I haven't actually played a mage myself but the way I see it and have seen it best explained is that a mage is more of a low risk playstyle that revolves around controlling the battlefield. Basically this means that when played right you can essentially not allow the enemies to attack you and can easily keep yourself at a safe distance while loosing the advantage of insane damage output. But in order to do this you MUST pair destruction with something else like Illusion or no magicka cost enchantments. Now you may think this makes destruction weak because it relies on other skills to really shine, but think about that statement for a second. How good is one handed skills without smithing or enchanting? How about a two handed weapon without armor skills? Smithing without enchanting?

There ARE ways to increase destruction magic damage. You can make or buy potions that can almost double the damage output. If you poison a dagger with weakness to magic, there is another significant damage increase. Paralyze your opponent for a few seconds, poison them with weakness to fire/frost/lightning, down a potion to increase damage, and blow that SOB apart! Sure it takes a little THOUGHT and PLANNING but you are playing a freaking MAGE!! You are supposed to use your head!! You are not some blood thirsty orc charging into the fray with reckless abandon! Outsmart your opponent! I think there are enough ways to obtain these potions and poisons so that when you do come across a tougher than average opponent you will be well prepared.

Also, if you are leveling skills outside of your mage playstyle simply to level up more you will probably end up gimping yourself and spreading yourself too thin while the enemies continue to scale up. And don't discount the usefulness of a nice staff! When you run out of magicka and need those last few hits to finish off your opponent this can be a life saver. You should not have any problem keeping it charged either.

pacify, fire rune, double cast fireball, pacify, rinse and repeat, groups handelled easily

Two things:

1) The difficulty setting makes a huge difference.

2) Master level spells need to be redone.

Currently level 37 using Destruction as DPS. Mage Stone the whole way, no extraneous skills (if I could help it) until Destruction is maxed. Turned the difficulty from default (Adept) to Master and gave it a whirl.

Bears, ice trolls, boss draugr, a party of Thalmar.. no problems.

Then I bumped heads with an Elder Dragon. He won. And won. And won. I finally realized that I couldn't spam cast and had to time things perfectly. Then died. Died again. Finally beat the so and so and it was SATISFYING. I can now respect the power of dragons.

This was at the College of Winterfell, and as I fought I heard someone taking bets on either me or the dragon, I couldn't hear which. Everyone else stood around and watched. LOL

The problem is, that dragon's HP is going to reach tedious levels (on Master difficulty) and killing them will become a chore at level 50. From the comments on the board, so will the Forsaken and certain draugr, and I've always had a little problem with Falmer.

OPTION 1: On the other hand, I don't really need to level anything else, so I could peak out around level 40 and be just fine for the rest of the game.

---

OPTION 2:

Now for #2 - Master level Destruction should be:

2-3x power runes (affected by perks, so 150 or 225 damage), allowed to cast up to two at once.

Ranged, pinpoint spells for all damage types, (eg more powerful incinerate/ice spear/thunderstorm)

Ranged, AOE spells

Streaming spells (mostly for lulz) at 30 (+50%) dmg/s

OPTION 3:

I think I can play at Adept to level 50 without any major difficulty. It may get more challenging, but I like that. I'm leaving it on Master for as long as I can stand it.

pacify + fists = same outcome. We understand illusion is overpowered; that doesn't make Destro okay. The problem is Destro is mehsauce unless you exploit cost reduction.

Exploiting or not, most destro spells do end up useless. Master ones svck, most under expert don't scale. Bolt spam is....blegh.

try killing an ancient dragon on expert with destruction..... having to deplete your magicka bar countless times (even with a bunch of fortify destruction enchantments) and drink ALL your potions is REALLY lame.

Destruction is very powerful in Skyrim. Ice Storm is the spell you want to stagger lock an entire room full of foes. It is different from Oblivion's spell stacked damage, but keep in mind that Oblivion has no Impact perk and thus no stagger lock. Impact was implemented to stagger a dragon from far to cancel its breath weapon attack. I have not come across a single foe that is immune to Impact's stun, though some foes have elemental resistances that prevents freeze effect from kicking in. The only other school that comes close to being a god while playing solo is conjuration.

Melees are awesome up close with 600 atk weapons. However melees can only stagger lock with ice/paralyze enchanted weapons or Windshear and all of these require being up close and personal.

That said, destruction's damage svcks big time. If any rebalancing is going to be made, I would welcome the following changes:

- increase elemental damage from spells
- code in weakness to fire/frost/shock/magic spells
- Impact should have a cap at 60%
- Impact should be tiered with at least 3 perks invested to get the maximum % of success
- certain high level foes should be immune to Impact but retain some form of elemental weakness

Naturally I'm talking from a -100% to mana cost point of view. Due to destruction's low damage, it takes an obscene amount of mana to stagger lock any foe.

take Aspect of Terror in the Illusion treeand your fire spells will do more dmg

Would that not also be fairly difficult and require a lot of potions for a melee focused character? Excluding smithing/enchanting/alchemy loops of course...

One man's "lame" could be another man's epic and rewarding.

If you enchant your gear to reduce the cost of destruction spells and put a point in impact you can basically kill anything without them even getting a chance to hit you. Impact just stuns them over and over until they are dead.

i'm sure everyone knows about this "method" by now, but many choose not to use it for obvious reasons.

Which is essentially a mage's answer to the rediculously powerful weapons you can smith and enchant. Mages may not be able to do more damage but they can kill anything in a 1 vs 1 fight without taking a scratch. Imagine a fight between a warrior with godly powerful weapons and a mage with zero cost destruction school + impact. Who will win more fights you think?

There is nothing rewarding or epic about spamming a hundred (or more) fully perked expert level destruction spells where a standard melee+non-abused smithing character's handful of swings could suffice

You're exaggerating. At level 54 it only takes about 12 Incinerate fireballs to take down an ancient dragon and about 15~18 against elder dragons on masters difficulty. This is done with all the +50% to elemental damage on the destruction perk tree taken.

I could be wrong here but unless a dragon is distracted by something else it's pretty hard to get into it's face without taking some hits or a breath blast and those do significant damage to my character (who admittedly has a very low health pool). Also you have to wait for it to land to attack it so most of the time you're just standing around waiting.

Also...aren't dragons immune or at least highly resistant to their own breath elements? Were you spamming a fire ball on a fire breathing dragon perhaps?

Nope, they still get stunned by Impact. Well at least the 2 variants I've fought do. Ancient, elder and a few unique dragons. Haven't made it too far into the MQ yet.

hmm. my experience has been different. agree to disagree?

And I'm assuming that this is without the use of damage aiding potions and poisons that I mentioned before? That could probably cut that number down to a third of the number of casts required.

What game is everyone else playing? I may have exaggerated a little but only a dozen or less spells to take down an ancient for you? and now your saying 8? really?

Then you reallize that scaling for hp goes up every time you level, and your fireballs dont do more damage. How many at level 60? How many at level 70?

15-18 incinerates without enchanting? yikes

Yes, if you do the bows method of weakness to shock + weakness to magic + weakness to poison + fortify destruction potions dragons last about 10 seconds, or roughly 3 thunderbolts.

exactly, i've been saying this too, some people get all worked up cause we get magic cost down to almost zero, they don't get it, the problem is magic lacks some OOMPH. it needs to pack more of a punch, so they say its cheating to have your magic cost down to zero almost, well its hardly cheating, it takes a lot of firepower to kill stuff with magic and even with low magic cost, the magic itself lacks punch at higher levels..and magic regeneration is way too slow also, especially in combat, but yeah you need to basically get your magic cost down to zero to make destruction viable at higher levels, so its far from cheating, FAR from it. magic is underpowered.

I just made it to level 50 and have the master level destruction spells... I'm pretty happy still.

Lightening Storm = WINNING!!! :shocking:

So let me get the argument here straight... Destruction is fine because it deals adequate damage at *insert completely arbitrary level since it does not scale* when you set it up by first pumping the target with 3 poisoned arrows?

Makes total sense! Call back Inspector Gadget, we found the answer!
/sarcasm

If your level is that high then you've leveled stuff that you probably aren't even using so what was the point? Yeah you have more magicka or health now but you really just gimped yourself in the long run as all the enemies are now stronger. However I do fully agree that magic needs to scale better at higher levels but nobody is forcing you to level that high. I wish leveling was still capped at 50 because I hate how they do this scaling. I'm supposed to feel more powerful at higher levels. Fallout accomplishes this very well.