First off, I do not care if they nerf melee or not. Seriously. I do not play melee characters, why would I care if they are super human or not.

What I do care about is that since there is NO way to bump up the power of destruction magic greater then 50%, your magic quickly starts to feel like you are attempting to kill the dragons with a lighter instead of a fireball.

I love to play a wizard, and I love the trope of wizards being hard in the beginning of the game, but super powerful at the end. If I am shooting bolts of lightning out of my hands they should feel like I am shooting bolts of lightning out of my hands. When people say things like "just use conjuration" or "destruction is supposed to be used for supporting other stuff" I just get annoyed. Why? Because I want to play a freaking elemental Mage who obliterates things with ice lightning and fire.

As it is, by level 30+ my Mage character is already struggling to do enough damage to make him worthwhile or fun. By level 50 I imagine that it will be even worse, since I am already at my maximum power as a mage.

I do not care about "balancing" them with warriors, I am not a min maxer. I just want them to actually be what they are, a glass cannon. Not a glass pea shooter.

Wizards are super powerful at the end, but magic isn't super-damaging. Mage is a utility class more than a damage class now, and mages have a ton of utility in this game. In fact they have so much utility that giving them insane damage would make them overpowered to the point of being extremely boring.

Yeah, so, I do not WANT to be a utility mage, I want to be a destruction mage. I want to blow stuff up. Fireballs should do that. Why have a skill called "destruction" if you cant destroy stuff with it?

Every other character type has viable high end damage, be it melee, sneak or bow, why not mages?

Edit: Also, being overpowered at high levels is fine. It gives a sense of progression. I do think all things in this game should follow the law of diminishing returns, including the magic damage increases. I am not asking for easy mode, I am asking for destruction to function as the lore and the skill descriptions intended it too. Why can warriors be gods by end game, but mages have to run like little girls from every enemy in the game.

I just hit 30 with my mage and fireballs are working just fine against the frost dragons that are showing up. Maybe too well, in fact, since impact works on them. I'm not seeing why people are getting so worked up.

Where is the utility?

I don't know about you... But Im lvl 24 and can kill dragons with 5-7 duel cast firebolts (a spell that I got at around level 5) that cost 9 magicka, and with the perk that makes duel cast spells stagger its almost unfair in 1v1 situations

I'm not buying a word of it Destruction magic kills things just fine.

Did you honestly believe that you had a new and unique take on this issue when you started this thread?

Wait a bit longer. They do fine damage early on, but as you run into tougher enemies, they will NEVER get stronger. Enemies will get progressively higher health, and destruction magic will not keep pace.

Honestly, all I think they need to do is allow enchanters to enchant +magnitude effects into their items, and then add those effects into the leveled lists. At that point mages would have a end game way of keeping pace, and it would require almost nothing to be done to the actual magic itself. While I would like a balanced form of scaling to the skill level, it would be a lot harder to do. Just give me the enchants, I will be fine.

Recap: Destruction = Destroying Stuff. It is in the name, it is in the lore. It needs to work as intended.

You shouldn't be feeling gimp at level 30, it was around then that mine felt at it's peak and that's on Master difficulty. It was around 40 ish that the damage drop off became noticeably lower and even more so now at 51. However, i now wear full heavy armour and mana costs are down to zero so the game is quite easy, but, the damage aspect is weak sauce even spamming incinerate.

@Moop I'd drop firebolt if i were you, fireball and incinerate are much better, give em a try

I share in this opinion; there seems to be a bandwagon of "Destruction is under-powered because it can't keep up with a clearly broken, and heavily abusive crafting exploit!"

It can not even keep up with my warrior who has not done the exploits.

In a game where you can be everything the players have the ability to create non-optimal characters. In order to make them viable bethesda created a difficulty slider in your gameplay options. This slider doesn't make enemies dumber or play different. It doesn't shorten quests or remove them altogether and it doesn't hand you things on a silver plater

What it does is make your skilles more effective against enemies and enemies skills less effective against you. Bump it down a notch or two if you feel the damage is sub-par to what it should be.

Of course I did not. That would be silly. I am joining the ranks of people who love destruction mages (I use all the other magic types too, but specialize in it) but feel they are being under loved.

Since when did destruction become "non optimal" for dealing damage? If nothing else they need to change its name then, to something like "mildly distracting lights"

Also while that does bump up the damage I deal, it also lowers the damage the enemies deal. Which is lame. If I am in cloth a two hander should still obliterate me.

Use a staff of destruction in one hand and a destruction spell in the other coupled with perks in destruction coupled with poision that makes enemies less resistand to fire coupled with arc-mages robes coupled with enchanted ring/amulet for less mana drain on destruction or some that is magic oriented.

People dont realize that your level depends on your skills so if you use only destruction you will go up to 100 skill that is lvl 13 for your char and you will never ever level your character anymore. Mobs will scale to that lvl 13 while you will have access to master level destruction skills that deal massive damage to low level mobs while having the whole destruction tree perked (9 perks) and have 3 perks left to distibute.

As I already stated, I use all the types of magic, my characters tend to be alteration conjuration, enchant, and specializing in destruction. with some restoration (just to get fast heal) Playing so the game only goes to level 13 also will not work, as there are a large number of enemies in this game who do not scale.

My post was for a pure destruction mage that dosnt use any other skill, meele or bow. This way you will be powerfull against scaled eniemies and the non-scaled ones arent that plentiful and you wont battle more that one of them on a single encounter.

So just kill the mobs , switch to dual wield magic and stagger the [censored] out of that un-scaled eniemie.

I keep seeing posts saying destruction is weak...what game are you guys playing? I'm walking around killing people with one shot with my destruction/conj focused mage at about level 25+. Are you buying the newest spells for your skill level? Certain spells do not appear until later in the game. Incinerate is AWESOME!

Most people here saying destruction or mages is fine have never even tested the class, just ignorant fools

In not so strong of words, but yes, it seems odd that they are defending such an obvious power imbalance.

Problem is...in every TES game from Arena up to Oblivion (even with the latter's [censored] level scaling system), mages started out weak and got powerful near the end. In Skyrim, because of the lack of spellmaking and only the presence of static spells that do not improve in damage output with an improvement in Destruction skill level, you're [censored].

The majority of the chuckleheads on these forums who think "Mage means you use summons to hide behind bro, working as intended" are not helping. I feel your pain OP. I've given Skyrim a rest myself until the CK comes out. I am fully confident that the first mod that gets released will be a Destruction scaling fix. The second, will be a Spellmaking add-on.

Sounds to me like there's a bunch of Mage only players that are butthurt there not top dog anymore to bad.

I have fire ball now and against semi-level enemies its a one shot dual cast.

I can use fire bolt pretty decently on dragons without much effort.

Only thing that stinks with mages is fighting other mages. - i actually have to use WARD!

I'm only 17 but I can start to see how flames and lower level spells aren't gonna help since higher levels mean there will be more occurent harder enemies.

Sounds to me like you are terrible at understanding simple concepts.