Restoration magic is deliberately bad and I think that's the point

[DragonbornVet]

Okay so I've been replaying with a pure restoration focus (no cheesing, no alchemy, just healing and wards) and it finally clicked why the game gimps it so hard.

Restoration has like three useful spells max - the healing ones, maybe a ward spell if you're desperate. Everything else (cure disease, cure poison, paralysis) you can just... not get hit by. Or chug a potion. The perks are weak, the scaling is terrible, you're basically just a worse tank than someone with heavy armor and block.

But that's intentional, right? The game WANTS you to be a squishy support character who can't actually carry a fight alone. Every other school has a clear power fantasy - destruction nukes stuff, conjuration brings friends, illusion breaks the AI, alteration makes you unkillable with mage armor. Restoration just... keeps you alive. Barely.

And honestly? That's kind of thematically perfect. You're not supposed to be the hero. You're supposed to be the healer in a party. The game is built around you being solo, so restoration feels useless. But if you lean into it - follower tank, you heal and debuff - it actually works.

Just wish the perks didn't feel so gutted compared to other schools. The restoration tree looks like they ran out of ideas halfway through.

 

[RiftenWanderer]

I think you're onto something, but I'd push back a bit on the "intentional design" angle. Yeah, restoration feels weak solo, but I don't think Bethesda was designing around the idea of you needing a dedicated tank follower to make a school viable. That's more like... accidentally discovering a workaround than the intended experience.

The real issue is just that healing in a single-player game where you can pause and chug potions is fundamentally less useful than damage or crowd control. It's a design problem that doesn't have a great fix without breaking the game. If healing spells scaled as hard as destruction, you'd never take damage. If wards were actually strong, mage armor becomes pointless. So they had to nerf it, and yeah, it feels bad.

That said, the perk tree thing is legit. Comparing restoration to destruction or conjuration, restoration just gets less stuff. Destruction has like half a dozen damage-boosting perks, conjuration gets summoning upgrades and duration extensions, but restoration gets... Respite? And then a bunch of perks that boost spells that are already not that good. It does feel like they ran out of steam.

The follower tank angle is interesting though. I tried something similar on my last playthrough with a heavy armor Lydia and pure restoration, and yeah, it's way more engaging than I expected. Felt less like "I'm weak" and more like "I'm actually doing something." But that shouldn't be the workaround - that should be optional roleplay, not the way to make a school function.