Meele benefits from upgrading weapons, enchanting gear for more dmg and defence, using pots for more dmg. 3 things that let meele dmg go up while they need 3 crafting skills maxed and perked, and you gonna use they`re synergies to even more buff your weapons.

Destro benefits from enchanted gear, potions and poison. So we get 2 skill that let our dmg go up and 1 skill that makes us spam attacks without mercy. None crafting skills are needed to achieve this. Enchanted gear for nearly no mana cost can be found or bought ingame, the hardest hitting weakness poison can be found or bought ingame, and destro dmg pots can be bought or found ingame but not as good as hand crafted ones ( still at least half as good ).

If your only playing destro mage you wont level anything except destro tree. Sneaking ? why would you sneak if your such a badass in the first place. Lockpicking ? Why would you not use the Stone buff or your companion for opening lock. Pickpocket ? Why would you need to steal anything if your dont want to. Speach ? Yeah its gonna level when you sell loot but are you going to become a pack mule and loot everything there is to loot in game :sadvaultboy:

Even with this I could still level all my other skills to 100 and reach lvl 81 and never perk anything other than destro tree and be able to dish out good dmg. When the situation gets hairy I can just use a dmg pot and If im against something really powerfull I can just add a poison.



I never said that destro is bad at higher levels I only agreed with the statment that if your just using destro skills you wont level that high to even notice destro becoming weak without using other means of dmg boosting.

Seams we just misunderstood the situation.

Since nobody here said Destro is bad at "normal" levels, I don't think that any "Destro hater" (as you said it) would gonna hate Destro during those levels. if it's a misunderstanding, then I'm sorry myself

Just give it up Raestloz. They refuse to see reason, and any effort to educate them is wasted. Proof that counters their belief simply does not exist to them; it is wrong simply because they want it to be so.

You just defined yourself, pretty funny :facepalm:

The people comparing destruction to melee/bows have some valid points. Simply put, destruction is much weaker at at higher levels/difficulties than weapons. However, personally I tend to view it from a different point of view.

My mage is lvl 48 and I play him on master difficulty. I have no problems with him, in fact he is pretty much invincible. I spam my fireballs and everything is stunned and dead before it has much of a chance to do anything to me. It is not nearly as tedious as some people make it out to be. It does not take forever to kill my enemies, most die in 3-5 casts and I can usually get more than one in the area of effect at once. The really "hard" enemies might take 30-45 seconds of spamming at them, but that's about it. The character is a walking death machine and even on master the game is pretty easy. Not because of any skill on my part either, I just spam my dual cast fireballs until everything in the room is crispy.

That said, I have also leveled up the character's 1-hand skill and I can pull out a sword and deal far more damage with it. Everything dies faster, enemies die in 1-2 hits mostly. As a source of damage the sword is obviously superior to magic spells. However, I don't really see this as a problem with the spells being weak. In my opinion the problem lies with the sword being too powerful. More precisely the combination of smithing+enchanting+alchemy can create a sword that is simply too strong. Personally, I feel that comparing magic spells to this crazy weapon and then claiming that there is a problem with magic because it doesn't measure up is wrong.

We have given ample evidence that destruction is severely lacking in the 'destruction' department. If you refuse to acknowledge this, the fault is on you. Resorting to saying what can be summed up as "no u" is exactly the problem I was talking about. Where is your proof that destruction is fine? Because you can enchanting to make it free? We've already said that you'd be better off having free conjuration or illusion spells.

Remember how they said weakness to magic was overpowering? So they removed it, except they didn't and just made it a poison instead. Except you can't apply poison using spells, so thanks for nothing. Oh, I COULD use archery to apply the poison, but then I'd be better off simply being an archer in the first place now wouldn't I?

It may be wrong, but it does indicate that there is an issue here, an issue that needs a bit of balancing. It's either nerf the physical weapons, or make the magicka cost reasonable, so that you can enchant yourself some damage improvement enchantments instead of reducing magicka cost to be able to cast said spells

Wards aren't that bad to use against enemy mages and I would like to see Destruction Spells scale in damage to meet the ability of my character. Now the second issue with being an all around mage is if you don't focus one or two skills you're a tad screwed because you'd be spreading yourself too thin with over-generalizing your focuses.

With 100 archery with archery perks (no sneak perks) and only loot dropped or bought. Remember, you want to compare 1 skill/perk tree to 1 skill/perk tree. Deadric arrows are fine though imo there aren't enough to reasonably use them as the rule instead of the exception.
Dungeon boss / dragon sees you, so it doesn't matter. You get off 1 sneak attack maybe, big deal you don't have it perked anyways.

You've got your bow, your arrow, and your archery perks.

Destruction does more damage than that.


If you're talking about that 147dps horse [censored] metric, its always been wrong. I really don't know how people keep quoting it with a straight face. It is completely fabricated and in no way resembles reality.


And? And? Doesn't matter, cause the damage still isn't ridiculous without smithing, sneak, or enchanting. Its not bad, but neither is it better than destruction.


Nope, can't have that. Cause we are intelligently arguing for a character that wants to use destruction and only destruction, and absolutely NOTHING else, we're going to compare it to someone that does ONLY bow.

I don't like 100% magic reduction...Even more so, the fact that you can only have it with 2 schools of your choice, requiring you to have many sets..

We have given ample evidence that destruction isnt laking if you dont gimp yourself intentionaly.
We have given ample evidence that meele/bow lacks in the dmg department if gimped intentionaly like detro.
If you refuse to acknowledge this, the fault is on you.

Your the one that started the "no u" argument.



Your doing the same thing your acusing us off.
For you proof that counters your belief simply dosnt exist and for you our view is wrong simply becuase you want it to be so.

So by your own standards your the same as the "wrong" side of the discussion is. Confusing ? No its the interwebz - its called diference of opinion.

The bow user is still allowed to use found enchanted gear and to improve a found bow without leveling smithing no? Besides, Destruction Expert spells are impossible to use practically without a high level enchanting. Oh and doing one sneak attack at x2 damage takes 0 training in sneak skill too.

Oh and, what's the name of the necklace you found that reduces destruction magic costs? I never found one myself.

if so, then perhaps you'd like to count magicka cost in...

@DieBySword:
perhaps you'd want to take a look at my post up there

Actually, someone did say that; me. While it may be perfectly "functional" for some, that does not prevent it from underperforming compared to everything else regardless. A Mage that uses summons will perform significantly better with a bound bow than they will using Destruction spells. Why do people keep forgetting about both the range and sneak attack ability with bows? Even when you are not a "stealth" character, you can still one-shot a great many enemies simply from your initial sneak attack, and often you will be able to kill a second enemy long before the rest come rushing, if any are even left. Dragons are also extremely easy to kill with a fully perked Archery tree. While you can also kill them with Destruction (some might argue even more brainlessly due to it not being able to fight back), the damage is still quite a bit lower.

It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to realize that something is very wrong when your character has more longevity and killing power using their fists (with the gauntlet perk) than with their spells due to how absolutely inefficient it is. Even if the "power level" of the caster jumps in a few levels, there should never be such large spikes and dips. It's like 1-15 is prettty good all around, 15 - 25 svcks badly, 25 - 30 improves greatly (compared to before) and from 30+ it's a downward spiral. Abusing Enchanting (or vendors) should not be a consideration, because if it was actually intended, then it was a horrible design decision and totally counterintuitive. You're a caster? You better dump all of those points into Magicka! Oh wait, we forgot to tell you that none of that Magicka matters now, because you are now required to use gear that nullifies your first 30 levels!

How dense can you be? Have you not collapsed into a singularity at this point? NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT JUST USING DESTRUCTION! For gods sake, NO ONE IS. How many friggin times do we need to repeat this before you understand this simple concept. How many times do you want me to say that no one is talking about JUST destruction by itself. We are talking about destruction when using other skills. You need 0 perks to get the 2x multiplier sneak attack for one. Second, if you REALLY wanted to take the skills as just destruction vs just archery, you will still lose. You'll get 4 or 6 thunderbolts off before you are out of magicka, FACT. You can carry however many arrows you want, they weigh nothing. You cant use enchanted gear to make the spell costs free, and you can't use potions to recover magicka. 6 casts, no using other skills. Forsworn briar-heart just ate your lunch because your 6 spells did piddly all to him. Drauger scourge and friends bent you over thier knee and spanked you. And even if you did kill him in 6 spells, what are you going to do about their friends? Hope they go into mourning at the sight of their dead companion? Magicka regen in combat is next to non existant. Destruction svcks, end of story.

Ah, then I guess I forgot about your post, sorry.


Yes, that's why I consider Destruction is broken. While most mages would put lots of their points to magicka, the cost reduction enchantment nullifies the need of magicka completely, which is indeed counterintuitive. it'd be best then to just dump every point to Health, but before the enchantment is found, nothing can be done.

Archers have finite number of arrows so once they are out they will never be able to attack again, while mana regenerated.
So you gonna buy arrows and stock it ? How is it different from stocking mana potions - both are ammo for your main weapon.

Err, did you try playing an archer yet? How can you even be out of arrows? I have like 700 iron arrows, 250 steel and 80 orcish and I left all the ancient nord arrows in the draurg but if I had picked them up, I'd have at least 1000 of them so far. They are also as good as steel ones.

Run out of arrows? ......you can tell he has not played an archer.

You seem to be ignoring my posts at this point

Perhaps you'd want to elaborate about what I pointed out before?

Upgrading your weapon means using smithing so your actualy relaying on a crafting skill.
So yeah you can found or buy enchanted gear and pots found in the word so can we.
Your dmg still gonna be below the destro mage and arrows dont magicaly restock on they`re own.

Nonsense.
This isnt Halo.

When one needs to purposely gimp themselves and quit levelling in order for something to be viable, why, thats the very definition of broken.

There aren't enough magicka potions in the game to fuel destruction spells without enchanting. Hell, I know you're full of it now, because if you DID go pure destruction, and nothing else, you would NOT have leveled up enough to have enough magicka to cast expert level spells. What say you now! Holy crap, I think I just killed any argument that involves JUST destruction.

No, he has not played an Archer, just like Hori has not or anything other than the "perfectly fine" Conjuration/Illusionist that wears -100% cost gear to sometimes "help" their double Dremoras finish off the last 10% of an enemies health. Archers only have arrow issues before the teen levels when they are using weak bows, weak arrows and do not have more than a 40% damage increase with perks.

Not it doesn't. Expert Destro spells runs out of magicka very very fast, resulting in considerably lower dps -> FACT :thumbsup:



You're right. Without enchanting, Destro DPS is far lower than 147. This is a fact. The 147 figure is WITH exploited enchanting.