Here is why destruction magic is seriously underpowered, and it really doesn't have to do with 'Scaling' so much as how things are set up damagewise.

For the sake of comparison, let's compare it to the closest mundane skill to Destruction's purpose, Archery.

They both have the primary purpose of doing damage at range, but archery completely blows Destruction out of the water.

Archery has the following things that Destruction lacks:

Critical hits.
Sneak attack if stealthed (and a stealth perk to increase the damage of these)
Fortify damage enchants and potions.
Perks to increase attack rate, zoom in to improve aim, and 50% stagger/15% paralyze per shot.
+100% damage perk (for 5 talent points - Destruction has +50% damage perk for 2 talent points, but split into 3 damage type branches.)
And finally, you can further improve bow damage by enchanting for extra damage, smithing and getting better arrows.

The only thing destruction gets is the aforementioned +50% damage in each branch for 2 perks each, and upgrading to better spells (think of it as the equivalent of getting a better bow, but not smith-able.) Destruction enhancing potions and enchants only lower the cost to cast. They do not increase damage or speed up attack rate.

A fully perked archer with full archery enchants can annihilate just about anything before it can reach him short of a dragon. A fully perked destruction mage with full destruction enchants is lucky if he can take out a Troll before it's whacking him over the head, never mind giants.

What destruction needs is something to compensate for the head start mundane combat skills have by having enchant-able weapons. At the very least, Fortify Destruction should enhance damage, NOT lower casting cost. It's silly as it is now anyway...you can reduce your casting cost to zero, but due to the casting time restriction, you still can't do enough damage fast enough to compete with mundane attacks.

Destruction magic ignores armor one hundred percent, and if you are smart about the enchants on your mage, as a mage should be using his / her brain and use situational awareness, you will become god, I can cast incineration for a whole 5 magika per cast, and do what I like to call a machine gun rate of fire with my incineration fire balls and destroy ANYTHING in under 2 seconds, aside from an elder dragon, that will take 10. If destruction is underpowered to you, you are doing something wrong. Dual wielded incineration does over 200 damage, ignoring all armor, so yeah, totally underpowered. And yes, I am playing on master. It took time to get it down, but nothing can stand in my way anymore, short of....well...nothing.

On your archery list, you forgot to include: "Can poison arrows, and the poisons can stack with each other if more than one variety is available to the player". Also: "The player can hoard arrows from the start of the game and effectively never run out... destruction costs magicka, and can run out quickly unless/until the player gets casting gear."

-Loth

PS Fortify Destruction potions (not enchants) DO increase raw damage, BTW.

Everything could be solved by simply including spellmaking.

I dont know what you are talking about. I make the enemies go away with my destruction spells.

I can cast expert level destruction spells for a whole 5 magika, i dont run out. ever. A mage uses enchants wisely, just as a warrior would use smithing wisely, and an archer / assassin poisons.

I have no doubt of that. Every mage I play uses casting gear -- in fact, it's a necessity. This is not so bad, of course, but the point remains: until that casting gear is acquired, you will run outta magicka and be left up a certain creek without a paddle. Archers do not have this problem if they retrieve arrows and keep all the arrows they find. And arrows have zero weight, so you could have thousands of them and not even notice.

-Loth

While this is true, a mage is not supposed to be a straight forwards role, if you use alchemy wisely, or use magika fortification enchants, you will never run out of magika at the beginning. Hotkey magika potions on the right d-pad and every time you run low, just hit it. And you can find things to make magika potions from the get go.

On a side note, I just found out you can map your most used stuff to left and right on the dpad on 360, so if anyone else didnt know this, there you go.

OP, either you're an idiot, playing dumb, or you haven't experiment with destruction at all and you're just making a moderatley intelligent anolysis from looking at the perks. I'll list some of the things that the Destruction School has thast Archery doesn't.

Strafing - Even with that one perk in the Archery tree, a Mage has alot more mobility in combat than an archer.

Staggerlocking - Destruction Mages can kill almost anything without it being able to touch them, one perk makes it so that Dual-Casted Destruction Spells will stagger an enemy. And since Armor does not affect Destruction damage, you can just spam enemies(even Dragons and Dragon Priests) and staggerlock them.

Infinite Destruction- With the right enchantments, a Destruction Mage can cast an infinite amount of Destruction spells, which are faster and more accurate than arrows.

Accuracy, Damage and Speed - Unlike Arrows, Destruction spells don't have a drop-off rate, and other than Ice, they're just as fast if not faster than arrows. Lightning is automatic infact, since it uses hitscans, and doesn't travel in real-time. Destruction spells can be more conviniently casted quicker and faster than arrows. As for damage, I haven't tested it to the fullest, but a fully upgraded Daedric bow would do what? 80 Damage? Along with Daedric arrows which do 24 Damage(I'm pretty sure); together they do a little over a hundred damage. A dualcast Thunderbolt spells which does 235 damage(Dual Cast is 2.5x damage) is faster, stronger and more powerful than anything a bow can do. Incinerate does even more damage than that if you consider its burn effect.

So no, other than scaling, which isn't even necessary, Destruction is far from underpowered.

Of course, I also maybe an idiot as I haven't made a pure archer, but from what I can see, Destruction beats archery. However, an Archer is probably an easier character to make/fund/play.

Destruction is underpowered when compared to any other direct combat skill or when compared to Conjuration or Illusion. Ignoring armor is pointless when almost all the enemies in the game have dire armor ratings in the first place.

Dual wielding is a moot point, because any weapon dual wielded will make destruction look weak. Without exploits and by only using 2 perks you can easily smith weapons well beyond 150 damage unenchanted, which when dual wield means 300 dps. Thats a full 100 above destructions output per second. DPS is not the same as damage, as melee can have more attacks for more damage in the same amount of time as a dual cast or double cast spell.

Anyone arguing that destruction is not underpowered compared to other combat skills doesnt understand the game mechanics properly.

Oh yeah, the game being easier for me using destruction magic on master than using 2 handed weapons and shields w/ swords, is totally me not understanding the mechanics.

Yes it does show you not understanding the mechanics, especially when the math proves otherwise.

Melee weapons can be smithed, damage fortified via armor enchants & potions, have 100% damage increase perks (5x 20%), and can have two unique weapon enchantments.

Destruction can be damage fortified via potions, and has 50% damage increase perks (2x25%).

And as I said dual casting is a moot point entirely. Mechanics are completely seperate to gameplay style.

Lexandro is right -- sorry guys. The Destruction school is supposed to be the damage-causing tools of the mage, but Conjuration trumps it easily (Dremora Lords? Two of them? Permanent Thralls = undeniable pwnage?)

Do the math... we're not saying that Destruction is worthless -- because it's not. What it is is underpowered in comparison. It needs a mod for scaling to have a chance against other types. A modest scale-up with skill level or perks fixes it.

-Loth

Which two perks would those be? Without any enchantments Daedric Swords will do 70-80 damage(don't quote me I haven't dual wielded Daedric in a while). But Destruction spells have a very high range, and they will staggerlock everything. Of course if we're talking about unenchanted Destruction vs. Unenchanted Dual-Wield than of course Dual-Wield is better. As far as I see it scaling destruction is a welcomed implementation but not absolutely necessary(haven't played as a mage on master yet).

If I'm still wrong then please elaborate.

Indeed Lothario, Im not saying its not usable or worthless. Its simply mathmatically inferior to other schools and combat skills for damage output.



You see its extremely easy to buy fortify smithing gear, the player can easily purchase 3 peerless items (25% fortify) and also purchase a smith draught for another 50% fortify. That is a 125% increase over and above 100 smithing. For two perks you can get arcane smith, which to procure requires steel smithing.

Many unique weapons are steel based with special skins, a Blades sword for instance or most notably Dragonbane which features dual enchantments as do many unique weapons (therby removing the need for weapon enchanting).

So there you have 125% from gear/potions and a perk that doubles the upgrade effectiveness. That can generate a weapon with between 100-150 damage raw, and by adding a fortify 1h enchantment armor piece or two you can then boost it further. And this is just a basic way of doing it, there is more damage available if the player wishes to perk for alchemy (eg 110% fortify potions ) and/or perk enchanting for 100% fortify and high power weapon enchants with infinite charges.

And no need for exploiting the broken fortify potions


Dual casting is moot precisely because you can dual wield weaponry for the same effect at higher output.

Dual wielding augments your spells making the much more powerful, so no, its not moot.

-this-. Scaling is welcomed, but I can take out a room of deathlords faster with my spells than with conjuration .

So I see two arguments here:
Argument 1

Destruction allows for stagger lock which prevents enemies from ever touching you
Destruction can be cast infinitely with potions and/or enchants
Therefore, Destruction is not underpowered

Argument 2

Destruction fails to achieve the same DPS that other damage types are capable of
Therefore, Destruction is underpowered

It seems to me, that these two arguments are talking about two very different things while using the same language to discuss what they are talking about. One is about damage potential and how fast enemies can be taken down, the other is about pure viability.

Im just saying, if I can take down an elder dragon in under 10 seconds with incineration or ice spear no problem, i dont understand how it can be underpowered.

Because melee or Archers can do it in one or two shots, ie under 5 seconds without backpeddling or pre-fight buff spells. We are not saying it cant be used, we are pointing out it is mathmatically inferior to other skills.

Incinerate can cause 198 pts of damage per dual-cast when fully perked out in firecasting. For an elder dragon (2255 health), this takes 12 casts to kill. Meanwhile, you can one-shot the same dragon when using fully decked-out combat gear and dual-wielding any two weapons except a pair of iron daggers. Hell, you can one-shot Alduin when dual-wielding melee.

Before you say "well... you're using fully-buffed stuff to do that, so it's not a fair comparison", I'd like to point out that in order to cast those 12 full-power incinerates, you need to also be kitted out to the near-max for destruction with low to zero magicka cost. So -- enchanted out, just as the warrior types... just in a different way.

Destruction is at most 1/12 the power of melee (actually that's being very conservative, it's really a lot less)... and don't even get me started on backstabbing vs. destruction.

But having said all that, I still love playing my mages. It's not like they are terrible -- quite the opposite, actually.
-Loth

PS My numbers above are for playing on Adept. On master, it's 24 casts to kill an Elder dragon... but you can still one-shot it with a dual-wield power attack -- that's how incredible melee is.

Critical hits aren't that big of a deal, I skipped those perks entirely.

Fortify enchants and potions are a huge increase in damage, just one enchant can be the equivalent of multiple perks into the basic damage increase.
Enchant/Alchemy are broken and most players know it.

Attack rate perk is disfunctional, it only speeds up the animation you still have to draw for the same time as before. A perk to avoid as it throws off your judgement of when the arrow is ready.
Destruction's impact > archery's stagger and paralysis

Weapon damage increase via smithing is probably the most major factor, albeit a bound bow will still out damage apprentice level destruction spells(the only cost effective ones). Like alchemy and enchanting, smithing is broken.

The cost of destruction spells is what really gimps it though I think. If higher level damage spells were castable for a more reasonable cost it'd be less of an issue. Archery's only limit is arrows which is essentially no limit. You can shoot arrows all day, you run out of magicka extremely fast casting anything above novice level destruction spells.

The cost reduction enchants are the only decent solution for making destruction reasonably playable on vanilla.



One pretty damning comparison is this:

Conjure Dremora Lord 358 base magicka cost
Thunderbolt 343 base magicka cost

Thunderbolt does 60 damage. How much would you say a dremora lord does while it also is distracting enemies and taking damage for you? Not to mention potentially staggering them with its attacks.
Are these really anywhere close to appropriate returns for their magicka costs relative to eachother? Most players who've used both spells would probably laugh at a suggestion that they are.

You are forgetting the 100 percent damage augmentation potions. Which puts it at.....396 damage.
But, I agree it needs a sneak attack option.