There really needs to be more spells all together but, it would be nice to have more varieties. We have stuff you shoot out of your hands, runes, and cloaks.

Not that this is imaginative or anything (i dont have a good imagination) but why not spells where it coats your weapon in an element, or hovering balls of elements that follow you and home in on targets?

Bioware fan eh? (Dragon age for the element and weapon thing, Mass effect attack drone for the homing spell) JK

Anyway, we have summons for the homing thing, and I guess cloak spells kinda work for the first thing you said.

It's an improvement over all the previous games where the destruction spells were all just different colored missiles that exploded or got bigger.

In Oblivion at least the fire/frost/shock spells differed from one another in that fire spells exploded on contact, so AoE spells only triggered once they hit their target, while AoE frost spells were a wall of cold air as soon as they left your hand. Shock spells seemed to travel faster and hit any other nearby targets even without an AoE effect. Nothing else was different outside of those traits.

Honestly, I would have loved to see touch spells in this game. I could see them being full-contact magic and being activated with a punch or grabbing onto someone and blowing them up. Maybe the impact perk wouldn't be so cheap if it were restricted to those kinds of spells.

Other than that, enchantment has the "elemental weapons" covered and homing spells are kinda/sorta like cloaks.

I think they are good. I just wish they would have given some perks to upgrade the spells a bit more rather than just raising damage. Maybe get the J'zargo cloak thing without me taking damage. Maybe a perk for shooting three consecutive fireballs. Have longer duration for the side effects; burn longer, drain more magicka, slow the enemy faster. Place more runes. That sort of thing.

It could always improve.

It's a visually graphical improvement, but that's where it ends. It's an utter failure in sheer mechanics, variety and overall implementation.

... damn!

This posted in the wrong thread, for some reason.

Definitely.

The missle/AoE spells are technically still the same as they were in Oblivion (as I've described above). At the very least now we have sprays, runes and cloaks, but from my experience only cloaks were ever useful because sprays became crap early on and runes the way they are aren't very handy.

IMO the magic system--Destruction specifically--actually took a step down. I mean, p-much everything else in Skyrim is still pretty shallow with very minor improvement. Melee, for example, suffers from the same thing. It "feels" better, but the implementation is actually worse.

Ohh dont put ideas into my head.

Physical magic is best magic 馃槏

That said, i can think of a lot of good Destruction spells. More powerful stream spells to start. Honestly a stream of fire would hurt way more than a bolt of fire.

Physical magic, too. Im just thinking of fists thrown engulfed in flames (firebending anyone?) and lightning charged palm strikes...

Ill think more maybe tomorrow. Need sleep.

Very much! The majority of the spells are just powered up versions that look exactly the same as the rest. Which made me a bit mad, "No spell creation but you have so many spells to chose from!" Yes this one does 5 damage and the other one does 10 damage, but it's the same.

But I've been playing a lot of Oblivion lately, makes me miss creating spells and using wacky ways to create them and create unique spells. Sure they ended up looking the same, but the effects! The effects!

Reminds me of Infamous, forcefully grab a person's face and just svck out all their life force.

This is something that I've often thought about too. At least with Dawnguard and Dragonborn the devs added a few more interesting ones but the series is still lagging behind DnD games such as Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale.

Maybe it's the challenge of rendering more intersting spells in a 3D engine in a first person view, or maybe it's a lore thing ... I don't know but I hope they improve the variety for the next TES game.

Well, destruction does have runes and they are fun. But it's too difficult to get one under a dragon. But yes, destruction spells are a lot of point, click, and reduce health.

Apocalypse Spells has some destruction that I like for being different. In particular, Flaming Core is a projectile that you must use while you are moving because it is momentum based. If you fire it while standing still then it will go nowhere. Then there is Freezing Gaze that will fire where you look for 20 seconds, you're like Cyclops from X-Meh who can't stop the beam and could potentially hurt his friends.

Another one is Hidden Scorpion that is a touch spell, has a delay and requires you to be undetected. Volcano is random ground mayhem. Knowing Bethesda, they may steal these ideas and put them in the next tes. If you're saying that projectile kill is samey and uninteresting, then I agree. But it has got to be useful and convenient or else it's too "risky" for an investment, but should also be lacking enough to justify better spells in paid dlc and "legendary" whatever edition for full price again. I base that last sentence more on greed than me knowing anything about what they would really want to accomplish.

More like a leap of faith that turned out to be the equivalent of realizing that your god of worship is a myth.

Spellcrafting is something many fans were looking forward to. Myself included. That whole 'spreadsheety" BS was just that.... a boat load of crap. I was so distraught when it was revealed prelease, that it was removed.

Then Sir Todd continues with, "... we removed spellmaking, but we have something special planned for the mages." I've yet to see what the Hell that is exactly. I guess the plans were scrapped like the crafting alters.

I can't tell you how many hrs I spent at that altar coming up with all kinds of kookie combinations as well as incredibly viable and powerful ones as well. For practically or sheer fun, it was exciting to want to see how they would have improved on it. Sadly, and quite obviously, the implementation of improvement translates into omission.

Honestly, i think it's more to do with them using the Gamebryo engine than anything else. If they tried to make the spells actually a huge leap than other games i doubt it would functionally work with that. I hate gamebryo, one of the biggest reasons why every game is riddled with bugs and problems. They need to build an engine from the ground up imo

On unrelated note. Bathesta made a post on steam. It is a game call Lichdom, it seem like a game that can full fill our first person Mage game play that skyrim failed

But Stealth this engine was build from the ground up- oh wait.

Needless to say I have made more unique spells in Oblivion than there is in Skyrim, the whole magic system was downgraded so much, each school of magic was brutally beaten down like crazy. The favorite system just made the magic system more irksome, having to constantly pause the game to change spells, as a pure mage I found myself constantly using a good 4ish spells per encounter, that was a lot of pausing.

In the other games we have Hotkeying! Press the button and it's equipped/used without having to pause the game.

In a nutshell, yes I felt the destruction school, as well as the other schools lacking, I swear, games publishers now a days think gamers don't have the capacity to....think and establish patterns in our brain like humans are suppose to...so you know, they could live.

I want to see "Does X type of damage per Y seconds." not "Does MORE bleeding damage Yay!"

Engines evolve. No need to build a new baby from the ground up. The biggest reason why the games are buggy isn't because of the engine. It's because they are just so absolutely massive that they generate more reasons for things to go awry.

Even then the bugs aren't mainly engine related. The fact that all of the bugs that are fixed, are done so by actually fixing them, is proven with the unofficial patchers.

Granted, there are bugs that are engine related, but the other 99% are fixed by people that use the CK.