Flames - Mana cost is perfect.
Firebolt - Mana cost is..a tad bit high.
Fireball - 1 dual-casted fireball and it's almost all of your mana - even with 100 destruction and 300 Magicka.
Incinerate - 300 magicka, I can't dual cast this.
Fire Storm - I can't cast this yet.

I'm lv 22, put every point into magicka, pretty much only leveld Destruction - and I ..quite simply.. can't kill a dragon in under ~20 minutes due to magicka. I play on master, and it takes me roughly 15 magicka bars to kill a Frost Dragon. That...seems a bit ridiculous. I'm not playing enchanting, so I only have -12% destruction cost reduction.

Enchanting is REQUIRED to play destruction effectivly - This is terrible. This is why Pure Destro mages are so rare. Their damage is Plenty - their magicka efficiency is not. Single casting Incinerates takes up roughly a third of my magicka bar - and 1shots most anythign I come across outside of bosses/dragons. But 3 casts later and I either wait for a day, or hide around the corner til I have moar magicka. Of my 6 characters now - this is by FAR my least favorite.

Take my conjurer for example - I'm lv 26, I do 129 damage per bow shot, roughly 400 damage on my first shot, and in a few more levels I'll even be paralyzing things I shoot. Couple that with my 2 Awesome pets, tanky and burney, who both do about as much dps as my destruction does - individually. It's no wonder why no one wants to play Destro. :/

And oh - Just for fun, Once you hit -100% you can just charge Master Spark(whatever it's called - reminds me of master spark from touhou =P) on anything and they just MELT to you. But being mana-free, You just spam it endlessly, with no repercussions. People can't be finding that enjoyable =/. I want SOME difficulty in my game, where as destruction literally goes from Near-impossible, to near-invincible who can melt everything in seconds. Seriously - to anyone playing destruction, shed your self-enchanted gear for just 1 dragon fight - see how long it takes ya. It's not cool.

The OP and Ain's post above (ESP. Ain's) sum up my experience currently as well. I'm truly not finding Destro fun at all at the moment (level 19). First time I actually switched to playing a different game last night - the amount of deaths I suffered was phenomenal. I don't mind more challenging game play, but firing off one spelling and seeing and almost hoping that there is enough magicka for a second spell is making for a decidedly not-fun-anymore experience. And I still love this game like an obsessed madman.

I know you said you're 22...I am much higher than that (51 now). But I have about 460 mana, with my +mana gear (I don't have a lot of +mana gear, mostly +mana regen/-% destro cost). I recently upgraded to the -100% destro cost. It makes me feel like god. I honestly feel like I am cheating all the time. I now have 100 Enchanting and Double Enchanting perk, and yeah, it's just silly broken for any build.

That said, before I switched to that armor and before I got 100 Enchanting/Double Enchanting Perk, I was wearing Master Destruction Shirt (or whatever it's called) that gives -20% cost and 150% mana regen on my chest, some gloves that gave +mana, some boots that gave frost resist, the +100% mana regen mask, a necklace that gave -15% destro cost, and a ring that gave -17% destro cost. I made the gloves and boots myself, everything else I found by or before level 40. I could cast double handed Firebolts till the cows came home. I could proabably have doublecasted flames for forever. I almost never used Fireball, as I found it to be too inefficent for the cost. I used the double cast Ice Storm instead for AOE, and I could get about 7 or so of those off before I went OOM. I didn't have Firestorm at the time (just got that at level 50 actually). As far as Incinerate went, I would use that only rarely, but I could get about 3-4 double casts off. This is all before drinking mana pots. Mostly I just Firebolted things to death, as the stagger effect from double casting is amazing and 1v1, you can just chill and firebolt anything, even dragons, to death. It might take a while (and dragons will certainly take a bunch of mana pots) but it's totally doable. All of this is on Normal difficulty, mind you. If you're on Super-Extreme-Mega-Hard, don't come whining cause the game is hard. That's counterproductive, silly, and makes you look like a tard.

So either your doing something wrong, or I am doing something awesome. Either way, be more awesome.

A