4221

I’m playing a mage, I guess I can just turn down the difficulty if he starts to peter out. You’ve got me considering a new character though, I already want to try out other play styles.

I haven’t been having any real trouble in combat, but I did notice a weird thing in a couple of dragon fights. The axe I carry around does way more damage to dragons than my spells do. Maybe it’s because I’m using fire and they have a resistance, but it takes a while to wear them down with firebolts. Axe swings cut them down in just a few hits, even though I haven’t raised my melee skills or gotten any perks, and it isn’t a special axe. Pretty strange, but I haven’t used the weapon in enough other combat to tell if it does better than magic.

4222

I hate to say this, but Skyrim is the first game that has me forward to DLC. I am disappoint with me.

4223

Sounds like this game is trying to improve on the imbalance of previous Elder Scrolls and many other fantasy RPGs where players are often left wondering why play with weapons when magic usually offers greater damage, area effect, and utility… but they overshot and went too far the other way.

Very disappointing to hear that about Destruction scaling. I guess I’ll remake with an archer.

Until now I was wondering where my bonus damage from a high skill would kick in…

4224

Don’t despair though, I’m guessing it’ll be fixed, one way or the other, soon.
That said, even though I’m not a melee fighter at heart I’m loving my new warrior; being in the thick of it brings a new perspective besides my usual “stand in the back and kite the bastards”.

4225

And that’s usually how it goes… then you find yourself either examining game mechanics to see what’s going on, or you visit the forums and find other people are coming to the same conclusion.

I had the same thing. I was playing as a mage, primarily into Destruction at first for combat, and started noticing that my bow (which I had 0 perks in and pretty poor skills) was doing significantly better with no mana cost… then I got nice sneak bonuses with it as well. So I switched it up and started using a sword in combat and same thing. I tried rolling up a sneak Archer, got him up to L29, and it’s so easy I’m bored… I’m going to have to up the difficulty or something.

As a mage, no matter how much you have in Destruction, you are much, much better off just summoning a Bound Bow and plinking with that or skip the middle man and just use a nice bow you find on the ground.

Yea, there’s several easy solutions, I’d be surprised if this isn’t addressed in the first patch. It seems a pretty obvious design oversight, it almost feels like something was in place (like Spellcrafting or some other system) and was removed without Destruction being retooled.

4226

I haven’t played far in the game yet and i actually have never played a mage in an ES game, usually play as stealthy archer with healing, but are there AOE type spells available? Wouldn’t this offset the fact that melee does more damage?

I mean, if a warrior can hit for say 100 per swing but a mage can shoot a fireball that hits for 40 but can hit three or four enemies at once, doesn’t that sort of balance things out? The warrior does more damage to one target at a time (and naturally has to be close to the target) where the mage does less damage but to multiple targets and from range. Or am I understanding the complaints incorrectly?

4227

I think the problem is that eventually, at the end of the game, that mage is still hitting 3 enemies for 40 while the warrior is slamming people with 500 damage criticals.

But hey, at least the mage is using like, zero mana to cast, AMIRITE?!

4228

The 2-hander hit everyone in front of you perk only affects sideways power attacks, so it’s a little awkward to use reflexively, or when you have any friendlies around (hey horse, how about you stop attacking the snow bear thats clawing your face off and go run away somewhere mysterious like you usually do when we’re ambushed by harmless bandits?) since aiming it is a little weird. It is incredibly satisfying to massacre 2-3 goons bottlenecked in a doorway with one swing though.

4229

It doesn’t offset it completely. Yes, there’s AOE, but for one thing there’s not a whole lot of AE situations as opposed to a game like Diablo. But like Pogo was saying, if you’re being attacked by three guys and you’re hitting them for 50 damage each whereas the archer/rogue/warrior is hitting for 500 a pop, it still doesn’t come anywhere near to compensate.

But you’re completely boned in the “boss” fights. Well, maybe not “boned” once you get Impact as you can hope to chain-stagger them, but it is a brutally long and tedious slog of spamming a dual-casted spell and guzzling 30 mana pots - and god help you if the big baddie has Lightning or Wards.

Don’t get me wrong, the Mage archetype still works, but it’s all relying on Conjuration and other schools. As a matter of fact, summon a Fire atronach(sp?) and note how much more damage its Firebolts hit for than your own - same for mage Companions! There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a “Pure Mage” being reliant on multiple spell schools, but what is wrong is when Pets are more effective casters than you, and how you’re better off attacking with an unperked Bow or Sword than you are using your Destruction spells. That’s just off.

Also, something I need to test but is just hearsay at this point - I’ve heard that there may be a bug with Dual Casting where instead of extra damage, the multiplier is being applied to mana cost instead. The forum post I read had the guy with a save game shoot a Dual-casting firebolt at an NPC, looked at the damage and mana cost. He then repeated it with shooting one firebolt with each hand and found it did more damage and he had far more mana. Like I said this is completely hearsay and something I need to test, but I do wonder if there are bugs currently in the system which would also explain why Pets and Companion’s destruction spells hit so much harder than your own.

4230

So, some magic balance issues seem to be rearing their heads, has there been any official word on whether adjustments will be coming in future patches?

4231

No official word I don’t believe. I imagine the dev team is on a very well-deserved vacation this week.

4232

Wow, so lazy. We should start a petition and see where that gets us.

4233

To the MOOOOOOOOOON!

4234

I respecced my character from destruction to onehanded and am considerably more powerful. I still use stealth/archery for most dungeoneering, but now I pop up my swords in melee range.

4235

Respecced?

4236

When people say mages are underpowered, do they mean just in comparison to other builds, or are they struggling to survive combat?

I remember my Oblivion character was practically invincible at higher levels. Making him twice as invincible or half as invincible wouldn’t have made much difference.

Tony

4237

Probably easily done through console codes… wipe all your perks, then give yourself points again.

I don’t blame people for doing that if they like to just have one character to go through the whole game, really. I personally like the feeling of starting off as a weak peon and rising up through skills naturally.

4238

Mages are perfectly viable if you complete the main quest and generally speaking finish the game at lower levels (around level 30).
The issue with mages right now is the lack of scaling of spell damage unlike weapons for warriors or rogues which can be upgraded to a obscene amount of damage but this is generally only a problem if you are playing a long game (level 30+).

4239

I have a … 9th level Breton mage and I was scrabbling to survive doing the mage quests. Lots of fear spells and running away.

Which I’m all for, btw. I think if I had a tank buddy I’d be fine, and that might be the key.

4240

To be fair, the mage quests are surprisingly difficult.