So far I am thinking of going fire and ice. Thing that is a good combo or is lighting really good? Or do you max out all three?

ice is suprsingly effective at slowing charging warriors down as a destruction mage otherwise i love playing a sith with some lightning ''UNLIMITED POWAAAH' :intergalactic:

At some level you will find you can have all three and will use them all in various situations. If you conjure as well just remember that atronachs are immune to the same element that they are formed of so you can AE that elemental spell without harming your pet.

I stick to firebolt with impact to keep my perks in other places. I don't like the other two as they are only useful in specific situations. I only use them when I fight fire atronachs.

Impact negates both the other effects because a warrior cant charge while stunned. Likewise a mage cant cast while stunned. So you wind up getting the extra fire dot after the spell instead of the less useful effects of the other two elements. Additionally lightnings magicka burn rarely seems to stop casters anyways.

fire, since at high lvls i need all the damage I can get with destros scaling.

also the least resistances I think.

I think the master level shock spell is the only master destruction spell worth using.

Lightning does more damage when you spec higher thanks to disintegrate. It's also easier to land lightning spells because they are instant. Missing an incinerate because something moved is not cool.


None of the master level spells are worth using, they do less DPS than expert level force you to stand still and you can't chain stagger with them.

Shock is the ideal damage type for a couple reasons:

1) Disintegrate outright kills things low on HP, whereas fire causes things to flee(very bad) and frost paralyzes(not bad but dead > paralyzed)
2) Instant travel time, no waiting for something to connect or having to predict movement, just blast the [censored] out of stuff.
3) It's extremely rare to find something resistant to shock, whereas fire and frost are much more commonly resisted(especially with dragons).

I only invested in shock when I remade my character as the other two fall way short of it. Frost major advantage is slowing and draining stamina but when I'm chain casting TBolts they are stagger locked so slowing and draining stamina are pointless. Fire supposedly does more damage but because of disintegrate this isn't true. I do play on Master so YMMV.

my favorite school is fire, my favorite spell is wall of fire.
I usually stick to fire and lightning as those are the most damaging when fully perked and chained together because perking all 3 schools is a bit taxing as you level and even draining stamina on master difficulty doesnt make me feel safe enough to risk melee range.

overall I like all spells apart from the shields, dont really use them, but traps+wall+thunderbolt = huge burst <3

ps: to the poster above me, fire is also the most comon school that benefits from mobs with vulnerabilities since IIRC all trolls, undead/vampires, nature and naturally frost related mobs have vulnerabilities to fire.
this not to mention that is worth using a low rank aoe spell (such as fireball) even on resistant mobs (as long as not immune) just to apply the damage multiplier debuff from fire to chain with other spells
the shock master spell is also pretty good, but yeah the rest are situational, if you have a summon out drawing atention or after you use a freezing shout or a aoe paralyse or something like that.

Thanks for the help. I think I will go fire and lighting because it seems like impact will help a lot and I feel like I have a harder time missing people at farther distance with frost.