Not wishing to throw oil on the fire, but it's getting to be a toss up between:

'Mages svck' - 'The game is too easy' - 'Fighters win all the time' - 'Smithing and Enchanting makes things too easy or are OP'.

If you correct one problem, you create the next, and so forth...it will be a never ending cycle.

I'm at level 20 with a fighter type...is it overly easy? No...and it's not overly hard either...but I don't want an uber-powerful character either way.

Yeah, I'd like to hear the OP's solution too.

Robes of the archmage do have incentive because of it effecting all spell trees. Also its good for me because no armor + muffle + invis = really easy to sneak even with crap sneak skill and no sneak perks.

The spells scale like equipment. Late game you use ebony not iron. So the same is true with incinerate and firebolt. All the noise people are making about destruction I don't understand. At all. I can teach you to mage. If you get to expert destruction and don't have enchantment at 100 with enchanter 5/5, 25% skill bonus, and extra effect, stop everything you're doing and focus on getting enchanting all the way up or you will hate life. If I were to show you my spell list and how much mana I use then destruction starts to make perfect sense I assure you.

I do miss waterwalking though. :sadvaultboy:

Simple scaling with level of all spells for destruction, the same as all the other weapon skills do. Destruction is the only skill that does not increase damage with level. Flames will have the same damage at master as it did at novice (besides the 50 percent increase from perks). Thats one fix. And also add back the spell variety from morrowind and oblivion.

Add a real incentive to wearing cloth armor! Make heavy armor unable to have magic related enchants. Heavy armor should only be able to be enchanted for resists and the like. In effect, making robes a real benefit for mage related characters. As of right now you are gimping your character with no benefit by wearing robes. I can easly enchant a full set of steel armor with the same enchants that my robe of alteration has with 100 times the defense, and next to no consquence. That does not make sense.

All those numbers say is that other things (1H and 2H) are stronger. Does knowing those facts make me want to be a mage less? No, I love magic. When everyone whines that 2H or 1H is so much better do I suddenly yearn to go out in heavy armor and wield an axe? No. If my choice is magic the way it is or no magic I'll take it the way it is. I suppose you want everyone to tell you that you are absolutely right and it's a terrible tragedy and, well, I don't know what else. But I can't do it. I know mods will fix a lot of it for those of us who play on the PC and want that, I don't know if Beth will ever do anything about any of it, but I'm not going to take my ball and go home because it's not exactly the way I want it to be. I'm going to play the game the way it is and make the most of it.

most people are totally disregarding the fact that in this storyline the mages guild has been disbanded and is 200 years after oblivion, the reason being im guessing is that mages had too much freedom and were partly to blame for the oblivion crisis, if you do a bit of research instead of herp-derping your way thru the game without reading anything you'll understand that the recent decline in mages and less mage viability and utility is purely lore based

The mages who are 10-30 defending Destruction should just stop already. Since the problem is damage scaling (or lack thereof), you will not begin noticing how weak you truly become until 40-50 when you discover the master spells are a waste of time and your popular Adept and Expert standby spells don't do jack for damage and use an extreme amount of mana. There is nothing wrong with Destruction damage in low and mid levels, it is high level play when it becomes a joke.

@skeleton1947 This is probably the most ridiculous cop-out explanation for castrating mages that I've ever seen on this board. You really think a guild disbanding or political shenanigans have anything to do with how the player experiences a Destruction mage or the removal of pretty much all utility? haha

Edit: NPC MAGES DO NOT PLAY BY THE SAME RULES. Using that as your basis for anolyzing how a PC mage operates is ignorance.

its a moot point anyway because a thief just stole your ball and you cant do anything about it because he can 1shot you before you even have a chance to cast anything.

No, he didn't! My companion wiped him out before he even got close to me. :tongue:

your companion must not be a mage then

Briarheart's will spam high leveled ice spells and [censored] your ass. If even one of those hits me Im frozen toast, Mages are over powered.

If you brought back all of the Mage abilities and spells from Morrowind and Oblivion then the boards would be flooded with complaints about how overpowered it is (which it was). The Mage in Skyrim is the most sensibly balanced (class) -- now that's just my opinion. People are all over the boards moaning about how their Pokémon build has made the game so easy and eventually boring. In Skyrim's Mage you have the ability to be constantly challenged: and for me that's a good thing.


All I'm hearing is: I can't one shot everything in sight so this game svcks.

Mages are weaker damage-wise than fighters or thieves. There is no question about it. A warrior is many times more damaging and endurable than a mage and Bethesda dropped the ball big time when they didn't make spell damage scale with skill.

As for utility, they are lessen, but not unfairly so. As long as fighters don't get to bash open chests, you can't really complain about having to pick locks like every other class. What annoys me is that transmute don't work on iron ingots, which is just plain illogical. That and the fact you can't enchant staves.

Hopefully they release the creation kit soon and we can mod in destruction damage increasing enchantments effects currently available only by potion. That will solve some if the OP's issues.

I really, really hate to get in on this... because let's be honest here, the OP's argument for why mages get the shaft is just flat-out weak... but the man/woman has a point.


They stripped out everything (save for light) utilitarian about the Mage class, in favor of turning it into a purely combat-oriented build. Which, when it comes to mages, is utterly fatal. If you can't play a mage without having to rely on the other non-magic skills to perform mundane tasks... then you might as well not be playing a mage. That's the whole purpose of magic, in the first place. They sacrifice physical strength for utility and damage output.

If you take away both of those things, what does a mage have left? I love that they took the time to re-structure the schools... but this over-simplification of the spell-slinging 'archetype' has rendered the class both utterly weakened and desperately underpowered for the higher-level battles which inevitably come. This is why Spellmaking was so important. This is why the system needed to be refined, rather than scrapped.

Either the entire magic system needs to scale with the player automatically, so that creating spells is no longer needed... or the ability to create newer, more level-reflective spells needs to be restored.


As for the spell-functionality? I hate seeing lock/unlock gone. I hate that they took away levitate. I hate that they've stripped all of these good spells away because they're too shortsighted to bother designing puzzles and levels AROUND them. Nope, we can't be arsed to put -that- much thought into a puzzle! How else would we get our 300+ unique locations in?

Pfft. Doesn't matter.

I love the game. I even love playing my mage. But it's steadily growing more and more impossible.

Worse still, I'm playing on the 360... so I might just have to abandon my mage characters entirely after level 50 or so.

lol! He is!

That's a lame excuse for gimping the whole mage archetype. I bet you could explain the uninspired & idiotic Dark Brotherhood questline using a similar argument.

No disrespect, but your only argument seems to be that you acknowledge mages being gimped and you enjoy that. That simply does not hold up for the majority of players and therefore has no real grounds on this forum post.

nobody said anything about 1shotting. Many mentioned that the mage should have more utility spells actually.

that said, i don't know why i am all over this thread since i dont play a bloody mage.

Level 48. Master. Kill most enemies in ~4 seconds. Pure mage, using only mage skills.

My mage spells are just as strong as yours. I don't get it, is 4 seconds too slow or something?

the op is a tiny bit to upset about this issue. I play a spellsword Argonian and my magic works just fine. If you want your spells to be stronger maybey you should put it on a lower difficulty, just sayin. Theres no reason to troll and state that others are wrong because there enjoying there mage class. your 100% right facts are facts, fact # 1 Its a video game.

For all those people out there who haven't played yet and have read "spells don't scale" a million and one times, it's not completely true. There are perks for leveling up fire, shock, and ice spells and there are two levels of those perks. So they DO scale...to a degree at least. You can get better spells: apprentice, adept, master, and expert, and there are perks to make each of those levels of spells cost less Magicka.

How is my argument weak if you agreed with everything I said?

You say that, but what you've done is actually point out a few factual things that have been removed in conjunction with an entirely subjective roleplay-nerf, and then link it to mages being weakened in a subjective sense. There are plenty of people who play as mages and have no problem with the current system. If mages had factually gotten the shaft that couldn't be the case.

You don't play a mage, you play a hybrid spellsword. Therefore, you have no fing clue what you are talking about. Good day.

And no, selecting an easier difficulty than the default is not a solution.

now you'r e both using faulty logic. Yay forums.