no, it is no defence at all. mana reduction should be nothing more than a boost and not something needed to make destruction viable

when i first saw robes in this game i was excited. But 1/3 mana regen was kind of a cockblock. It's really sad, there was some potential for desirable mage gear.

That just makes no sense what so ever. Mana reduction is more than just a boost and the base damage of any weapon shouldnt be extremly powerful without some augmentation, such as mana reduction or using potions. Thats like saying you should be able to be a viable warrior with just one-handed skill, no smithing, no light or heavy armor, no block. Using just base damage of any offensive weapon and only one skill should not be viable.

A good defense perhaps, but free casting feels cheap and takes away the necessity of having to manage your magicka reserves. I'd rather that they had a reasonable magicka cost in the first place and replaced cost reduction enchantments with elemental damage increasing enchantments. The whole "cost reduction game" seems a rather strange way to advance the power of a mage.

Well I agree but thats a totally different issue in itself. The higher cost, damage that doesn't level with the skill and cost reduction was added to bring destruction magic inline with the perk system (i.e. perks determine your strength in a skill as opposed to the skill number itself). I'm not saying I agree with the way it was done but I believe that is why it was done that way.

um...you do know that the character you described is viable (takes a bit of work though), right? but that is beside the point, i never said the mage should not have some other skills in other areas (i would not conider them a mage if they did not) but a destructionist should be able to trust in his favored school without being forced to take enchanting. besides comparing a mage to a warrior in such a way makes no sense, mages are supposed to be glass cannons whih should be able to deal enough damage to at least keep up with their enemies, a better comparison would be raw damage output of both styles of combat, this is where they should be alike in the name of balance but instead warriors can deal high ammounts of damage (without using exploits, enchanting or smithing) while a mage is stuck fireing a cannon every half hour or shooting a pea shooter off that can deal remarkably low damage before depleting his or her mana resurves. something is wrong and that cannot be denied, the ways i mentioned before would effectivly fix destruction magic but spell making would be the best solution.

I just don't think they got the math right for their cost reduction perks. The perks should have reduced the cost more, so you don't need to wear enchanted cost reducing items in conjunction with the perks in order to be viable as a destruction mage. Everyone I have heard of on this forum claiming to be a no-enchant destruction mage admits to wearing at least 27%-35% cost reducing gear in addition to the perk. I'd be much happier if the cost reduction perks were a 75% reduction (at least for Adept and above spells) and they toned down the cost reduction gear a little.

You expect to cast the most powerful spells as a spellsword?

That's the thing, a hybrid mage cannot be as strong in magic as a pure mage.

I agree in principle, but in Skyrim, a spellsword who puts 8 perk points in enchant can put all their level ups into health/stamina and cast as many (if not more) destruction spells per combat as a pure mage with all their level ups in magicka and all relevant cost reduction perks.

And you could be the most unnoticeable person alive with no sneak skill just by having a lot of chameleon enchanted gear before...

Of course you can get unfairly powerful if you metagame it...

Except free casting is not metagaming. It is the logical result of perking enchant. And the 100% chameleon issue you mention was well known and universally condemned. You would think they would not repeat the same mistake . . .

I'm sorry, but having gear that reduces magicka by 100% is bogus. That should NOT be our saving grace. Magicka is meant to be spent. Mages are supposed to be powerful, but have a short battery life compared to warriors. We want quality, not quantity damnit!

Free spells are not an exploit, but it is min maxing. Enchanting is supoosed to be for customizing your equipment and making yourself more powerful in a variety of ways. That's why there are magicka resist/regen and fortify health enchants. However these will only see use by warriors/archers because destruction use demands you focus nearly all of your slots on making it less terrible. How many warrior enchanters have to exclusively use fortify weapon skill enchants?

As for that mention of chameleon, why complain about it? That sort of freedom is largely what gained the TES series such following in the past. The only people who used it were those who thought it was fun. This isn't an mmo, gameplay balance is probably best set on the backburner so freedom(the reason most of us play TES) can flourish.

Well, I think it's more of a valid argument that destro damage should be patched to scale with skill. Magicka cost can be easily negotiated through use of enchanting, that is within the school of magic. But to earn more points in damage, you have to resort to alchemy, and alchemy is skill associated with the thieves in this game.

Get over it. I don't perk destruction cost reduction and use items to lower the cot to 10%. Three items + archmage robe will do it fine. Since destruction is a heavy use in combat school, I use enchants. At any rate you can only reduce two schools, so I still perk utility schools like alteration or conjuration which are not cast as often. Illusion is another heavy spam school that it 's preferable to enchant cost reduction.

Those are the game mechanics and I use them to my advantage. In Oblivion I exploited spellmaking to maximum effect. Weakness to magicka 100% + weakness to fire 100% for 5 seconds, stacked twice followed by 50 damage fire spell would slaughter anything. In Morrowind I made an altmer mage under the atronach sign, kitted out in medium armor and fortify intelligence enchants to more than 1200 magicka.

Why not just enchant beast fortify magician gear and bust them on master? Get magicka up and then cast master level spells untill your hearts content?

Honestly, I don't get it. This idea of "balance" is like, I dunno, some kind of disease. I don't like it.

The game isn't "broken" because certain kinds of mages are harder to play than others. Where is it written that a "pure destruction" mage should be exactly as easy to play as some other kind? I think it's fine to have a rough balance between the main archetypes -- melee, magic, stealth -- but if you choose to specialize in only one kind of magic, why *shouldn't* that be harder?

All these comparisons between Destruction and Conjuration -- who cares? Either spend some points and perks on Conjuration, or pick up a few Summon scrolls, they're easy enough to get. Choosing to be a "pure destruction" mage is a *choice* -- like being a warrior but deciding to only use daggers.

You might call it "balanced" if all character builds were perfectly balanced with each other -- but I'd call it "boring". Lord, how I miss the days of EverQuest (the first one), where the game would actually tell you "hey, great that you want to be a troll healer -- but please note this kind of character will be a lot tougher than most others".

I vote for *less* balance in future games, thank you very much. It'll give the min-maxers something to do, the complainers something to complain about, and the rest of us some actual replay value for once.

Incidentally, I'd also like to vote for quests that are actually class-specific. In skyrim, I became arch-mage entirely by accident, while being able to cast nothing besides novice/adept spells. I'd love to see that change in future TES games -- doesn't anyone else remember how many different factions there were in Daggerfall, and how you couldn't just join all of them???

Game isn't broken, but combat is broken if there's no balance. Appropriate degree of challenge and a reasonable selection of viable and enjoyable play styles is not a bad thing. If you don't care about combat, that's fine and you'll enjoy the game regardless, but for people whom combat balance is important - and it's especially important for replay-ability for me personally - it's not a disease, that's just a sensationalist way of describing it and it's complete nonsense.

Destruction gets complained about, and it's completely justifiable that it does, because it's the core of a popular mage play style. It's like making swords a terrible option for warriors - most people who play warrior type characters just aren't going to be happy about that for good reason. And being a warrior who only uses daggers is a bad anology because you can perfectly well play a warrior which only uses daggers and there's no reason you shouldn't. You sacrifice some damage and range for speed. It's a reasonable trade off. Specializing in destruction instead of conjuration isn't a reasonable trade off - it's a clear loss.

It's also a red herring to suggest pure destruction being non-viable relative to destruction in combination with other things because that isn't even the issue. Destruction just isn't good no matter what other skills you mix it with - it's a bad choice for a way to deal damage. The only exception is if you use 100% cost reduction, which is clearly not a good or balanced solution and is counter-intuitive to perk tree design since so much of spell school related perks are made obsolete by enchants.

I agree. A better system would have had a more reasonable magicka requirement for destruction spells coupled with a limitation on cost reduction through enchant.

When you get your enchant to 100 and all perks and enchant your first piece of cost reducing gear, you find out that you get a 25% reduction. There are four pieces of gear that take that enchantment. It may be min maxing, but it seems like the game is inviting you to do it.


There are a lot of similarities between 100% chameleon and 100% spell cost reduction. With chameleon, you take it to 80% or 90% and it can be a lot of fun, but you put on enchanted gear to take it permanently to 100% and it looses all the fun. You can stand there and hack away on the toughest creature in the game with an iron dagger and it will just stand there and let you hit it over and over again until it is dead. With 100% cost reduction, your mage no longer needs a magicka pool.

I don't mind this stuff being in the game, but they should make it harder to manipulate this kind of stuff. With 100% spell cost reduction, the game seems to be beckoning you to do it. And they should not set up Destruction so that this type of "exploit" seems so necessary to so many people just to get by as a Destruction mage.

The idea that freedom should equate to no balancing is just a terrible one. Freedom in video games has to be limited by choices - if you can have everything both ways it ends up an incredibly bland experience. Character development is completely undermined if there's no real consequence to the perks you choose. 100% cost reduction is a perfect example as it makes several destruction perks obsolete, as well as making a core stat(magicka) almost obsolete.

By the time you could make 100% chameleon armor, you have pretty much reached your peak. Besides most people probably didn't bother with there being other, more fitting enchantments and gear available. Chameleon didn't ruin the game for anyone. I never used it, and never felt gimped either. Unless multiplayer was part of the equation, such an end game tweak is simply not "broken". Similiarly, there is no problem with free spells at such a high power level. You shouldn't blame an rpg player for wanting to be an unstoppable achmage.

Furthermore, true rpgs are partially defined by their defiance of balance. Encountering and being destroyed by powerful creatures you simply cannot defeat and being all powerful by the end, these are defining traits of an rpg with a true sense of progress. You just don't want the player to get the infinity+1 sword too early, you want them to work for it. But it should be there.

In all fairness, archery gets a perk that allows you to slow time by 25 & 50% giving far better hit rates then using destruction. I know this because I'm made both destruction and archer characters and gotten them up to level 50. I found myself firing my fireball at enemies feet to make sure I got a hit in. Plus I can double enchant my bows for some nice damage/effects.

I think the real problem is that with how destruction is set up in this game, it just scales very poorly with rising difficulty levels.

You can easily get a 100% Chameleon suit in Oblivion way before you reach your peak. All you need is access to the Arcane University and about $10,000 gold, give or take, depending on your mercantile skill. You can buy filled Grand soul gems at any mages guild alchemist or at the Mystic Emporium. They have a base price of $500 and you only need five (you could also do it with Greater/Common soul gems, but you would need more of them). You do need to be able to cast the Chameleon spell, but it only takes an Illusion skill of 50 to do that, and you can activate the Shadow stone to get the ability to make Chameleon enchantments without having to learn the spell. The rest of the money goes towards the cost of the enchantment. You don't have to be very high level to make a Chameleon suit in Oblivion.

That argument is rubbish, it slows you by exactly the same amount, unlike the shout. You missing with destruction is your problem, I barely ever miss with any frost/fire spells and never miss with shock spells.

It doesn't scale because the damage is high already, 90 damage with the perks is high, considering the attack speed (you could probably fire 3 destro spells in the time it takes to fire a bow).