Talking Backwards
Senior Citizen
- Oct 5, 2009
- 1,833
- 43
- 48
Magic is fine. Way better than previous games where it was formulaic and numeric, it actually feels like magic now.
What the hell are you talking about? There's literally ZERO customization.
-There's no damage over time spells
-There's no huge damage, point blank touch spells
-There's no drain health spells
-There's no poison spells
-There's no multi element spells
-There's no speed increasing spells
-There's no true "Regeneration" (health over time) spells
-There's no gravity (encumberance) spells
-There's no temporary stat buff spells
For damage you literally have "Flamethrower", "Icespewer", "Forceshock", Firebolt, Icebolt, Lightningbolt and then Fireball. That's it for single target damage and you usually only ever need to toggle between Fire and Shock depending on resistances or if they are casters. The area of effect spells are utterly POINTLESS because enemies are almost never together enough to ever hit more than two *at most*. The damage doesn't scale at all either, and since you can't create more powerful spells, you cap out fairly quickly in damage. The magic in this game = plasmids from Bioshock in not only function, but it actually LOOKS identical now with the new hand positioning.
If you want to argue about Conjuration; ok, it's great and Alteration can be ok too if you don't want to wear armor. Otherwise, the magic is utter crap in this game. Not to sound like some elitist prick or anything, but level up and then reconsider. Destruction is "fine" until around level 20 and then it's all downhill from there. To actually use Destruction from then on, you're required to use summons, unless you enjoy countless hours of backpedalling.
The game became so easy with my lvl 30 melee character that I had to jump from Adept to Master just for anything resembling difficulty. And it's still pretty damn easy, and yet I was struggling on Adept with Destruction...because it sucks.
Also, is the game engine like every other Bethesda game? You know, buttfucking the engine as opposed to playing an actual RPG? As far as the magic thing goes, I'm talking numbers here. He mentioned that a fireball did 50dmg whereas he was hitting with 83? Yeah, I'm a DnD player. I won't play a game with something that fucking nonsensical.
If you missed it when I was talking about it earlier; you can enchant items to add +%damage to one-handed and two-handed weapon skills. You can have four of these, and I believe the cap is 50% each, so you can have +200% weapon damage. That's not counting the fact that you also can improve your weapon skills through perks by +100% AND if you took smithing, you can increase the raw base damage by something like +50% with the correct level and smithing gear. That's just base damage, not even counting the DOUBLE fire/frost/shock/whatever enchants you can put on each weapon as well. Magic only gets +%regen and -%cost reduction. There's absolutely zero way to increase the damage of Destruction after you're 100 in the skill and have the +50% modifier (that barely seems to do anything).
Also, the "Dual Casting" perk makes your spells do slightly more damage, but it's horribly inefficient. It's like you get a 25% increase in power, but at a 40% increase in cost, so until you have a giant mana pool, or the cost reduction gear, it's not so great. Even Impact doesn't make up for the cost. There was a specific "Reaper" type creature that literally took me six dual casts of fireball to kill at lvl 26. Against that same enemy, my current character simply rushed up, power attacked once and hit it again with a normal swing. And I have around 2.5x the health as what the caster did, because the caster had to have all of that mana to do anything. It's easier on Master difficulty as melee than it is Adept difficulty for a caster who does not want to rely on summons to do everything for them. I'm sure it's a breeze if you level up Conjuration, but then you may as well have the game play itself.
Bitching aside, the game is leagues beyond Oblivion in every other way possible and you should attempt to play it even if you're stuck using mundane magic. It's interesting enough that the throwaway combat can be dismissed.