» Sat Dec 10, 2011 11:32 pm http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1293704-the-people-who-say-destruction-is-fine-havent-played-it-at-higher-levels/
This is a transcript of the OP in that thread:
I'm not going to go over the arguments for why destruction is underpowered since I know it's been argued to death, and this specific topic probably has been as well, but I thought I'd go ahead and make it clear for people who think it's not underpowered.
DESTRUCTION DOESN'T SCALE. Again, this point has been made as well. It's probably the main point that is made. But let me summarize: once you get your expert level spells that hit for 90 damage with perks, or your master levels ones that hit for somewhere in the mid 100s depending on the spell, that's it. Your damage will never ever go up again. Now, someone in a thread before calculated that destruction can do around 146 or so damage per second with these numbers compared to 500-600 or so for one handed. That's fine for lower levels since, as many people have argued, 146 dps is more than enough to kill pretty much anything the game throws at you, and so the discrepancy doesn't matter.
But once your enemies start actually scaling in appreciable amounts, it becomes easily noticeable how weak destruction is.
I realized this as I, a level 60 mage, was running through one of the dungeons with a dragon priest at the end. These dungeons are in general supposed to be much harder than your simple bandit dungeons that you crawl through for miscellaneous quests. At the final fight, the dragon priest popped out of his tomb/sarcophagus along with about 3 draugr deathlords. Eh fine, no problem.
But then, more started coming out in a staggered fashion. I expect this was meant to spread out the amount of enemies you would have to fight over a longer amount of time, but it was taking me around 15 incinerates (the highest damaging single target spell you can get) to kill a single deathlord. Because of this, they started coming out faster than I could kill them, and I ended up with 6 deathlords + the dragon priest on me by the time they had all come out. That's over 100 casts to clear the entire room of them, which is not only ridiculous but impossible to manage without the -100% casting enchant from a fully maxed enchanting tree. One tree shouldn't absolutely need another tree to function, much less require 100 skill in that tree (which is required to get -100% magicka reduction).
To kill them all, I had to either back track through half the entire dungeon to keep them all from piling on top of me as I tried to kill them, or use the mass illusion spell mayhem, which caused them all to fight each other leaving me to sit there and watch. Which wasn't a problem, mind you, but it made me realize how ridiculously weak and slow at killing things destruction is at higher levels.
This is why scaling needs to be addressed. Again, for the majority of people who will never level up that high, 90 damage is more than enough to roll everything and complete the main quest without trouble. But if you like to explore or train other skills at all, and level up fairly high in the process, you will see why destruction needs to be fixed. Please address this Bethesda.
DESTRUCTION DOESN'T SCALE. Again, this point has been made as well. It's probably the main point that is made. But let me summarize: once you get your expert level spells that hit for 90 damage with perks, or your master levels ones that hit for somewhere in the mid 100s depending on the spell, that's it. Your damage will never ever go up again. Now, someone in a thread before calculated that destruction can do around 146 or so damage per second with these numbers compared to 500-600 or so for one handed. That's fine for lower levels since, as many people have argued, 146 dps is more than enough to kill pretty much anything the game throws at you, and so the discrepancy doesn't matter.
But once your enemies start actually scaling in appreciable amounts, it becomes easily noticeable how weak destruction is.
I realized this as I, a level 60 mage, was running through one of the dungeons with a dragon priest at the end. These dungeons are in general supposed to be much harder than your simple bandit dungeons that you crawl through for miscellaneous quests. At the final fight, the dragon priest popped out of his tomb/sarcophagus along with about 3 draugr deathlords. Eh fine, no problem.
But then, more started coming out in a staggered fashion. I expect this was meant to spread out the amount of enemies you would have to fight over a longer amount of time, but it was taking me around 15 incinerates (the highest damaging single target spell you can get) to kill a single deathlord. Because of this, they started coming out faster than I could kill them, and I ended up with 6 deathlords + the dragon priest on me by the time they had all come out. That's over 100 casts to clear the entire room of them, which is not only ridiculous but impossible to manage without the -100% casting enchant from a fully maxed enchanting tree. One tree shouldn't absolutely need another tree to function, much less require 100 skill in that tree (which is required to get -100% magicka reduction).
To kill them all, I had to either back track through half the entire dungeon to keep them all from piling on top of me as I tried to kill them, or use the mass illusion spell mayhem, which caused them all to fight each other leaving me to sit there and watch. Which wasn't a problem, mind you, but it made me realize how ridiculously weak and slow at killing things destruction is at higher levels.
This is why scaling needs to be addressed. Again, for the majority of people who will never level up that high, 90 damage is more than enough to roll everything and complete the main quest without trouble. But if you like to explore or train other skills at all, and level up fairly high in the process, you will see why destruction needs to be fixed. Please address this Bethesda.
And here is a quote regarding balance of destruction relative to other methods of damage dealing:
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.
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.
Sneak kills are balanced because they can only be done once (generally). I believe that the perk that lets you keep re-sneaking and re-doing sneak attacks is broken because it removes the element that makes sneak attacks balanced. In the same way, magic is usually balanced by a high risk, high reward philosophy. Magical spells deal a lot of damage, but in return mages are squishy and prone to dying. Skyrim got the squishy part right, but it didn't get the damage part right. Melee generally do less damage than mages, but that is balanced out by the fact that they are hard to kill. In Skyrim, they are both harder to kill and do more damage. See how that breaks the system?
So yes, different classes play differently. And different should mean exactly that. In Skyrim, though, different means weaker, at least with regards to destruction and mage damage.
Continue discussion.
