Bethesda games are pretty much like that these days, though in your specific instance idk how conjuration wasn't letting you faceroll everything. It was always destruction that failed me because I consider 100% reduction to be cheating, and even with it it still takes too long to kill anything unless you use thunderstorm or abuse the fear perk adding to fire damage exploit.
Conjuration allows you to stand in a totally different location and still damage the enemy. You can stand on a rock and spam summons, though a good frost atronach or storm atronach tends to tear through most groups of enemies. I never really used zombies, but they can be even more effective. Dremora and the the DLC summons are overkill. The sound of 2 frost thralls stomping after you is really annoying, but it makes the game easy mode.
I prefer frost magic, but Skyrim punishes you heavily for using it by giving practically everything NOT on Solsthiem 50% or greater immunity to it.
I finally finished New Vegas recently, and thought I'd go back to Fallout 3. I had forgotten that you can't actually use ANY of the gun sights they already bothered to model into the game, and that energy weapons suck in FO3.
This being a stark contrast to my NV playstyle where I rocked a scoped laser rifle and YSC/183 to snipe things at maximum distance. Also ED-E is the only follower in any of these games I actually like or use.
FO4 looks way better about this stuff though with the weapon mods etc. though.
Dark Souls 2 tended to punish you heavily for liking lightning miracles by nerfing them to the ground, and then giving the DLC mobs heavy magic resistance.
Dragon's Dogma kinda punished you for liking any one class in particular by gimping your stats in every other area than the one the class boosts on leveling. If you love magic archer, good luck getting anything other than good magic defense unless you level up like 3 other classes for 150+ levels and THEN go back to Magic Archer. And if there is a class you really don't like like Mystic Knight or the other 2 tank classes, but you want their passive traits for other classes then you get to waste your time playing classes you hate and getting levels that could have been in a different class that supports your actual playstyle.
In Final Fantasy games with job systems, I always prefer it when changing the job changes your stats appropriately instead of relying on stat gains from all your previous jobs to make your current one any good. The Tactics games punish you heavily for making a fresh unit in a new class instead of training it in like 3 others for half the game so its not a glass cannon or a titanium sponge.
Classically I always felt the original F-Zero punished you for picking any racer other than Samurai Goro, because he was the only one I could even win any race with.
Say what you will about how much Kingdoms of Amulur sucked, at least its combat was solid and you could rock practically any playstyle you wanted with all those options. I prefered giant hammer/chakrams with elemental spells. Unlike Dragons's Dogma, I liked playing a Mystic Knight in that game. The problem with that game is that it was a bad RPG with excellent combat. It could have been a great action game, instead it was a terrible single player MMO that they wanted to parlay into an actual MMO and it failed so hard it became a matter of State.
