My first bear kill taught me about Skyrim’s river system. I was on a bluff overlooking a river and spotted an enormous cave bear hanging out inside a building on the other side. I shot him with an arrow and he charged into the water after me but got caught in a current and couldn’t get across. So I just strolled down the riverbank casually peppering him with arrows as he floated lazily downstream like a big brown furious furry barge.
My other bear kills have not been as relaxing.
They’re tough for archers. Without a sneak attack critical, you’re way behind the curve by the time they close the distance. It has nothing to do with how strong your character is in general, just what kind of enemies they’re suited to handle.
Haha, I knew this post was coming. It also took me a while to discover this. Then I immediately used it to escape from a bear!
It’s a problem with magic; unlike melee and ranged damage (bows), magic doesn’t scale beyond the 100 threshold which means that a late game mage on a long game (level 30+) deals pitiful damage when compared to a warrior or rogue.
It’s a very long thread but it goes into all the details about why magic is underpowered as it is.
WarrenM
4164
True. This is why I generally run from dragons instead of trying to engage them. Melee doesn’t do a whole lot of good…
So!
I’m 60 hours into the game. I’m a level 28 Bosmer assassin type with a focus on archery, stealth, lock picking, one handed/dual wielding axes, alchemy, and enchanting.
I’ve done no more than 5 quests in any given quest line, including the main quest. I have only joined 3 factions, and one of those wasn’t really intended (college). There is at least one city that I have not set foot in and several more that I’ve only visited briefly.
I’ve been devoting nearly all of my time to exploring the world on foot and doing random quests.
Christ, this game is huge. Loving it still.
I’m just glad it’s not just me. Hopefully in a patch they can address Magic’s shortcomings. It seems like enemies using magic have no problem just destroying ME and those same enemies take my entire magicka pool to take down. I decided to focus on Conjuration for my secondary - summoning a deamora prince has been really helping with those later game enemies. :)
Enidigm
4167
Dude, Very Hard. I’m one-shotted by Saber Cats.
DeepT
4168
Great… So magic doesn’t work out in the end game? I started as my melee / magic assassin guy but found that neither my melee or magic was working out so I started a pure mage.
I am level 15 and am having trouble with mobs while my NPC with a 2h weapon in steel armor seems to annihilate dudes. Its only going to get worse? Maybe I should start my melee guy I have been thinking about.
Let’s summon MattKeil. Maybe he can comment on late game magic from a non-min-maxer perspective.
Regarding magic damage, bear in mind that there are two more tiers above Bleed’s 72 rating. And I believe there are spells that become available then. So you’re basically still throwing around Adept-class spells; hopefully expert and master open up more powerful spells.
Of course I could look in the CE but I’m home from work and rushed for time right now.
I’m probably the only one who does this, but if I see 4 gold pieces lying on a table, instead of picking them up, I go to the console and:
player.additem 0000000f 4
That’s 4 entries I saved from being recorded in my savegame! I need it to last for hundreds of hours!
Magic, as it stands, is broken.
Broken in the sense that it does not scale as well as melee/ranged combat when combined with enchanting/smithing, a necessity if you are playing anything beyond Adept difficulty.
It’s not so much that mages don’t scale but that the main tools of damage, namely Destruction, stop scaling at a certain threshold.
Seriously, there are a couple of mindbending threads with all the theorycrafting showing it on the bethesda forums:
Mega Epic Warrior/Rogue 2469 Armor. / 3199 Damage:
How and Why Magic is broken:
I really wouldn’t advise rolling a mage for a long game but if someone is playing just the main quest and some side quests and ends the game at around level 30 it’s hard but doable.
They don’t
Thunderbolt (like I said earlier) does 60 base +50% more if you have the right perks, so 90. About what I can swing for, minus critical hits, etc. Also, it costs a base of 200 magicka, or about 189 for me at 72. I’m sure I can get that down to about 80, once I hit 75 and put a perk in Expert (reducing the cost 50%) but that’s still only maybe 4 castings or so tops. I can swing 4 times much easier, too.
The Master rank thunder spell deals 70 base damage (105) per second though, but it’s probably going to be over 300 magicka until you hit 100 in skill, when you can (finally) get the 50% cost reduction.
Maybe in the VERY late game, mages become good and viable, but in this middle game to late, I think something needs to be able to bump up damage. Maybe skill in destruction should have some small effect?
I got jumped by a couple of those, but they conveniently fell off a cliff before they could do any damage.
I get the impression that a lot of those guys insist on playing on a higher difficulty. That said, I did restart my pure mage of 10 hours for fighter type character. I took a peek at the later spells and they’re just not that interesting. The lack of spellmaking really hurts; I miss making combining various spell effects and (best of all) naming them. Plus, my major complaints with the game as a mage (can’t block with spell+sword, too few hotkeys, etc) are likely to be fixed by mods in the near future.
WarrenD
4176
Pretty much the same thing happened to me, one huge cat jumped out of nowhere and having read posts about how tough they were I said looks like I’m done, cat food now, he lunged at me I hit with my hammer he then fell back and stumbled over the cliff, so still don’t know if my burly warrior can take one on or not.
WarrenM
4177
I’d say there’s an excellent chance that, yes, you’re the only one.
I beat the game last night with a level 16 mage, and it wasn’t hard at all. At Adept difficulty.
Well, I was playing as pure mage on Adept difficulty and at around level 21 started to feel that I did basically no damage so I did the same as you, rerolling a warrior and once it’s patched or modded in I’ll go back to my mage.
@John: yeah, completing the game at level 16 on Adept is easy with every possible combination of skills, that’s not the point. On my mage at level 16 I was killing the first dragon, had not even cleared half the quests in Whiterun alone.
Also, what 4 entries? I suppose taking 4 gold pieces would modify your total money to increase in 4 units. I very much doubt there is 100 entries in the savegame file if you have 100 gold pieces.
Even if gold is not considered in a special way (very possible), it would be soemthing like this: Type of item: gold, quantity: 100. 2 records, not 4 or 100.
