Why ice storm spell does so much damage to me?

[Jesse Lingard]

That ice storm spell used by many necromancer deal a lot of damage to me, I am playing on adept difficultly but that spell just destroy me, most enemies take away half of my hp by using this spell (I have more than 300 hp), for some bosses who use this spell can one shot me. I do not have any debuff which makes me weak to frost damage, or this ice storm spell is bugged?

[Finn ™]

dude... have you meet Arch Electromancer?

he one shots my 600 hp character even with -20% shock damage reduction potion.

npcs spells scales along the game with huge amount of damage, mainly "bosses".

Ice storm does damage per second too, but it seems to only work with npcs, this is why it is so strong.

[Jesse Lingard]

Originally posted by Finn ™:

dude... have you meet Arch Electromancer?

he one shots my 600 hp character even with -20% shock damage reduction potion.

npcs spells scales along the game with huge amount of damage, mainly "bosses".

Ice storm does damage per second too, but it seems to only work with npcs, this is why it is so strong.

Could it be another coding problem from bethesda? Maybe it was suppose to be like 'deal 100 damage' when a npc use this spell, but in the end it become 'deal 100 damage per second', because I also notice wall of storm used by a dragon priest also deal a lot of damage.

[Rez Elwin]

I think it might have to due with the hidden damage buff perk some npcs get. Mages level higher than most enemies so their perk level might also increase. Mages can scale up to level 50, quite a few enemies fall off before that. Besides bosses only Dragons and Vampires can go above 50 with Draugr and Dragon Priests being at 50. (IIRC)

It could also be mages get a better version of the perk since magic doesn’t scale at all so their perk gets real screwy at high level and absolutely devastates...everything.

[alexander_dougherty]

You occasionally run into an NPC mage that can kill you with one or two shots, apart from having armour with the relevant spell resistance, there isn't much you can do.

but have that resistance on every piece, for example I had Shock resistance on evrything I could when I ran into some mages (a pair of them) who were twin shotting (one shot each) me to death, the resistance kept me alive long enough to kill them both (two or three sword strokes I seem to recall).

[MysticMalevolence]

Yeah, Ice Storm is that one spell that always seems to be insanely powerful in the hands of an NPC. I know in vanilla the spell is broken for the player, but I still have trouble with it with the unofficial patch... so I don't know.

[Ankou]

Originally posted by MysticMalevolence:

Yeah, Ice Storm is that one spell that always seems to be insanely powerful in the hands of an NPC. I know in vanilla the spell is broken for the player, but I still have trouble with it with the unofficial patch... so I don't know.

The issue is not fixed by the Unofficial Patch because it is not a bug, just very poor design.

Enemies scale, especially if the difficulty is increased, in a way that does not effect the player and enemy mages receive additional perks and very high level enemy mages have infeasible amounts of magica. I'm guessing while Bethesda was testing the game they noticed e enemy mages were a cakewalk to fight and strengthened them.... and didn't leave player mages with anything but the weak flat increase to damage for a few perks, then nothing.

And this is true for every spell, since the spell is the same I believe, it's all damage multipliers and magica pools the player doesn't have access to. Just that's a very powerful, dramatic, spell when cast by an enemy mage so we all remember being 1-shot by it... Repeatedly...

It's intentional on Bethesda's part, so a big fixing patch wouldn't touch it.
Without gameplay mods, a pure mage player is the weakest "class" in the game while a high level enemy mage is a demi-god.

[MysticMalevolence]

Originally posted by Ankou:

Originally posted by MysticMalevolence:

Yeah, Ice Storm is that one spell that always seems to be insanely powerful in the hands of an NPC. I know in vanilla the spell is broken for the player, but I still have trouble with it with the unofficial patch... so I don't know.

The issue is not fixed by the Unofficial Patch because it is not a bug, just very poor design.

Enemies scale, especially if the difficulty is increased, in a way that does not effect the player and enemy mages receive additional perks and very high level enemy mages have infeasible amounts of magica. I'm guessing while Bethesda was testing the game they noticed e enemy mages were a cakewalk to fight and strengthened them.... and didn't leave player mages with anything but the weak flat increase to damage for a few perks, then nothing.

And this is true for every spell, since the spell is the same I believe, it's all damage multipliers and magica pools the player doesn't have access to. Just that's a very powerful, dramatic, spell when cast by an enemy mage so we all remember being 1-shot by it... Repeatedly...

It's intentional on Bethesda's part, so a big fixing patch wouldn't touch it.
Without gameplay mods, a pure mage player is the weakest "class" in the game while a high level enemy mage is a demi-god.

Actually, it is a bug fixed by the Unofficial Patch, but I was mistakenly referring to the spell Blizzard:
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Blizzard
"The formula used to calculate the damage dealt by Blizzard includes your Magic and Frost Resistance, resulting in a weakened spell. At 85% Magic Resistance, it might not do any damage at all. "
At some point I appear to have mixed the two spells up.

Anyhow, still doesn't change the fact that Ice Storm just comes off as incredibly overpowered exclusively in the hands of NPCs...

[alexander_dougherty]

Originally posted by MysticMalevolence:

Yeah, Ice Storm is that one spell that always seems to be insanely powerful in the hands of an NPC. I know in vanilla the spell is broken for the player, but I still have trouble with it with the unofficial patch... so I don't know.

Lightning storm or whatever it's call is just as bad, trust me on this.
On the other hand, fire doesn't seem to suffer this overpowered effect syndrome.