Magic damage doesn’t scale based on your magic stat. The only thing that changes is that the spell uses less mana to cast. So the only difference between a level 1 mage and a level 100 mage is that the end game mage can cast the same spells more. But by the end of the game, those spells are only doing small amounts of damage because their damage hasn’t increased as enemies have gotten stronger.
There were a number of mods that fixed that, which I would like to note is not a defense of the game. The one I used was Ordinator, which is a perk overhaul. For the magic skills, it makes it so that the first perk of the tree makes spells scale, up to twice as much damage once you max the skill out. The magic perk trees in that mod also provided a bunch of other nifty abilities. For example Illusion had a perk that added I think 1d20 power to spells such as ‘fear’, allowing you to try your luck in casting them at targets that are normally out of range.
Magic damage doesn’t scale based on your magic stat. The only thing that changes is that the spell uses less mana to cast. So the only difference between a level 1 mage and a level 100 mage is that the end game mage can cast the same spells more. But by the end of the game, those spells are only doing small amounts of damage because their damage hasn’t increased as enemies have gotten stronger.
There were a number of mods that fixed that, which I would like to note is not a defense of the game. The one I used was Ordinator, which is a perk overhaul. For the magic skills, it makes it so that the first perk of the tree makes spells scale, up to twice as much damage once you max the skill out. The magic perk trees in that mod also provided a bunch of other nifty abilities. For example Illusion had a perk that added I think 1d20 power to spells such as ‘fear’, allowing you to try your luck in casting them at targets that are normally out of range.