One of the first things I've accomplished in Oblivion was becoming the Grand Champion of the Arena. I started out slashing my enemies with the steel long sword, but then I decided to use magic as my secondary attack (which was pretty boring imo). Well, I noticed that It would take roughly 10 sword hits to equal 1 or 2 basic fire spells. After this, I quickly majored in magic only because it was the practical thing to do. Imo this sort of ruined my idea of being a "pure" swordsman, because I knew that I could be kicking ass with a mage.
I'm hoping that since now magic is able to be equipped in one or both hands in Skyrim that this is fixed. Maybe they've increased the damage done by bladed weapons, or perhaps greatly decreased the damage done by spells? Have ya'll heard anything concerning this?
Thanks :flamethrower:

I was under the impression that magic was too weak in Oblivion...

Same here :unsure:

Your magicka regenerated, so I agree that the individual spells felt incredibly weak compared to Morrowind's. I think everything was too weak in Oblivion due to increasing amount of health enemies and the player gains.

I believe ranged attacks will be more difficult to continue using during fights because you now run backwards slowly. It should turn out nicely.

It is. Right up until you hit enemies that start outleveling your equipment. Unless you get into the Mages Guild, do the recommendations, and gain access to the spellmaking altar or you have Frostcraig Spire. Then it gets broken from the get-go.

In my last play through, I discovered that it didn't necessarily pay to come up with my own spells. While I could certainly come up with something more powerful, the Magicka cost required to cast them meant they weren't really practical in a combat situation. I was constantly running out of Magicka, long before my enemies were defeated. I went back to using mainly the default spells you can buy in the game, overall they were a good compromise between power and Magicka use. I certainly don't think that spellmaking was broken by any means.

Spells were too powerful in Oblivion? How are they too powerful? I thought they were the exact opposite, I could end up needing to cast a spell ten times to kill an enemy, and that's ignoring the possibility of magical resistences or the possibility of spells being absorbed or reflected, not to mention the absurdly short duration of the default fortification spells (Really, what's the point in casting a spell that's supposed to make me fight better if it doesn't even last until I kill one enemy?) if anything, I'd say spells should be STRONGER in Skyrim, I've always felt that magic should be stronger than mundane weapons, speaking in terms of balance, magic has the disdvantage of having a limited amount of magicka whereas a swordsman can fight as long as he has a good sword, not to mention the series gives one multiple ways to cripple magic users, there's silence, which completely stops you from using magic (A spell which has no equivalent for non-magical classes.) and there are multiple ways to COMPLETELY NEGATE the effects of spells, and even add the magicka from the spell to the target's own magicka or reflect the effects back at you, and it seemed that a lot of high level enemies had some degree of reflect or absorb magic abilities, though that was more true in Morrowind than Oblivion, I think, and in terms of logic, I see magic as a much more powerful force than mundane weapons, that's why people take the time to study it, a common warrior shouldn't stand any chance against a mage if he just runs blindly at him and slashes, he should be burned to ash before even getting close, for normal, mundane warriors to win against mages, they should need to either overwhelm them with superior numbers, or rely on less direct tactics, such as evading their spells until they run out of magicka, or by somehow neutralizing their spells or crippling their ability to use them, such as by using a silence or damage magicka poison, but obviously, for the sake of game balance, Bethesda can't do this, as we don't want mages to become much easier to play than other classes, so I'd say a good compromise would be to have spells in general be stronger and last longer, but require more magicka to cast, so that as a mage, there will be less spamming of spells, but in exchange, you need to be more tactical about which spells you use and when since you don't want to use up all your magicka quickly. Though it should never get to the point where a character who has regularly been focusing on raising magicka can potentially not have enough magicka to cast high level spells at all, provided you're of an "appropriate" level for said spell.

Now, there were some spells that could be overpowered in the game of course, chameleon, for example, and that should be addressed, but as a whole, it seems to me that in past Elder Scrolls games, magic seems to work better as a means to support other skills rather than something you can rely on for all your needs, even though it seems to be designed to be versatile with one magic school often being able to cover the functions of multiple mundane skills.

This.

Yeah, it was too weak if anything. Even with 100 intellegence and willpower, I found myself spamming the strongest destruction spell I had to kill off enemies. Only the weakest of foes, like rats, crumbled in front of my mighty fury, without the need of spamming. Sure I could spam all day, and I was never injured, but it wasn't too fun.

I agree, magic was weak and underpowered compare to other combat skills. I hope Skyrim greatly increases the power of spells.

Oblivion magic, at quite low levels you could just make a drain health 100 points for one second spell, and kill most things one hit for a while, but when you got to higher level, you couldn't get high enough magika to support enough powerful spells... get a few shots off, then you'r chugging potions, or dancing around waiting for it to regenerate.
i kind of have mixed opinions on it...

You ruined your swordsman? Dont do magic.

Sure spells were overpowered in Oblivion (especially if you exploited spellmaking) but it's not as if the rest of the game was balanced and that's part of the problem.

Either it was hack away at an enemy for five minutes with your sword or kill the enemy with one or two blasts. IMO neither way was balanced and I hope that enemy health/defense has been revamped so that a similar situation does not occur.

Interesting how people have totally opposite experiences with this. I found spells to be very weak(not counting exploits like 100% chameleon), and I recall discussion about how weak mages were in general in Oblivion.

Actually the basic destruction spells are quite weak (other spells in different schools of magic are a different story though as those aren't measured by how much damage they do.)

But stacking effects dealt multiplicative damage

For example if you created a drain health spell for 100 pts with 100% weakness to magicka then you could deal 200 damage in two shots (which was more health than most enemies had) and 300 damage in three shots...etc. etc..)

This damage took far less time to deal than someone with a sword and most enemies did not have any magicka resistance so it made things all the more easier. A few enemies had reflect spell or, in the case of one enemy in the arena, 100% resistance to magic but essentially these foes were far a few between.

Edit: well weakness as far as health could certainly be argued. My mage characters typically had less health than melee characters simply because they had to focus on intelligence and willpower as well as endurance. But my melee characters mostly had to deal with strength and endurance. Offensively however, mages have pretty much all other character archetypes beat but only if they are using the effects mentioned above.

Or you can lower the difficulty (although this comes with its own problems), or bind negative effect items for balancing. Even if you do find yourself with a high skill that you didnt want, you can not use it. Its not always about whats practical, but what your build/character/avatar/toon/alternate persona is.

Total disagree with the OP about the specific spells he is refering.

Magic can be very overpowered, but it's not the raw damage effects like he suggested. Overpowered stuff is:

Invisibility not costing enough magicka
Hurling summoned creature after summoned creature no matter how outnumbered or in a bad situation you are -- usually used in combo with invis.
1 second paralyze. Needed to cost a lot more mana. Humanoid NPCs shuld only fall over if they are paralyzed for at least 3 seconds. 1 sec paralyze is more like a 4-5 second paralyze.
multiplicative resist reduction stacking. 100%--> 200% -->400 --> 800

From what we havew seen so far it looks like basic magic is alot more powerful in skyrim..a fireball a frostbolt whatever.. those are alot more powerful. But now there will be no more weakness to magic 100% blah blah spells.

As for the ops post.... the basic fireball only did 15 damage the greater one did 30.. a steel sword.. far from the most effective weapon.. did more then the basic fireball. alot more.

A lot of it had to do with skills. If your blade skill was low and destruction was 35 at the beginning, the fireball seemed wicked compared to hacking around with a worthless sword. If your marksman and agility were very low, firing arrows was frustratingly meaningless.

I found that once every skill and the governing attribute were at 100, most of the different attack methods seemed to balance out nicely. The problems arose out of the various roads to get there. In other words, players find themselves frustrated when they try to use a skill that their character is not very good at.

Skyrim aims to fix this simply by changing the way characters build up their skills. You become good at whatever it is you do and most of your abilities start at the same place. This will help prevent players from building characters that are better with blades than magic, then having a hard time when attempting to use a spell, or the other way round.

I totally agree with this. Mighty Magic is the First mod I install, when playing on a PC. Even then, Imps are dangerous until you are lvl 7. But at least that much... Strange how people have totally opposite feelings about magic. Magic was uselessly weak in Oblivion and altmer mages were easiest to kill.

The default spells was not very impressive in Oblivion, with spellmaking and weakness you could make real hard hitting spells if you added weakness.
At low level the starting spells did more damage than the weapons, as you level up and get better weapons and sigil stone enchantments weapons get better, add that you could do sneak damage.
In Skyrim we get no spell making so we has to use the default spells, but we can make enchanted weapons, unless this is nerfed hard weapons will work better than spells.

couldn't agree more

This.

Okay, so we've come to the conclusion...


- if you min/maxed cheesy spells on the altar, magic was overpowered
- if you just tried to shoot store-bought fireballs at people magic was weak



Given that, at the current time, the odds are against spellmaking, so you'd only have store-bought spells........ :whistling:

I never was interested in a mage build so I did not bother messing around with custom spells, and I guess that happed to a lot of other people. I want magic to be good with out having to relie on custom spell making a few types of powerful spells. I want a range of magic options that are viable in Skyrim.