Mages could alleviate this lack of armor by putting more points into health, but… Imagine if fighters had their armor fall off every couple of minutes, it took them several seconds and a good chunk of their main combat resource to re-equip it, and doing so made sounds that alerted all nearby enemies. Fighters don’t have to worry about all their armor vanishing in mid-fight and leaving them vulnerable to an instant kill, but mages do. So you have to keep re-casting the spell every few minutes. But they do have various mage armor spells, which can raise their armor value to something reasonable (although still below what armored characters enjoy) for a short time. And mages are less able to endure long fights than anyone else because…Ī “proper” mage doesn’t wear armor. The rest of the mage’s skill-ups are in non-combat skills, which means fights take longer. So a level 10 fighter might have their primary weapon skill at (say) 50, while a level 10 mage will have their destruction magic at 30.
This means a mage will level more slowly overall, and more of their levels will come from incidental skills. The fighter will get perhaps twice as many skill-ups on their primary weapon for killing the same collection of mooks. Run through the same dungeon as a mage and then as a fighter. Sure, lots of games use this setup, but the other games don’t also have the problem of…Īgonizingly so. If a fighter runs out of stamina they can still swing their sword, they just can’t use special attacks. (Called “magicka”, because this series pre-dates the concept of using “mana” to denote universal mojo power.) No mana, no spells. Your ability to fight is tied to a resource.
And in any case, that system is gone in Skyrim and you’re stuck with a feeble magic system unless you’re the modding sort. But I’d rather just have some properly balanced mechanics than trying to balance the shortcomings against the exploits. Morrowind and Oblivion both had a spellcrafting system, which let you design your own spells, which let you turn the broken underpowered magic into broken overpowered magic. At the start of the game a fighter is only modestly stronger than a mage, but the longer you play the bigger the differential gets. (Although it is.) It’s that all of the mechanics are actively hostile to the very idea of using magic for fighting. Then I gave up and stabbed them to death with a knife. Then I ran around in circles waiting for it to recharge, then spent it all again with more ineffectual “fireballs”. Then I rolled a mage and spent all my mana trying (unsuccessfully) to burn someone to death. I first discovered this in Morrowind when I rolled a new fighter and killed my first foe in two or three hits. But one constant in the last three entries is that apparently the Bethesda developers hate mages.
According to Steam I’ve sunk almost 1,000 hours into Skyrim, and I played about that much Morrowind. I have a love / hate relationship with the Elder Scrolls games.
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