He did a good job. Not perfect, but significantly better than what the simulated nonsense would've become.

I saw a mudcrab the other day. Nasty creatures

what do you mean by that?

No, that's human nature. Turns out stealth archer is just the optimal way of approaching combat for maximum efficiency in any game that lets you do it.

Yeah it's quite hard to beat _instantly killing the enemy without ever giving them the chance to retaliate_ in any meaningful way lol

Early game destruction magic is such a letdown. During my first playthrough I put points into duel wielding fire magic. Enemies would ignore the spire of flame being blown at them and bonk me on the head once for an instant kill.

It makes a little bit of sense. Some dude just spent four hours killing rats in a sewer and suddenly he finds he can throw fire from his hands, he's probably not going to be that good at it.

Soyboy stealth archer has to slowly sneak around and line up shots one at a time. If spotted, he must hide, or run, until aggro drops and he can start sneaking again. Chad two-handed weapon user boldly charges in and power attacks anything that moves until all that's left are bloody corpses. When spotted, enemies will rush him, saving him the trouble of having to hunt them down.

yeah fair enough.. I think they tried to make melee on par with ranged magic

Until the game does a secret dice-roll and decides a big enemy has already beheaded you, making you stand there doing nothing while the animation plays. Even if they're almost dead and you're at half health.

Magic sucked. Simple as. Destruction magic was weak, expensive to cast, and didn't scale well. Other forms of magic also didn't scale well or were otherwise very situational.

I feel like when you're spewing fire from your hands the CC should be a level 1 benefit and not a late/mid? game unlock.

ice storm was pretty devastating, but yeah, a good chop with an axe normally trumped it

That's what Morrowind is for. "Wanna be ostensibly a god? Ok! Here, you can levitate and endlessly smoke n'wahs from the heavens. We'll call you [Nerevar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR-K2rUP86M)."

Bethesda had a really nice game design in Morrowind. When walking out of Seyda Neen and you see Tarhiel fall out of the sky. When you loot the corpse you find the scrolls of 1000 Acrobatics. Bethesda is telling the player "Break this game when creating spells".

I tried to do a traveling mage run where I didn't use fast travel. Had to quit two hours in because it was just. Bear. Walk twenty feet. Bear. Walk ten feet. Bear. Turn around to go back to a bed and regain health and mana. Bear. Bears are extremely hard to kill with basic destruction spells.

No wonder its balanced like shit.

It's so stupid that Morrowind's spell creation system didn't carry on into Oblivion and Skyrim.

Dual-casting 2nd tier lightning could stun-lock Alduin!

While I agree, this falls apart in VR, which is objectively the best way to play. Physical combat lacks any sort of weight, while archery with mods feels insanely satisfying. I wish physical combat felt… good.