When i use my frost breath or fire breath shout (both at full power) it hardly even dents my enemies. One swing of my sword does like 3x the damage of one of these shouts. Has anyone else noticed the complete lack of power / usefullness of these 2 shouts? Are these shouts more useful on a lower difficulty? I play on master, with my skills and armor anything else is just too easy.

I don't know about the frost shout, but I use the fire shout regularly and usually takes out a huge chunk of their health.

The cooldown is way too high I'd say, otherwhise I'd use them more.
Barely use them either at the moment.

When fighting a Draugr Deathlord, I once used Fire Breath. It took away about 1/15th of his health. My Ebony Dagger (Legendary) did slightly more.

Also, Unrelenting Force is more useful, as it gives you time to whip up something that does do damage and take a few swings or casts.

there's better ones for sure

Many Shouts are useless... I hate that half of the shouts are also spells ingame or stuff you can do via Perks........

Yup, pretty underwhelming. You can boost Fire by meditating, if you didn't know... I'd think that would be pretty effective against draugrs.

The full three-word fire breath does a fair bit of damage on undead on default difficulty. More importantly, it gives a stun effect on them that gives me time to close the gap.

The problem with shouts and shout effectiveness is the fact they all share the same cooldown, meaning if you use Fire Breath shout, you cannot use any other shout until the cooldown associated with Fire Breath finishes. For things like Call Storm (or whatever its called) that has an absurdly long shout cooldown, this puts ALL of your shouts on cd for a very long time, to the point where you don't use it in many cases or end up "saving it" when you need to, but never really end up needing to. It's like games with "Special" ammo that is limited. You end up not using it, and "saving it". I think a much BETTER system would be one where shouts are categorized. Certain shouts WOULD share the same cooldowns, but others would not. You would be able to bind hotkeys for each shout type. Shouts that cause damage would have their magnitude scale based on level, which is more natural and makes more sense than "outleveling" shouts. I think THEN, those shouts we more or less see as "worthless" because we have had to prioritize them, now become useful and the entire Shout system becomes more functional and useable as a system rather than now where it is more or less the toilet paper that gets stuck on your shoe sometimes when you exit a public restroom facility.

Thanks

Yeah they're not the best although they're pretty good against a pack of wolves or skeevers.
I wouldn't say they're useless but more situational. Yeah sure it's quicker to just hack down enemy's with an axe but that can get boring after awhile.

My last playthrough was a mage, and I almost never used shouts. I'm now playing a warrior type, so I'm planning on using shouts much more often.

I find Fire breath is great if for some reason, they are all in a line (I once killed half a dozen bandits with Nightengale strife just because they were sort of in a line formation.). Also, both my characters are 2 handers, so Fire breath adds some ranged options to my character.

They simply need to implement a Shout perk tree like the game jam Werewolf tree

I may be wrong, but I believe the fire shout does AoE damage. That means you get a lot more bang for your buck against multiple enemies.

My fire battlemage used Fire Breath as a warm-up. Enemies already on fire take more damage from fire enchanted weapons.

Personally, I find them weak and the cooldown too high to be practical.

But, personal taste...the character I rolled up last night is so ugly that I suspect he won't need to shout, his breath would be so bad that the enemy would flee.

(In fact, he's so ugly that the first thought that hit me after I woke up this morning was to scrap him and start another).

I find they are all useless except for dragonrend, I have not once used a shout outside of dragonrend(sorry and clear skies just cause I like a sunny day).And it seems that alot of the shouts are represented in alot of spells which are far more effective then said shouts.Also, you're enchants seem to be more effective as well, if you use fire breath for a ranged weapon try putting fire on a bow, I tend to lean towards the physical side of combat over the magical side so this is just my opinion, for those who favor magic over brut strength might find that shouts are non-essential as well.Look at the recharge rate of most of the shouts,it's way to long IMO and I find my magic recharges a hell of alot faster, and I end up hacking the poor bugger to death while I wait for the shout to recharge so why not just open with a physical attack if thats what you end up falling back on anyway.But once again this is just my opinion and experience, I'm sure there are lots of people who would disagree.

They're sometimes useful but only situatonally. Unrelenting Force with all three words knocks the hell out of a Hargraven but does next to nothing to anything that wears any kind of armor. Fire and Frost are indeed woefully underpowered. I think the most disappointing is Marked for Death. Such a great name, so little usefulness.

It's understandable that Shouts aren't supposed to be able to completely devastate any opponent at any time, but by the time you acquire that 3rd word for Firebreath, it should be significantly more powerful than a level 35 Firebolt spell.

I don't use them really. I have used the Elemental Furry and FRD often, other than that...not so much.

I feel the cool downs should stay as is. After all the shouts are words. Words that are...well shouted. Thus you use your breath and you need to catch it after each shout.

They are really just a free magical attack which doesn't cost you any magicka. Its not meant to replace the destruction spells.

Shouts are mostly a single strike you would use at the start of a battle to weaken, disable or slow opponents.

im in the same boat as carrots pretty much...dragonrend is essential for my warrior, and clear skies is used on the regular because i, too, like sunny days. And yeah, cooldowns for shouts are just too long considering the magnitude of their effects. They're really just not practical. I think its lame that i can enchant a weapon to be more effective than my god given ability to wield the voice of a dragon...especially since the dragons are using the same words i use for insanely more powerful effects.

The fully upgraded fire shout is pretty darn good against multiple enemies, especially if your using flame effect weaponry.

I wish the fire shout would be more like the actual dragon shout. More intense, longer (flame throwerish) and LOUDER!

They may not be THE MOST impressive shouts, but I guess the logic is 'If a Dragon can shout it, the Dragonborn should be able to, too'.

my frost shout 3 word does 0 damage to anything. it's been like that since like..patch 1.2..it just broke the shout. fire damage is really low too, but at least it does damage..frost breat just doesn't do ANY damage to anyting..