction is pretty bad as many have stated, including myself in most of these threads popping up. My current mage is in his 50s and it's taking a ridiculous amount of spells to kill enemies now, when I should be getting stronger as I level, my destruction is instead getting weaker.

The other schools are all strong, and pretty game breaking (Illusion and Conjuration destroy entire groups of mobs for you without you ever lifting a finger), but even the other schools lack variety in spells. Magic in Skyrim is extremely flawed, and it shows most in Destruction.

I've played Morrowind and Oblivion and the first time I've ever gotten very far with a pure mage build is in Skyrim.
Maybe due to my inexperience, I didn't have any preconceived notions of how ES magic should work, and instead got my character to work within the existing system.
Playing on Adept, I focused on destruction and relied on conjuration and alteration for support.
I played the character as an academic, going straight to the College after leaving Riverwood (taking the cart from Whiterun- she couldn't walk all that way, weak as she was). In an early dungeon quest (at lvl 2), she kept getting wasted by a draugr wight that one-hit her familiar and could survive her entire magicka pool worth of the flames spell.
Not being able to go toe-to-toe with even a single powerful enemy, I started to buy into the "mages svck" attitude that's so prevalent on this forum.
Then I decided that I would play like a mage instead of a fighter.
On the next encounter with the wight, she ran. She heard the dying yelp of the familiar, but it had bought her enough time to get a few precious steps ahead.
With the draugr close on her heels, she made it up a corridor to where she had used a lever to open a portcullis. With barely enough time to think, she reached desperately for the lever.
And pinned the wight with the gate so she could fry it at her leisure.
Magic might svck, but mages are awesome.

From then on, I played with more awareness of my environment than ever before (no HUD). Traps, Oil slicks, terrain, these were my friends. I went for the invaluable impact perk straightaway. Used wisely, I could control mobs without draining my magicka. I didn't spam enchantment, but leveled it organically- disenchanting everything I could pick up and gearing up with protection against fire and frost (i.e. dragons)-improving it as I leveled. At level 43, I maxed destruction and alteration and my enchanting and alchemy are at 80 and 55 respectively.
At any given time, I've had at most 2 pieces of cost reduction gear (one being the ArchMage robes and the other no more than 25% destruction) and one magicka-boosting item. Sure, I've run out of magicka on occasion, but I've never had to spam potions. I make a few boost potions (40-50%) but really only use them when I'm fighting the tougher dragons.

I use the spells how they are, not how I believe they should be. Flames is weak, but short bursts instead of continuous fire took care of opponents quite handily at low levels. Fireball didn't seem to be as powerful as I wanted it to be, so I stopped using it, except against low-level mobs. Ice storm on the other hand, seems terrifically effective. I never hear anybody really mention the various Wall spells, but I think they're great, especially in tight corridors- remember, running away is a strategy.

I've done without followers for the most part, with Sven guiding her through Bleak Falls Barrow (hardly any use), Aranea helping out in Labyrinthan, and Brelyna sharing the trip to Blackreach.

OK, so here's where my "purity" gets called into question. I use shouts. A lot. Ice form was particularly effective at lower levels to buy time against single, powerful enemies (now I have the horribly OP Paralyze). Become Ethereal and Slow TIme have enabled more than a few narrow escapes and strangely, I get more use out of Unrelenting Force (to scatter mobs) now that I'm at higher level.

This has been my favorite playthrough so far and this character feels more powerful than any of my others.

I don't know. Play the game with the mechanics that are there, not the mechanics you wish were there. If you're worried about DPS, play a dual-wield sneak assassin and not a mage. If you can't make a viable build on master- don't insist on playing on master.

I downloaded a bunch of mods to make magic "better" in preparation for playing a mage, but I wanted to see how it worked "out of the box" before I installed any of them.
Others' opinions differ vastly, but I think it works just fine.