Yes it follows but it also implies that that diversity is not already present -- which I believe it is. But I'm not entirely certain as to what you mean by 'character possibilities'?

Any possibilities at all, really, but I was specifically referring to the increased level of offensive and defensive capabilities (equal to those of a warrior) for mages, which you suggested would would limit diversity.

That mod linked early in the thread is baller.

Thanks for posting it! :foodndrink:

It would limit diversity. If, mathematically, all builds arrive at the same offensive and defensive capabilities then where is the motivation to plan your character? If a Mage can output the exact same level of damage as a Warrior of equal level then where is the choice in choosing one over the other? How do they mathematically differ? The only real differences would be in player styles and aesthetic preferences. It would be a case of "I can do anything you can do equally well.".

So the differences in statistics are, for myself, a pre-requisite for diversity. Obviously I'm not claiming that the game is perfect but over all I'm happy with the variety in builds as it is now.

Master spells are ridiculous, yea. 5 second casting time is just..not to mention being a classic mage you're probably gonna be quite low on health. Seems to me like the only thing the master spells are useful for is eye candy it looks cool. But it isnt really practical.

What's your present motivation for creating sub-optimal characters? Nothing forces people to max out all their offensive and defensive capabilities, just like we don't all have to choose warriors at the moment. Greater choice, a greater spectrum of possibilities, means a greater potential for diversity. It should be a matter of player choice, not hard-coded into the game. Players should be able to choose whether they play a weak mage or a strong mage. Any potential mathematical equivalence in offensive and defensive capabilities, even if realised, doesn't render the difference between mages and warriors illusory: the play styles are still very different.

People will eat more varied meals at a buffet than off a set menu.

Most importantly, from my point of view, I'm not happy with the variety of builds in the vanilla game. There's no room for a destruction-based mage build which I enjoy playing into the high levels.

Well, yes! Isn't that kind of the selling point they touted? Play any way you like. I want to run around using spells to protect myself while I swing my poisoned sword at my enemies and get the best out of the townsfolk with my silver tongue. Why should I be less effective if I chose to shock and burn everything around me to a crisp from within my suit of self-smithed heavy armour and steal everything from everyone while I'm at it? I can't swing a sword as well, obviously, but I should certainly be able to kill things just as well. Just like the first guy can't get the best out of daedric armour, but should be able to take a hit as well from behind his mastered, perked shielding spell cast by a master in alteration.

As I see it, we have multiple choices in offense, defense and utility. These choices should offer different playstyles/advantages/disadvantages, but all be similarly effective. However, there are two notable cases where this isn't true; Alteration has absolutely no bonus over physical armour but plenty of penalties (cost/duration/cast time/protection), and Destruction has no bonus over melee/archery or even conjuration, the spells simply do not scale well enough or long enough. When a weapon can be made to reach 250+ damage per swing without abusing the game (see http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1315339-what-is-the-highest-damage-your-weapon-can-do/page__p__19778024__hl__weapon+damage__fromsearch__1#entry19778024 where I quote "the highest I got without exploiting was 268 on 2 ebony swords I was dual wielding. That was using 100 smithing and NPC bought potions/enchantments.").

It's annoying that these are both magicka skills as this cause the whole "mages svck/mages are fine" debate when, I'll say it again, I am not a mage! I am not a warrior! I am a guy in Skyrim, and the way I choose to play should be on some semblance of a par with the way anyone else chooses!

I realised that when my Novice spells kill faster than my Apprentice spells.

My present motivation would be Role Playing -- which sounds like a universal get out clause but I don't believe it is. I mostly agree with your first paragraph. I do believe that Skyrim offers great diversity in builds. I also mentioned that player styles and tactics are important factors; however, I don't agree that having equal offensive and defensive capabilities is not an illusion of choice.

A Destruction only Mage (assuming here that you mean that you only spec that perk tree) may not be a viable build and would require supplementary skills and perks. But then again the same thing can be said of a Warrior that only perks the one handed tree. Most builds need supplementary skills to be viable so I see no issue here.

But to steer myself back on topic: the viability of high level Destruction spells (ignoring strict equations) comes down to the subjectivity of an individual player. That subjectivity is influenced by many things; prejudice, prior expectations, confirmation bias and play style to name but a few. One player states that they are pointless while another explains a tactic that renders them all powerful. All players are not created equally -- if you'll excuse the perversion of that quote.

TES is about individual skills, not classes. A mage can simply use armor if alteration is bad, which it is, which many of us grudgingly do. I'd prefer robes and nice hat, but I'm wearing light armor because it's senseless not to.

Every Alteration armor spell should give 100 more armor than it currently does. You get +25 hidden armor for each piece of actual armor you wear, makes even a terrible set of armor unperked better than ebony flesh unperked. Also, a spell making perks in it's school's tree obsolete(Dragonhide doesn't benefit from Mage Armor) is just bad design. I also think it needs a mechanic other than just being armor in spell form, for a duration. That's just boring. If it's going to be that boring, just make the spell last for an hour real time. The cost of the armor spells are another thing that adds to their inferiority vs. actual armor, so an hour long duration wouldn't actually be unreasonable for bringing them up to par.

I would just use, what is it? Ebony Flesh? as dual cast, and only break out the Dragonskin for a tough battle, or when you know you are about to take on a large number of enemies.

But I certainly think Dragon skin should Last for ten minutes, or all day as a reward for well...Mastering....Alteration.

Interesting concept; 'Interesting to cast'

How about casting the armor spell makes you immune to damage for a second, kind of like blocking with a shield or ward. 3seconds to cast, 1 second of immunity might work.

But really, I think the duration of the armor spells should be much longer considering they are weaker than simply wearing armor.

I've only just started a mage character just to see how it would fare and I found the first 3 hours I played with it much much easier than the warrior I currently play with. Long range permanent damage flow /splash damage/ ice slowing enemies. I never even get hit! Don't know how it will level later in the game, but I found magic to be really powerful.

I noticed some people talking about stun locking, I know what that means, but using shield/2H bash consumes stamina, so stun locking only works against a single enemy if you can kill it within the amount of time you drain your stamina. At this point for me it's drained in about 20 seconds while using shield bash/offensive attack. It also takes away the possibility to do power attacks. So yeah they have a 100% success rate, but it's not an infinite attack. Freezing/stunlocking enemies with magic is much more powerful than going up close and personal with an enemy and bashing a single one while getting [censored] from behind by others.

I read the magic mod, but I'm afraid to use it because it might actually imbalance the game. As said I have not yet played magic on higher levels so I don't know how effective it is in the long run.

Yes they touted play any way you like; but I saw no assertion that all builds would be equal. If your enemy dies is that not sufficient? Do you really want equivalence in offensive capabilities; or, to put it another way, do you want to spam an "I win button" all the way through the game? Isn't a hard fight a good and rewarding fight?



Mathematically I cannot argue with that. I can only point to play style and tactics as a method to offset any sub-optimal aspects of a particular build. To argue, briefly, from an extreme position consider the following build:

Lock Picking, Speech craft, Sneak and Pickpocket.

Is this a combat oriented build or a great Role Playing thief?




I suppose this raises an obvious question: were you successful in the game?

Why...why would anyone spend three seconds casting, and any amount of magicka, for only a second of immunity? O_o

Anyway, I'd say have it ignore X% of damage and knock enemies back(as if they hit a shield, nothing major), for a set amount of attacks. Make a visual effect for when you're hit, and a noticeable effect when it wears off.

Novice spell 30% reduction and 3 attacks, apprentice 40 and 4, adept 50 and 5, etc. A cap of 70 should be fine, it's still less than armor but you've got the knockback factor.

for some reason i take damage when casting blizzard around a group of enemies(i have tested it its not the enemies hurting me), but when i cast it with no one around my health bar pops up and stays up but i dont take damage while I'm in the storm. has anyone else experienced this?

Mages and warriors having potentially equal offensive and defensive capabilties does not mean that the difference between them is illusory, that the choice between them is illusory. A choice between options which are merely potentially equal is not an illusory choice. It is at worst potentially illusory. In the instant case, it is not even potentially illusory, because the chooser has complete discretion as to whether the potential equalities become actual equalities.

The perilousness of an argument that potential equality necessarily vitiates real choice is revealed by consideration of the fact that every character is, at character creation, potentially equal to every other character in every single way, from name, to race, to perks, to equipment. Are the choices you make there illusory?

On top of all of that, there're very real and obvious differences between inflicting X damage with Flames and inflicting X damage with a battleaxe. So even if there was potential equality in terms of damage capabilities between mages and warriors, there's no qualitative identity between the categories.



If players found that for warriors to remain viable required a playstyle they didn't enjoy, I'd say that they had a completely valid grievance.



I totally agree that it is subjective, I'm not trying to say that destruction mages at high levels are objectively not fun, just that I don't find them fun (and that I want to). Obviously, game designers can't please everyone, since we'll have conflicting interests, but I think that increasing player choice is the best way to maximise the satisfaction of our preferences. Let the players choose. At the moment, there simply is no choice that satisfies those of us who want to play destruction mages but find stunlocking boring. Well, there is for those lucky few of us on PC, but plenty of people are playing on consoles and quite a few seem to have the same view of vanilla destruction mages that I do.

Regardless of destruction's usefulness compared to other forms of magic or combat, the OP's point is that MASTER spells across magic schools are poorly done.

This has not once in this thread been refuted. They need attention and the person who designed them at BGS should please go find another project to work on that, you know, requires less creativity and brainpower.

5 second cast times and requiring 90+ skill in something it SHOULD damn well be better than dual cast impacted firebolts I can spam at level 5. But it isn't. It's much much worse.

Absolutely, I've played on master the whole way through, used a variety of skills and like the fact that so far, I have been challenged (though I'm nowhere near through the game yet, not enough play time!) and I hope that my post conveyed the fact that my interests lie in making each option a fun and viable alternative to the others.

I don't believe that alteration should offer capped armour, or that light should offer the same proection as heavy, but they should have benefits to trade off. Similarly with destruction, I'm aware that you can finish the game with it as your offensive skill choice, but stunlock (which I don't think should be an option at all) does not make for an interesting fight. At the other end of the scale, neither does one-shotting things - personally I'd say there are lots of tweaks needed and am glad I play on pc...



Can't argue with the point you're making there, the only thing I can say is that you have created that character using nothing but utility skills (though even this build has backstab...), where I would personally group skills into 5 categories and suggest that building a character without one skill from at least the offensive, defensive and combat utility trees cannot be compared with a character who has, in my original post I'm deliberately comparing two characters with similar distributions.

For anyone who cares, the groups as I see them are offensive as 1h/2h/archery/destruction/conjuration, defensive as light/heavy armour/alteration, combat utility as sneak/illusion/block/restoration, general utility as pickpocket/speech/lockpick and crafting as smithing/enchanting/alchemy.



So far yes, and I am still having fun - but at the same time, I'm mainly using sword & board, haven't powered any crafting skills or bought materials, and haven't gotten to level 30 yet!

Ignoring the ad-hoc revision to the argument by placing weight on potentiality: if mathematically build A == build B then choosing A over B has no mathematical consequence and arguments to the opposite are illusory.



The moment of creation is an exception to this argument. We are not discussing the potential to create build A or B; rather, we are discussing whether A && B should be equal in their respective offensive and defensive capabilities. For my part I do not believe that this should be the case.



Obviously, and I make no claim to the contrary.




Yes it is mostly subjective. And Mods are there for those who are willing and able.

You definetly NEED to do enchanting if you are a mage or you will not be able to cast those high level spells without depleting your mana in a few shots. I took the extra damage for fire and shock with duel cast, but by the end all I needed was my conjure in one hand and fire or shock in the other... so I can't really say how fast a duel cast would take out a high end enemy all my itself.

That's exactly how they should be, except bethesda was apparently going for some sort of dynamic playstyle like you might see on a PC mmo, except that concept completely fails due to the pathetic console interface. Instead of macro-macro-hotkey-macro-hotkey you have pause-select spell-unpause-cast-pause-select spell-unpause-cast. It's a garbage system designed to work on a garbage interface.

It wasn't a revision to my argument at all. Potentiality was always the lynchpin of my argument, which is why I used the term 'possibilities' in my earlier posts and wrote several times about people being free to choose sub-optimal builds (ie, to not realise possibilities, to not fulfill capabilties). I used the italics to draw attention to that fact.



Except that it isn't a choice between A and B. It is a choice between values within two ranges of possibilties with upper limits which are in one or two aspects identical but in other aspects, as you concede, obviously very different.

It's not a choice between '$10US' and '$10US'; it's not even a choice between '$10USD' and '$10.2CAD' (or whatever is equivalent to $10USD). It's a choice between 'whatever value you like between $1US and $10US' and 'whatever value you like between $1.02CAD and $10.2CAD'. You could choose $3US, and you could choose $10CAD. Even if you chose the upper, equivalent values, they're different denominations. It's a real choice. It's as real a choice as it would be if one range was $1USD to $8USD; and it's unquestionably a more free choice.



As you conceded in the beginning, people make sub-optimal builds. A sub-optimal warrior build might be mathematically identical in offense and defence to a mage build. Is there only an illusory difference between mathematically equivalent mage and warrior builds below the threshold at which warrior builds outstrip optimal mage builds? If not, why does some mathematical equality between certain facets of the optimal builds suddenly transmute the less optimal builds in the spectrum into illusory choices? Or are optimal, maximised builds for some reason the only relevant builds?



What about those who aren't able?

I like the conjuration master spells.

Yes, watching the game play itself is fun.