I don't care about conjuration, illusion, or anything else that gets others to fight for me. I want to throw fire at people and kill them. That is it.

Am I wasting my time? Will it work at high levels?

Vanilla game: no.

With mods: yes, absolutely.

On 360.

Building a PC after I pay off my guitar.

A pure destruction mage? I am not sure, once you get to a higher level it may get challenging, but using only destruction might not get you to a level that you may consider high, though. You probably will have to use another skill, specifically enchanting, so you can fortify your destruction magic.

The only way to work a destruction mage with vanilla Skyrim is to max enchanting and dual cast spam so Impact stun-locks enemies.

Absolutely - but it'll be difficult. Add enchanting and it'll be much more viable.
Basically you'll have to pour every last 'attribute bonus' into magicka, and constantly level your destruction spell. If you add enchanting, reduce the cost of destruction - I'd recommend about 60%.

Thanks you guys.

Two questions:

1) would the enchanting perks I have in the link below be enough for my enchanting needs?

2) If I choose to use a sword also, will this build do ok do you think? I would only summon atronachs against dragons or in really tight situations.

http://skyrimcalculator.com/

Destruction alone? Lol no, not even close. Low damage coupled with absurdly high magicka cost make the master level spells useless.

With Enchanting? Absolutely. Enchanting at 100 fully perked makes all Destruction spells cost 0, if you so choose, making spamming master level spells effective and fun.

You can do it in vanilla so long as you only level up destruction and nothing else. If you have 100 destruction at level 20 or so you will be extremely powerful even on master difficulty. I just did a perma death (DiD) character like this and I rocked it pretty good, didn';t use potions or enchanting either.

This. Though reducing it to 0 is a little too much, i'd rather have 75% reduction so that you won't feel like you're cheating by spamming 0 manacost fireballs.

Vanilla game: yes.
Adept: yes.
Master: yes.

Destruction can feel very strong if you give it proper attention and adopt an appropriate style. Destruction will feel quite frustrating if you want to walk into a room full of enemies and start blasting away until everything is dead. You will run out of magicka. Instead, if you sneak in and kill them one by one, it's pretty awesome. Magicka pool is limited, especially in the beginning, and you want to keep the battles small. Magicka regenerates very quickly when you are out of battle. If you do not, or cannot kill your enemies in sneaky way, and you have to be in an open battle, you are going to depend on magicka regeneration and kiting, which can be quite fun and exciting.

I would recommend Destruction + Alchemy + Alteration. I really enjoyed this build. You get to kill everything by yourself, and utilize the unique power of destruction mage, the ability to hurt many enemies at once with spells like fireballs, ice storm, and chain lightning, and the runes. Alchemy is good for giving destruction extra kick when fighting ancient dragons and giving health and magicka boost when you need them.

I would not recommend enchanting or smithing with this build. Enchanting especially really changes the flavor of the game. I feel that there is too much grinding and too little killing if you depend too much on enchanting. The game gets very boring for a mage if you have enchanting in the mix. It can easily become all about grinding enchanting quickly so you can get 100% cost reduction. If you remove enchanting, you find or buy better gear gradually.

I have a write-up of a variant of this build here: http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1387285-guide-for-new-mages-pure-destruction-opening/

There are no pure destruction warlocks that you would encounter in Skyrim. You should make your character like the arch - pyro, cryo, and electromancers. They combine alteration and restoration with destruction and they always carry the relavent destruction staff

Level 46 Magicka 500 / Health 575 / Stamina 50. Adept and Expert level spells

Destruction is certainly viable. Destruction has great synergy with magicka regen, so make sure that you have good magicka regen, along with, probably atleast 50% reduced cost on top of the appropriate cost reduction perk at a high level.

I don't know why people think that destruction has low damage, the augmented expert level spells do almost 200 damage when dualcast.

With the impact perk, what you want to do is dual cast to stagger, and then stop casting and let your magicka regen, once the enemy breaks stagger, hit them again, rinse wash and repeat. This is what i meant when I said that destruction has a great synergy with magicka regen, you do that and single enemies will go down easy as can be. When going against multiple enemies, even when you have the expert spells, use the adept spells like fire ball and stuff, costs less and AoE is always better against multiple enemies.

Use become ethereal to prep master level spells, sometimes they won't cast while you are still ethereal, so go into the menu and drink a potion or some food before casting it, cast a cloak spell before going ethereal, every bit of damage helps.

Make use of all the spells available to you, wall spells aren't as bad as people make them out to be, and even at level 81 don't be afraid to make use of the apprentice level spells,

If used with alchemy and enchanting, destruction can be absolutely devastating.

Use enchanting and Alchemy to make destruction deadlier, also use heavy armor because you'll need to protect yourself at higher levels.