Geez do not waste points on restro's mana regen, it doesn't work in combat. Level alchemy and enchanting, and buy the right perks and you can choose 2 schools of magic that will use no mana whatsoever.

Then you can manoless aoe-calm 5 enemies and then stunlock them all to death with incinerate within seconds. Mana used: 0. Health lost: 0.

Perhaps you should make some weakness to magic poisons.

Your post is full of personal attacks and conjecture about how other people play the game. If there's a problem with my argument please discuss that.

I don't think you've read my post completely as I very clearly cover enchanting as being the solution to the destruction tree's mana problems. The problem with this being the period in the game up until you get enchanting up to a reasonable level. From what you've said about enchanting gear to "one or two shot" enemies I'd have to guess that you were using a bow or sword as this is definately not the case with destruction spells in the midgame on Master difficulty. What we're discussing is the mana requirements of destruction spells in the midgame on a pure mage (No melee or ranged weapons). If you're using weapons you would not experience this problem as you're playing a completely different type of character.

I've played the whole game on Master and my character is currently Level 46 having finished the main questline. Before getting the enchants on my gear that reduced the cost of destruction spells the game was not hard, it was just tedious. Now that I have these enchants the game is too easy. What I'm proposing is changes to make the midgame less of a grind by allowing a pure mage to be more active after the first 15 seconds of battle.

Hey guys, I went and compared destruction to one handed. Take a look and see what you think.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1283497-destruction-versus-one-handed-statistics

I am playing as a full mage and have the Atronach 'stone' or w/e
Level 25 or something, and have been doing pretty good so far =D
Equilibrium and fast healing keep me alive and full of mana for most fights.

Report back in 15-20 levels

To anyone who may be curious as to what gear I'm using as it might be relevant to the discussion my current setup is below.

Glass Helmet: -25% Destruction spell cost and +62 Magicka
Glass Armour: -25% Destruction spell cost and +62 Health
Silver Necklace: -25% Destruction spell cost and +20% Magick Resist
Silver Ring: -25% Destruction spell cost and +20% Magick Resist
Glass Boots: +37% Frost Resist and + 37% Lightning Resist
Glass Gauntlets: +25 Light armour skill and +62 Magicka

Total Stats: 308 Armour, 432 Health and 434 Magicka. 77% Frost Resist, 77% Lightning Resist and 40% Fire Resist.

All my gear was improved while wearing gloves, helm, ring and necklance enchanted with fortify smithing to give me an additional +100 smithing (200 total). This is the reason for the high armour. I also have another pair of boots enchanted with fire resist instead of frost to swap out when going up against fire using enemies.

I'm level 46 and have played through the whole game on Master difficulty completing the main quest line. My mage is specialized in the Destruction, Conjuration and Illusion Magick trees. The only points I've spent out of the mage trees is the smithing tree for Glass Armour (Though this could have been avoided if I wanted to wait to loot it from higher level Thalmor once enemies were scaled up), Enchanting tree (All the perks down the center path) and two points into the light armour tree for some extra armour (Unnecessary but I had some extra perks).

One expert spell alone without the perk costs around 300 magica... and does pretty much no damage by the time you can cast it... Essentially you need high enchanting + destruction perks to even be able to use expert spells or higher.

If you get the really high level destruction spells they destroy your magicka, you HAVE to get the perks if you want to use them, and even then you might have to enchant your armor so that it could even be possible to crank out spells.

The easiest fix for destruction magic would be making it equal to all the other offensive skills.

As in, make the damage scale with the skill you have, not decrease the cost of the spell.

The way it is right now, the most damage you can do with a single spell is around 240 points on a single target.
AoE damage is completely useless if you're playing with a companion, because as soon as you cast your fireball, your companion is dead.

Guess I'll have to make a mod that lets destruction damage scale with skill and have allied NPCs ignore 90% of AoE damage or something.

Thats not really a point proving that destruction is bad, its that melee weapons are stupidly good.

Magic does scale in a way. For destruction you replace all of your lower level spells with much better ones. They use a ton more mana and you counter-balance that with enchanting. So as you level your mana pool grows, the spells you use grow in power and use about the same amount of mana.

For melee players the game stays pretty much the same, upgrade your weapons and charge into battle flailing. Destruction mage you change the way you play. Stop using novice sprays and runes and lower level bolts. Use the more powerful ones.

Use your other spell trees. Illusion + destruction i've found to be extremely powerful. Turn yourself into an invisible ball of fire to terrorize bandits. Make your enemy chase you down a hall of flames while you shoot ice storms down it.

Oh and god forbid you drink a +100% destruction damage potion. (possible with top alchemy gear) Or use a +60% elemental damage poison on a boss. You can deliver the poison with an arrow, its not the end of the world to break out of role-playing a completely PURE mage so that you can boost you damage through the roof. Other playstyles have to do the same thing.

Basically you can't compare tradeskilled through the roof melee with zero-tradeskilled mages. If this game had PvP I would absolutely destroy any melee character, even if they were magic immune.

The stuff you can do with a mage using all of your tools is amazing. Its actually harder to play at the earlier levels for me. Now that I've got enchanting and alchemy down and my expert and master tier spells I'm having fun being creative on how to embarrass entire rooms of NPCs and especially end bosses.

Agree with you here. Doesn't really matter if melee does more damage than a mage in a single player game as long as both are fun to play.

My issue is that a destruction using mage is a pain in the ass to play until you get enchanting up to snuff. Mages are definately insanely strong, my argument was about how fun they were to play until you got your enchanting to the point where you could sidestep the mana issues of destruction spells. With top level Illusion, Conjuration and Destruction spells and decent enchants you're almost invincible on Master difficulty.

I know you weren't addressing my post either, but thought I'd clarify in case anyone else had misunderstood where I was coming from after reading my original post.

Playing on Normal, level 49, never cast a conjuration spell other than soul steal (or whatever it's called). Never swung a melee weapon or used a bow. Destro all the way. There are ABSOLUTELY no enemies that take 20-30 casts. I don't even have max level destro yet (99! one...more...point). Dragons take 6-10 level 4 spells of opposite type, Named Dragon Priests, 10 or so. Everything else, WAY WAY less...Most "tough" mobs (vampire masters, storm elementals, named monsters/undead, etc) take 2-4 casts...Anything that isn't a "hard" monster 1-2, tops...usually 1. 90% of all player-race-NPCs take 1 spell, even the named ones. I enchanted my armor to 100% cost reduction more out of convenience, simply because I got tired of carrying around mana pots (which are SUPER cheap and EVERYWHERE) But even if I couldn't do that, I can kill almost anything without running out of mana (basically Dragon Priests are the only exception...Dragons take more casts than I have mana, but they swoop around a lot, aka, mana recharge time). And in those situations where I had to kill more than 1 tough thing before I got my 100% cost reduction, I just...GASP...drank some mana pots...DOUBLE GASP! You know, like every player character wizard in every video game ever is expected to do...

Is this different on super-duper-drive-you-insane hard mode? I am sure it is (no actual experience). Is dual wielding (or even just melee in general) better at dealing damage? I am sure it is (no actual experience). Does it matter? Not in the least. (Unless maybe your playing on the aforementioned hard mode, and you expect the game to be super easy, which I think is a lot of peoples problems).

My "fix" to the problem of destro being "under-powered?" Nerf melee...If you all can pull the sort of damage you say you can pull with melee weapons, then obviously the problem is that you are doing too much damage, not that destro is doing too little and needs to be brought into line with melee...

If you want the game to be super easy, play on super easy. If you want a real challenge, play on the hardest mode possible. If you want to play a mage, and it makes the game even harder, cause you aren't using the completely silly broken parts of the game, well then, guess what, you just made the game more challenging, which is what you're trying to accomplish by playing super hard mode, isn't it? So stop complaining.

That is all...

so the issue isnt a problem late game ? how long is the mid game?

Spells do not cost too much, its perfectly balanced. Higher-level enemies should obviously have more hitpoints. You can kill most bandits and regular enemies with the base 100 pts magicka and a few basic spells. On expert!

It doesn't matter if you drink. It does not work in combat.

And yes Destruction is underpowered. Of course you could do tactics and nifty clever school combinations to take down enemies, but Destruction is the weakest school. Even Restoration beats it.

Fool yourself by saying it isn't, while at the same time employing all those tactics to compensate for its weakness. It's not like in Oblivion and Morrowind, where the school powers up as you level. Not in Skyrim. Destruction becomes stagnant.

I am 41st level mage and focused on Destruction (91), Conjuration (81), Restoration (65) and Heavy Armor (55). I am currently wearing Archmage robes but looking to switch back into Heavy Armor soonish.

Destruction is a tool in my arsenal, that said, it is not a strong offensive tool in my arsenal. The strong offensive tool in my arsenal is Conjuration followed by one handed melee with a decent effect . Even if I reduced my destruction spells to 0 cost from a mana perspective, they simply will not do as much single damage to a target as a Dremora Lord will.

Destruction is a great situational tool and provides great muli-target damage and good secondary effects but it is not a damage powerhouse.

Personally I do not care that it is not a damage powerhouse because that is not how I planned to build out my character, but I disagree that the correcting the spell cost will solve the perceived problem as you cannot cast destruction spells fast enough, even with endless mana, to keep up with the damage output of a Storm Atronach (Ranged) or a Dremora Lord (Melee).

Oddly, I have the most perks allocated to the Destruction tree simply because I needed to do so for the secondary effects and to make the damage effects usable. Which, was not how I envisioned spending my perks but it does meet the character vision in the end so all is well.

I love http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/632983753065027784/11522191165FC324C5F42B735F406724AEDBE61B/. Its a real http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/632983753082265567/69BCD1CAC8B909B4E5649B433B568ECA71B5ACD3/ due to its LOOOONNNNGGGG range.

The Cost of them doesnt really bother me and I use other schools to help out. Just wish the spells grew in power according to your skill level of the school.

OP, your wrong, plain as day.
I have no issue with the cost of destruction spells, without using alchemy/enchanting I have 15% redux from archmage robes and a ring I found for another 17% off, Face it, its the horid lack of damage scaling past level 40.

Please stop lying to yourself.
Go do yourself a favor;
Turn on god mode, take off all your +mana regen gear, enter combat, drain your mana pool and count. 90 seconds right.
Put your +mana regen gear on, enter combat, drain your mana pool and count. Less than 90 seconds right.

You can test it with gear, potions, perks, ALL MANA REGEN EFFECTS WORK IN COMBAT.

Now that you know how the game actually works, have fun using the tools you have to play.

I think it also has to do with reactive balancing from bethesda. In oblivion magic had lots of ways to be creatively abused and became very powerful with the right approach. Meanwhile physical combat was pretty limited, and led to boring fights. So now they first made sure that destruction magic couldn't be overpowered anymore, and they added ways to make physical combat more powerful, and the balance has gone all the way to the other end.

Destruction was seriously powerful in oblivion even without the weakness to magic/drain health abuse. Just using a simple weakness to element spell before your barrage of normal destruction spells led to really quick combat. But then again, it had restore magicka potions that were both very easy to brew (mainly because of the flax seeds) and most of all a huge amount total magicka that you regained.

To the OP:
IMO, the main issue is that you are obligated to use higher level spells to keep your damage. And this means that spell variation becomes almost zero. For example, Flames is a nice cone spell that has no similar at higher levels, so would be very interested if it could be used at higher levels dealing at least average damage.

I still use flames on occasion, as it does not have a stagger effect, those situations are pretty situational.
1. I use it on NPCs once they "give up"
2. I use it on erratic movement NPCs like magic anomalies and wisps to finish them off

Actually, I suppose I use it a lot to finish stuff off.

No, it's both.

I am a mage who only uses destruction magic, and holy [censored] do I feel overpowered!

ill admit Im only level 20, but still there is only one enemy who has managed to kill me (the boss in the quest for findting the staff of Magnus). I have 120 health and 420 in magic ( with rings, neckless, robe etc, and NO i have not enchanted a single item.) and I have to say, equiped with chainlightning, fireballs, shouts and ice storms youre pretty darn close to being god him self.

And if it should happen, that i do infact run out of magic I guess I could always use one of the 60 + potions i have. Also there is the slow time shout...



10 enemies is piss easy as long as you have chainlighting and fireballs with 15 feet radius. Now Im still at a low level so things might become harder as i advance, but people who claim destruction is to hard should start looking at what the game gives you.

Robes with 100% faster magic regeniration, rings/hoods/neckless's with fortify magica etc. Then there is the Arch-mage robe.