You won't notice a problem with mages till mid to late game when destruction scaling stops. However, I started to notice it was difficult in my mid teens and twenties compared to other class types I played. The damage of dest spells are just weak

I don't play games to beat them, I play for the entertainment value. In Oblivion I had to restrain myself too but for different reasons. In Skyrim I find myself not having to restrain myself as much, which makes the game more fun and makes me feel like im actually playing the game rather than against the game.

I play perma death, which means when my character dies then I die. Obviously, im going to use extreme measures to ensure my success but I also get the most mileage of the game this way. I have been playing RPG's like this since the 1990's. Morrowind was ridiculouly easy, Oblivion slightly less easy, Skyrim is a challenge and will probably take me another year to complete on perma death.

I feel sad for you because you played it like halo and never experienced the marvel of Vvardenfell.

Nevertheless.
These are not the types of games to do that to and your detrimental experience is wholly due to your own fault.

Thats an interesting concept to play with. However, you can#t judge a game of that time so harshly in the difficulty spectrum. it was revolutionary for its time.

Oh quit it with that'for its time'
I dont hold truck with that malarky.
I am old enough to remember the very first pc in our street that everyone played pong on.
Everything above that is a marvel.
Morrowind is stunning, gorgeous, and a credit to human endeavor.

'For its time' indeed.
Chess is over 1500 years old and it held up pretty well now hasnt it?

I agree, Morrowind was revolutionary for its time, it was one of the most revolutionary games I've ever played. But it wasn't one of the best games I've ever played, not by a longshot.

Morrowind was revolutionary more from a technological standpoint than it was a gameplay standpoint.

Skyrim is the opposite of Morrowind for me. Skyrim is revolutionary from a gameplay standpoint but not from a technological stanpoint.

So, I guess it depends on what you value more as a gamer, technology or gameplay. For me, In my 25 years of gaming I have always maintained that great gameplay is all that matters, I don't even care if its 2d graphics.

Im going to bed now, but I leave you with this.
All that said that Morrowind is 'shallow' and its NPC's are 'flat'
Its your own fault for not listening to what they had to say.

Sermon the sixth:
The Sun shall be eaten by lions, which cannot be found yet in Veloth.

Six are the vests and garments worn by the suppositions of men.

Proceed only with the simplest terms, for all others are enemies and will confuse you.

Six are the formulas to heaven by violence, one that you have learned by studying these words.

The Father is a machine and the mouth of a machine. His only mystery is an invitation to elaborate further.

The Mother is active and clawed like a nix-hound, yet she is the holiest of those that reclaim their days.

The Son is myself, Vehk, and I am unto three, six, nine, and the rest that come after, glorious and sympathetic, without borders, utmost in the perfections of this world and the others, sword and symbol, pale like gold.

There is a fourth kind of philosophy that uses nothing but disbelief.

For by the sword I mean the sensible.

For by the word I mean the dead.

Erm... Well. This post is just the typical "OP lack of awareness" reassoning...

...Someone saying others they shouldn't play in this or that way...

...Without actually checking how "that way" is played.

The reassons are simple starting by things you perceive on your enemy that you can't do as Mage (Each of this sentences is wrong when you apply it to the equivalent weapon/armor/stamina comparisson):

- NPCs direct damage scales up with level. The best Mage scenario is the Volkhari Vampire encounter... Enjoy it and come saying "magic is weak on Skyrim" or that everyone populating Skyrim needs to cast a spell 50 times to kill others... Sadly only player DPS magic is weak. OFC any physical 2h weapon fighter is deadly... BOTH player and NPCs.

- NPCs have an humongous reserve of the action bar. The best Mage scenario is ANY ward wielding NPC... Try to do the same as a player and you need 100 enchanting (And focus on resto) to even get close to the reserve needed to keep the appropiate ward level for the spells thrown at you. Physical atackers "get tired" as players do, so you see they stop blocking and performing power attacks in around the same time scale as the player.

- NPCs have an humongouns regen rate of the action bar. Well, even if you manage to drain an NPC mana bar, in just a few seconds you will see it casting max level spells that take around 40% of the player mana bar (Not counting Dual Casting costs, ofc). If you do the same to a physical character you will see how it takes a while for him to be able to do power attacks again.


Then you have "perk equivalent" reassonings:

- Count the perks needed to do max ranged damage as Destruction Mage and Archer. I mean every single perk... Then compare the time it takes for each character to kill an enemy... Any enemy. And then dumbdown the Archer so it provides more or less the same DPS as the Mage (notice that due to the fact that arrows weight 0, "efficiency" is a concept that only bothers the mage)... After you do this, you will get your own conclusions on "how to kill things at distance".

- Evaluate "Impact" perk effect on Destro mage gameplay... Silly, right? Even more if you think the effect is independent of the spell level used (and the damage descriptor). Why they did bother with all the options on the same skill tree, if one perk makes the other irrelevant?. Notice that I'm already assuming, that as mage, you don't mind spending far more time killing 1 opponent than ANY other type of adventurer.


I don't need to even start to think on gameplay preferences, TES lore and other important aspects... I'm just caring about how to do things on the world and how the "world" does things to me...

...And obviously the conclusions you get is that player magic is broken.

I know this aint about Alchemy but I have seen several people stated it: Why is Alchemy so powerful?

I have my alchemy at 50 so far and it seems pretty useless, maybe I don't really know the mighty side of Alchemy?? Please explain..

Your right about that point, yet I see more and more people complaining about balance between the ''classes'' the player can make.
And that is just stupid in a single player game, so what if my rogue does triple the damage your mage does? you'll never see me in your game anyway so I can't gank you or spoil your fun because I'm so OP and your not.
Ofcourse there should be balance between enemy mobs and the player and that balance is actually pretty good in skyrim too be honest, atleast when compared to oblivion.

I agree with the OP that terms as DPS/HPS/TPS etc are [censored] in a singleplayer game and totally BS in the elder scrolls serie where DPS/TPS/HPS have never been an issue.

I used to play wow pretty hardcoe (6/7 FL HC) and I started playing around the release of TBC, I still don't see why people can't seem to put two games aside from eachother and judge them by what they are instead of comparing it to other games who work in a totally diffrent way.
Thats like playing call of duty SP in a ''vehicle mission'' and complaining the cars don't feel the same like they do in forza/gran turismo.

I think most people are on the same page that Destruction would be more effective if it scaled. I haven't really seen anybody contradict this yet. But there are lots of wacky arguments flying around based on the traditional way that many people like to play Elder Scrolls games or RPGs in general...

"Mages have zero defense, and because of that, they should be glass cannons." What? Mages have zero defense? I mean, back when Spell Effectiveness was reduced by armor this argument would have made sense, but 'mage' and 'warrior' are archetypes which are being ludicrously over-applied in Skyrim. Damage resistance is a function of perks and armor, not your narrow conception of how a mage is defined. I'm very glad that nothing is FORCING me to wear robes as a mage, because it never made sense that iron armor would decrease the amount of damage a fireball does. I'm glad there are enough perks that a mage OR a warrior can get near the level cap for Damage Resistance without having to stack alchemy+enchantments.

So here are some of the arguments in this thread, distilled and with my evaluation.
Destruction svcks towards the middle and end of the game because the damage doesn't increase over the course of the game: Probably valid, and I can see how this might make the game less fun, especially on harder difficulty levels. I would like to see a less contentious discussion about this, but I guess the forums are not the place to find it.
Destruction svcks because it takes lots of perks: Not really valid, since there are plenty of perk points to distribute. If putting 15 perks into Destruction and 7 into One-Handed resulted in characters with equivalent damage at level 60, this would be completely acceptable; learning to use magic should probably require a larger investment than learning to swing a sword.
Magic svcks because there is no Spellmaking: I'm sorry you feel that way. As I said, I mostly steered clear of it in Oblivion because it felt overpowered, but not numerically. More like "it feels too lazy or god-like to cast multiple spells with one trigger press" and "I don't want to have to pre-research which spells are best and then make a few ultimate combinations which I'll use in every encounter; I'd rather pick and choose individual spells based on context." But I've learned from reading this thread that there are a few people who really LOVED Spellmaking and nothing short of getting it back will make them happy. Any time you take away a feature, you risk upsetting people, and clearly this was one of those cases, but I don't think it's obvious and fundamental that Spellmaking should be a part of all Elder Scrolls titles.
Skyrim svcks because it isn't Oblivion, Morrowind, Dragon Age, WoW, etc.: I can understand that you would want to compare all of your gameplay experiences to each other, but it doesn't make for very helpful game critiques, especially if other people have not played the same backlog of games as you. In fact, it seems like the biggest complainers about recent Fallout and Elder Scrolls titles are the ones who had the most love for the earlier games and don't want to see them change. You might be justified in missing something you grew to love, but you shouldn't overapply this disappointment to your critique of the game as a whole.

What about going toe to toe with another mage? 1v1 high level mages.

They shoot ice spikes o'death while I shoot snowy toothpicks of tickling. Yeah, that's balanced.

I agree. There's basically too many young gamers coming out of the WoW nursery and they're expectations are horrid. Because they're upbringing as a 'gamer' is horrid. They probably never had calculate THAC0 on the fly or appreciate the solid rules of a virtual game world.

Elder Scroll games challenge you to survive in their worlds based on their rules. If that intrigues you enough to continue you may hopefully find enjoyment. If not then let it be. There is no DPS in the Scrolls.

as mentioned many times, destruction by itself isn't a meaningful build.

best to pair it up with some other tree, like max smithing and max one handed

of course get rid of all the magicka cost enchants and just go pure melee.

even at level 40 if you make the switch you can do extremely well at the end.

Oh good lord this.

I really hope gamesas wont go out of character and start listening to the peanut gallery.

They haven't in the past, so I remain hopeful.

That is the thing that bothers me. When people complain that something is overpowered in a single player game. Especially if the thing they are complaining about doesn't have to and WILL NEVER AFFECT THEM! Like spell crafting. WHY they would care about this being in the game is beyond me?... Just because YOU don't like it is not a good reason.

the only real "pure caster" weakness is that it cant be exploited to the same extremes as melee, thats about it, but since exploits are lame anyway... who cares...

people who whine about pure caster, and particulary destruction, of being "weak" or "broken" are just egotistical noobs who rather declare the game broken than handle their own shortcomings or asking how to deal with problems they have (often flaming people who try to teach them).
let those go to the easy mode mods, and call it a day cuz you wont ever change their minds or teach them how to play.

The OP is completely wrong about balance. He doesn't even understand, what balance is actually for.
Without a certain balance, the game simply doesn't work ... some of its mechanics become void.

If you're too strong too fast and too easy, the whole purpose of exploring, crafting, finding better loot, getting stronger, etc. is totally destroyed. Why search for better items, new shouts, etc., if you're already untouchable?
If some things are too weak, you simply can't successfully use them. And even if you manage to beat the game using the weak classes, you might feel stupid not using the strong stuff, the game is offering.

It's simply highly unsatisfying, if a game is like that. And sadly Skyrim is (at least in some points) like that.
Some playstyles/classes are not as fun as they could be (if they'd be a bit stronger), and some playstyles/classes totally break the game by taking away the whole "exploring and getting stronger" appeal.

I'm not saying destruction HAS to be better then other damaging schools, but it's sad that I have to exploit it just to make it good, even then it is worst off then other damaging skills. Most high level mages could just drop destruction and get a bow out that does more then your destruction magic, thats stupid. It's called DESTRUCTION it's meant to be the mage's dps skill, yet it hits for so little at high levels. Also, my favorite spells become obsolete, because they don't scale. It's a stupid design and it needs fixed. Have you ever played a good RPG that a mage mostly built for damage did little damage, No I doubt it.

you are using propaganda false argumentation m8, try it for yourself, dont listen to the noobs.

you dont need to exploit at all...
in fact its the damage skill that is LESS dependant on crafting of them all, aswell as the one that is by base, the highest damaging of them all

Fine but in a game where the motto has always been "play as you will", forcing someone to play a "certain way" kind of - defeats the purpose. Besides, HOW (and no one can answer this) would having spell crafting in the game even affect you? All you need to do is NOT use it and guess what? The npc's will never use it either because they don't have too so what is the issue?

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