Just won my hardest fight ever

[chaospearl]

I've run into the "artillery cannon mage" type before and I tend to suspect those particular battles are glitched. A mage shouldn't be able to keep flinging high-level stuff at me, continuously, about five times faster than any other NPC I've ever come across. Even if his entire inventory were composed of magicka potions it's still not possible. As others have mentioned, there ARE a number of gloriously epic battles to be had in Skyrim, frequently when you're not expecting them -- but these ones in specific, the mages who fling magic projectiles (fireball, ice spike, etc) at you like a gatling gun gone berserk? I really think it's a glitch.

 

I've only had that happen to me twice; the second time I was watching pretty closely precisely because I suspected something glitchy and I was afraid my game was about to crash or something. It seemed to me that the fireballs weren't really being "cast" by the mage with the usual casting animations or movement. It was like they were just kind of coming from his direction, a stream of fire so fast it almost wasn't individual fireballs, and the mage wasn't casting them after the first one. He just stood there sort of frozen-like and the fireballs shot out from him. It had to be a glitch, it had to be. I wish it had occured to me to make a save and try reloading, or try walking out of the dungeon, doing a cell purge, then going back, to see if the fireball cannon happened repeatedly. If I ever see it happen again I'll do just that.

[RedRavyn]

I've seen what you describe happen in Borderlands, chaospearl, but never in an ES game. I've encountered the "artillery cannon mage" (I like that term) about six or seven times in Skyrim -- never in Oblivion, and I've not played an ES game prior to that. All of them behaved normally, including the expected taunts, but just kept tossing spells at me, nonstop. It's always the ones that use projectile spells, too. I've never seen this happen with mages using spells like Sparks, Flames, or Frostbite. It doesn't occur as rapidly as you describe, either, but it's still much too fast to account for even a maximized magicka regen rate, and a lot of these guys are only apprentices or adepts -- not even master mages.

 

I'm not calling Bethesda for cheating, here, by the way, although I think it's common knowledge that virtually all games like this cheat because the developers can't figure out a way to make a smart AI. All they can do is make the AI overpowered . A human player will almost always be able to out-think an AI, so this is probably to be expected. In this case it's got to be a glitch of some kind. My usual response, since these are no-win situations, is to resort to a console kill and then get on with my life. I don't even want the extra experience by using godmode and eliminating such an opponent through more legitimate means.

Edited March 30, 2012 by RedRavyn