Oh, trust me... the bad guys are using those spells, my friend. You can even see the difference from Novice casters to Apprentice casters in the game, if you pay careful attention to your health bar while getting blasted by the supposedly same "Frostbite" spell. The computer cheats, man!

-Loth

All of the other schools become amazing at expert and master level. Illusion can clear a room or make them not fight with a single spell. Alteration and put all enemies on the ground with a single spell. Conjuration can summon or raise two powerful creatures at once. Destruction can use a large chunk of magicka to tickle the enemies, or create a wall of damage that doesn't seem to be boosted by the perks in that damage type. That leaves destruction mages using adept level and apprentice level spells even at 100 destruction.

But by the same token, it's overpowered for the wrong reason. Not due to damage, but because I can use an apprentice level spell and keep ancient dragons locked down. It has better crowd control against dragons than the spell lines designed for crowd control.

Being a pure conjurer and taking bound bow with archery perks, or bound sword with 1h perks will make you a better damage dealer than destruction not even factoring in the two pets.

Enchanting and smithing is not required to have weapons outpace destruction.

OP, the problem with destruction is that melee and archery are 10x better choices for direct damage. All three of these skills need to be brought in line with each other or else there really isn't a reason to use destruction are a primary offensive skill over melee or archery.

My main problem with the Destruction school is the effort-to-reward ratio is much less than any other school of combat magic.

A mage casting Icy Spear, Incinerate, or Thunderbolt with the appropriate damage perks will take 3-4 casts to do equal damage as one attack from a Dremora Lord without any points put into the Conjuration tree. Illusion, with perks to effect higher level enemies, has Fury, Frenzy, and Mayhem to indirectly deal damage. This damage also scales as enemy levels scale so it often takes 3-4 spell casts to equal the damage of one attack from Frenzied enemy as well.

Out of the melee, archery, and magic skills designed with a source of damage, Destruction is the only one that doesn't have at least one ability with damage that scales with player and enemy levels. Conjuration has Dead Thrall which can be cast on an enemy up to level 40 (50 with Necromage). The thrall can also be improved further through smithing and enchanting if the player chooses to do so. Illusion scales with the enemy level which indirectly increases it's damage output. Weapons are known to have ridiculous multiplicative scaling with smithing, enchanting, perks, and skill level. Destruction damage does not scale through player level, enemy level, or synergy with other skills. It can be temporarily buffed through alchemy, but a buff is not the same as scaling.

Destruction, which is designed to be a primary source of damage, ends up feeling like the supplemental school to the other spell classes at higher levels. It's something to do so I don't fall asleep at the keyboard while waiting for summons and frenzied enemies to kill one another.

In Destruction's favor, the school has the strongest AoE capability in the game and Impact is quite possibly the most gamebreaking perk. However, Impact is a double-edged sword that essentially turns every fight into an AoE stunfest until all oppostion is dead. Some people may find it fun, but I did not.

All this said, I do still find Destruction magic enjoyable as long as I don't use Impact, but it would be much improved with a little scaling or the return of spell crafting.

tl;dr
Destruction feels like a supplemental school of magic instead of a primary damage source.

Magic doesn't need the same "advantages". My Mage has played nothing but Master mode. I have yet to use alchemy and haven't enchanted one piece of my gear, yet. I am level 38ish and doing just fine....unless something hits me... that is to be expected.

I use a follower. Every now and then I'll use conjuration. Other than that it is all destruction.

They use the same spells. In higher difficulties like master those spells just do double damage to the player. Thats it. No scaling. Otherwise my companions would have seriuos trouble yet this isnt the case.

Why should the destruction "person" have a bunch of potions and the archen none? Last I checked potions were not supposed to be tied to mages in any way... They were just consumables like all others...

Seriously now... are you pretending you're not understanding? I refuse to believe your IQ is that low, you wouldn't be able to write in such good syntax if it was... The talk we have is about people using destruction as the only DAMAGING skill... and that because all damaging skills do exactly the same work, and coupling them usually ranges from pointless (1-h and archery) to stupid (archery and destruction). And since they all do exactly the same job-kill things and little more- they are all directly compairable in how fast and how safely/easily/efficiently they kill things.

And the facts are:

1) Destruction is way too far behind the other damage skills in terms of raw power
2) Destruction is way too far behind the other damage trees in terms of damage/recourses ratio (until you get it to 0 cost , which btw is the default cost for archery and melee)
3) Destruction offers some nice controlling skills, which however are inferior to what enchanted weapons can do
4) Destruction is a ranged skill, but archery gives you twice the range and 5x the accuracy... I have tried aiming fireballs countless times to no avail, yet with bows I always hit the target, even without the ultra-easy zoom and slow-motion perks... plus it lets you chain 4-5 sneak attacks, destro has no sneak attacks to begin with...

No matter how you look at it, destruction is inferior to the other damaging skills.
Destruction can be aided by many skills and things, but melee and archery are aided by many more, and much more.
And anything a destruction mage can do apart from destruction, a swordsman, an archer or a summoner can do just as well.

There is nothing in which destruction wins over other damaging skills. Nothing. No matter what build. Especially archery, whatever destro does archery does it 5 times better.
All the times I tried playing with destro as my main damage tree, they all ended up the same: with my dunmer pyromancer dropping her fire spells, conjuring 2 bound swords and butchering the draugr that had swarmed around her, and which she was trying to no avail to kill with fire. And then me quitting and rerolling, because if I'm gonna play with swords I might as well play with real ones...

I think you are exaggerating a bit here. Dual cast Thunderbolt is hitting for 200 dmg+ with the right perks. I really do not see how it is mathmatically possible for a non smithed, non fortify weapon skill melee toon to come even close to that. Destruction has problems, but I think it is mainly because melee/archery gets too many super bonus from crafting.

Where exactly did he say he didn't use enchantments and smithing? He only said he didn't put any perks in them...

With a potion 400. Why people even want to play on master when they want to oneshot enemies like dragons?
Regular Weapon damage of 1000-2000 is just stupid to begin with if it isnt a sneak attack anyway.

And yet they still out damage spamming dual thunderbolt. It ends up being a dps thing. You hack, or shoot away with the other damage types, while you either spam TB, and it still doesn't live up to the other damage based skills. couple in sneak, which I'm not even considering, and you have way more damage. You shouldn't have to take alchemy to compensate. Just have damage scale with skill level and it would be fine in vanilla Skyrim. Destruction lore wise should out damage any other type by a very wide margin, as is, its a spam joke.

@Pan

OK then, just magicka potions to compensate for having to have arrows...

But the actual point is that builds always have a combination of skills, and when played in combination, Destruction is not a problem. When you try to reduce the comparison down to "just Destruction" it becomes absurd, as we showed. When you have Magicka there as a resource to use for Destruction, you can use it for other magic skills. A build where the only tactic you have is to cast Destruction will be artificial, for role-playing reasons only -- but if you do have such a build, of course you will take Impact, and then there's no problem as many people have said.

If you try to make Destruction viable "on its own" with no Impact, the other magic skills will become "useless" by comparison, or at least we would see just as many complaints. This is the difficulty of balancing many skills across many playstyles. There is melee, there is archery, then there are five magic schools. Magic is harder to balance for that reason.

My final comment is that overall I find Skyrim to tend towards "too easy", and if anything it's that melee needs to be toned down. I found Destruction well balanced over 47 or so levels of pure mage, and I would not want it changed.

1.Other schools of magic are brought up in this topic because ALL types of characters have to use multiple perk trees.
If you ONLY used one handed weapon perks but no armor or shield perks your character would be pretty weak....don't forget the smithing and enchanting perks also.
2.If you have a sneak thief you can't complain about having a weak character because you ONLY focused on sneak skill. You must also focus on one handed, pickpocket, armor and/or alchemy.

...Therefore as a destruction mage you also must focus on other skill trees to make a strong character.THAT IS WHY OTHER SKILLS are brought up in this topic.
There is no such character that uses ONLY one skill to become good. With a mage character you just need to be creative and use a little brain power to find the mix that is right for you.

Yes destruction can bog down in the strength department untill you can perk your way to a higher level on the skill tree but you would also have the same problem if damage didn't level with you in melee combat. Since damage effect (any magic effect actually) doesn't level with you when you go up levels, people seem to think it's under powered.
I actually think melee is over powered and that magic leveling is the correct way to level. I always make a brawler with my first character and it became pretty ridiculous how easy it was to make him godlike.
I am enjoying my mage type character much better because I can give 100% effort to leveling by way of the Perk tree and don't have to worry about being over powered.

I may have rambled off topic a little bit but when talking about ANY class of character you 100% rely on other different perk trees to make those characters progress. THAT is why other magic categories are mentioned in this thread.

I played a mage type for a while but not for long so I can't really say much. One thing that I noticed is that, although the damage doesn't increase, the cost does decrease as your skill goes up. I think by the time you get to 100, the cast cost is almost 1/2 of what it was when your skill was only 10. (I used the console to switch it to see what change it would make, so same level char, same gear and same spell)

The other thing is that the regeneration of magicka reduces when it combat.

The biggest thing that would help is for the regeneration to stay the same in combat as it does out of combat.
Another change that may help is for destruction spell damage to basically double as you go from 10 to 100 in the skill. Excluding perks since weapon types have perks as well. For other schools that have time based effects, the duration could double as the cost is halved by going from 10 to 100.

This sounds like a personal failure. Plenty of people have rolled destruction mages all through the game.

Good post.

Fixed.

Just because you fail doesn't mean that others don't succeed.

I don't spamlock and I just recently started using a small (30-40%) spell reduction. I get by just fine by using potions, using Ice Form shout to freeze enemies while I regen, occasionally summoning a fire atronach to act as a living shield, and occasionally using archery to whittle down groups to sizes that my fireballs can handle. In short, I play the game.

This is not a contest. It doesn't matter if destruction doesn't do as much damage as Skill X. What someone else does on their game has no effect on what I do in mine. Maybe they can 1-shot draugh overlords because they have a triple-smithed daedric bow with double enchants and daedric arrows with 6x multipliers. [censored] fantastic. Great for them. I don't care. My game works just fine. And you wet blankets, kvetching about how "everyone knows" what destruction is underpowered and doesn't work and can't kill anything don't get it. If you need to be able to do 3,000 or 4,000 or 5,000 or 50,000 health in a shot, then fine, go and find some mod that lets you do that. Or if you think destruction svcks because you can do 3x as much damage with your orc tank and that's what makes you happy, then go run with him. But what you can't say is that the only way that you can succeed with destruction is by spamlock or reducing the cost to zero. Because you're wrong.

Personally, I find the only true use of Destruction is to take potshots at goats. I jest you not, I can kill a goat in ONE SHOT.

I had to go up one level from default (expert??). The default settings were way to easy for chain lightning. Chain lightning and the stagger perk make you very powerful. It's really nice when you hit them and their bodies fly all over the place, bouncing off walls, etc.

One thing I didn't know is that when you change the game settings, it stays there and affects all your characters. Quite a suprise the next day when I started on my newly rolled warrior lol.

So, if you have multiple characters, going up/down game settings, it affects all your characters till you change it. Of course, then it affects all you characters .......... ! And on. And on. And ..... .

sigh.

Hi, I'm Valravn and I just caught a glimpse of your future and being the stand-up guy I am, I wont charge you for the privilege

You'll take the following path through your adventures in Skyrim:

1. Stop playing on Adept

2. Hit level 60.

3. Instantly throw a fit like that ragekid on youtube, remote control up the butt and all.

4. Join all the disgruntled posters on these forums.

5. Give up on Magicka altogether and switch to Combat or Stealth.

6. End up with a 22 megabyte save file and spend the rest of your Skyrim days living in constant fear of the incoming barrage of CTD's.

I have two magic mods that I am using right now (better magic and tsssss). One has each perk in the main line for schools (novice, apprentice, etc) also increase the effectiveness of spells (for destruction this is damage). Another has enchanting increase the magnitude/duration of spells and alchemy reduces the cost. Each about doubles the damage dealt by destruction. Magicka cost is reduces a bit more and costs of spells are adjusted a bit as well and stunlock from Impact is removed (there's something like a 30% chance of stunning on double spells). Overall I find this to be an extremely crude "fix" and does more to highlight the problems with magic than anything else. Destruction still becomes fairly spammy, and while the depth is a LITTLE better, it is still rather 1 dimensional. It's nothing like the gameplay of using a sword and shield, for instance (in terms of options and quality). I think part of this is that using a weapon comes with a number of options in terms of power attacks and positioning matters a lot more. Destruction doesn't have much depth, and the various elemental attacks don't have much difference between them or depth to really make it feels like there's much choice going on (to say nothing of how using lightning is the best all-around choice).

I feel like destruction needs more than just tweaking numbers. Same with magic in general really.

I also feel like the problem with enchanting and smithing is completely seperate from this and often gets tossed in. Enchanting needs to be more interesting and offer more playstyle choices for players rather than clearly having one or two best ways to enchant your gear. Smithing is perhaps easier to fix and isn't really that bad in and of itself. I think part of the problem with these comes in terms of how defenses scale (60->80% magic resist is vastly different than going from 0%->20%, the first reduces all magic damage you currently take by half and the latter just by 20%). The accelerating effectiveness of increased defenses make balancing combat damage (received) and crafting nearly impossible, imho. This is part of what makes the crafting skills so powerful.

Not saying I don't love the game. I just find its combat system to be somewhere between two steps forward and one step back to one step forward and two steps back.

All characters can use all types of skills. There is nothing preventing a destruction mage to wear a shield and heavy armor and nothing preventing an archer to summon minions and cast illusion and alteration spells. However, many people go saying that "destro mages have more variety, because they can cast all shorts of magic" and use this as an excuse of how destruction does low damage. But ANYONE can use all sorts of magic, so it is stupid to use this as a defense to destro.

Damaging skills can only be compaired with taking into account the skills that dirrectly affect them DIFFERENTLY THAN THEY AFFECT EVERYTHING ELSE. If they effect everyone the same, then they might as well not exist for our comparison purposes. That is what I meant with
Armor, Illusion, Conjuration, Restoration and a few other skills... they directly affect none of the damaging skills. It doesn't matter if you use fire or swords, they are equally usefull to everyone.
Alchemy directly affects all exactly the same, so it's out as well
Enchanting gives 0 cost to destro and (a lot) more damage to archery/melee. However, the thing is, those 2 already have 0 cost, so enchanting favors melee/archery
Smithing only affects melee/archery
Sneak only affects melee/archery
Moreover:
Skill level only affects melee/archery
Perks affect melee/archey much more than destruction, especially in the case of dual 1-h.

Also, no, melee is not overpowered. In EVERY RPG, you MUST have the ability to eventually become a walking god. That is the base upon which the whole leveling system is based: it's only purpose is to make you become ever stronger. The moment you can't become stronger, it's not an RPG and you might as well ditch everythin g and model it after Crash Bandicoot or something... and I will say it for the 717761861678618th time: if EVERYTHING is powerful except for one thing, what do you think they were aiming for, and what do you think is the odd one out? Common sense?


You fail to realise that the point of having multiple skills that do exactly the same basic job (ie kill stuff) is to have many different takes on the same thing that are however overall balanced. Which means that archery should be slower that 1-h to compensate for the distance between the target, 2-h should be somewhere between 1x 1-h and 2x 1h with some moderate blocking (all ok till here) and that destruction should do huge damage to conpensate for being the only damage skill to have a scarse resourse (ie mana) always tied to it and kind putting a brake on it... well, what we got is destruction being by far the weakest, and just having the potential to cost 0 magicka. Which is plain wrong balance wise. And it is weaker all the way. Yes, at low levels weapons don't do amaing damage, but at low levels destruction mages have only spells like fireball and flames, which svck harder thaneven lowly steel swords damage wise, plus they drain your magicka in no time, unlike how swords and bows take no stamina to swing, and if yoy do happen to spend stamina on melee you simply do MORE damage than normal...
It's an RPG, which means you will always aim to make your character as strong as you wish. Your aim might be to make it just strong enough so that it is not too hard, or you might aim to be a god - it doesn't matter. You might net even be aiming in combat skills. But if you plan on focusing on one damaging skill, it makes sense that you would want to make your character somewhat good at damage, right? However, if one skill is clearly inferior to the other skills that do EXACTLY the same, why would you pick the weak skill? Even in roleplaying,what sense would it make to pick a mage using destruction? Mages are supposed to be smart, so how could someone fit for a mage choose to speciallise in the worst possible killing skill of all killing skills?

And that is the problem with destruction.




If I, as a mage specced on destruction and fire, unleash 3 full magicka bars on a bunch of draugr, using the most useful fire destruction spell I have in use and I barely take off 1/3 of their health in Adept, then use a bit less than one bar to conjure 2 swords and 15 seconds later they are all dead, while I have never before used or put points in either conjuration or 1-h, I consider the fail a bit more than personal... I don't really care if some people are content with this amount of damage, but having to go all the way down to novice for the fights to last a reasonable amount of time and not spend hours and hours on trash mobs that are not even challenging apart from the fact that their health bar is fixated on max, is not the way I can enjoy an RPG... It's not hard to play a destro mage all the way, not by any means, it just takes FOREVER to kill things that should die in seconds...

You must play on Novice.

-Loth

Uhh, read my quote? He clearly said a non-smithing, non-enchanting char can outdamage destruction. I say it is impossible. The base dmg of a plain Daedric Sword is 14. Perks and skill can boost that to 250%. A power attack can boost that to 350%. Still 350% of 14 is not a really big number. It is the unholy combination of smithing (boosted by alchemy + enchanting) and stacking Fortify One Hand Weapon Enchantments that makes melee godlike. Smithing by iteself can raise the base dmg to 34 - at 100. But people are fortifying smithing up 300%+ on top of Fortifying Enchaning and Alchemy 100+. Eliminate all of the Fortify Enchantments/Smithing/Alchemy effects from Potions/Enchantments and melee weapons are no longer uber. Very strong - but not uber. Heck, if Bethesda really wanted to balance it set the Max bonus from any Forify Effect to 50%. Problem solved. No more one shotting Ancient Dragons.


Destruction beats the crap out of one hand with no smithing/enchantments. Learn how to play the game. Smack em with your dagger coated to Weakness to Poison and then weakness to shock posion. Then drink a mega fortify Destruction potion(crafted with your fortify alchemy gear) and unleash godlike 1000+ Thunderbolts. There are mechanics in the game to make Destruction super powered. Just like there are mechanics to make melee powerful. Just don't sit there and complain that plain Destruction by itself is not uber. Magic may not have smithing, but there are no weakness to Blades potions. Learn the mechanics and exploit them. Crafting in this game is where all the power is at- use it exploit it.