Do you think Beth will -maybe in future patches and DLC- change the mechanics for destruction, as it is super Under powered later on in the game and seems to have most things going against it compared to other classes. E.g-

- The max you can increase destruction skill damage is 50% over 6 perks for all outlets of destruction compared to archery/1hand/2hand up to 100% in just 5 perks.

-The standing stones (atronach and apprentice) the only stones that really are made for mages, are the only stones out of ALL 13 that have negativities (x2 vulnerable to magic with atronach and 50%- magicka regen with apprentice)

- On top of the 100% damage buffs archery/1hand/2hand get, you can buff the weapons/armour at a smith increasing the damage even more. destruction is still at a flat rate. a legendary deadric bow with IRON arrows does more damage then fire storm, and fire storm takes around 5 seconds to get ready. in that time i let fly 4 arrows with a combined dmg of around 450 dmg, and that is without enchant buffs as well + not using the exploits.

- (the one thing that peevs me off) enchanting buffs for mages. the only enchants for destruction is the reduction on magicka is costs, there is no damage increase. there is a damage increase enchant for archery/1hand/2hand again.

- Dual casting is fairly pointless (2.2x the damage for a dual cast ice spike costs 2.8x magicka, same with everything else.) magika:damage is ridiculous.


I know there have been plenty of topics on destruction and mages, but c'mon there must be change. playing a pure mage on adept at level 32 is futile. I cannot do enough damage even with with dual casting stun lock, and I really don't want to use an infinite magicka enchant because that still doesn't help the lack of damage done. What do you guys think? I hope some balancing is done in the future. Maybe new spells, magicka cost adjustments, damage adjustments, perk respecs. I don't know but I hope so :l

Yea, I'm not so sure.

Maybe a Pure Dest mage only.

I've played 2 casters so far and I seem to always want to combine Ill or Conj with it.... and it becomes overpowered I think.

But I understand if your only using Dest spells.... maybe you can try a little Alch with it..?

Anyhow I think it's perfect for anyone using combo builds.. but I agree with you if it's only a solo Dest build.

I think Bethesda kept the damage like that on purpose, so that being a mage wouldn't be a brainless excercise in dual casting every single mob you meet to death.

Thieves have to sneak and attack, warriors need to block and slash, mages need to blast and blast? Try using some other spells.

Except that isn't how it works. You just use firebolt until your expert level magic is to the point where you can spam it without ever worrying about mana. You still spam one spell basically.

You can make potions with alch that fortifies destruction and adds to it's damage. Stack plenty of fortify alchemy gear and make a lot of potions. So far that is the only solution I have discovered.

That's a totally different problem though. This topic is about magic damage not being high enough. The "fix" which would be spell scaling would just make the problem of spamming one spell even worse since there would never be a reason to get new spells.

How? If flames actually scaled I could use that if I get in stuck melee range instead of spamming incinerate. I could strategically place runes to damage my enemies because they will actually do damage. I could wall of flame small corridors. I can start to aoe again with large groups of mobs because my adept level aoe spells will actually do good damage to high level enemies again. Right now it's spam incinerate forever. And, in situations where incinerate is appropriate, like against just 1-3 enemies at a time, it would actually do enough damage to where it won't feel like a spam fest anymore. Actually, spell scaling would make this true of any spell.

Like I said this topic is about damage, which is related but not exactly the same problem as spells not scaling. The reason the damage is not the best is so that mages will mix in other spells, and I dont just mean other destruction spells, I mean spells from other trees.

The whole point of dual casting is so that mages could be more interesting, utility in one hand and damage in the other. I'm not saying "this is how to play a mage" but what I am saying is that only using destro spells has a high disincentive, which we can all see by the way magic was designed in this game.

MMMMM yeah because swinging your two hand weapon with a power attack once or firing an arrow from overpowering sneak mechanic/sneak attack damage is comparable to spell damage how? Right. If my archer can invest 5 perks to up his bow and arrow damage by 100%, then sneak attack and deliver a triple damage attack (usually one shotting enemies or crippling the strong ones bad), oh and let us not forget more % damage to archery enchanted gear, plus damage enchants on the weapons, plus smithing to increase damage.... wait, we forgot adding poisons to them too! /pant.

Seriously. If they are going to give all of the above to melee and archery (hello it already has a range advantage!), the least they can do is show a little love to dealing out massive magic damage IF YOU SO CHOOSE to invest in that path.

Tweaking some of those destruction perks would help a lot. I would like to see 50/100% increase damage to spells instead of 25/50. Would like to see the perks that add flee, paralyze and disentegrate at low health completely changed. Perhaps the fire one could increase the damage and duration of the fire/burn DOT. The frost one could occaisionally freeze an enemy solid (how about same chance as the bows paralyze attack perk), and lightning could stagger enemies.

The impact perk is a bit on the cheap exploity side too, I think it should be reduced to stagger 50% of time like the bow stagger chance. I have always felt 100% reduction to spell cost is a bit crazy too. Kind of defeats the point of a mana potion, or things like the high elf racial skill no? If they cap things like resistances to magic and physical damages in the 80s why not cap the reduction to mana cost in the same range?

Destruction needs an overhaul, perks and the spells themselves. Badly. -_-

Destruction is clearly underpowered in vanilla even below master difficulty (where you do half damage and enemies have doubled hp) .

If you play an elemental pure mage , until you get to level 20ish , you don't have many perks in other schools than destruction at first , destruction is your only damage dealer but often insufficient without potions or enchanted gear . i got owned by a bear so many times , and i had a companion and dual casting , but the damage is just not enough , quite often you have to run away if you are out of potions . Thief , archers or warriors don't have this problem , they're much stronger . Fire mage is not really a viable option in master difficulty , and still quite difficult to play in expert without enchanted gear , a companion and high level in other magic schools

I would say it's the enchanting that needs a nerf. And to lesser extent smithing.

Legendary Daedric sword does what? 24 damage? With 100 one-handed and five perks of Armsman, that is multiplied by 3. 72 damage per swing.

Twin-casted(not dual casted) Fireball is 80 semi-AoE damage + fire. It's also an Adept spell, there are two levels above that(though admittely Master level is kind of bad)

It's really only when you start to stack fortify one-handed effects on weapons that magic begins to look like a joke.

The problem with your vision of the destruction tree is that it stands alone by itself as the only tree a mage will ever need. You can take those other trees for extra sauce if you like, or you could just only cast destro spells, and be the most destructive force on the planet by level 7 or 8. Not seeing the problem with that?

But no mage is only going to roll with one tree right? Who wants to be level 10 forever. So he'll mix insane damage with insane utility of illusion and have himself the most broken archetype in the game.

i'm really baffled by these pure destro mages. What skills does that require, destruction and enchanting? All the classes I've made require 4 sometimes 5 skills minimum.

Intentionally gimping one tree to "encourage" use of other trees is a pretty poor design choice. As it is, destruction is one of two main ways for a mage to do damage. The other is dual summoning dremora lords and going afk. Generally, what people do is pick a single damage type and build their character around that. Warriors can pick 1h/2h/1h+block/archery, and then they get some defensive or utility perks to go with it, which may include armor perks or spells. And this is fine, maybe even a little OP depending on how you enhance your damage with these types. If you pick destruction and other defensive/utility perks, well guess what? Your damage still svcks.

There are no classes in this game. A warrior can pick up the same perks as I, a mage, can, and vice versa. The thing is, in a scenario with a warrior with a certain set of perks + 2h as his damage vs me with the same set of perks + destruction as my damage, the warrior will always win out. Heck, as a warrior you can even equip a good set of armor and spam power attacks if you want. Spamming isn't a disadvantage for them. It is for destruction, but it is at the same time necessary.

Basically, warriors can spam and get away with it, and be better than mages in that respect, or they can use other spells or armor perks and, because they can complement the use of these perks with adequate damage, are also better than mages in that respect as well, i.e. using things other than just spamming an attack. Which is why destruction needs a damage buff.

excellently said. Bethesda needs to see this post.

Destruction isn't the problem. Magic, as a whole, is easily the most versatile of the 3 archetypal roles. It proved to be even more versatile in the previous TES games.

Rolling destruction alone is still viable, especially if you pick up some restoration perks along the way to restore your magicka. Stamina buffs aren't nearly as plentiful or as powerful as the magicka buffs available. Destruction dual casting is the only skill in the game that will allow you to stun-lock enemies and defeat them, regardless of their HP level, as long as you are bolstered with enough magicka to last you the battles.

Plus, destruction bypasses armor, and wearing armor no longer hampers a casters ability to cast.

Primarily as a warrior there's been plenty of times on master difficulty where I get my ass handed to me because a vanillla warrior just doesn't have the utility to do anything other than keep swinging. The grass is always greener though I guess.

And though there is no classes, for the sake of argument it's easiest to just use the archetypes, since in this case you're arguing that a pure destro mage should be viable, and I play a pure warrior as my main anyway, so having a pure class is something we can understand.

My pure warrior has periods where he gets owned and it's frustrating, but I don't blame game balance, I chose to limit myself to no magic and so I have a harder time of it.

Not all the classes are created equally and I don't believe they can or should be. It would really svck to see someone posting a dps comparison, and see Bethesda respond by fine tuning all the class archetypes into exactly the same dps. Since utility is the Mages major strength, and the one which everyone here is overlooking.

Yes , because the concept of firemage and pure elemental mage was viable in Morrowind and Oblivion .

Skyrim is more "practical" now , you are forced to use other schools , some people see it as a limiting factor both in gameplay and roleplaying (other schools have nothing to do with fire and elements , it's an immersion killer to be forced to use necromancer's powers (conjure ) or illusionist's magic in order to survive (especially on harder difficult modes ) .

What they should have done IMHO is put more perks in the destruction tree (to let people specialize in ) and made destruction spells to scale in damage as well as made master spells to be much more powerful given the insane mana cost and long charging time ... it would have been great , especially since some trees are perfectly useless like lockpicking , pickpocket or speech where hardly anyone ever spent a point there

You can't just ignore other combinations, which are completely viable and possible, and say"Well based on ONLY the archetypes I think everything is balanced." A warrior has access to all of the utility a mage has access to. Yet they have good damage too. And good damage + utility > poor damage + utility. It's as simple as that.

i agree and disagree with you, since I started my mage out as a pure destro mage and I quickly saw it wasn't going to work and got pretty disappointed. But after some thinking about the reasons why pure destro shouldn't be viable in the first place, I've pretty much come to accept the wisdom of the current state of the destruction tree.

The only way I could see them fixing this would be by doing what you said, adding more perks which would require mages to level out of the 19-20 area they'd be in once they maxed destro and enchanting. They'd have to dip into other trees so they could earn the perks to spend in the destro tree.

Hopefully they wouldn't just grind blacksmithing or something to get those perks :s yeah they probably would.

on level 42 i run around with double fireball on master and i find it pretty easy. I get one shottet by almost everything but it's rare that i get hit.Destruction is bad, but since the game is too easy, that actually makes it balanced...
The worst is the number of spells. Double fireball is all i will use the entire game.

Personally , i don't use the trick of having mana cost reduced to 0 , it's kinda weird to cast magic without using magicka , it feels not right .

I wish the mana cost reductions were only accessible through perks (and capped at 50% ) , and that you could only enchant "fortify destruction/illusion/resto etc " effects .

I mean it's weird that suddenly , the magicka bar is taken out , from a roleplaying point of view it is not right , Mages should use mana , however powerful they are .

Fortunately there are mods

*sigh* again, it's not about pure destro, not in the sense that destruction will be your only perk tree EVER and you refuse to use anything else. That would just be stupid. The point is, destruction combined with other skills will always be weaker than any other damage type combined with those same skills (because everyone has access to everything in this game).

Conjuration is overpowred - at least at my level. Unfortunately for me, its my favorite school of magic. However, its dreadfully boring with how powerful it becomes after capped out. The whole magic system is such a mess and uninteresting. Its great that magic finally got some love in terms of visuals and mechanics, but the schools seem to either be far to weak or far to strong with no middle ground.

Right that's true, but mutliclassing in games has always raised tons and tons of issues. All of Bethesdas classes are always unbalanced because Bethesda has very little control over how people build their characters. If set classes with no options for customization were introduced to ES then class balance would be easier but it would be far from easy. Better companies than Bethesda have tried and failed to implement decent class balance (No offense intended to the good folks at Bethesda) And those are games which have far less class building flexibility.

So basically Bethesda tries to get the 3 main archetypes into a kind of working order, and then let the chips fall where they may when it comes to hybrid classes. Honestly I'm surprised things aren't even more unabalanced than they are already. I think Beth tried really hard with Skyrim, it's just a mammoth job to get right. No pun intended.

Exactly. Destruction isn't hard, it is just very poorly designed. Impact means rarely ever having to worry about dodging enemies because of perma stunlock, while at the same time no spell scaling means you'll be limited to only 1-2 spells by the end of the game to do damage with. Essentially, the thrill of surviving (defense) is gone, and the thrill of finding various ways to kill things (offense) is also gone.



I don't think that's how they went about balancing things. If the game advertised "freedom of choice" as one of its main features, Bethesda should accordingly balance around "freedom of choice" as well. If they advertised "freedom of choice" and balanced around classes, hoping that freedom would just magically happen, well then that is a pretty poor game design on their part.