Bulvine

What's the question? You want to have fun or be a purist bow user? Illusion rocks in skyrim. bout the only thing I really have fun doing in skyrim is the archer/illusionist--cant stand melee characters and my pure mage is a suxxor :( That, and, the frenzy, calm, etc. are REALLY good in this game once you get that perk for undead charming. It's probably an almost "I win" scenario...but not 100% like the stupid enchant/armorer/alchemy bahrokeness.

I agree with the OP...although not to the extent that I won't wait for some mods to fix immersion, gameplay and difficulty. I do kind of doubt that skyrim will get the mod support Oblivion received because I envision a lot of modders will look at the game and think...jeez...overhaul this so I can overhaul the overhaul... It's that bad. I had a thought the other day about this actually...why doesn't bethesda just implement a really integrated difficulty system that does more than just make combat more (a tiny bit more, anyway) difficult? How hard could that be. Give the dumbed-down version to the majority market segment--I get that, I really do--and have an in-game difficulty slider that actually does something to fix some of the OP's concerns. Heck, most people I know here played Oblviion so much they literally bought the game multiple times...with this release they're like, yawnzors, after a week. Really, let the serious players have more immersion, choice and apply more than just the point-and-click aptitude necessary to play this game they've just released. Things were great in Morrowind, superb in oblivion, getting shabby in fallout and now...jeez...If I play Skyrim too long I feel like my IQ is dropping... I'm passing on getting excited for the next release until I've actually seen in action. Can't trust bethesda anymore :(

I play an archer/illusionist. Illusion is my only master level skill so far (about 90 in archery). Usually I use calm/hide/sneak attack as my m.o. It works brilliantly. Maybe I can make a vid or something to show, but I'm sure someone's already done that. For groups I hide and cast frenzy from a distance. It works amazingly well, surprisingly. I really don't see the point in playing illusion without sneak, tbh, the synergies with bow/sneak/illusion are about the most fun and logical for me. After the game came out there were a bunch of threads talking about how mages were weak...I just shook my head because I'm sure if you asked the complainers how their illusion was, they'd woulda scoffed and wrote the entire school off. Their bad. Illusion is pure power if used correctly and invested well into. Some things I've noticed, however. Alchemy is extraordinarily (read: Morrowindishly) broken. Playing a straight mage makes no sense to me when you can use poisons to basically destroy anything. Another thing is, you really don't need to invest too much in sneak, imo. I have the first perk and then up to the 3x modifier for bow sneaks. That's it. Lastly, since you're never getting hit by melee, you really don't need to use the enchanting/armorer madness and can spend some points in alchemy, speechcraft or w/e you want. I think because of the synergies between my 4 main skills sneak/illusion/archery/alchemy, this may be my most fav ES char ever. Oh, and Lydia the tank makes it just ridiculous fun even on master difficulty.

I have the same problem as you. I finally have a perfectly functional install of FCOM and this glitch is horrible. The problem is definitely with the mod itself. Could have installed it wrong or something...but I followed the directions to a fault (apparently). Anyone with any insight into how to fix this? EDIT!!!: Found this patch for the problem: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=18305 Case closed, I hope, installing now...if I don't return, it worked!