Hello, I am currently playing a high elf spellsword around level 18 on Xbox (so no mods). I maxed out the intelligence and destruction skill a few levels ago and unfortunately the strength of destruction spells is completely broken. I one-shot or two-shot pretty much any enemy I meet with a custom touch fire spell. It’s not even min-maxed, I could increase the damage per magicka by making the damage hit more slowly and adding frost and shock damage. My blade damage is negligible in comparison and at this point I just swing the sword for aesthetics. It takes a lot of fun out of the game.

This is on adept difficulty. If I move to expert, the difficulty goes from way too easy to way too hard. Especially since higher difficulty reduces both the damage I make and increases the damage I receive. Maybe there are some Oblivion experts here that can recommend a playstyle with a non-broken difficulty? So far my ideas are:

  • Increase the difficulty to expert, drop melee combat, play as pure mage with optimized spells, and lean into how broken magic seems to be in this game
  • just continue and hope the difficulty balances out later in the game (I don’t know if this will happen though?)
  • start a new game in a different class without destruction magic (sucks cause I’d lose my progress)

I’d appreciate it if some Oblivion experts could give their thoughts. I had a ton of fun with this game before the difficulty broke and would love to continue.