Indeed getting enchantments on amour to make destruction spells cost 0 is nice like my lvl 41 mage with daedric amour (with oakflesh maxes amour rating to 700+). The only bad thing about it is that the basic fire bolt does 40 damage (as it seems to level up as the character levels up) but fireball and incinerate never do so i never used them although i do now since they cost nothing. Wish i had thinner fingers so i could put more than 1 ring on.

I only have destruction to 100
amour to 80
enchanting to 100 for the 2 enchantment perk.

The key is to get mana-regen enchantments on everything in the early game. Also combine say firebolt stuns enemies even dragons

Yes, mages are the most powerful - if you abuse the game. It's not like Morrowind (or even Oblivion) where you could become powerful with Destruction alone. Lack of damage scaling and miniscule combat mana regen mean you either have to cheese the game with the "-% to cast" enchants or carry a metric ton of potions.

Best class of all: Battlemages/Spellswords. If you focus on when to use magic, and when to use weapons, then you'll have the power of both of them.

For example, it's just priceless to teleport behind an annoying archer and bash him with your shield before he has time to do anything

lol yeah true, i personally did only buy magika and health potions alot and sold everything else as i dont need swords etc. So i gained a massive amount of money enough for me to buy 4 houses although only used 1 that is fully furnished (Solitude house). Still have 78k septims.

I modded the hell out of mine to the point where you can't even call my spells destruction magic anymore..

BUT before I modded mine, I simply relied on Paralyze, Pacify, and icy spear/fireball to "make ends meet" as a mage.

Heh, my Alteration magic can't also be called that way...having some limited Levitation, Teleportation, Mark/Recall, Mark Chest/Remote Store in Chest, Stone Prison, Advanced Transmutation (I can finally get rid of searching for smelters...hooray!), Force Push...and a large etc of other cool spells

Pity I haven't had the same luck with Restoration by now. Midas Magic has a "Absorb health" beam to use in range, but the Absorb value is way too low (10 HP per sec)...gonna keep searching.

My experience has been that a focused mage is going to be more effective than an all-rounder, at least in the early going.

My first mage was an all-rounder. I did Illusion, Destruction, Conjuration, Alteration, Alchemy, Sneak... but I didn't have a very good idea of what I was doing, and so my leveling was all over the place, to the point that none of my spells were especially effective.

Then, after reading about how Destruction was underpowered, I decided to try a more focused build. I used Destruction and Alchemy. That was basically it. I levelled up a bit from Sneak, Lockpick, Speech, and Enchant, but Destruction & Alchemy were considerably far ahead of those.

I found out that, if I planned well and was able to assess the situation, my Destruction spells worked just great. I focused on the Destruction perk tree and made good use of runes to draw out foes, my higher-tier spells as openers, and dualcast Flames when Magicka got low. I also used staves (which seem to benefit from your Destruction perks!), scrolls, and shouts to keep bad guys out of my face.

This was on Adept, with no companions.

I made it up to the early 20s in level, without abusing Enchanting or Alchemy or using Impact all the time. I did use Alchemy, but found that I always had a surplus of potions - I didn't need to chug constantly as long as I was playing smart, using cover, keeping distance, approaching situations carefully, etc.

I found that my pure Destruction mage had a much easier time than my pure warriors, because warriors had to get right into the thick of it. My warriors were always running out of health potions; my mage had more potions than he needed, and very rarely got hit.

Anyway, not everyone is into Destruction, and I will admit that I wish some of the spells were more useful, or that the school had more effects like from Oblivion. But overall, I think focusing on either Destruction, Conjuration, or Illusion, and pairing those with another magic or support skill, can be a winning combo. It all comes down to approach, I think.

Well im not modded since im on the ps3. I wish half the stuff thats modded on the pc was on the ps3 like those amazing new spells and super hard dragons. Like what a dragon mod said,

''Whats the point of the dragonborn when all it takes is 6 guards to kill a dragon''

The patch has screwed up the master 'blizzard' spell, its casts on the user but now kills the user as well as enemies. Completly pointless now.

I like having a low defence for a Mage. I wear robes and use Mage Armor with the Armor spells. But the problem for me is the damage for a "pure" Destruction mage isn't very strong. I like the idea of being a glass cannon but not the glass without the cannon. I just don't want to have to focus on potions and enchanting to be successful. High damage and low defence is how I want enjoy my mage.

I played vs a frost master mage lastnight and it seems their spell skills increase with their lvl but not yours. My mage has 460 hp with 600 amour and the master mage hit me with 3 frost storms and i died. They must of done 300 damage each but mine only do 90... player magic scaling needs sorting. Killed him though after drinking 13 heath pots.

Well, as I said, mages are a completely different playstyle. Some enjoy it, some don't. But they also have the most versatility. Warriors are pretty much just that. They might use different weapons (mace, sword, greatsword, etc) but they pretty much are similar in play.

But you can play an Arcane Assasin (sneak/illusion build). You aren't a beast like a warrior, but if you get spotted you can just calm them and then backstab them. I have a lot of fun with my heavy armor wearing, dual bound sword wielding, necromancer battlemage. With two dead thralls (forsworn pillager mage and master necromancer) I tear thru most everything. At level 38 now. Or you can go Conjuration/destruction or any other variation of build.

Have fun and play what suits your playstyle best.

Warriors and Assassins carry weapons.

The Pure Mage IS the weapon.

Mage > Warriors & Assassins (even if they were on the same Team).

The game has been designed so that a varied range of characters with dramatically different skills are able to complete it though so the discussion is a little moot.

Az

Unfortunatly the game was designed for the Warrior to be better than anything else. They wanted the "Dragon Born" to be a Warrior and that is how they designed the game.

It's a shame really for a game that supposedly gives you the option to be whoever you want make being a Warrior the best as well as the most fun to play.

I love how differently each "class" has to play in order to be effective. My spellsword generally can handle any threat in the game now with ease (lvl 62), except for the super mages. My first assassin was a sniping machine, and poor-decent in close quarters fighting. My new assassin is an even better archer but gets mauled in a "real" fight. She's also learning to make poisons. My Orc warrior was just a simple killing machine, without room for growth since I was only gonna focus heavy on 2 skills (heavy armor, one-handed) with smithing mixed in, but he was a lot of fun to use. He just sliced through everything with his war axes with ease. My mage heavily utilizes destruction and conjuration, and has perked a few other schools of magic lightly. They all have their strengths and weaknesses and it's great learning how to overcome the weaknesses to succeed in the game.

Battlemage is a fun class to play and it fits in with the lore perfeclty, my only issue is that's not how I see mages.

This is how I see mages. Besides, if you deck your character out in plate it seems to take the usefulness out of the Alteration tree other than magic resist and paralyze. Call me crazy, but it just doesn't feel right. If there is one thing we can all agree on I hopes it's that Mages need a lot of fine-tuning and care from Bethesda in the upcoming DLC.

You GREATLY underestimate a mage's power.


I can summon 2 Dremora lords, on the hardest difficulty, to fight an ELDER dragon, and they'll kill it within 6-7 seconds...


You can't say the same for Warrior's WITHOUT buffs.



EDIT: So yeah. It may be the slowest skill to level and use efficiently, but at the end of the day, it can be much greater than any form of combat.

This.

I have to put my input in that nightblade > all.

If you are on a PC, and get a balanced destruction mod, it is about the most fun class to play, evar!
I really feel bad for console users, with a scaled destruction this game would have alot more depth (combat wise). So I modded mine and never looked back.
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Example: 42 destruction skill at level 23, lightning bolt (with 1 shock focus perk) does 53 damage for a single cast, now with a change like that I haven't even picked up a bow.
79 damage runes? 160(something dualcast) and 4 placeable at a time? Well that makes runemaster a bit more appealing.

Just my opinion again, but I see nothing more important to patch than a destruction scale value.
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Thank you. I've been saying this since the game came out.

Mages don't have enough cannon in their glass IMO. Conjuration is the best school, since it levels very fast and you can summon extremely powerful creatures at high levels. Illusion is decent too, but you really have to focus on it, else it will not be able to catch up to your level and everything you meet will resist it. It's either OP or worthless, no middle ground, and I dislike this. Restoration is always good. However, Alteration seems a bit moot when a mage can wear full heavy armor with no penalty towards spell-casting. Roleplaying purposes I guess.

Destruction is where the problem lies. it simply doesn't do enough damage. It relies on a broken perk (Impact) to be anywhere near useful. Almost every spell above Apprentice are cool but too impractical to use, hell all Master spells consume way too much Magicka for their damage, deal friendly fire and immobilize you to boot.

The only successful (as in, no need to jump through a ton of hoops to be fun to play on Expert) mage I played was a Spellsword type, using Light Armor, Cojuration, Alchemy, One-Handed, Sneak, Restoration and Destruction (the latter mainly against archers and dragons). A ''pure'' mage, using only magic skills and ye olde robes, was simply too much trouble, ran out of Magicka very fast (granted, he wasn't an Altmer) and got killed by a breeze. What I disliked the most was that, if taken by surprise, I was done for. My warrior could just turn around and start beating up the offending Troll or Sabre Cat, but my Mage would just be easily turned into mush if i didn't abuse pause and healing potions. You absolutely need the initiative, else you're boned. If it was balanced by superior DPS, I would not mind, but it's quite simply not.

Now that the scale issue with destruction is up in this thread, how long will it be before defenders of the neutered system perk up to tell us all about the glory of jumping through hoops like a monkey to kill every creature.

Oh just chug a fortify destruction potion every 60 seconds.
Oh just pull out a bow, poison it with weakness to element, and shoot every single thing you intend to kill once before using your destruction.
Oh just enchant all your clothes to reduce costs to 0 so that you can spam underpowered spells to get the job done.
No problems here!

Off topic though, so I'll be done.

i play as neco-mage hahaha

destruction w/ Conjuration


and the all of other magic skills that's it

I like playing mages because you have to react more and be on your toes as they are more fragile compared to a warrior which just charges in and hits things until dead.

hybrid > all specialized classes

mage>everything else
why?
because everytype of character uses magic at some time
example - warrior uses restoration at boss fights
assassin uses muffle and invisibility while sneaking
mages have access to all of that! we can be assassins whenever we want to, if we get caught, cast a calm spell.
also, shouts are in the magic menu, so technically, theyre magic

All depends on the mage and his skills. Mods to balance leveling make a big difference for a mage. My current character would slaughter you before you ever got close enough to hit him once.