Skyrim was 'personally rebalanced' by producer Jeff Gardiner just 2 weeks before launch: 'Well, I hope this is good'

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.

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.

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.