Although there's less schools and less spells each spell now has several different casting methods which will probably increase tactics for mages beyond simply shooting a spell at an enemy. Personally i think this will be an improvement. And without spellcreating (if that's really left out) magic won't be overpowered either.

Your stats are going to be affected in a direct way whenever you level up, versus manipulating them via an interface that reads "Attributes"... :shrug:.. And the only spells that have been "stripped out" are really levitation and mark/recall... But they were cut before Morrowind, so it's nothing new...

this is OP'd: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Px-WhcnZoPw
mages in my opinion were plenty overpowered, but only if combined with say, alchemy, or combat skills. usually with any custom spell you ran out of magic before the enemy was down, or the spell is so weak it was the equivalent of throwing ping pong balls at a naval destroyer :/ now it looks like they're refining the mages, making it much easier to play alone as one, while also not making them overpowered. but hey, we'll find out on november 11th :tes: ....or until you start using spells in game, anyway :shrug:

Huh? I think you mean 'before Oblivion'. I was using these spells the whole time in Morrowind.

The point about attributes I was trying (badly) to make is that it would be intuitive and natural to have an alternative system whereby exercising strength based skills would automatically increase your health, carrying capacity, weapon damage etc, while exercising intellectual skills would automatically increase the power and complexity of spells you can cast (also possibly improve persuasion).

The trouble with Morrowind and Oblivion is their use of attribute multipliers and linking levelling up to increasing primary skills - which especially with Oblivion's auto levelling system could reward playing against type. But if attributes were properly linked into the increase in skills it would be comparatively straightforward to avoid mages becoming overpowered by making an overspecialised mages a 'glass cannon' - dealing huge damage but very vulnerable with a slow attack rate. A gameplay style that would be rewarding to sufficiently skilled players, but hardly overpowered .

It will all depend on the power of the individual spells, so for instance if the "Flame Thrower" spell thingy is too powerful and roasts anything in front of you, then you say that magic is too powerful.

But if t ucks, then you say mages are weaklings.

I hope they balance them all right.

I am going to go with yes, magic is definitely fading from Tamriel. In the first game, there were Pass Wall spells, that would allow you to remove dungeon walls.

Mechanically speaking, the reason is quite simple. Mages are the hardest archetype to "balance" in the gameplay. They usually start off pathetically weak, barely able to take down the quintessential giant rats and by the end of the game are usually so over-powered as to make even the final epic boss fights, not feel so epic at all.

My guess is that "streamlining" means for mages that they are trying to make them more like warriors.... better able to handle themselves early on and be no more powerful than any other class at the highest levels.

I think mages where slightly underpowered in oblivion, as for killing anything with destruction of 50? You need to turn the difficulty up a little bit because even stacking weakness to fire, shock, frost, and magicka, with fire shock and frost damage, it still tales a few casts to take down some of the higher leveled players. Mages are weak because they can't use armor effectively, and staffs svck. So let's see here Mage with no armor, crappy staffs, and adequate spells... And you think they are over powered? The only thing they have going for them is the ability to have anything at their disposal for a cost of magicka of course.

The thing is though, if say, a warrior went against a powerful mage he should have one hell of a fight on his hands. These are no mere mortals or cheap street magicians. They wield the power of the very universe in their hands.

If you are a warrior going against a mage ill prepared then you deserve to have your ass handed to you. You are just a regular human, albeit way more fit, stronger and faster you are still a flesh and blood man going against someone who can summon lightning from his finger tips and turn his skin as hard as stone.

If you want a fighting chance then stock up on the right equipment like a warrior is supposed to do. Then kick that mages ass the right way instead of gimping him because baby can't prepare for a fight.

EDIT: And if two mages come to blows with one another, gods help the surrounding area and it's people. It should be that epic.

Without stats like INT and WILL we have only three things that give us an idea of how powerful our magically gifted characters are.

1. Our current level
2. Our mana pool
3. Our spells

The more we know the more power over the world and in the world we have. The more mana we have the more spells we can cast and the more powerful a spell we can use. The higher our level indicates roughly whether our mage is near their maximum potential within the game parameters.

Knowledge (spells) and Mana (MP) are the two defining aspects of a mage. They are the foundation of a mage per se. So its not a bad thing that we dont have a numeric statistic relating to intelligence and willpower.

The important thing now is that the spells we will have access to must be interactive enough, and have the potential to take us beyond the ordinary wizarding level and carry us into legend.

Who of us plays a mage to be a backwater mediocre magister or witch? Not I. Power is key to the mage, and when used with stratagems and cunning wit one's power becomes a deadly force not to be reckoned with on a whim.

My intelligence attribute, being over 9000, prompted me to check how many spell effects were in Oblivion.

77.

How many are in Skyrim?

85.

Argument? Invalid.

Boom.

Eh. Personally, I've never been a fan of the "all min/max, all the time" playstyle. Which is why (I vaguely recall) I made a chameleon suit once.... then realized it was boring as hell and never used it again. (Kind of like running around with TGM toggled is mildly amusing for a few minutes, and then gets boring.)

(Of course, it depends on the game style.... in roguelikes, min/max is where it's at, since that's basically all there is to the games.)
-----

In the end.... yeah, the game designers put the ability to do those things (100% cham/reflect/spellreflect, stacked weakness, etc) into the game and didn't remove them in patches. That doesn't mean that they can't decide (while working on their next project) that they were unbalanced, broken, or otherwise "not what we wanted" and remove some of them from the next game.

BOOOOOOOOM!Shakalakalakalakaaaaaa!

Removing mysticism doesn't make mages any weaker, because most of the spells in mysticism are placed into other schools, rather than removed entirely. Removing skills only makes certain character types weaker as long as they still can do what those skills allowed them to do, in some cases it can mean it makes them stronger, as if those mechanics initially governed by a removed skill are moved into a different skill, that skill may end up effecting more things, thereby making it strong, in theory anyway, in practice, there are a lot of factors which decide how powerful a specific skill is, some skills that are fairly specialized can still be quite useful if the task they govern is something that is very beneficial to the player and can't be performed by other, more versatile skills. Likewise, removing intelligence doesn't make mages weaker, as you can still raise your magicka, you just increase it directly upon leveling up rather than having it calculated based on intelligence. And willpower... we don't know about that yet, as the main thing willpower did in Oblivion was control your magicka regeneration, and we don't know how that's handled in Skyrim, though if magicka still generates in real time as in Oblivion, and due to the absence of willpower, is locked at a specific amount, then it will most likely be a moderate amount, lower than what you'd get in Oblivion with a high willpower value but not as low as a low willpower character, assuming that the balance here is still basically the same as Oblivion, which it is entirely possible that it is not. But what's ultimately going to decide how powerful mages are is not what skills and attributes exist for them, but what they can actually do and how well they can do it in comparison to other classes, and really, I'd argue that the latter is more important than the former, it's not going to matter if mages have access to a spell for everything you could possibly think of that could be accomplished with a spell if none of these spells actually do it well. Even if Skyrim's mages turn out to be less versatile than Oblivion's, that doesn't necessarily mean they'll be less powerful, I'll have to judge whether they are or not after playing the game. Though it does look like battlemages may suffer due to the mechanic changes of Skyrim, as the only way to have a spell and a weapon equipped at he same time is to have one of these in each hand, meaning they must sacrifice both the ability to have one spell in each hand and the option to dual wield, use a shield or carry a two handed weapon, which might actually be a good thing as battlemages could be a little overpowered in past games. In theory, as I see it, a battlemage is supposed to be some who can both use magic and fight in melee, thereby sacrificing a degree of effectiveness in both tasks, essentially, it's a tradeoff between having a wide variety of talents that you can perform decently, or a narrow variety of things that you're very good at. This could also increase the desirability of pure mages indirectly by making it so if players want to use magic, some options will only be available if they're willing to not have a melee weapon equipped at the same time, though this only applies if the advantages gained from doing so are significant enough to be worth not using a melee weapon.

And I wouldn't necessarily say mages were weaker in Oblivion than in Morrowind either, sure, they lost a few spells, though the only removed spells I actually used often were levitation and teleportation spells anyway, and the former was actually essential for completing the main quest, whereas the latter's main use in a game with map based fast travel would be to escape from battle anyway, and if you need to do that, it means you're already losing. On the other hand, they gained several advantages over Morrowind mages, such as magicka that regenerates over time (One of the most frustrating things about playing a mage in Morrowind was the fact that you never seemed to have enough magicka, aside from the fact that if you don't add racial or birthsign bonuses to your magicka, or fortify intelligence, the maximum amount you could achieve was really quite pathetic, there's also the fact that once you run out of magicka, the only way to replenish it is using potions, which add extra weight, and that is a bit of a problem if you've been adhering to the usual stereotype of frail mages who would fall over if you just lightly tapped them with a finger, and resting, which is not always an option, and in any case, sleeping for hours on end after every single fight isn't really beneficial for role-playing.) not to mention spells always succeed, which admitably fits in with some of the other mechanics of Oblivion (If an attack connects, it always hits, for example.) but I've had a lot more frustrations caused by failing at spells than attacks missing, in part because spells cost magicka, sometimes a large amount, whereas attacks only drain fatigue, which regenerates quickly, and in part because I've had several experiences with dying in a situation where I should have been able to survive simply because a spell failed when the chance of success was quite within acceptable levels, simply because of a factor completely outside of my control, finally, mages could cast spells without needing to put away their weapons and "ready" the spell, making casting a spell much more streamlined, though admitably the ones who benefited most from this were battlemages and other characters who combined magic with other skill types rather than pure mages, but as I see it, magic in both Morrowind and Oblivion was most useful when used together with other skills and was not reliable as your only tool to ensure success anyway, and with the factors I mentioned, I'm not sure if they made mages more powerful, but I certainly feel like they removed some of the frustration of playing a mage, and really, the reason players usually strive to gain powerful things in games, aside from bragging rights, is to remove frustration anyway.



I suppose you could argue that those things are part of the gameplay mechanics, but I hardly think that the option to completely strip any sense of challenge from the game is a necessary or desirable gameplay mechanic. You might as well just had an option to toggle off fun in the options menu, because that's essentially what using 100% chameleon amounts to.

And as you said yourself, choosing not to use those things is deliberately limiting your character even when the game allows you to be stronger, which I think is another compelling reason to remove those abilities, making a fun game is supposed to be the developers' job, my role should just be to provide a source of income for the company that made it and enjoy the product I get in return, it shouldn't be my job to make the game fun on my own because the developers didn't do their job properly. The only reason we would need to intentionally limit ourselves to keep the game fun is because the developers did not do their job of balancing the game properly. Of course, I did, in fact, prevent myself from doing those things, but that's because I had to to keep the game fun, I can't say I'd miss 100% chameleon if it were made impossible in Skyrim (Though entirely removing chameleon to prevent it is like amputating an arm in response to a paper cut.)

Mind you, I agree that mages should be powerful, in fact, if we take out things like 100% chameleon, I'd argue they were quite overpowered, but power in a game needs to have reasonable limits, because in the end, games are created to be entertaining, while certainly having a high level of power can be quite entertaining, if it reaches the point where nothing at all in the game can challenge you, it often becomes boring. power is supposed to help you overcome obstacles, but that doesn't mean it should automatically eliminate them for you without any effort on the player's part.

The Mysticism spells are still there. They just scattered them into the other Magic schools and got rid of that particular school.

Mysticism spells have been redistributed towards the other areas of magic.

Morrowind's are game breaking to an extent unless their nerfed and people will rage for that too.

The biggest loss is spell creation although it's not really a "loss."

Clever. Of coarse your the one with a dark hood and scythe. That makes us all mere mortals.

You know, it seems like now spells aren't fixed values anymore. Look in the demo, when Lightning is cast, it's like the caster holds the spells (which drains magicka), and then unleashes his charged lightning strike, which is more powerful for having been charged.

So it seems as though we're no longer limited by the stupidly weak spell limits that NPCs sell in older games (seriously, what kind of mage can't even focus to raise the voltage, without having created the spell before?)

So if anything, mages are becoming much more deadly

Sprays (flamethrower), glpyhs (fire/ice-trap), pbaoes (fire nova, chain lightening) >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 2 spells that let you bypass content.


I fail to see how the introduction of these very important/classic combat spell types makes a mage weaker.

Um you might want to have a recount. Or if you are combining a ton of effects into one effect like Bound everything, absorb everything etc you may want to assume a similar style of counting will reduce the 85 from Skyrim.

Spellmaking makes mages overpowered.

Stealth makes thieves overpowered.

Summon is a spell effect, Summon Daedric Spider is a spell. Bound is a spell effect, Bound Cuirass is a spell. Very different things.

If by weaker, you mean they cannot one-shot enemies and generally being unfairly more powerful than a thief or a warrior at the same level then yes.

So yes, Mages are not the "easy mode" anymore

last time i checked stealth didn't give you dozens of ways to become practically immortal

Magic wasn't overpowered - it was unbalanced. If you played it the way it was designed, it was fine. If you played it that way most people did, it was extremely overpowered.