Mages, do they need armor?

[Someone92]

It depends on the mods you're using.

In vanilla Oblivion there's no reason not to wear Heavy Armor. You'll have up to 75 armor, with Armorer 75+ even up to the maximum of 85, and at master level it will be even weightless. The disadvantage of armor is a mere 5% less Spell Effectiveness, which isn't noticeable once the magnitude of your spells are big enough (the game rounds the magnitude down, so a spell with magnitude 2 would only do 1 if you have less than 100% Spell Effectiveness; you can fix this with FractionalMagicDamage).

There are very few mods that put any actual meaningful penalties to your ability to cast spells while wearing armor, ROM is probably the prime example, Fizzle also adds some penalties to wearing armor, and in Supreme Magicka you can increase the min/max penalty to Spell Effectiveness via the .ini file.

 

When I first played vanilla Oblivion I wanted to play a mage, but because I'm a power gamer my final class selection might seem a bit strange:

Strength (I want to be able to carry as much as possible)

Endurance (As much hitpoints as possible)

 

Combat (I don't intend to use those often, so if I specialize in them I can level them up much quicker)

 

Heavy Armor (extremely strong bonuses, almost not penalties; also linked to Endurance which maked it easier to get a +5 Endurance on each levelup)

Armorer (Endurance; saves a lot of gold, later you can have equipment with 125% durability)

Block (Endurance; making it level up easier)

Blade (Strength; in case I'm oom)

Mercantile

Speechcraft (because those two are very hard to level up)

Any skill you like to level up quickly

 

I don't specialize in Magic or use magic schools as major skills to prevent them to level up during combat too much, you can level them quite easily while running through a city or to a quest location.

 

edit: Oh, I forgot to mention that at some point I added All +5 Attribute Modifiers because it wasn't fun anymore to level up specific skills just to get +5 to two attributes every level.

Edited October 5, 2011 by Someone92