Need help building a pure mage class

[hithl4in]

Hi,

 

I have a female character I would like to make a pure mage. My goal would be someone who only use magic the whole game, no need for a sword or an armor, just spells, and pretty mage clothes.

I'm only at the beginning of the game, and so I use mostly destruction spells as those are the ones we start with, and the most obvious to kill the enemy.

 

But there are a lot more magic school to choose from, and so I'm a little lost. In mmorpg we can choose to be a pure healer, for instance, but in skyrim it will not work as we should have a way to kill things. We cannot team with others ;)

 

I have seen there is an illusion school of magic, but dunno what kind of spells we have in. I'm just level 3 and I have not yet used my skill points. btw can we change the skill points we used, later?

 

So your help would be appreciated to help me building my cute, smart, magic user with spells and pretty mage clothes.

 

Thanks ;)

[thompsonar]

Have you read this? So you want to be a mage

 

You can't change your perks later so sometimes it's a good idea to hang on to them if your skill levels aren't high enough for the perk you want. You're pretty much going to have to use destruction if you want to kill things although technically you can make an illusion mage that doesn't have to fight most of the time, or a conjuration mage that uses summons to do his/her dirty work.

 

I've been playing around with different mage characters recently. My current uses destruction, alteration, and restoration and it's been going well. There are very useful perks in the alteration and restoration skill trees that allow you to regenerate magicka more quickly, lower the cost of spells, and have increased magic resistance.

 

You will probably get killed a lot early on so frequent saves are a good idea. I'm up to level 10 now and get killed by one hit of pretty much any arrow or 2 handed weapon. But I am also playing on expert difficulty and have a bunch of mods that make the game harder. Though I also use a mod that makes magic scale and therefore more powerful. It's a good trade off and I like the challenge.

[xMcNerdx]

Have you read this? So you want to be a mage

 

You can't change your perks later so sometimes it's a good idea to hang on to them if your skill levels aren't high enough for the perk you want. You're pretty much going to have to use destruction if you want to kill things although technically you can make an illusion mage that doesn't have to fight most of the time, or a conjuration mage that uses summons to do his/her dirty work.

 

I've been playing around with different mage characters recently. My current uses destruction, alteration, and restoration and it's been going well. There are very useful perks in the alteration and restoration skill trees that allow you to regenerate magicka more quickly, lower the cost of spells, and have increased magic resistance.

 

You will probably get killed a lot early on so frequent saves are a good idea. I'm up to level 10 now and get killed by one hit of pretty much any arrow or 2 handed weapon. But I am also playing on expert difficulty and have a bunch of mods that make the game harder. Though I also use a mod that makes magic scale and therefore more powerful. It's a good trade off and I like the challenge.

What "magic" mods would you recommend? I checked out Midas Magic and it doesn't really appeal to me, but a scaling mod sounds good.

[BrettM]

It isn't quite correct to say you can't team with others. You can use a follower NPC, or, with the right mod, more than one. So, if you really wanted to take a team and be their healer, you could probably make it work. It might be an interesting way to play, though I don't think that I'd try it until I made my second mage. :)

[thompsonar]

I use the mod "Balanced Magic" and haven't really tried any others. I feel overpowered sometimes, but underpowered other times, so I'm not sure. I'm still testing this one out. There are a ton of mods that change the way magic scales in the game, this is just the first one I've tried. It has a couple difficulty settings as well.. I used the middle one but I think I should have picked the hardest option instead. I may change that soon.

 

I'd just browse around the "Magic" sections of the mods to find one that appeals to you. Just read up on them so you know what you're getting in to. There's one somewhere that adds a lot of the spells from old TES games that I was waiting on (it had some glitches if I recall). I need to try to find that one again and try it out.

[hithl4in]

In fact my original post was not really about mods to change the way magic works, but how to build a magic class ;)

I didn't know we could team with others in this game, I always thought we were alone.

[thompsonar]

Yeah got a little off topic. If you get a followers mod you can recruit many followers and use them as your "team." It can get cumbersome though having 4-5 people following you everywhere.

 

That guide I linked to is pretty good how-to guide. But really the thing with Mages is patience. If you're not wearing any armor you really have to watch out and run away when people get close. You're going to want to dump as much as you can into magic early on. It's usually all I put my points in to until I get to around 300 magicka. If you're also going to do enchanting you won't need too much magicka as you can enchant items to reduce spell cost to almost nothing (though I usually avoid doing this as it feels like cheating).

 

Really the thing I did (and sort of recommend doing) is make your mage and save right at the beginning. Play a while (level 10 or so) experimenting with perks and point distribution. If you like how it turns out good, if not load up your save from the beginning and try out another way. The mage I'm playing now is about my 8th. I've tried so many different ways of going about it but this one I really like and will probably continue with for a while... who knows I may complete the main quest for once.

[hithl4in]

Yup I know about moving a lot ;) In one of the first quest when we have to enter a dungeon to find a dragon stuff we have to fight some undeads, I had just my fire spell to do so and my healing one, for the last boss fight I always run and fire till he dies ;)

 

Why cheating? If this is not some kind of a mod but just vanilla game system there is no cheating in enchanting armor ;)

 

Perhaps I'll try a destruction/conjurer/enchanter kind of mage.

 

Can we find pretty robes for a female mage? For now I use what I found early one, just a plain tunic with a hood.

[thompsonar]

Yeah I know the enchanting thing isn't really cheating. Just feels like it to me If I can cast as many spells as I want with using any magic. But really you can't even do that until your enchanting is almost maxed anyway.

 

The clothing options are pretty crappy in vanilla. You have your standard novice/apprentice robes and such for each school of magic, but not much else. I have some mods that add some cool ones (there are tons out there). If you're doing enchanting you can just buy regular clothes that you like and enchant them with "mage type" enchantments. They will be weak early on but will get up to par as your enchanting goes up.

 

Just watch out and don't go crazy on enchanting since it will level you up fast and your enemies will stomp you even easier than do now. I usually just go with "destruction robes" or "mage robes" early on (anything that makes you gain magicka quicker or reduces spell cost) since you run out of magic so quick.

[hithl4in]

But magical robes just have this? Magical stuff enhancement we can put with enchantment anyway? There is no other bonus we cannot put with enchantment?

This is a good idea, then I can wear the prettiest robes I can find and enchant them.

 

I guess I'll have to upgrade destruction the most, and perhaps conjuration, as I'll need a high enough level in attack magic when I level up, right?