It's definitely viable on Master, it's just best to know stats of enemies and spells so you never get in over your head. A good mage values foresight. Another awesome build Paul! And so soon...did you even playtest, bro?! Hahaha! I'm glad somebody put James' knowledge to good use.

I love how in depth you get with this build and that you focus so much on one skill. +1 from me for such an interesting build.

yeah i was getting some negative vibes from those forums. The only thing to do is to try it out. Don't know why they would be negative before trying it, but this is the internet afterall 

Holy crud... that is awesome!

Now I've got two pure mage builds to play (and they're polar opposites)--Alastor's Transient Sorcerer and this. I have never been all that thrilled by mage builds, but you guys have really sold me on these.

Fantastic work, great write-up, and excellent sources of info... thank you for this.

This build is a piece of quite an impressive dedication to make this work, great job +1 from me :D

Great minds think alike, hmm?
Great job here Paul, I'm running something similar to this right now, and it's so fun.
An easy +1.

Heh, of course I playtested!  I've been playing with pure Destruction builds for a while, actually - though my usual route was to avoid all other skills entirely and *only* do Destruction.

Well, the problem with that route is that you stop levelling by around level 25.  That never bothered me too much, honestly, since my characters usually don't get much higher than that.  But lately I've been rereading James's articles and really wanting to put everything together in a single character who could just get silly with Destruction spells.  

A character like this doesn't take too long to play, in fact.  When you're just focusing on Destruction, it levels quickly.  When you've stockpiled thousands of ingredients, it's no problem to raise Alchemy to 100 inside a couple hours.  And if you've been saving soul gems and disenchanting stuff, Enchanting can get where you need it to be without really trying that hard.  

The slowest thing to level was Restoration, because I limited myself to that Novice healing spell (in order to ensure Destro would advance fast).  The only hard part there was waiting to level up once my two main skills were at 100 so I could buy more training.  

And yeah, kudos to James for putting all of that information into black and white so English majors like me can understand it easily!

That's a good point - it's hard to imagine two more different mage concepts than this one and the Transient Sorcerer (which is chock full of great tricks and a fun RP)!

This is awesome! Love the simple skill selection but the gameplay makes Destruction school shine. Another awesome concept.

Yeah I was definitely teasing about playtesting this. You write with too much detail to not have played every one of your builds all the way through!

This is definitely the most sensible way to approach Destruction too. It's so true about the scaling of those spells and how they seem to be more appropriate the earlier you obtain them.

I would have had to been training Restoration though. It's such a slow leveler unless you're an all out undead slaying paladin or priest!