Well if a mage can't out DPS a warrior then what is the point of being a Mage? you have the penalty of no armour without any upside in terms of increased dps over a melee class.

I've re-rolled as an orc warrior and the single-hand damage output is on another level compared to my mage who is a higher level as well. The game is no fun as a mage and is stupidly difficult and time consuming. Every encounter becomes a battle of attrition and takes forever to down even a basic opponent.

As a warrior the battles are more fun, shorter, and fairer, and I'm not downing mana regen potions every 3 seconds because my MP has run out.

Mages need a buff of some sort; whether it's reduced mana cost of spells, faster mana regen in battle, or greater damage and/or spells scaling with level. Spells ought to scale with level anyway, whether that would be enough to balance it on it's own I'm not sure.

Then what would be the point of having novice, adept, expert and master level spells, if your starter spells would get the job done from the git go?

My theory is that mages are underpowered compared to warriors because warriors equip all +blacksmithing gear and drink that +blacksmithing potion to craft grossly overpowered gear.
Then they use the same exploit to enchant their gear.

Warriors are OP because they exploit the system to craft and enchant their gear. Because they took out spellmaking, mages do not have the same exploit method to be stronger.

If you ask warriors to craft and enchant using only 100 skill, I'm quite sure they will be on par with mages.

The argument isn't that mages aren't viable. The argument is that destruction is a very poor primary skill late-game, as in nearly useless.

Short term solution: Don't use destruction until BGS fixes it.

Yes it svcks, but surely people were planning on multiple playthroughs anyway, right? Just start with a build that doesn't need destro and pick up your destro game again when the patch comes out.

I gotta try a mage with alteration/restoration/enchanting/destruction. See how bad it is

Just cap the amount that spells will scale. i.e. a novice spell will scale to keep pace with enemies up to level 8 for example, and won't continue to scale as you gain any levels above this. At this point you'd need to invest in apprentice level spells and these would start with more power than "level 8 novice spell" and would scale similarly up to a given point.

To each his own, I found melee extremely boring. Maybe if blocking, positioning and stuff like directional swings actually ment something like they do in mount&blade it'd be fun, but in Skyrim you can just mindlessly bash away without ever coming in any danger.

Ok, the finishing movies (yes I ment to say movies) while dual wielding swords or daggers can be pretty awesome, but beyond that... meh.

This has been disproved a million times by math on these forums. Highest damage per hit of a master AOE spell with relevant perks is no more than 500 or so hit points. A warrior with a non enchanted sword and relevant perks can dish out 1000 damage easily. They also have the bonus of being able to wear heavy armour so they are essentially a wrecking ball in human form. A mage on the otherhand can't wear armour so they are weak to hits and destruction does a third of the damage of what a melee strike would do so there is no benefit to playing a mage. You get the [censored] end of the stick in both defense and offense

This is exactly my point, and all that ends up happening is I get called a rubbish mage, and not fit to play the game

Amazing

If you are using the novice spells past level 8, or even by the point you get to it, then thats your own fault, a warrior has upgraded his equipment by that point. So should the mage.

I didn't want to play as a warrior, but after hitting a dead-end with my mage (which was my preferred play-style) I rolled a warrior to firstly see how it compared to what is considered by some (and myself) as raw deal for mages, and secondly so that I could play the game without having to worry about leveling issues as we know that warriors scale well.,

I'm not, but that was an example to answer the question of how you'd scale spells without making apprentice, expert spell level redundant.

The problem with using higher level spells is that the mana cost becomes far too high relative to the damage which they output, and this is the scaling problem again.

I don't think that adjusting just one aspect of how a mage plays will solve the problem. I think many things need adjusting slightly. A slight reduction in mana cost, spells that scale, a slight buff to mana regen in battle. Just adjusting one variable won't solve it.

Roleplay what you want to be, if you want to be a weak mage, gl hf

I rolled 3 different warriors before I started a mage and mage wins Not in strength, but coupeled with fast key binds, spell/item switching and dual casting is just awesome. Pop a spell with both hands, swap to shield to take the 2h swing head on, swap to healing, swap swap swap pawnage Very entertaining. Destruction being subpar is a small complication waiting to be overcome if its output proves to be unsufficient at high levels.

Well if you want to be a weak mage then this game has got everything you could want. The problem comes if you want to roleplay as a powerful mage, then you'll encounter some problems.

Or, even simpler - every spell starts out as a Novice spell. As your Destruction skill raises higher, the spell does more and more damage, eventually becoming an Apprentice-level spell, then Adept, then Expert, then Master, corresponding directly to your Destruction skill.

This highlights another problem. On consoles the "favourites" menu is terrible for mages who need to swap spells in and out frequently and quickly. The favourites menu makes it feel like playing a turn-based RPG.

Oblivion on consoles had a very good system for quick access to items, on par with PC hotkeys. Why oblivion ( a game designed primarily for PCs) had a better system on consoles for quick-swaps than skyrim (a game primarily coded for consoles) is baffling.

Sort of sad to hear this.

It's funny though. NPC mages damage scale (assuming you fight a high level mage-type). I'm a level 40 two handed warrior and the only things I have problems with are high level mages shooting fireballs and electricity. If I wear no magic resist armor, I can get get 2-3 shot by some of these guys with their spells doing well over 130+ damage a shot. I'm sitting on 340hp or so and I remember two instances of having to reload and use up my orc beserk and a lot of resist potions to defeat two groups of 3 mages. Their spells would kill me nearly on contact. This is on master difficulty.

Off the top of my head the mages during the Azura's Star quest (in the ice temple) and the mages at Johan's Folly (or whatever) did major damage with spells. Sad that destruction players at high level don't also do similar

Yeah, I hear you ... the fast swapping = so fun.

Why do people compare ONLY Destruction Skill (mage) vs Smithing skill, One Handed Weapon skill, Blocking skill, Heavy Armor skill, Enchanting skill (warrior)??

Mages get less perk points than all other archetypes out there or what??

Mages TOO have skills with synergy.
One of the Alteration Magic perks is Mage armor. If you run without heavy or light leather (as you do if you use only robes) then oakflesh (40 armor), stoneflesh (60 armor), ironflesh (80 armor) etc get up to x3 as strong. Dragonhide let you ignore 80% of all physical damage for a short period of time. You block up to 30% of spell effects and absorb 30% magicka of spells that hit you (basically can't run out of magicka if you fight other mages). Feather let you carry lots of loot without spending points in stamina. [Mass] Paralyze for crowd control. Telekinesis let you steal stuff from range. Transmute for free gold.

Or maybe instead of Alteration + Robes go Enchanting + Heavy Armor and keep - or even improve - all of magic buffs you normally find on robes.

Illusion let the mage turn his opponents against eachother with frenzy. Not only does it damage your opponents (while you at the same time blast away with your destruction spells), it also act as crowd control and reduce incomming damage taken. Illusion also let you silent cast all magic. Invisibility let you "reset" a fight in a more powerful way than the top sneak perk. Muffle even let sneak around in heavy armor if you like to go that way.

Conjuration let you summon up bound weapons with inbuild soul traps. Eventually you can have two atronachs or reanimated zombies at the same time fighting for you, adding up damage done while you blast away with your destruction spells for range or aoe and your bound weapons for solo targets at melee range - they also soak damage for you.

Restoration let you regen magicka (and health and stamina) even faster. And you can buff magicka (and health and stamina) pools. Cure poison, disease and paralyzis effects. Heal health and stamina at the same time. You get a 250 point cheat death instant heal once per day. Cause undeads such as draugr, skeletons and vampires to flee in terror while you cast your destruction spells on their backs.

Destruction perks give your destruction spells a stagger effect (stun) and cool disintegrating finish moves (die from a spell if they are at low health). You can place magic trap runes quite far away and you get access to fire (which turn off troll regen, making trolls very easy to deal with), lightning (which arcs and bounce to close targets and seem to own undeads. It also drain magicka from other casters), frost (which drain stamina and snare, making it good against melee targets).


You can also get a lot of inspiration from the starting skills of each race. How about a dark elf mage assassin in muffled leather armor buffed against magic using alteration.... killing single targets with hit n run... i mean invisibility... poisoned backstabs, and silent casting frenzy + destructive magic against multiple opponents (Destruction, Alchemy, Alteration, Light Armor, Sneak, Illusion) or an imperial "pladin" with turn undead, powerful healing spells that also heal stamina, enchanted heavy armor and shield, one handed weapons for melee and destructive magic for range and elemental weak opponents (Restoration, Block, Destruction, Enchanting, Heavy Armor, One Handed Weapons). Why not a brenton necromancer fighting in robes. Using pots for buffs, poison and healing. Buffing up further with magic armor and different wards and healing health and stamina with restoration magic. Dealing damage with bound weapons, Frenzy and Zombies. Stealing items from range, skipping stamina but can still carry loot using feather and quickly regen stamina with restoration. Using both charm and speach to sell off all that loot and talk your way out of tricky situations (Conjuring, Alteration, Illusion, Restoration, Alchemy, Speech)

You do know that you can open your favorite meny and then simply press numbers 1-8 on the spells/items you want to hotkey.

Tap the hotkey twice to place the same spell in both hands....

I'm not sure why so many people are having problems with playing destruction mage ? Granted I'm not max level yet (40'ish at this moment)
I have raised my magicka to a decent level 250 or so, the rest has gone into hp.
Here is my reasoning why:

Simply put, higher level spells are far too expensive to cast so the logical thing to do is to reduce the cost right ?
Well, turns out that you can easily slap a 25% reduction on a certain school (destruction in my case) on 4 items (Head, chest, necklace and ring)
And all your spells from that school are free ! 25% x 4 = 100% (Tested and it works, don't think it's a bug)
So there is no need for magicka regeneration or higher max magicka, cept if you want to use some other kind of magic once in a while, therefore there is nothing stopping you from wearing whatever kind of armor you want, I'm rocking daedric armor cause it looks awesomesauce
And with master enchanting you can still slap an additional enchantments on these items.
This is also viable for a paladin type build for some awesome healing and pwning instead
Enjoy !