Nerf the mages

[shuazoid]

I play on Master difficulty, upped it from Adept.

 

At level 58, everything is pretty manageable to kill (without saving and loading again and again), except for mages which still feel strangely overpowered due to a couple of reasons.

 

1) Their wards make them immune to Shouts

2) Ice spells slow move speed and stamina

3) I think spells go right through armor.

 

I constantly have to keep using my Ultimate Health Pot

 

I propose

 

A) Lowering their general mana pool

B) Increase armor's defence against magic (Surely a thick Daedric armor would buff me up against some cold)

C) Lower their health

D) All of the above in some varying amounts.

 

I feel the difficulty of the game should meet your expectations and be attuned to the diffculty which you set.

[myrdred]

Gotta disagree here.

 

For one thing, magic isn't all that powerful and it should be. You're sacrificing lots of defense and endurance for what should be huge bursts of big effects. Sadly the magic system doesn't support that as well as it should. So nerfing it? BAD idea.

 

Second, why should armor protect you against magic? If you're talking non-elemental spells, then just no. Armor provides no illusion or drain health defense or anything like that. Makes no sense for it to. For elements:

 

Fire heats the material (metal and such) or burns it (non metals like hide, leather, etc)

Electricity electrifies the material at worst and just goes through it at best unless you've found rubber armor

Cold turns it freezing or just ignores it, causing it to stick to your skin on contact and if the cold is cold enough to hurt you (as it is with spells) causing that cold to linger

 

This isn't what happens in game, but it makes real world sense.

[jeffrobot]

First, explain to me how shooting icicles out of your hands makes real world sense.

 

Second, when we talk about magic, we definitely need to distinguish between NPC and PC casters, because they are basically two completely different classes. NPC casters have huge wells of magicka and health, and also lots of armor (at least it seems that way on difficulties above adept).

 

Back to making realworld sense. if we do say that magic makes realworld sense, it also makes real world sense that a giant piece of armor on your chest would mitigate the dmg from one of aforementioned icicles. Mages are actually hitting you with physical objects - it definitely makes sense to have armor mitigate them. I can see certain spells having more armor penetration than others though, like drain.

[myrdred]

It doesn't make sense. But this is a world where magic does exist, so we start from there. Honestly *sigh*.

 

EVERYTHING NPC has huge wells of magicka and health and armor on high difficulties. The problem you're talking about here has nothing to do with magic. It's all with NPC beefiness. Which I could probably agree with. I refuse to play on anything but the hardest difficulty, and there's some tough stuff in my gameworld. None of it is unbeatable, but it would be nice if anything that was a normal-ish race (all player selectable races, humanoids that we can't pick, etc) had to level up in the same way we do.

 

Finally, magic itself: Normally mages AREN'T hitting you with physical objects. My mage currently shoots fire and lightning, conjures elementals, and casts crowd control/defensive spells. Pretty much does everything a mage should do. The only spell he has that shoots a physical object is the icicle you mentioned, and he doesn't use it because it kind of blows. So in my experience, which I admit doesn't cover all spells but does cover a very wide range of them, 99% of spells shouldn't be affected by armor if I think about it.

 

For the 1% that should? This comes down to annoyances in programming it in. Having to have an extra thing to keep track of whether a spell should be resisted by armor or not and all that. When magic has it's own 'armor' stat that is actually more effective at resisting it than armor is at resisting physical damage there's no good reason to put this in.

[vuendyr1986]

You need to stack magic resistance on Master, and the problem goes away. There's also a guardian stone that gives 25% magic resistance.

[myrdred]

^There's a lot of options here:

 

Play a Breton for 25%

 

Guardian Stone 25%

 

5 perks in Alteration tree (I think it's 5) nets 30% Magic Resist

 

Gear.

 

You can get huge defenses easily.

Edited November 21, 2011 by myrdred

[SealCubClubber]

5 perks in Alteration tree (I think it's 5) nets 30% Magic Resist

It's 3 perks, the 3 levels of "Magic Resistance", gives 10/20/30% resistance, requires 30/50/70 Alteration skill, respectively.

[myrdred]

^I meant with prerequisite perks. I could still be wrong though. Edited November 21, 2011 by myrdred

[Blackmask521]

I have 800hp and 1 mage with frost magic makes me have to use 3 ultimate health potions and Im even playing on apprentice and have full legendary deathbrand armour with full light armor tree

Edited October 29, 2015 by Blackmask521

[Perraine]

Cerealy? Mages OP? With the possible exception of Hag Raven's and there damn Fireballs, mages are a pushover! First thing I 'allus' do if going "anti-mage" is get Enchanting up so I can add 2 enchantments to an item and then add Frost/Fire resists on one item, and Magic/Electrical resists on another.

 

Plus mages are completely pish weak when it comes to close quarters fighting, smack them doon with a hammer, or just slice and dice them, they are easily defeated. Sneak Attack Critical's with a bow are also fun :)