Kitting and evading sure as heck does. Blast a few spells, move back around a corner.. oh look my magicka is going up... blast some more, move some more... avoiding damage.. dealing damage.

Sorry to have to break it to you but a successful damage dealing mage on master difficulty has to keep active and put some skill into their gameplay. If it's too much for you, turn down the difficulty.

You know how you would enchant your weapons with shock damage? Instead of doing that, you use potions to increase your destruction spell damage. Those dual-wielding BAMFs would not be half as powerful as what they are without an absorb health/shock enchantment on their weapons.

I wasn't aware that evading enemies with my warrior would restore my health or stamina.

A mage that wears armor, is a battlemage, not a pure mage. game mechanics for a pure mage, using alteration encourages you not to wear armor.

A few? Try 2. Like I said, it took me 15 casts of incinerate to kill a draugr deathlord. Without any enchanted gear and using only the destruction perk, that's 212 mana per dual cast. So I'd have to use 7 and a half full magicka bars to kill a single deathlord by your method. Good luck with that.

Meanwhile a melee character can kill a deathlord in a few hits and without having to worry about magicka.

Magicka regen is pittiful in combat. What you are proposing is kinda like watching paint dry between each kill.



Stamina regen is very good and since you only need a tiny bit for one power attack, it's not even that important.


You sure? Let's compare my level 45 with 100 destruction/enchanting mage and my new level 28 with 75 smith and twohanded barbarian that put every single level up bonus in HP vs the aforementioned arch necromancer in master difficulty.

End result? My barbarian using only a crafted glass greatsword and enhanced with no additional bonuses (nothing, no pot, no enchants) using only a single +20% twohanded damage ring killed the necromancer nearly as fast as my mage that had the best enchants one can find and spent the whole fight spaming the strongest lightning spell available (ie, dual casted expert thuder spell) I can't wait to gear up my warrior even more and get more HP! I didn't even get all the damage perks I could get at my level.

If you look at damage per magicka point that's is not the most efficient damage spell (the incinerate mentioned up thread). And why on earth would you be talking about no enchanted gear, and level 50+ gameplay at the same time? Are you seriously surprised that a gimped character is gimp?

You could easily drop that cost by huge amount by just visiting npc vendors and buying some destruction gear if for some bizarre reason you don't want to have the enchanting skill line. But then if you insist on ignoring enchanting, then make sure any comparison to melee you make is to a melee who ignores enchanting and smithing. You know, in the interest of balance.

And I cannot emphasize this enough. Over and over people in this discussion are comparing intentionally gimped mages to maxed out melee. It's dishonest and has nothing to do with balance.

Fine. Any excuse against health?

Fine. Compare a mage with full enchants and a melee with full enchants. Mage gets -100% magicka cost to cast gimped spells, melee get +160% damage. Melee also get bonuses from smithing as well while mages do not. They both get bonuses from alchemy, but melee can also use alchemy to boost their enchanting and smithing bonuses. See where I'm going with this? Gimped mage vs. gimped melee, melee wins. Maxed mage vs. maxed melee, melee wins. Go test it out if you don't believe me. The poster above you just gave an example too.

It svcks only if you do nothing to improve it. My 56 mage regens 50% the cost of a double casted fireball in the time it takes for them to recover from the stagger. That's a very useful amount. Robe 150% + 3 items at 62% +50% from restoration perks.

Oh look, put some effort into your character not being gimp, and they are not gimp.

Perhaps because lightning magic reduces enemy's magicka? The opponent is a necromancer, so maybe that.

Also, the problem with destruction magics is that they cost too much to cast and deal not enough damage. Compared to another ranged class (let's say archer, but there's only archer) destruction mages don't deal the same amount of damage in the same amount of time, largely because you have to wait for magicka to regenerate (while arrows don't cost stamina). If you don't have any enchantment, that is.

Really? Because a FULL Mage, who uses all schools is almost unstoppable.

Ah right, forgot that one. Get some better armor and as many magic resist as you can. A single health pot will go you a much longer way than those pitiful magicka pots for mages go. My warrior never run out of HP pots so far but I cannot say the same for my mage pre -100% cost gearing.

Without at least 50% reduction in gear, a single magicka pot can at most allow you to cast one dualcast expert spell. Weaker pots don't even give you half the magicka needed.

Yeah destruction magic is very lackluster. Honestly, I cannot figure a use for it other then "oh gosh I really screwed up and need a fix fast" moments. Alteration magic is good in concept but kind of annoying at the same time. If warriors were one shotted by every other creature unless they used a skill that drains stamina and had to be manually refreshed every 60seconds.. I suspect there would be some outrage.

Lets break this down shall we(looking at other schools in combat)?

illusion - Frenzy and calm and invisibility. Assuming the target is within the level cap and type it means you can turn a creature on its allies. If fully perked not even being undead will save it.

Alteration - Armor spells + paralyze. Sure it might not help you against swarms of critters, but if your facing swarms of critters with a mage your sol anyhow. Also paralyze is great for working on any other combat skills you might want.

Restoration - Normally not thought of as a combat skill, but it is still highly effective. Just heal your warrior companion. Less mana intensive then trying to kill your targets with destruction magic. Really, I have just hid behind rocks and healed companions every now and then to off dragons.

Conjuration - Summon critter and hide behind a rock. Depending on your strength the wait won't be long.


Funny how destruction is the only combat ability that is utterly dependent on one or more skills to be viable.

And another thing that makes no sense at all. Why are people going on about it takes a mage X seconds to kill a mob but a melee takes Y seconds therefore it's bad?

What on earth makes you think only X = Y is balance? How on earth does that make sense? By that logic the fact that a sneak kills in one hit means both mages and melee need to be adjusted to kill just as fast!

Different classes play different. Different builds kill things at different speeds. This is a good thing and has absolutely nothing to do with balance. It means that choices we make actually results in differences in how you play and how combat plays out. Otherwise the game would be so incredibly monotonous and boring.

i think more important is the level you play at and your magicka bonuses. i play on Novice and kill everything with 1 or 2 fireballs. i am level 33 and have expert robes of destruction, an expert hood, a 60% magicka regeneration ring and savron's (sp?) amulet. im hoping when i get to level 50 that things will be a little harder to kill. if not i'll maybe bump up one level from novice.

I guess you missed the part where I said I was refering to the post up thread about using incinerate. You post about lightning was not there when I started my reply.

I'm able to do ~612 damage with a dual wielded Thunderbolt. That's a lot of damage. However, without the mana reduction enchantments or hundreds of mana pots, I wouldn't be able to cast enough of them for the damage to matter.

Even then, people have been able to make weapons that far exceed that damage and have no restrictions on their use.

The question is then, so what? Different playstyles play differently. Some are unbalanced. If you don't like it, either you change the game with mods, or go away. The only thing Bethesda HAS to do is to create a game world. Support for "balance" isn't something they have to do when definitions of "balance" vary wildly between players. Melee characters gain power by upping their damage. Mages gain power by being able to cast more spells before they run dry.

In a single player game, talks of "balance" is stupid. All that matters is "am I able to complete the game or not?" The answer is "yes, quite easily". Saying this as a level 57 mage who casts nothing but Destruction spells in combat, with no issues. Yes, I get one shot if I get careless or get caught. You know what happens then? I reload, and say "okay, not doing that again", then kill every [censored] in the room without taking damage at all. It's a different playstyle from running into the room and hitting everything, taking a load of hits and surviving. If you don't like it, that's a different issue than "game balance" altogether.

You clearly have no idea how strong smithed weapons can be without putting any enchants on them. It's not even close.

And a full melee, who uses all schools, is also unstoppable while dealing an absurd amount of damage. A mage doesn't deal nearly as much damage, and can still get one to two shot if he/she isn't careful. My point? They both get the job done, but with a mage the process is much slower and more painful.

Going with that logic, the mage using destruction should be the one doing the most damage, since thats how it is in the series, lore, and even genre. Yet they do the least amount of damage with their direct damage dealing skill.

There seems to be a HUGE abundance of magic potions in the game. I BARELY find health potions in dungeons while I find TONS of magicked potions.

So you're saying that a character who can run into a room, with nearly no regard for his own well-being, and smash everything up in a (relatively) short amount of time, is balanced compared to the character who can get one-shot, has to carefully maneuver around enemies, and has to cast spells that kill enemies even slower than the reckless berserker's axe swings? Yes it's a different playstyle, but it shouldn't be a worse one.

It's not that. They do, during the "normal" levels range. Once it gets to 'high", they no longer do, while melee and bows still do, that's what they're addressing

You can play as a pure destruction mage until you hit the "problematic" level range, at which point you are forced to change your play style, while "playing the way you want" is the series' slogan