Is it too much magicka for some of these spells. There are only 96 total spells in game when were total there would be more than 300. What's worse is many seem to cost too much.

Permanent storm atronarch -991

Does this seem too high for a permanent storm atronarch?

Permament frost atronarch -909
Firestorm -1222
Blizzard -948
Lightning storm -1180
Harmony -922

Six that cost more than 900 are too much?

There is no possible way to use these at all unless you master many perks. Even then you have to waste at least 30 levels+ to get enough magicka for these. Or is there something that I don't know.

Yikes. I summed a fire atronach last night (no perks in conjuration) to help me against bandit marauders, and it took two arrows and vanished instantly before it had even finished fully forming, then exploded right in front of me.

I don't know if it gets tougher with perks, but those arrows were taking about half of my HP per hit too. (And this was on adept. I was pretty surprised, I had just upgraded my armor, too.)

Yeah it seems magicka is just awfully done.

Is there anything I'm missing?

Illusion is overpowered imo. Even at level 64 my illusion mage takes zero damage on Master difficulty.

Wow. I never used illusion before. That gives me incentive to. How did you manage that?

Why must this thread go by so fast?

Because even if the enemies are extremely powerful, you can just turn them against each other with illusion spells. Of course, it has several other useful effects as well.

I suspect you're missing that those are the base magicka costs and that higher skill level with magical skills gives you a lower casting cost, even without perks.

For example, my current character has Conjuration 46 and casting Bound Bow costs him 156 magicka. I open the console and change his Conjuration skill to 100. The casting cost of Bound Bow is now 123. It's not as much of a drop as in previous Elder Scrolls games, but it does get reduced for higher skill. (I've seen one mod claiming that vanilla Skyrim reduces casting cost by 25% of base when your skill is 100, but I haven't seen it confirmed that this is correct.) I assume the rate of reduction was slowed on the basis that, if you're serious about the school of magic, then you should also be putting perks into it as your skill increases.

I thought they tool that all the way out thanks hadn't noticed the change at all in game.