Necromage exploit is so good it makes you question why vanilla perks aren't balanced

[DragonbornVet]

I just realized on my current playthrough that if you become a Vampire Lord and grab the Necromage perk, you get a flat 25% damage boost to basically everything. Spells, weapons, summons - all of it. And the only "cost" is being a vampire, which honestly isn't even a downside anymore since you can just feed once a week and ignore the weakness penalties.

Like, I get that it's a perk designed for the Dawnguard questline, but the fact that it stacks with literally every other damage modifier in the game and there's no cooldown or resource cost makes me wonder if Vanilla Skyrim's perk trees are just... not playtested at higher levels? You can hit absurd damage numbers that trivialize Legendary difficulty faster than a stealth archer ever could, and stealth archer is already the poster child for broken damage scaling.

Am I the only one who thinks this should've been either a one-time effect or capped at specific damage types? Or is this just one of those things everyone knows about but nobody talks about because it's fun to be overpowered?

 

[WhiterunModder]

Necromage is definitely busted, but I'd push back a bit on the "vanilla isn't playtested" angle. I think it's more that Bethesda designed it as a trap option that happens to be secretly the strongest thing in the game if you actually commit to the vampire side of Dawnguard instead of immediately curing yourself.

The real issue is that it has no downsides once you realize feeding is trivial. Yeah, you lose regen in sunlight, but that's only annoying if you're doing dungeons at high noon in some weird roleplay. The actual mechanical cost is basically zero. A properly balanced version would either cap it to undead-related damage (spells, summons, maybe weapons imbued with soul gems or something) or make the vampire penalties actually matter - like permanent stat reductions you can't feed away, or sunlight actually drains your magicka.

That said, if you're on PC, Ordinator and a bunch of other perk overhauls completely rework the damage scaling so nothing gets that ridiculous. Wildlander and similar modlists handle it too. Vanilla balance at level 50+ is genuinely rough, and Necromage is just the most egregious example of a perk that should've been playtested against itself.

But honestly? I'd rather have one broken perk than a game where everything feels equally weak like some overhauls do. At least you're aware you're exploiting it.