It doesn't change once you get stagger and enough enchanting to use spells infinitely. It doesn't matter if you're level 20 or 80.

To the OP: If you don't understand people's problems with destruction you probably don't understand Skyrim very well. It's not a difficult concept.

What? Do you mean the Skill Level? I recently hit 100 and was a bit dissapointed with Firestorm. Although the Master Lightning Spell is rather sweet.


My post earlier with the "Spam, Stun" was a joke to how OP Destruction can be if used correctly.

Yep, then it is "Conjure 2 Dremora Lords, cast Fear and go fetch a bottle of beer from the kitchen"

It's not like your destruction will make it much faster anyway...

This. Very much this.
-Loth

That's because the lower level spells have not too bad damage/magicka spent ratio. The higher level spells ratio is terribad though for some reason but you kinda need the increased DPS from them or else you'll spend two days killing anything which is detrimental to your low health (since you put everything in magicka in the first place).

Lower the base magicka cost of Expert and master spells to put then on the same damage/magicka ration as the apprentice once and also multiply by 3 the damage of the master spells (except lightning which stays the same). Remove the effects that reduce spell costs from enchanting and nerf the potions that increase destruction spell damage down from some stupid +200% to a reasonable +20% or something and now we're talking. Replace the enchanting effects with damage enhancing effects too that give 10% bonus max per armor part.

Oh and remove impact from the game of course.

AFAIK, NPCs use the exact same spells as PCs. I'd be interested in a wiki link if you have evidence to the contrary.

Here are the numbers again (including improvements from smithing and enchanting)

http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii167/bl3count/rangeddamage-1.jpg

http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii167/bl3count/meleedamage-1.jpg

http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii167/bl3count/meleedamagepower.jpg

As you can see, power attacks make a huge difference, and magic does not have them (the bonus from the dual casting perk is taken into account in these graphs.) As for archery, destruction seems to outdamage it, but it also has no sneak attack bonus, which can let you one-shot half your enemies before the battle even begins if you're careful. This also ignores the critical shot perks for bows (~+30% damage) and the blade type specific perks for melee (bleeding and whatnot.) The destruction numbers are also the dual cast numbers, which will absolutely gobble up your magicka unless you're taking advantage of enchanting.

*Edit - The graphs show damage per second on the y axis, and skill level on the x (destruction skill for destruction, melee/archery, enchanting, and smithing skills for melee/archery.)

Okay, let me go write on the wiki real quick, and I'll post a link later.
-Loth

PS Enemy mages have scaling spells. Spawn a Master Necromancer with the console, and see how fast his frostbite spell kills you.

Destruction is really weak when you gety up there in level, no real purpuse to them other than leveling them up for perks.

Yeah but the whole idea of a Mage is to mix them. I found a mix of conjurer and destruction a life saver in Oblivion. Weaken the enemy with conjured spell like a skeleton or whatever and then destruction to finish them off.

Skeleton right. You are still very low level I see. Wait until you summon a Dremora Lord and see that you'll rather resummon a second when he dies (if he dies) than use your magicka to throw wet noddles at the monsters

people are crazy....

my first mage relied on destruction UNMODED and I found it OP to be honest (I played on expert btw)

tis true I did use conjuring as well

Not to mention that you get a free comedy show with each Dremora Lord summoning, as they relentlessly heckle your opponents while slicing them to ribbons.
-Loth

I'm sorry, but most of these ideas are terrible.

Magic is the limited (Ultra Enchanting aside) resource. Melee (or even archery for the most part) is an infintie resource. To borrow from the FPS genre (excluding the more simulation oriented modern trend), you usually have some early blaster thing with infinite ammo that does lackluster damage in comparison to the more powerful ammo-limited variants.

Skyrim takes this sort of basic game balance, and inverts it. The limited resource is drastically weaker then the infinite options. Theres a range factor too, but that is neutralized by the fact that the enemies are largely also forced to come into range of you either way. It's like playing Doom and having the BFG do less damage then the combat knife/chainsaw/etc.A few of the FPS genre do this with melee too, but its mitigated by 99.9% of the opponents using ranged, which makes melee a very challenging range option worthy of receiving the damage boost.


The secondary issue was probably already covered, but is related to how difficulty scales. Adept is an unmodified environment wherein Destruction is effective, and weapons are potentially overpowered. Scale that up to Expert and Master, and you have Weapons still being viable due to their prior power advantages, while the inability to enhance damage on Destruction makes it ineffectual at taking down targets with the halfed damage effect.

I meant overall level 45-50.

Personally, I see a lot of people talking/joking/ripping about mages spamming spells, stunning their opponents. But playing as a mage, that hasn't been my experience. Or at least it's not my experience most of the time. I can't just walk up to a deathlord, banking on the idea that I'm going to keep him reeling with spells until he's dead.

Rubbish. It took me to nearly maxing one-handed skill and selecting a large number of perks, as well as having to actually max smithing to get a 94hp hand axe and sword, but with incinerate in destruction it only required 2 or 3 perks to get a 91 hp spell. Therefore, if anything, melee skills and weapons are underpowered, by your reasoning.

The issue really boils down to people not wanting to use anything other than destruction magic. Well, if you want to really test yourselves, take an unmodded sword, only take perks in one-handed, put on a set of robes, and see how long you last in the game....because that is the predominant attitude that comes out of this debate.

Not that 'destruction is underpowered' but that people don't want to use common sense or take a tactical or multi-skilled approach to the game. As I've said before, if the game is too hard for your playing style, lower the difficulty to match your abilities.

Destruction on it's own in vanilla game is ok in the beginning low levels. As you level up the damage stays the same and your eneimes gain more health. So eventually it becomes pointless to use.

Terrible argument. People want to make the game more difficult, but not difficult in an arbitrary sense where it just takes longer to kill things, but you're killing them in the same way (spamming one spell over and over). We want the difficulty slider to make it necessary to use spells strategically, by making the encounters different than they would normally be, and making enemies more difficult by making them smarter, giving them extra abilities, etc. Not just increasing their health and damage.

The game as is doesn't provide enough buff type spells or protective spells (there aren't even heal over time spells . . . ) for this to work, unfortunately.

Also, since you can carry an unlimited number of potions with you and chug as many as you want as often as you want (and since your health/mana recharge very quickly after an encounter), increasing the difficulty in Skyrim just makes play more tedious, but not really more challenging.

I don't use potions gratuitously (or really even very often) on master. Not to make it harder, but because I'm lazy, and because there's rarely a situation where I actually need some.

The game is too easy on master, and if you have conjuration you really don't ever need, to cast a destruction spell.

Where are you defining lower versus higher levels?

WTF, are you still using steel or something? Because in that case you should compaire it with fireball, not incinerate... and you're also not putting enchanting in the equation, in which case you'll run out of mana by the time you try to cast for the third or fourth time... but with your axe, you can just keep going after the 4 first power attacks (which btw will do much more than 94 damage)
Yep, melee is soooooooooooo underpowered...

So... I should stop lasering Ancient Dragons in a few seconds (without Impact, on Master) and try to start using a sword?

It doesn't matter if you use steel or daedric, the vast majority of the points come from Smithing. 94 points 1H with zero enchanting bonuses means high Smithing.

hehe, well, that was just an example when starting Oblivion. I was a Mage a bit in my last game but didn't pick perks up much since I was mainly a Warrior, this time I'm going all the way up the destruction/Conjucter tree.

Remove all perks, potions, and enchantments then let me know what you think.

But the majority of these people complain that alchemy, enchanting and smithing already break the game, so why are they then complaining Destruction doesn't have an equivalent? The issue is with those 3 skills, so i dunno why people are beating their gums about destruction. Destruction is fine, it's the crafing skills that are broken.