Well, let me put is this way:
1. There are Achetypes in this game since you can recreate them, people will do that, pretty much everyone does it would be my guess, dosent have to be on purpose.
The game actually endorses that because going Heavy Armor+2H Weapon+Stealth dosent make much sense, even less so 2H+1H and Shield or any type of melee weapon or Bows plus a lot of Magic.
Most people will probably end up with either a Warrior or an Assassin type Character+some supporting Magic or as a pure Mage. Magicka, Stamina and Health are very limiting in that aspect.
Archetypes in general do exist because they make sense, the skills that make up one archetype usually add up to a good and fun combination.
2. While I agree that balance DPS wise between classes is not needed in any single player game, if such a balance isnt there the game would either need to have much better and different ways to adjust its difficulty or at least a blance of DPS+Defense.
Also there isnt any difficulty in this game no matter which difficulty you play on, it is way to easy and I have yet to find a way get a challenge.
Maybe Bethesda really balanced it so characters with only 2H Weapon+Heavy Armor+Stealth skills with all level ups in Magicka and perks in Lockpicking are playable, it for sure looks like that.

The magic has been removed from TES

The "magic" has been removed from the magic in this series. :shifty:

Not until TES VI. And by then judging from what I've seen, it will probably end up as a God of War clone.

That's exactly what I'm saying; The option to be overpowered should always be there. Being overpowered is as easy as typing ~tgm, but there should be balanced, legit ways to do it as well. If you can be overpowered, it means that you can be whatever you want to be. If you cannot be overpowered, you inevitably get railroaded into one playstyle, and it's just not as much fun in the end.

Please no...

The Elder Scrolls: God of War :banghead:

Complaints not-withstanding, it is completely illogical to not include a spell for weakness to magicka - which can fix destruction's gameplay at higher levels. I mean, for [censored] sake, they have a poison for it! But yeah, much of the spells we all know and love have been cut for no reason.

ignore

Hit level 71... started as a magic user, but stopped at around 40-ish. Ironically, stopped using various schools at different levels. Illusion is staggered in usefulness... meaning when Fury and such spells stop being effect at level 7, 14 etc you stop using the school when you character surpasses that level. Kind of a design flaw imo. Thought it was funny when my character level surpassed the next rank of Fury before I even got to make use of it.

So at level 71 with perks in destro and illusion (for the silent casting) I can blow up an entire room with firestorm making every object fly around the room in the process (making me spend 40 minutes trying to see where that pesky "Unusual Gem" flew off to) or I can sneak attack with a conjured bow and kill the 4 mobs in the room in 4 shots before being discovered...

Magic is fine until around level 50 as a player. If the same combat style of magic scaled with me as it does my opposition (meaning enemy ice spears that one shot me did the same in return instead of taking 5 silent spell casts) perhaps I'd concur with the OPs statement. Late game, magic is trash. Or maybe having to cast 5 spells instead of 1 arrow is "balanaced" and I'm just old school.

Needless to say, personally I wasted a lot of perk points in the various magic trees on that level 71 character so I rerolled a sneak/thief/archer so I could actually play uninterrupted without having to completely adjust my playstyle as my level increases.

Waiting for a modder to fix magic just like they did in Oblivion because Bethesda hasn't gotten magic right yet. That being said, I'm thoroughly enjoy Skyrim, but to say that magic is fine tells me you haven't leveled a character beyond character level 40 and noticed the disparity because pre-40 magic is fine EXCEPT the hard level capped spells (ineffective at level 7, 14 etc).

This pretty much sums up the point I was attempting to make. I wasn't saying that Destruction should not be beefed up a bit and I don't remember at any point saying that the removal of custom made spells was a good thing. I said "mages" not "destruction mages" are not broken (re-read the title of the thread). I stand by this statement. You can still create and play a perfectly viable mage character to max level. The ability to do so is really only limited by how creative your willing to be with your playstyle and build. I think some people may have been confused by the example of a common destruction based build that I used with "Jimmy". The point I was attempting to make with that entire section was that it was ridiculous to do a warrior vs. destruction mage comparison(the most common comparison I keep seeing) as it implied there were set character archetypes. There are not. There are no defined archetypes in this game outside of what a player decides to create. Does this mean I am against beefing up Destruction? Not at all. If someone wants to make the argument that Destruction needs attention, then base it on the grounds that it is not fun to play the way you want to play at later levels; because your playstyle would require Destruction to do more damage to still remain viable playstyle for you. My point was(though it seems many people mistook my meaning and for that I take responsibility for not communicating my point clearly enough) don't base your comparison on "this guy's play style works better then my playstyle" arguments as they are, in my opinion, irrelevant.
In response to my views on game balance. Custom spell removal is a direct cause of developers trying to "Balance" Skyrim in my opinion and a prime example of why I think the traditional view of "balancing" is a bad thing in a TES game. Hence my point of not balancing Skyrim and letting players make the decision to whether or not they want to abuse it. Hope this clarifies my position a bit.

Spellmaking is what ruined magick in Oblivion for me. I hated the limited spell effects and the stupid little sliders. If they could make a BETTER system, then that's all well and good. Come up with it, post it, get some comments, edit, and email it to bethesda. Heck, everyone who agrees with it can email it to bethesda, maybe it will get released as a DLC or patch or something. But you HAVE to do something better than complain, or nothing will change.

Its not false logic to say that a character that uses all skills melee, magic, archery and crafting will be vastly overpowered in comparison to the character that chooses not to. The only thing that confuses me is why it took some of you this long to figure it out, because in every elder scrolls game I have played it has always been this way.

Yes with that option you can be however you want to be. Apparently people cannot seem to understand if something is lowered in terms of usefulness its useless after a while and its just there to look pretty. ( Looking at you destruction <_< ) Again this game is based on options and in terms of magic it is lacking.

*hugs* OP, thanks for putting into words what i could never be bothered to sit down and type =D

In more than the literal sense.

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It's more like Stealth tears the spine out of Magic, while Combat proceeds to beat Magic to death with it.

No, this is factually wrong because the game actively punishes you for a hybrid build.
A hybrid build will be at a relatively high level compared to his skill levels and how high he is up his perk trees.

Conversely, his enemies will have all level ups and perks put in their respective trees, without hybridisation.
Therefore, a level 25 bandit against a level 25 hybrid is very overpowered.

Yes I have stated several times spell creation could fix probably all of the problems in this game with its current stable of spells. But people cannot seem to understand or comprehend this. Some defend this game like its flawless. This game is a 10/10 for me its near perfect, its flawed.

Ok, so if you feel that the opportunity costs of using destruction spells outweighs the marginal benefits then don't use them, use illusion or conjuration instead.

Sorry, but you totally missed my point. The level reference of when you should drop destruction is not important.

Try it this way....


To play this game and get through the quests etc you have to kill stuff. All of the ways you kill stuff, EXCEPT FOR destruction, work and scale in similar ways.You can use any of them from level 1 until level 81 and expect them to do a relatively similar job on an enemy, if that enemy is of the appropriate level, EXCEPT FOR destruction.

It has nothing to do with combining different skills or "arcane arsenals", period.

Thats not a valid argument Bethesda should have found a solution for this.

I certainly agree that certain effects were unnecessarily removed. Others could have been tweaked to fit better into the feel of skyrim. The entire magic system feels rushed to me, the more I think about it.

Take necromancy, for example; out of the 240+ perks in the game, necromancy, something a load of people like to do, gets 2. And on the other hand, there are a ludicrous number of "apprentice, adept, expert, master" efficiency perks that could have done much cooler things, similar to the cool stuff you can do in the different weapon types.

They did not and half a year ago the forum was full of people going: 'Oh I wont miss spellmaking, its so 'spreadsheaty'"
We can 'dualwield' and they 'look cool'.
And now look at what we have got.
Wonderful guys.

Maybe you just svck at playing the game?

Personally, I play perma death and I also play on master difficulty. I play a hybrid character that is able to use 1h swords, destruction magic and archery just fine, in fact I feel overpowered with this combo. The previous builds I made were more specialized, one full melee and the other one a pure mage and neither of them were able to survive past level 15. My current hybrid build is the only build I made that is dominating under perma death.

I know it makes no sense.
I knew I would miss it, its the best thing about the entire magic system.
Now your right look, its gone!

Well, it WAS too spreadsheety. The way it was in Oblivion was terrible. But to remove it entirely wasn't the way to go, I don't think.