I have discovered that enemy mages are effectively free of magicka cost requirements; magic costs are so insignificant that the enemy mage can spam AoE destruction spells like there's no tomorrow (and they will as anyone can attest). For example, a Ice Storm spell costs a measly 10-ish MP for a NPC to cast.

What does this mean for shock damage spells? It means their magicka drain side effect is essentially useless, since it'd take who knows how many castings to actually reduce an enemy mage's MP to a level below what's needed to cast.

Fire has the advantage of having the cheapest damage/cost cast ratio and does some afterburn damage, and Frost does stamina damage as a side effect... and it also slows the target's movement down. It makes Frost damage useful against melee-heavy bandits, even Nord bandits.

I was thinking... Would it be possible to have some sort of 1-second Silence effect to impede mages who get struck by a shock damage spell? Or has Silence been completely gutted from the game?

Could it maybe be faked by an effect that jacks cast costs up so high that no mage could possibly hope to cast?

My aim is to make Lightning casters as much a challenge to face for a mage as a Frost caster does to melee fighters.

You could fake it by setting the enemy mages magic to 0 and then changing it back in a few seconds. Mages with 0 magicka can't cast.

Here's a version I use in one of my mods:

scriptname doomTKAtronachEffect3Script extends ActiveMagicEffectFloat property TargetMagicka autoEvent OnEffectStart(Actor akTarget, Actor akCaster)	TargetMagicka = akTarget.GetAV("Magicka")	akTarget.ModAV("Magicka", -(TargetMagicka))	EndEventEvent OnEffectFinish(Actor akTarget, Actor akCaster)	akTarget.ModAV("Magicka", TargetMagicka)	EndEvent

Easy enough, it does exactly what Dheu says, only I use ModAV so to avoid any issues with SetAV's permanence. They still react the same way.

By the way, the Property does not need to be a Property, it can just be a variable. That script was written when I was still dialing in Papyrus.