Why is magic so weak in the game?

[LuChao]

I actually enjoy the magic system in the vanilla skyrim just because I couldn't become so OP I guess I'm an old school RPG person where games are always supposed to be a challenge and make you think about what your gonna do to pull a win out of your arse to many people these days are all about one shot this one shot that it seems sadly it makes my heart cry itself to sleep at night knowing so many people are looking for the easy kills on the tough bosses

That's not "Old School RPG", that's masochism.

XD lol so its both XD wait till you hear about Olaf XXXXX-Hopper who will be a rags to riches story lol

 

[Yingvar war wolf]

In all the elder scrolls games they have characters that are just crap. In oblivion it was the stealth archer belive it or not... Now in skyrim stealth archer is unbelievably fun and with the right setup over powered. I think in this game mage is the crap class. I could never get into doing a pure mage... Im just going to do the mages guild with my stealth archer thief assassin and say that he wanted to join the college to learn illusion magic.

 

[mireigi]

I just finished the game playing purely as a mage.

Race: Orc
Primaries: Destruction, Conjuration, Smithing, Enchanting, and Heavy Armor
Follower: Ingjard

The idea was to use summons to sort of tank out the enemy, while I peppered them with spells from behind the lines. A follower was there to protect me when I didn't have a summon ready. Most of the time it worked out pretty well.

My only issue is that the magicka-to-damage ratio, aka efficiency, of the higher level Destruction spells is horrible. While, yes, Ice Storm can clear out several enemies at once, it also damages your follower and summons, if they are caught in the line of fire. And despite getting Mana at 40 out of the 45 level ups, and having enchanted gear to reduce the cost of Destruction spells, boost my magicka regen, and increase my magicka pool, it didn't take long to run out of magicka.

So I kept to Firebolt for the majority of the game. Single-target, low-cost, spammable. Where I to do any sort of statistics on the playthrough, 97-98% of all casts were probably Firebolt. 7 magicka for 37 damage, versus 50 magicka for 90 damage with Incinerate. I didn't mind the extra casts, since they were not only cheaper, but also faster, giving more stuns from Impact, again boosting the effectiveness of Firebolt over mid or even high tier spells.

That is the major flaw with magic in vanilla Skyrim as far as I see it. You can either dual-cast spam 25 spells on a 500 magicka pool for ~90 damage plus stagger, casting 2 every 3 seconds; or you can dual-cast 3 spells on a 500 magicka pool for ~216 damage, plus stagger, casting 1 every 2 seconds. The former will take longer time to kill stuff, but the latter will have more downtime. I prefer to not have downtime, and I think most others do as well. Especially on bosses.