Spells didn't scale in Oblivion either, you had to buy stronger ones with higher skill levels. But the overall effect was that you did more damage at higher Destruction levels. Is that how it works in Skyrim?

Even if they scaled, look at how all of the spells ultimately work. With the small exception of runes/wall/cloak spells, everything else is ultimately point and damage, so there will be a clear winner among them and you just need to spam that.

As for rune/wall, again, do you really need to place that rune, or just throw another thunderbolt for same damage? Even if runes did more damage than thunderbolt, the situation just flips and essentially same deal continues.

To copy and paste myself from another post...

Few simple tweaking could have made destruction so much more rich in options and just plain old fun.

First, remove magic cost reduction enchants, reduce high level spell's cast cost by at least half, and create enchants that add flat damage (adding percentages always end up breaking, flat numbers can be balanced better). Something like 20 extra damage max per slot.

Second, I would've changed rune to about 3 ~ 4 times in size, and change their function so that they lower resist of all those who are inside the rune. Top it off with really high mana cost, maybe even percentage mana cost, like 25% of your total mana. This will add spacial advantages/disadvantages to every fight.

Third, impact has to go. Sorry, but perma stun lock is just blatantly not fun. Ice should be the source of enemy movement control. Instead, dual casting would bring element-unique effect to the table, like fire cause secondary explosion for 30 ~ 50 extra damage to targets that were already on fire, frost cause ground beneath the target to freeze over, causing other enemies to slip and fall in that area (if that's too hard, then just another 10% snare on top of frost's regular snare), and lightning would add visible charge to the enemy, and at max charge on out door, the enemy would be struck by lightning for 100 damage or so.

Fourth, add more flavor to the perks. Fire perks should let the fire burn for longer duration (both fire on target and on environment), frost one should increase the snare, with something like base frost being 20% and 2 perks bringing it up to 35% and 50%, and lightning should exclusively get stamina and magicka drain. So fire for maximum damage, frost for movement control, and lightning to reduce combat capabilities of the enemy.

I think most of those could be tweaked in since there are many in game stuff of similar effects.

Oblivion had spell crafting so it didn't matter

There is a lot of different spell effects in skyrim. The problem is most of those spell effects are useless at high levels because the damage is so small. And there is no way to make a new spell with that effect

Spells absolutely did scale in Oblivion. But what really happened was, the spell had a minimum magicka cost and maximum effect, that was only reached by being 100 in the skill. The closer you got to 100, the less the spell cost and the more damage it did.

Oblivion spells do NOT do more damage with higher skill level. All the skill level does is reduce the cost of the spell and unlock the ability to purchase more powerful (and more cost-ineffective) spells.

I like the challenge of subpar destro. Hope I will have my perfect build finished before the patch hits.

This is what Bethesda should have done in the first place to keep at least some of the flavor in their new, admittedly watered-down system. I would love this, personally.

when compared to other combat-centered skills its damage output, even at high levels is significantly lower than that of another combat skill.

Most people believe it's because the spells don't scale, others say it's because people aren't playing as mages correctly.

whatever the case is though, you'll definitely notice that the payoff for destruction or magic in general is not as high as the payoff for a warrior or rouge.
The poster below you made a pretty good point. this is partly because warriors and rouges have the advantage of using crafting skills to make incredibly over-powered weapons and armor.

If you actualy do the math the damage output of a high level destruction spell can be in the 1,000 range. But when put next to a warrior's high level sword that can ve in the 3,000 range it definitely feels like mages got the short end of the stick.

the only things I think destruction need fixing, is the dual cast mana multiplier (its too high) and damage multiplier (too low) and the stagger needs to be a 50% proc like the archery similiar perk, bows are slower firing and have a 50% chance to stagger, I dont think its good to chain stagger mobs to death with spells that are cast faster.
rest is all fine and very powerfull, some +dmg gear in the order of 10-20% TOPS (accounting for all enchanting perks and all armor slots) aimed for lvls 50-60+ may be welcome, but at those stages the game is pretty much finished tbh, not a biggy.

what absolutely needs work, is setting caps for exploitive mechanics, caps for stacking of enchants, pot effects, etc, refering specificaly for the no spell cost enchant stacking (should be capped at 75-90% imo) and the stacking of smithing+alchemy+enchanting to get insane multipliers to weapon dmg.




bethesda is the holder of the best, most complex and interesting rpg mechanics of all single player games that I know of.
having that said, they always did leave a great deal of mechanic flaws and loopholes/exploits, some of them repeated from game to game wich is anoying... but yeah...

Yes!

no, they did NOT scale in damage.


to the people actually interested in the facts of damage debate of destruction:
a fully smithed upgraded, with full perks two handed daedric sword, has a base dmg in the order of around 138 IIRC swings once every 3 seconds or so.
a expert rank direct nuke, with full perks hits for 90 every 1.5-2 seconds, and can be dual casted for a multiplier of 2.2 dmg

so no destruction dmg is NOT low at all, its actually stronger, this is not giving into account the fact that you can, and should also chain cast spells, for exemple using a fire spell before your nuking burst, increases your damage further because fire puts a damage debuff on target, you can also chain spells such as your walls and traps to hit simultaneous with your nukes, causing even more dmg/burst than any weapon can, baseline.
when you get weapon enchanted weapons keep up to destruction dmg, and if you perk enchanting and boost your weapon multiplier and weapon enchants it surpresses it, even more so if you do the same with alchemy.

thing is spending 33 perks to exploit crafting and become a 1-2 hitting machine, is an exploit, if you have fun with that, sure casters cant compete damage wise, but if you only care about normal conditions, then destruction is not only stronger its superior, not in single player perhaps, but in control and AOE for sure, aswell as for most stages of leveling

spells scale in a reversed way to melee, melee starts much weaker than spells, and scales in dmg to get on par with spells, spells start strong but expensive to cast, and scale by being able to cast more of them, higher ranks of them, and chaining effects together.

thats not taking into account extra perks like ignoring armor for warhammers, the fact you can attack infinitely with melee, or the fact that power attacks can be done with 1 stamina etc.

perks that ignore armor do NOT increase dmg, especially comparing to spells that all of them obviously ignore armor themselves.
the axe perk does increase damage however and so does sword critical strikes, but you can calculate the dmg increase and add it if you want and you will still find spells vastly superior in raw base dmg,
and like I said I was comparing raw base dmg, to show that most propaganda about destruction dmg being weak is simply false... there is alot that I did not mention there about spells, like mobs with vulnerabilities... effects from the spells themselves, the fact you have range and can drain enemy mana and stamina, etc.

without any perk in any crafting tree, you can sustain spell slinging for far longer than power attacks, with enchanting perks and without exploit, you can do so almost indefinetely in later stages of the game, THATS how spells scale, not with their already high damage,

the bottomline is, in order for melee to be superior in dmg to casting, you need to perk at least 2 crafting trees.

On Normal difficulty? Absolutely, without a doubt. People forget that the game is balanced for Adept difficulty first. Everything else like Master and Novice are just multipliers to health and damage.

And besides that I was having no problem playing the game on Master with a mage who used destruction magic to kill her foes and dragons. 100% stagger chance is absolutely god-like for anything, much less something that does it at range with speed and precision that archers could only dream of.

I had to dump a lot of points into Magicka, and I had to use the best regen gear money could buy, but I never even had to touch the crafting skills to get by.

pff; you can beat master using block alone :laugh:
Doesn't say much if you can beat something on normal cause the game is quite easy on the standard difficulties.

destruction is a bit underpowered, so people whining that its too easy to "exploit" so your magic cost to zero need to get a clue, magic is not overpowered, magic regeneration is really slow actually and even more so during combat and it takes a lot of strikes to kill a lot of higher level enemies, i like to use magic, but i use a bit of everything with magic, but its not overpowered and it needs to pack more of a punch, another 15 or 20 % at least. and as for reducing magic costs, well you have to use up perks to do it bascially, you can buy most of the items you need anyway, but if you invest in enchanting you should be able to benefit from it, like people who invest in anything else, if you invest all your points into health you get to be a bullet sponge, mages are usually not over armored so they need a lot of offensive power.