WHY IS MAGIC ALWAYS TERRIBLE NOW
STOP MAKING MAGIC TERRIBLE
#MAKE MAGIC GREAT AGAIN
Basically I've noticed a tendency lately for games to make magic MASSIVELY underpowered or just plain useless. This has many facets but it always ends up with me not playing magic users.
For example: Skyrim! Yes Skyrim has TERRIBLE fucking magic. It commits just about all the cardinal sins of game magic. And then invents some more.
1. You have to drop half your shit to even think about using it.
2. Just about EVERY goddamn spell has a charge up, which is MASSIVELY annoying for the non-AoE fireball spells, often I'll want to use a quick ranged attack right after sorting out some melee and then by the time the spell is ready I'm in melee again.
3. It doesn't scale. AT ALL. That fireball is exactly that powerful for the whole game, meanwhile your foes will get 300x stronger and you'll find new swords that keep up nicely damage wise.
4. It has SHIT ASS UTILITY SPELLS. Seriously, they all suck butt. In Oblivion invisibility just WORKED but here you have to already be undetected and sneaking for it to matter, so no more disappearing acts in the middle of fights. Your armor spells have the same problem as the fireballs, they're just TOO DAMN SLOW for the game's pace. The only thing worth a damn is the healing spell. Oh and illusion is a whole school of jokery, since it'll become 100% useless after the enemies get strong enough, and frankly what type of enemy would you LIKE to use illusion on to go around? The big bad boss who'll kick your ass and rape you (literally with some mods)? Naw you totally want to use it on the grunts who die in two hits. Those are the ones you wanna be creative with. Obviously.
Skyrim is just one of the latest in a growing trend of making magic slow, useless booms that might as well just be replaced with guns since at least those tend to be done fucking WELL.