The 40-50 damage fire spell is pretty powerful, you probably cast it on a Dark Elf, who have insane fire resistence. I tried using it with a character with 70 intelligence, and ended up barely hurting the next foe (one of the Carmonna Tong from the 'bad people' quest) and almost completely draining the character's magicka reserves. Since it looks like the casting cost of a spell does not decrease with increasing ability in the relevant magic skill, how does anyone cast truly powerful spells? Just for the hell of it, I made a fire damage spell which does 40-50 damage to its target for two seconds.
While we're on the subject: what kind of magicka numbers does everyone have with reasonably high-level (15+) spellcasters? Does everyone use the sign of the Apprentice or the Atronach? Since the magicka number normally equals the intelligence score, it looks like a spellcaster without these birthsigns has a normal maximum magicka rating of 100.
