I'm quite a high level (55+) and nothing useful I come across can be made into a dead thrall for me, mercenaries, whiterun guards etc. They have all scaled to high for dead thrall to work, I could make a weak mage my thrall, but I'm better of with a storm thrall. I can still use fury/fear/calm on these high level scaled people, just not dead thrall.

Anyone found anything useful to make a thrall, I've heard ancient/master vampires are okay.

yeah some of these things are a disapointment, i found a staff of banishing, send lesser deadra back to oblivion... doesnt seem to work on anything?!

Just realised that the illusion spells don't work on these mercenaries. I have all the illusion perks as well (apart from the master spell one), forcing me to attack them now. Just the scaling needs sorting, the level of the people does anyway.

Banish Daedra seems to be a Fire Extinguisher for Flame atronachs.
Expel Daesra is useful even at high level.

I consider the inability to Dead thrall someone just cause they leveled with me a flaw as well, as it is one of the highest level Necro spells.

Yet another reason why spellmaking never should have been cut.
Now spells dont even work.
On my last character I tried levelling illusion, but the enemies kept outlevelling my spells before I got them.
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A few NPCs have been found who make excellent dead thralls. Orchenco, boss from the daedric quest where you need to sniff the cauldron of magic potion. Savos Aren, if you haven't done the mage college, unlikely if you're a mage. NPC wizard from first cave you have to go to for Clavicus Vile quest. Or you can do what I did and download Better Necromancy Mod (or something like that) from SkyrimNexus which lets you resurrect anything with dead thrall, even giants and mammoths.

Wait... does anyone know if Necromage might increase the level of undead affected by this spell? The description for it is pretty obscure.

They say they will sort some balancing out in january IIRC. Should be sorted already tbh.

I'm not sure how you've both managed to have Illusion spells that don't work. You do realise that dual casting Illusion spells more-than-doubles the max effective level? It's mathematically possible to have the top-level spells hit something like level 95 enemies this way (although obviously there's no enemies above level 50).

My Fury spell (a Novice spell) is capable of hitting level 56+.

Base spell hits level 6.
Kindred Mage perk adds 10 levels. Now hits level 16.
Rage perk adds adds 12 levels. Now hits level 28.
Dual casting "more than doubles" max level - call it double for ease. Now hits level 56.

That's just the Novice spell. The Master spell, Mayhem, hits level 25 single-cast at its base level. With Kindred Mage it hits level 35; with Rage it hits level 47, single-cast, or level 94+ dual-cast...

The annoying thing is finding an enemy that simply resists Illusion spells. I've not yet hit Illusion 90 so haven't got Master of the Mind yet, but at the moment I can't use Fury or Calm on vampires or Dwemer constructs.

To be honest Illusion is ludicrously powerful, I can clear out entire settlements without even readying a weapon.

As for the OP... yeah, that svcks. It only hits level 40 enemies and there's no way of raising the max.

for Dwemer Constructs at least did you really expect them to work? They're mindless machines with programming to carry out certain jobs. You can't make a computer mad. As for vamps i dunno bout that one.

No I didn't expect them to work - I guess I phrased it badly. It's not annoying as such, more inconvenient. I think it's perfectly good game design, it just means I have to actually get my hands dirty when I find a Dwemer construct

Damn, I'm Level 56 and struggling with Illusion quite a bit now, I have nearly every perk in it... besides Dual Casting. FML

Guess that's what I'll be spending my next perk on.

As for Dead Thralls, yeah, I never find anything useful either really, mainly just using it for fun every now and then now.

The master spells are not affected by dual casting, the illusion/destruction master spells are terrible because of this and the charge time. Illusion has always been powerful for me, I can cast it on pretty much everything dual casted (fury/fear/calm), just not these mercenaries who must have been a stupidly high level, I can with expert spells but there is no fury expert spell, which is the useful one.

I have the master of the mind perk and I can use fury on draugr deathlords etc, add two dremora lords into the battle and I can just sit there invisible ha.

The very last illusion perk takes care of that too, now spells work on automatons, Daedra and undead too... vamps are an exception because they whether count as undead nor as NPCs

Haha, it's like the only magic school where the Dual Cast perk works like it should And I love reanimating sabre cats and bears. I likes me my furry beasties.



Aha, wasn't aware the Mayhem spell wasn't dual-castable (as I mentioned, still not hit 100 Illusion). Still, the basic Fury spell should be enough to hit any non-resistant enemy in the game, with all the perks... I don't understand why it's not hitting those mercenaries. There shouldn't be any enemies above level 50, I thought...

Illusion + Conjuration is amazing. You can just Fury an enemy, reanimate him when he's hacked to bits by his friends, and let a big crowd whittle themselves down to just one injured enemy left without even needing a weapon

I'm level 62 atm, the mercenaries much have been a similar level for fury not to work. But I just dual dagger paralysed them ha, with their stupidly high health on master.

Magic stops scaling efficiently at level 50. I'm just going to stop playing once I get there, unless I manage to finish all the storylines I'm in first.

I am a lvl 52 mage atm. I have been using a former NPC named Kornalus as a dead thrall for a while now. I must say he is quite powerful. If I want to kill him with direct attacks it takes quite a while. I find that if I need to load him up with loot to carry it, instead of killing him I just conjure up a flame atronach or some such, wait for Kornalus to pile up, then store my loot in him till we get back to town. He equips weapons by himself, but not any enchanted jewelry or apparel of any sort (tried several options). I am finding him quite useful. Also, in between ghastly groans, he will occasionally lecture me with one of his standard NPC comments about fooling around with magic in public giving mages a bad name. Hilarious the first time he did it.

Dual casting is so stupid IMO, why should I have to use two hands to make a spell work if I am a Dagger/magic user shouldn't have to swap quickly between them. Rather have spell making than this. >.> because spell making was the only good thing.

I'm getting tired of hearing all these people complain about magic.. There could be some tweaks here and there but most the stuff people are complaining about I just don't see, I have mastered every tree of magic and they are all equally capable of clearing a dungeon by themselves with out ever getting hit. All master level spells are dual cast by nature, they equip to both hands.

Destruction : take Augument Fire x2, dual casting, impact, novice and apprentice. thats really all you need here. Dual casted firebolts can stagger almost anything, you can kill any dragon even up to ancient dragons by just staggering them before they use a voice, you can even hit them in mid flight when they are swooping and stop it or use a ward spell to block it. Also works on npcs as well and is cheap to cast, does not work on fire atronachs obviously.

Conuration : This is just the lolz people, get some gear that lowers costs for conjuration enough and you can have an infinite army of dremora lords, storm atronachs and zombies that will clear out dungeons as you just walk behind them in a casual manner going through chests and coffins. Its all about observing and learning which ones work best and were, if a mage is throwing alot of lightning at you, send a storm atronach after him, match them with something they can do little damage against and if you happen to run into an orc warrior that has a ton of hps, raise them and use them.

Alteration : Paralyze is the hand of god, along with armor spells. Now if only the atronach perk would work cause I dont believe it does. You can paralyze almost anything, except dragons and machines and kill them in a slow leasiurly manner, if you have enough alteration cost reduction gear, perks and magicka. You can take all day killing a deathlord slowly with a butter knife while they stare up at you fully concious of whats going on, but unable to defend themselves.

Restoration : Between wards and healing you can walk through almost anything like Wolverine himself, while the school of Restoration only has offensive spells against the undead, taking the perks in it makes it quite fun to set vampires on fire with healing spells. Combine it with paralyze and healing hands, its a slow fiery painful redeath... A few nice perks in the tree as well like permenant magicka regen and ward absord which i'm also sure does not work. Doesn't seem like any of the magicka absorb abilities work to me.

Illusion : Illusion is the trickiest of the schools, much less forward then Destruction and requires more attention to line of sight and distance from enemies. Taking the quieting casting perk will garuntee all your spells are almost silent whispers rather then loud bangs that alerts everyone around you. Using a combination of illusion spells you can stop and start combat at your discretion, you can let someone chase you into a room just to calm them next to their friend who is also calmed and then fury one of them so they kill eachother. Casting fury on one guy in a group of them is an excellent way to distract everyone from your presence, they will attack the guy who just went crazy and you are free to work your mental magics on the rest of them without fear of being stabbed, atleast till your puppet dies. Every group of bandits becomes a new artistic pallet for you the illusionist to great a grand opera of comrades, deciet and betrayel, friend killing friend, brother killing brother, its only as involved as you make it but Illusion school gives you all the tools you need to make it happen.

If you combine them all together hardly anything will stand in your way.. no wait, nothing is going to really stand in your way unless you want it to for your own sick amusment.

Forgot about this post ha. At the moment I have a dremora churl (mage) and a dremora caitiff (similar to dremora lord) as dead thralls. They are insane, they have so much health and decimate anything ha. I got them at the shrine of mehrunes dagon, which you unlock during the quest to get his dagger.

If anyone has a problem with thralls not following when fast traveling, try waiting for 1 hour they should be there, or fast travel again to the same place. They should be there after those two things. Wish it worked as it was meant to though.

To the guy above you miss the point of the complaint about thralls, I already know that conjuration is powerful. My problem is that expel daedra doesn't work on any of my summons, also the dead thrall doesn't work on most high level things.

I could +1 this all day!

I didn't bother with previous elder scrolls games, how would spellmaking work in skyrim?

In Skyrim it would just let you create spells like you already have but of variable magnitude. The magnitude you choose would determine the cost of casting the spell. You would also get to name the spell.

In previous games you could add multiple effects to the spell, which will probably be difficult to implement in Skyrim (although I'm sure modders will pull it off)

And for the illusion thing, alchemy makes illusion insanely powerful, you can pretty hit everyone without using dual casting if you r alchemy is boosted by enchantments. But honestly, isn't it a good thing that some people are immune to your spells?

Yup, necromancy while totally useful if looked at on its own is just the svcky version of conjuration if you look at the skill as a whole. The low level cap of dead thrall is just a solid example of why.