If every destruction spell becomes more powerful as you level up destruction, the impact perk should only work against small enemies.

I′m sorry, but no matter how hard i try i really have a hard time discovering all these new things Skyrim implemented concerning Destruction.The once that come to mind are dual casting and stagger, which is what you have to use constantly on higher levels together with the expert level spells.As i see it the major problem here is actually scaling, by just adding some books with higher damage wersions of the lower level spells, playing a highlevel destructionfocused mage would not be so mindnumingly boring, it would still be underpowered compared to archery/melee but not as boring.......Something to also keep in mind here is that with enchanting, smithing and alchemy you can increase your DPS with a bow/meleeweapon and the only way to increase your damage with destruction is alchemy.If you are playing a melee or archer char and feel you need a little more "omph" you can just go level smithing or enchanting a bit and then your ready to go, an option you don′t have with destruction, due to lack of synergies...........

Indeed. Destruction gameplay is so incredibly stale right now. You literally just chain stun things to death.


Personally I would like to see them at least add an Enchantment to increase Destruction damage. The mechanic is already in the game as a potion.

As opposed to what? Melee is just hit-enemy-until-he-dies with some blocking thrown in for seemingly no reason.


Interesting idea - make Armor Rating of all items inversely proportional to effectiveness of the enchants. But I don't know if it could be done without heavy scripting.

At least the opponent can attack you.. and not get stun-locked.

Hmm.. i do seem to rember something called "powerattacks" to, but sure you have a point. Nevertheless, since the engine obviously supports some effects like jumping targets ( chainlightning ) AOE ( Fireball ) countinuous stream attacks and so on, why not make them viable at all levels ?

Indeed, that would help things without having to touch any balanceing just having a bigger variety of spells.

I think the rule of thumb here is that...

• NPC Mages have scaling damage with all skills. This includes other classes as well.
  
• Player Mages do not have scaling damage with any skills. All other classes do.

Keep in mind this has nothing to do with "But you can use these skills to make this stronger," but simply the fact that Mages are weaker than NPC counterparts.

Something should be done, and hopefully when the Creation Kit comes out, everything will be fixed to a more balanced degree and increase enjoyment.

-New ranks or inherent scaling of most spells. I want flames that do the same DPM of Incinerate, and honestly....why not?
-Lower cast times on Master (useless) Spells.
-Make impact 30-50%. 100% is stupid and makes it pointless to use anything other than expert-bolts nearly all of the time.
-Slightly increase magicka cost reductions given through the destruction skillups.
-Increase magicka regen in combat from 33% to 50% OR allow regen during casting. (it stops during casting)
(the last 2 suggestions were so that we aren't required to power level enchanting or camp vendors for 1 stupid enchant (+destro))
-Give cloth an inherent bonus for casting. Right now its much smarter to use light/heavy and just put destro enchants on it.


Boom, way more fun, way less boring. Nothing overpowering.

Check out my mod you might find solution to some of your concerns: http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1337634-relwip-asbe-aleks-skyrim-balanced-experience
Here is brief description:

- Removed two-way crafting skill synergy loops by altering Alchemy.
- Removed fortify restoration potion exploits.
- Balanced enchanting including fix to zero magicka cost spells.
- Natural skill based scaling for most magic school spells except Illusion (Auto-applied, no need to invest in perks to get the scaling effect).
- Novice spells with greater scaling: Flames, Frostbite, Sparks and Healing should be useful at high levels.
- Spell Effectiveness: scaled increase in spell costs if wearing armor depending on armor skill and number of pieces worn.
- Better armor skill scaling and perk overhaul with new useful abilities.

seems awesome mitchalek, gonna try it out

IMO the problem with Destruction is the Combat Regen for Magicka. Its ridiculously gimped.

I think a great mod for this is Balanced Magic by mysty on nexus, I dont find enchanting broken, just some adjusting needed in destruction and magicka regen

I hear Alchemy does wonders...

I believe you can make potions that restore your magicka, fortify it, and increase how fast it regenerates, aswell as improve the damage of your spells...

*skips away*

Gimpy in-combat mana regeneration + wtfmana costs = piss poor chain casting. And there's only one school of magic that ever needs to be chain casted, and that's destruction.

Bethesda thought magic (Destruction mostly) in oblivion was too exploity, so to counteract that, now we get this. Hell they removed the weakness to magic spell, only to keep a weakness to magic POISON. Way to fail.

weakness to magic poison is really quite funny.

for the couple destuction mage playthroughs i've tried, my main criticism is mana cost. 0 cost casting via enchants made the game excruciatingly boring (then experimenting trying to get mana cost reasonable but not free was frustrating too...reducing high level spell cost to reasonable levels still made lower level spells free...at that point i gave up and deleted my character). stun lock, ugh, i really regretted taking that perk. why even have enemies with impact perk? stun lock dragons? who thought that was a good idea?

another question: why do i have to take perks in other magic schools to increase destruction magic damage? this is so backwards and downright stupid i can't believe this idea made it through development.

my first fix would be extremely simple: un-nerf in combat mana regen.

my second fix would introduce some sort of damage scaling so low level spells do not become obsolete (there's not enough spells for any spell to become obsolete).

last fix would be to reduce impact to 50% success like archery's counterpart. i've used that archery perk and it felt pretty good. i wouldn't be opposed to lowering it further to 40% and i would give certain enemies resistance bonuses to impact, and some enemies would be immune.

if those don't work, well, wait for the next game (or mods i guess) because i can't see beth doing anything more intensive than changing some numbers.

I think this would be a huge plus. Gives a big incentive to being a pure mage. Couple this with what somone else said about impact only working 30% - 50% of the time so using things like flame cloak would actualy make some sense and I think destruction would be great.

I am playing on master diffculty as a pure mage Breton and have only ever put points on magicka when leveling. I have reduced spell cost for Destruction on my circlet, ring and necklace and at the moment I am wearing a Master Destruction Robe. Enemy archers are my biggest problem because when they hit me, I die.

As for magic from NPC mages being too powerful, I guess I haven't really had too many issues here since I am under the Atronach stone so most of the time I absorb a lot of damage from magic and when I am in a particularly hard mage battle like inside Azuras Star I use my racial ability Dragonskin to make enemy spells extremely weak when they hit me. It might be interesting when I finally find the Apprentice stone and lose the ability to absorb magic damage. I might even go back to the Atronach stone if that proves too full on.

In closing, I guess it is a little lame that only certain races/stone combinations are viable pure mages or maybe it's kind of cool. I am yet to decide. For the record I am loving playing as a Destruction based mage.

It wouldn't be enough unless fortify destruction also increased damage done. Also, if you ever played morrowind, daedric armor could be enchanted far beyond any other armor, though I'm not sure if that was a lore thing or not (you know, daedric armor being made from a daedra's SOUL).

If they would fix in combat regen, it would go a very long ways. HOWEVER!! The fact that you can just enchant your gear to make your spells cost 0% mana makes the in combat regen moot, so this probably needs to be nerfed or done away with entirely and fortify destruction now increases damage on par with fortify weapon skills. If this is done, they need to in return reduce the cost of expert, and master spells by a good margin.

And then give us our spell maker back. I like the master lightning spell, but I want a fire and a frost version of it.

Alo, this still ties the efficiency of the mage to enchanting. I mean, enchanting is nice but if it is mandatory at high levels, that it is not good... At least it could help balance the fact that pure mages don't use melee weapons so much and so they are missing the enchanting benefits on these parts. The robes getting more powerful enchantments would make up for that compared to a warrior having both his armor and weapons enchanted... But then again, what about a warrior use both weaposn and armors, in that case ?...

I have a few ideas I would be willing to try once the CK is out.

almost all the ideas i read are pretty cool, specially scaling damage, armor penalization, and magicka cost nerfed via enchanting.

BUT................ after too much time.

HAVE WE A SINGLE HOPE TO BE LISTENED BY BETH??

Each night when i turn on my PS3 (No freaking mods saddly) , and i play the game, i tell to Fran?ois Dupone (my pure destro breton mage), "don't worry dude , continue using conjuration, they will fix it"

I can't keep looking to his french face, with this anxiety in my heart.

They pay attention to us?

Regen during casting would make regen gear as valuable as +destro gear.

I honestly don't see why they made it halt during casting.

destruction foritifcation won't be nerfed cause you have to be able to cast one destruction spell after the other, thats part of design of destruction magic. in just the same way you can shoot one arrow after the other or swing the sword or axe etc over and over...just casting 3 spells and having to wait for 30 seconds isn't viable and so destruction fortification isn't broken and also, as a mage you're not just using destruction magic, you're casting like 15 or 20 spells a minute in battle sometimes, so magic isn't suppose to be some single shot type of deal...not sure where some people get that idea, but you can only effectively reduce one field of magic to zero or near zero....yeah you can do more if you want to waste all your enchantments like that...but thats not practical or necessary..but reducing destruction to a few percent is a well thought out game mechanic, but for some reason it bothers a few people that mages can cast lots of spells, well an archer can shoot 20 arrows a minute, and someone with a sword can swing it 20 times a minute and i don't hear the same guys complaing about that...cause its stupid...well in the same way, its stupid to complain that a mage can cast 20 spells a minute.