Well, time to weigh in with some constructive ideas. These are mine, anyone else is welcome to theirs, I don't expect anyone or everyone to agree =)

Start by:
Remove 100% cost reduction
Remove OVER NINE THOUSAND smithing

Add magic/school damage buffs as viable enchants
OR (More fun)
Add "Weakness to X" spells (Including Illusion, raising controllable levels)
OR (Unlikely)
Re-implement spell crafting with "Weakness" components.

So, not really much to say. Just my ideas.

I'm not trying to nerf melee with the smithing thing, by the way. I think it's simply immersion breaking to one shot bosses, just like it is to cast infinitely. And, it's certainly not a 'sensible' solution to any potential balance issues.



Edit: @X2-Eliah: Why are you so aggressive in inserting yourself in these discussions? I've seen you in a couple threads, and your contributions amount to "You shouldn't try to do only one thing". A valid opinion, certainly, but I personally disagree. I'd like to see all the options be viable in their own right. Each weapon type, each caster type. Bows are a good example of this, their perks allow bows to function without a melee weapon or spells to back them up.

At the very least, you should be able to admit that destruction, when taken as the damage component of your Daily Balanced Character Build™, it is... largely (which is not to say completely) lackluster compared to [1H/2H/DW/BOW/Master Conj].

Perhaps I shouldn't respond as if I'm trying to challenge your opinion, which I'm not, really. My question to you is why you seem convinced that your proposed ways of playing the game are the only ways that should be effective.

Finally we have real information to prove destruction is underpowered. I got zero magicka armor, used the console to get lightning storm and perks (at lv 50 to test against other enemies), and went to kill stuff. Rather than 2-hit (or 1 power) a stormcloak soldier, lightning storm took about 5 seconds of constant casting. During that time they could power attack me to interrupt, or just kill me before I could even cast, which happened with two saber cats.

Destruction needs dmg+ from higher levels and you should be able to walk/turn while casting or charging the master spells. It's impossible to use conjuration's Dead Thrall in combat even with god mode on. As soon as someone hits you, you move and are no longer aimed at the body.


Yep. I stood on the top of a small mountain and anti-aircraft gunned an elder dragon with lightning storm. I got about a tenth of its health gone before I gave up (half a minute) and dragonrend/war-axed it to death in 15 seconds including walking.
Not to mention the cave bear that is practically immune to my master level fire spell. Three casts with tgm and it looked like it could eat another thirty.

Two more considerations, if it wouldn't muck up the math too much:

Some melee perks allow hitting more than one target, essentially giving you an AOE melee attack.

Poisons can add a lot of damage to weapons, but can't be applied to spells.

Edit: The AOE attack perks aren't in 1h, so never mind. :huh:

My Khajiit started out as a pure mage. Then, around level 25 when the FIrebolt spell did about 2% damage to anything tougher than sword fodder enemies, he picked up a bow. My Destruction skill and my Bow skill are about the same level. (mid 50s) My glass bow does over 60 damage per shot, with no cost in magicka or stamina, and ammunition is so common as to be meaningless. Compare to fireball, which I can only cast a few times, and does ... 50 damage per shot. Area effect inefficient? Firebolt is even more stupid over level 30 and does basically nothing.

It's extremely frustrating because ENEMY spell casters seem to have vastly better spells, more hitpoints, armor, and resistance; not to mention a nearly bottomless magicka pool.

There are several issues you failed to mention here - damage inferiority compared to weapon-using builds aside.

1, Most destruction attacking spells are ranged, and its true dual hand casts cause enemies to stagger. But to keep them in place you got to dual cast constantly, which cost truck load of magicka for not-so-obvious damage benefit. You can afford them come closer once or twice then use the knockback shout, and thats it. Potion chain chugging is inevitable for any fight longer than a dozen cast, it takes more pot for a mage than a melee-oriented char whacking their way through mob swarms.

2, Destruction damage doesnt scale as well as weapons. You cant pot every fight obviously, so +% damage is the only bonus you might have vs perk+poison+enchant+smithing bonus on a sword.

3, Higher than adept spells are almost useless, esp. mastery spells. There aint many packed mob group in the game. The spells are all AoEs, which cause trouble to your tanking follower in closed enviroment of this game's dungeons, or take too much time to cast. And if you choose single target spell only, you are stuck with adept-level damage output.

4, Defend is the biggest issue right now: to sustain reasonable rate of fire you have to invest quite a lot into magicka and +% regen, so your HP is pretty pathetic (translate: 1-2 shot by random mobs and 1 shot by bosses). You basically cant risk enemies coming into melee range, spell cloak is useless. If you build enough HP to make use of cloaks (even coupled with alter +% defend perk), you will be magicka-starve constantly.

Its obvious you have to combo destruct with other shools, but as it is, destruct provides so little DPS output to balance out its lack of utility. (hint: conjure's pets!). Single-player game or not, Bethesda should ve spent more time balancing gameplay so players wouldnt feel frustrated after committing so much time into their characters.

Err. My point is and always has been that - yes, I agree, destruction is way underpowered; It screws over the people who want to play nukers instead of summoners or mixed stuff. If anything, I think my contributions *should* have amounted to "Dear people, stop telling others to use conjuration or use swords - if a mage wants to base on destruction, he should be able to!". I might have said that it is necessary to multi-task *because* destruction is so bad, to remain playable in later-stage game (which shouldn't be so) - so that's perhaps why you think I'm not agreeing that destruction is underpowered. Well, I fully and totally agree, DESTRUCTION IS TOO WEAK. Why am I so persistent? Idk. Perhaps because I'm a bit tired of seeing tons of "you are a noob, you play on novice, you don't use conjuration so you fail" and so on.

Where do you get that the highest sustained destruction magic is 142 whatever damage?

I read someone saying they could cast a fire ball that does 130 damage, which of course when dual cast with 2.2 bonus is closer to 300 damage, and since you can use the broken system to have the magicka cost zero, you could chain cast 300 damage.

Sounds a little more than the 142.5 whatever OP came up with.

But yes, the destruction magic could use a boost in the form of scaling, but it can get TOO big.
There are other considerations no matter what the 'destruction only crowd" thinks.
Even if THEY only want destruction, you still have to figure in the damage a mage can do if they utilize other magic on top of that.
Conjuration with daedric summons doing damage a long with you using destruction is all in all MUCH more damaging than destruction only.

It never occurs to these destruction lovers that MELEE skills are BROKEN, DO YOU GET IT???

You should never be able to one hit kill a boss in hardest difficulty mode in ANY game.
So it's more like swords and melee and even bows to TOO much damage. Not that destruction does too little.

Melee needs to be nerfed, and all destruction needs is just ONE more level of making the destruction power do more damage.
IE, 25%, 50%, 75%.

That is all that is needed, and that the novice spells like flame thrower can be bought with proper corresponding damage as higher level spells, IE they shouldn't get moot when new spells appear cause that makes it boring and less in variation.

That is my take on it.


TL;DR

Nerf Melee and fix the broken smithing/enchanting bull, and then just make one more level of an extra 25% damage increase for all spells in destruction and make all spell variations viable.
Then you have a properly balanced game for ALL "classes".

Playing on hard SHOULD be HARD, not one hit killing bosses. I want destruction magic to be viable as well, but everyone keeps comparing it to a BROKEN melee that does over 9000 THOUSAND in damage, it is illogical.

Conjurer's pets provide way more damage than destruction high level spells, and way more controllable. Doubt it? Summon 2 draedic lords, watch them whacking on dragons, resummon when they are killed, repeat.

And I'm on the bus with "saying no to zero magicka cost" crowd. It removes completely an important aspect of game mechanic :\

edit: plus, my bow-only char is having much easier life than destruct-only one, at least at lower level. Looking at the perks, I doubt it would change when I reach 25+. Bow is the most comparable play style to destruct-only here.

Well, you sound a bit more .. reasonable? In that counterpoint. I can get where you're coming from with the "tired of seeing tons of [...]" bit, certainly. I suppose that's why I responded to you at all, I'm tired of seeing "DESTRO FINE, NOOBS" and that's what I saw. I think we might even be saying the same thing.

Anyway. I do think destruction should multitask, regardless. Most things should. If it doesn't have to AT ALL, something is equally wrong. But perhaps I'm also approaching this from a competitive balance standpoint instead of recreational one. /shrug.

Good to see someone who will respond moderately, either way. Cheers =)

Hope they patch this, the console brethren will be screwed over so bad if they don't. Not to mention Bethesda should have done it right the first time.

The spell that does that much damage is the mastery level lightning spell. I chose it because the alternatives are much more difficult to calculate the damage on. For example, fire storm does 100 damage within a certain radius, but drops off the further away you get...and it costs 1200 magicka to cast, while blizzard does 20 damage per second for 10 seconds, but i don't know it it stacks or not, and regardless of whether it does or not, it takes about 1000 magicka for 200 damage.


But AoE effects are much more difficult to calculate, so I just used the one spell that was single-targeted.

I didn't read the entire thread nor did I play a mage yet so I have yet to find out how strong mages can be. I'm also not going to say nor imply destruction does not need a buff at all. I do play with solely one handed weapons so I know how powerful it is.

First of all, destruction is ranged. It allows you to do damage over a distance, something one handed greatly lacks. Flying dragons, archers high up - you can't hit them at all and need to use shouts or cover to avoid their attacks.

Armor reduces the amount of damage enemies take for melee. Mages have to deal with resistance, yes, but if you're specialized in destruction you can always swap to a different element. You can't do this as melee, the only option in one-handed are maces to ignore a portion of the oponent's armor.

Destruction spells have additional effects on top of damage. Frost drains stamina, lightning drains magicka and fire does a DoT for additional damage. On top of that, perked out it has a chance of staggering.

That being said, with all the threads going on about how weak mages are it seems destruction is in need of a buff. But it should never do as much damage as one handed because of all the additional bonuses it has in comparison. That's all I wanted to point out.

[EDIT] Oh and I forgot to mention AoE, which is another obvious advantage [/EDIT]

Destruction as it is now is a joke, its just stupid that a single non-power swing can do just about as much damage as the most powerful destruction spells which take a long time to cast and cost tons of magicka

It scarcely matters that destruction is ranged. Spells take time to travel so the farther the range the less likely you'll hit. Besides, the range advantage is extremely short-lived, melee can cover intervening ground so quickly it scarcely matters except if you're kiting. And remember, you have to sit there when you cast the master spells, you can't just cast on the run.

At any rate, you could fairly compare destruction and archery, and destruction fares poorly there as well.

As for the bonus effects of spells, you can get those effects as enchants on your weapons, and you get to choose them rather than be stuck with them.

One should read a thread before reply, esp. when one doesnt play a mage. This post is such a terrible joke it doesnt deserve to be quoted in full.

Well the OP is so way off base I don't even know where to begin.

I guess I'll start with the fact that you can eliminate all mana usage for 2 schools with enchanting. That is to say, free spellcasting, 100% efficiency 24/7.

Next I think its worth noting that you can have multiple spell effects going with destruction at the same time, and theres no reason not to dual cast them because they are free, basically. Even without exploited levels of enchanting the mana costs become ridiculously cheap. 10 mana incinerates, 4 mana fireballs etc.

So lets start close quarters melee battle because thats what 1h does. So we'll start the fight with a dual-cast flame cloak. We'll draw the enemy close because we're comparing it to melee, we'll draw a little path for them to walk down with a dual-cast wall of flames, and try to line them up so that we we stun-lock them with incinerates they will stuble backward into our path of fire. Now we'll start pelting them with incinerate as fast as possible rapid fire.

Look at that, 3 spells doing damage to the same target at once, one school. Incinerates are about 1 per second and mine do around 189 per, cloak does another 12 or 24 per second depending on how the dual-cast damage part works, and another 120 per sec on the wall of fire.

This isn't even considering destruction potions that double your damage, or poisons that when factored with potions can triple it.

OP you are not a mage. You thought you were, but you aren't go back to the college, you'll see an enchanting table and alchemy table there, use them. Also they sell spells there.

I don't mean to be rude but you started this thread with completely ridiculous "facts" and I'm left wondering did you even try to learn to mage.

If you want a free ride as a mage ... you don't have to bother with enchanting, you can just use conjuration.

Well, if we're going to add alchemy (from the thief section of the zodiac) then we might want to mention how poisons buff melee (but not pure casters using destruction). Oh, and do poison effects stack? I believe they do, on top of axe bleed effects.

The problem isn't with mana, and never was. Its with end-game damage. Stuff dies much slower with destruction.

I have no skin in the game tho. I play on PC so I'll mod it. Just feel bad for console mages.

I'm not trying to tell anyone how to play their character. What i will say is that, based on just the stats i chugged out in 15 minutes or so, a melee character can do more damage more easily than a mage character.


One thing that you say does bug me, however; that is your usage of the zero magicka exploit. So long as we are playing with broken gameplay mechanics, I'll go ahead and enchant my armor for 100% magic resistance. Yay, i feel so balanced now.

I'm all for diversity in classes; I even agree that some playstyles could be harder than others, if the devs so choose. But using an exploit to win is not acceptable.

With a few easy changes Destruction would be more fun and worthwhile for higher levels and higher dificultiies.

-Have the same in combat magicka regen as out of combat.Still keep the no magicka regen while having spells loaded on hands.

-Dual casting Destruction should be more potent.With a ratio of +50%dmg for +50% more magicka.

-Fortify Detruction enchant changed to +%Destruction dmg (to avoid 0 magicka destructio spells while having a high in combat magicka regen)

-Add static +% dmg modifiers on novice-adept-expert-master destruction spells along with the magicka reduction cost.(15%-15%-30%-40% for a total of +100% with all perks at destruction 100)

-Master level spells should have a higher base damage to give them a more "Big Nuke" feeling and not be spammable.

So we will have a good magicka regen in combat to support continuous casting and will have to resort to potion drinking to spam the master spells only.More powerfull spells that really do give justice to the name of Destruction school while not beeing OP with 0 magicka cost.

Hell even only a +% destruction enchantment (aplicable to cloth/robes only and jewels) will fix and with some alchemy/enchanting min/max break Destruction just like melee/archery.

I'm hoping for a patch. I play on 360.
My mage is only lvl 10 so I'm fine for now

its obvious you didnt read the full post since you are mentioning that you can exploit the enchanting system to give yourself free casts, you can exploit in most any other game too and do well too, buster

0 magicka exploit isn't necessary. Robes of Archmage + 3 destruction enchantments reduces mana cost by 90%. That part isn't an exploit, its fully intended for you to stop using firebolts. Before enchanting firebolts cost 9 mana after enchanting incinerates cost 10 mana.

100% mana isn't really an exploit because you can use that difference in different ways. Instead of having 2 free mana schools you could have 3 schools at very low-cost mana consumption and supplement a potion every once in a while. Because your alchemy will be pimptastic anyways, might as well chug a 200+ mana potion from time to time. Thats what I plan to do soon anyways, just haven't decided which 3rd school yet.

Patch
-Lower effects of alchemy/enchant/smithing pots.
-Make enchant/smithing level slower.
-Scale destruction spells.
-Lower the potency of all enchants.

except all of that is basically endgame mage gear and enchantments, and the damage still hits a ceiling in which only meager damage is capable