Bethesda Hates Mages: 12 Reasons Magic in Skyrim Sucks

[TheMadTypist]

I didn't really like how they went with a "large mana pool, slow regeneration" style for the mages. Unlike my fighters or rogues, it always felt like every battle was on an egg timer where I had to remove the threat before it went off, or desperately run around trying to survive long enough to reset the timer again. Levels up and cost enchants lengthened the timer, but it was still there.

I'd have prefered a "small pool, constant regeneration" method, where charging or holding charged spells didn't stop the regeneration of mana, but took their cost from your reserves while charging, and perhaps leveling up the regeneration would increase the rate such that lower level spells would eventually be possible to cast while only slowing regeneration to pay their charge costs instead of draining from your reserves.

That would mean mages could open up with the big guns till the reserves are drained, then mix in some low cost spells while they recharged, then go back in swinging with a big blast again, and so on in a carefully managed cycle. That would have been more fun than emptying your mana on something, then spending the rest of the battle running in circles while waiting for enough mana to cast again.

Plus the "nursemaid" buff or summon spells that required constant recasting could be rewritten to something you applied to yourself with a specific drain on mana per second, rather than a x second duration, and have them drop off if your mana reserves ever empty. "do I go for this last fireball, and maybe end the fight, or stick to sparks and keep my armor?" kinda thing. More thought and strategy to the fight and less eggtimer.

 

[Luminous_Umbra]

I really don't understand a lot of the issues brought up in this.

1. Yes, it's annoying, but if it wasn't magic would be stupidly broken.

2. Fair enough, but it is ultimately satisfying.

3. I think that "something reasonable" is a bit of an understatement. With proper perks, mage armor is amazing and as long as you know how long it lasts, it really isn't a problem.

4. Maybe it's just me, but I almost never put points into health.

5. True, but how exactly could this be fixed? I mean, if it was a close kill, I could see maybe grabbing an enemy's head and liquifying it with whatever brand magic you are using, but how exactly could you make distance kills interesting? (Besides, I love how the current kill cams often send enemies flying farther then they probably should be.)

6. Personal opinions aside, they do feel a bit lacking. Although, considering they have to compare to such things as Daedric and Dragonbone/Dragonscale, it is a bit of a losing battle.

7. Perhaps not, but it becomes easier to cast lots of the magic, which is an increase in damage still. Plus, going from firebolt to fireball does a lot more than one might think.

8 + 9. No, but it can be boosted by potions, along with duration for other spell types. (I personally only need them for boss fights.)

10. I can't speak for Oblivion or Morrowind, but Skyrim has a few perks spread among the skill trees that work for each other. Illusion has one that makes all spells silent (Fixing that loud mage armor problem.), Restoration has one that makes all spells work better against the undead, and Alteration has two perks that makes you less susceptible to spells. Also, sharing spell cost reduction would, again, break magic. Dual casting I could see being shared, but not cost reduction.

11. First, there are ways to make followers at least immune to magic damage. Also, use discretion. You wouldn't swing a sword while a guard was in the way, would you?

12. Completely and utterly wrong, unless you have no patience and/or are unwilling to try. I've played a pure mage, archer, and fighter in Skyrim, with no mods and avoiding exploits, on expert to master and I honestly find fighter to be the hardest. Distance makes combat immensely easy, plus you have to rely on the block skill to save you as a fighter (If you mess up a shield slam, it hurts). Archer is the best though.

Is magic in Skyrim perfect? No, I personally would like a bit more versatility.
Is magic in Skyrim bad? No, certainly not.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

Not tried these much but Magic overhaul http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/29276/? and Apocalypse http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/16225/? seem to fix that problem.

 

[Lyri]

I haven't played in a long time but I never ventured into the dremora dungeons because I left spell creation well alone, which is probably why I do not recall those things.
The character I rampaged through the game was a typical nord blunt warrior.

Fair enough Nord warrior's my favourite way to play The Elder Scrolls as well, just smashing through dungeons with a massive hammer - I'm actually playing through Arena right now for the first time with one, and it's surprisingly good!

I'm tempted to grab it and play it, I've always been a fan of the older games in the series. I should revists Oblivion first though, I never really played it much.

 

[Fearzone]

Thanks for this walk down memory lane. I played Skyrim for 2 months. No comment on how many hours Steam says I played, just that, when I saw it, at the end of the two months, I calculated the number of hours in a month for comparison.

On Topic: I mean if Skyrim played like D&D then maybe, okay, if all you ever use is destruction magic. But in Elder Scrolls you mix different class abilities together to create something awesome like a battle mage in plate with a two handed axe slinging lightning bolts and storm andronachs. That literally was my first character and he rocked. By the endgame he was just using magic both for weapons and armor.

My second character I attempted a more typical mage path from the start and, yeah, that didn't last long before--well I don't remember how I got by but other than letting my follower do the tanking for me, and always having andronachs and raising zombies. I mean if you don't use your follower, that is a lot of loot you have to carry by yourself. May as well use them during encounters.

Okay you're right destruction magic was weak if that is the only thing you ever use. But conjuration magic was crazy imba. When you get that ability to have two summonables, game over man, just sit back while your follower and summonables take care of business. Alteration magic isn't bad. Healing magic works. Raising zombies... sure. Disagree it is harder to play with a caster than a weapons character.

 

[Mr_Terrific]

He's 100% right here. With a few gold transmutes and a bit of smithing, I can easily level up any crap armor twice as much right along with whatever weapon I'm using. Hell, with potions and enchanting, you can create weapons that basically one shot everything in the game. And that's all before level right around level 35.....

Meanwhile, those little fireballs don't do shit when you have a dragon or (god forbid) a bear running at you. It's completely absurd.

Anyone who CHOOSES magic over the much more useful warrior class is do so out of boredom or want of a greater challenge.

The main issue is that there is only a handful of items that boost magic damage. I think I found a crown that boosts shock damage by %30 or some crap. Meanwhile, I have rings that make me do +40 2 hand AND another enchant on top of that which stacks with the Necklace/gloves enchants of the same...which means there's very few fights that give me trouble.

I hope they fix magic for the next ES game...and I don't mean that overpriced mmo.

 

[Shamanic Rhythm]

I've never enjoyed the magic in The Elder Scrolls. The secondary magic skills are cool, but the destruction type spells are just awful. Firing slow moving projectiles at rapidly moving enemies is bad enough, but throw in a mana bar that runs out very quickly and you're just taking the piss. I've never made a character who used destruction as their primary means of attack: magic was always a backup to melee.

 

[Naqel]

I made a similar list myself:

1. You didn't mod it.
2. You didn't mod it.
3. You didn't mod it.
4. You didn't mod it.
5. You didn't mod it.
6. You didn't mod it.
7. You didn't mod it.
8. You didn't mod it.
9. You didn't mod it.
10. You didn't mod it.
11. You didn't mod it.

12. You're not using conjuration.

 

[joshuaayt]

Yeah, I've always hated how TES handles magic.
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the idea of having all these cool different schools of magic, I don't want to lose that- but it's so much extra work to make a pure mage work.
I was really hoping they'd have scaled magic damage in Skyrim; the UI made it look like spell damage might change as you levelled up, but it's all static, just like the earlier games.

 

[persephone]

And this is why the very first mod I ever installed was a magic scaling mod. And I installed it very early on, after I realized that magic didn't scale like your weapons do.

That said, if you install a magic scaling mod and know which spells you will and won't find useful (i.e., you've already experimented a lot with other characters), you *can* play a dedicated mage, and do fairly well. Is it harder than playing another character type? Oh yes. I actually played a "pure" mage through to level 30 recently, just as an interesting challenge. A friend of mine played a "pure" mage at the same time, but *without* the magic scaling mod. We both succeeded at our goals, but he had to be a hell of a lot more careful than I did, and last I heard he was still getting stomped by a lot of dragon battles.

As for balancing magic versus might, I wonder if part of the problem with Skyrim is that it condenses ALL melee weapons into two skill trees. In Morrowind and Oblivion, there were half a dozen or so different weapon skills, which was actually on par with how many magic skills there were. Skyrim also has fewer types of weapons than Morrowind and I think Oblivion (been too long since I've poked Oblivion to say for sure). I like a lot of things that Skyrim does better than Morrowind, but when I play Skyrim, I often find myself longing for Morrowind's rich variety of weapon choices. While it's convenient to be able to switch from playing a war axe to a sword without blinking in Skyrim, maybe it's actually *too* convenient. Maybe the next single player game in the series should re-expand the One and Two Handed trees into specific weapon types.

Of course, this would work a lot better if you could move perks around (say it costs you money, or you have to do it within so many levels of investing the perk); nothing sucks more than dropping a few perks into a specific weapon skill, only to realize you really would prefer a different weapon and you're never getting those perks back.

I suppose you could also condense the magic schools, in a similar vein to how the weapons were condensed, but that feels way too simplistic. (Though I do wish they'd condense Pickpocket back into Stealth; I've just never found it worth it to invest my precious perk points and time into *just* picking pockets.)

All this said, I almost never actually play "pure" characters; I like to mix things up. Almost every character I've played in Skyrim learns Restoration magic, for example. And once you add in a proper magic scaling mod to balance things up, a fighter with healing magic becomes a formidable force indeed! I generally only keep potions around as backup for when my magicka runs dry.

 

[grigjd3]

"I first discovered this in Morrowind when I rolled a new fighter and killed my first foe in two or three hits. Then I rolled a mage and spent all my mana trying (unsuccessfully) to burn someone to death. Then I ran around in circles waiting for it to recharge,"

I'm going to guess you didn't actually play a thousand hours of Morrowind because if you had, you might realize that in the game that was given to us by the developers, magic didn't recharge just because you ran around. To wit, from http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Magic

"Magicka can only be replenished by resting, using Restore Magicka, Spell Absorption or Absorb Magicka effects."

Also, my mages in Skyrim rocked it, dropping dragons with various forms of ice spikes.

 

[The Almighty Aardvark]

I've always found magic in Oblivion and Skyrim incredibly boring. Just because of the nature of first person viewpoint everything feels like you're just firing special arrows at the enemy. Add to that the fact that it's incredibly tedious to play mages in Skyrim. They do small amounts of damage and burn out quickly, so much more often then not I just find myself spending the majority of my time in combat running away waiting to regain enough mp to finish an enemy.

Particularly if you're trying to approach harder areas you'll need to do this several times per enemy:
-Attack enemy until mana bar is depleted
-Run away until he you're no longer being chased
-Heal
-Walk back
-Repeat 3-4 times
-Move on to next enemy

I like games that let me challenge myself without turning it into a giant tedious chore. In Skyrim I found that the only way I could find using magic enjoyable was to turn the difficulty down low enough that I could kill at least one enemy with a full mp bar without having to run away.

Maybe I'm doing something horribly wrong and there's some easy way to either increase your damage substantially without using more mp or increase your mp substantially. Or perhaps I should be stocking up with enough mana potions that I can use one every ten seconds. Either way despite my efforts Skyrim has never been able to hold my interest long enough to find out

 

[grigjd3]

Also, you don't roll a character in Morrowind. You make choices that determine where points go. There is no randomness involved.

 

[geldonyetich]

Speaking of somebody who wrote a plugin for Skyrim to try to address the problem, I'd say this top ten list was mostly on the money.

Mathematically speaking, the trouble is that physical damage eventually outclasses magic damage about 4 to 1. Towards the end game, you should be using mastercrafted gear that lets your most meager stab do around 400 damage or more. Now, make it a stealth attack, and that damage is multiplied - my sneaky character was pretty much one-shotting dragons with sneak attacks with bows. Throw in some magical enchantment on your weapon, it just goes even further.

Magic, on the other hand, caps much lower in overall damage, cannot be supplemented by enchantments or smithing (but it can by alchemy, just like physical damage), and they even have the audacity to make it cost mana... granted, if you're wearing enchanted gear, you can pretty much completely remove the mana cost from a spell school or two.

Yeah, there are mods out there that try to address all of these issues. However, I have to wonder why Bethesda is so bad at balance that they didn't fix it before release.

Something not on this list that should be: dragon shouts are redundant with magic. A sword-swinger can get all the cool parts of having powerful shouts to bellow with a nice variety of effect, but a spell-user has spells that render most of those shouts pointless and ends up tripping over the GUI trying to use both.

 

[Exterminas]

Once my mage reached Enchanting level 100 I could create a suit of ebony armor with a total of 100% spell cost reduction for destruction spells, meaning I was casting my stuff for free after that point.

This means I could keep that lightning-Kamehameha on constant fire, which in turn means that I could roast a dragon to perfection in about a minute.

So yeah, mage in Skyrim is odd.

 

[TheDrunkNinja]

Hmmm... I never once ever played pure mage. Then again, I never played a "pure" anything in an Elder Scrolls game. Playing without armor always made me feel naked. It always made more sense to play as a battle mage or a night blade with the armor, and the enchanting made it so simple to augment your mana pool and regeneration. Truth be told, he mostly talked about the archetypal destruction mage, but a friend of mine played pure mage with illusion and conjuration. Never had any trouble with a fight.

I dunno, with a game like the Elder Scrolls where it's encouraged that you swap and combine different aspects of the trinity of warrior, rogue, and mage into a wholly unique class, the fact that a pure build of one of those three isn't balanced with the other two pure builds doesn't really bother me all that much. Hell, mages in AD&D were a sort of expert mode for those who didn't mind starting out super weak at the beginning so that they could outshine the fighter and cleric classes when they earn later level magic.

 

[TheDrunkNinja]

snip

The "rolling a character" bit can be forgiven since I hear it a lot in regards to RPGs when they're referring to character creation, not the literal rolling of any digital dice.

As for Shamus' mistake regarding the magicka regeneration... I dunno. Maybe he was just confused or something. Hell, I put days worth of playtime into Morrowind back in the day, and when I booted up the game recently, I had completely forgot that the simple act running slowly drained stamina unlike the later entries in the series.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

I also seem to recall picking up enchantments that boost destruction and mana regeneration at the same time. I guess Shamus wasn't looking hard enough.

Those enchantments reduced the magicka cost, they don't boost damage.

Another sucky thing is higher level mobs have high damage resists, so your spells become even less effective.

Here's how I got my magic skills up, these can be considered "cheap", but screw it, mages are broken;

Blacksmith craft Iron Daggers (at smithing 40 get Dwarven and switch to bow crafting), dump junk enchants on them to level Enchanting (save Grand souls). Get Twin Souls at skill 100 to put two enchants on an item. Use the grand souls to make rings of destruction and conjuration 25%. Chest and helm with magicka regen. Level conjuration from 1 to 100 by casting Soul Trap on your horse, it won't agro. Make alteration rings and level Alteration with Telekinesis. With conjuration at 100, double summon Demora Lords to tank and hold back and throw your Destruction spells (while wearing Destruction 25% reduction rings).

Or you can just have fun by going in and cutting up everything with a big ass axe.

 

[nyysjan]

Only reason i did not have a group of nothing but mages in DA:O was because there was not enough mages (holy fuck those guys were OP), could not force myself to play 3rd act of DA2, but they really nerfed mages in that game.

Well, it's really different if you play on Nightmare, because then your mages will kill your own party

You should try a dual dagger rogue backed up by double haste (which you indeed need mages for), momentum + swift salve. Rapes everything a new one, even burns through high dragons and everything in seconds.

+ You can make warrior tanks virtually invincible (also to magic).

I did play on nightmare most of the time, turn of AI and micromanage, that's how you play DA:O (well, you can make a balanced party, setup their AI, and leave the room as they play on their own as well, but that does not sound fun).

Bah.

Level destruction, restoration and enchantment, get some gear that make your restoration and destruction spells cost 0 magicka, stun lock dragons to death.

Magic, if anything, has simply gotten easier to level overtime, but lacks versatility (seriously, stun locking dragons to death is boring).
Or get summoning to 100, do same with gear, have 2 high level summons kill everything for you.

I'm level 60+ on Skyrim, started out as a Dunmer mage, and having 0 issues, later i switched to rogue style play, and after levelling sneaking and one handed a bit, coupled with illusion, i can now one shot any non boss monster, and most boss monsters i bump into, with a dagger (crafted, sharpened, smithing 100 level daedric dagger).
Occasionally i use daedric heavy armor and 2 handed daedric sword (both skills below 30) just for fun, but when going gets though, i pull out my destruction spells (runes are especially awesome).

Could they have made magick better? Yes.
Is magic underpowered? Hell no.

You playing less than normal difficulty setting if you can one shot pretty much everything, one shotting does not happen so easily higher up.

I'm playing on expert, stuff dies just fine with one heavy sneak attack from a dagger, some might require dual wielding, but that's about it for almost anything not a dragon or dragon priest or having some bullshit mechanic that stops me from sneak attacking them (at that point, destruction stun lock ftw).

He's 100% right here. With a few gold transmutes and a bit of smithing, I can easily level up any crap armor twice as much right along with whatever weapon I'm using. Hell, with potions and enchanting, you can create weapons that basically one shot everything in the game. And that's all before level right around level 35.....

Meanwhile, those little fireballs don't do shit when you have a dragon or (god forbid) a bear running at you. It's completely absurd.

Anyone who CHOOSES magic over the much more useful warrior class is do so out of boredom or want of a greater challenge.

The main issue is that there is only a handful of items that boost magic damage. I think I found a crown that boosts shock damage by %30 or some crap. Meanwhile, I have rings that make me do +40 2 hand AND another enchant on top of that which stacks with the Necklace/gloves enchants of the same...which means there's very few fights that give me trouble.

I hope they fix magic for the next ES game...and I don't mean that overpriced mmo.

Someone has either not actually tried playing a mage, or does not know how to play a mage in Skyrim.
dual casting + mana potions = stunlock anything to death
at most you might have issues with some of the mages using wards, but then it's dual cast rune = dead mage

Now that's on expert, on the highest difficulty level, well, if you are playing on highest difficulty level,
STOP WHINING IT'S HARD, THAT'S THE POINT.

 

[Kyrian007]

My first Skyrim character was just a joke plowthrough as an Orc named "Hump." I was just testing the game and combat engine. My second was a Breton thief/archer because as "Hump" I had learned exactly which mechanics were the most broken and I exploited them all (a thief/archer who levels enchanting and smithing is an unseeable and untouchable killing machine by level 20.) Then I tried to make a mage. And it seemed like Shamus was was right. But I don't mind admitting...

I was just doing it wrong.

I was trying to keep every magic school leveled up and was pretty much ignoring everything other than magic to do it. And I was getting stomped and destroyed at every turn. I started over and I did it right. You pick one or 2 schools, and don't branch out until rounding out a character later in the game. You compliment it with 1 or 2 non-magic skills, and the combinations seem to all figure out a way to work. At this point I could use a random number generator to pick 3 skills to focus on, and come up with a successful character as long as at least one was a non-restoration magic.

Here, I'll try it a couple of times...

Block - Sneak - Destruction: OK, bad example right off the bat. Then again, if you just crank destruction it can remain pretty op as you level, ok it might work. Sneak up, unload with the burning and zapping, then block until you can recharge mana. You'd probably want to add enchanting and light armor to the mix, but you wouldn't have to grind them... it would work.

Conjuration - Enchanting - Speech: Yes, no problems there. A conjurer that can crank with enchanting... pretty boss. Might want to add restoration to sort of round things out, but paired with any companion this mix would run in to few problems.

Alteration - Heavy Armor - Light Armor: Ok, real bad example we only need 1 armor type. Let's re-roll that last one. One-Handed. I don't see a problem with that. I don't see much of a way to even damage that... just roll Breton and even mages couldn't touch that.

Ok, so it doesn't ALWAYS work. But the point is, the only way a mage doesn't work is if someone is going "omni-mage" and excluding everything else while trying to level every magic school.