» Tue Dec 06, 2011 4:23 am
If you play on master difficulty the spell schools kind of break down like this:
Destruction: You can pretty much forget about Destruction magic alltogether, it's worthless. There is simply not enough magicka in the world to kill much of anything with destruction magic once you get past level 20 because enemies just have such stupendous ammounts of hitpoints. The only thing Destruction is surprisingly good at is killing dragons, because dragon fights allow you to hunker down and regain some magicka in between firing volleys at the dragon, in most dungeon fights that's not a possibility though, and for some reason in this game tough humanoid enemies have morel HP than dragons.
Conjuration: The most important school of magic on higher difficulties is Conjuration. You really won't get far without it as a mage. Being able to summon a big beefy tank for the enmies to wail on while you attack them is key to beating all these giant hitpoint blobs that you will never burn through with spells without somehow making the time to regenerate magicka. One of the best spells you get with Conjuration is bound bow. It may not do huge damage right out of the box, but once you hit Adept level Conjuration Frost Atronrch + Bound Bow becomes the easiest killing combo for taking down hitpoint blobs like Draugr Scourges. Just get them to fight the Atronarch and peg away. Unless you put feats into Archery you won't do more damage than with destruction spells, but you also won't deplete your magicka before the enemy is at half health.
Illusion: Unfortunately Illusion is really hit and miss in this game. You'll find it going from horribly overpowered to completely worthless from one level to the next with no consistency whatsoever. Leveling it is also tedius, since half the enemies in the game are immune to all illusion effects until you reach 100 illusion to get a perk to make them not immune, but then there isn't a perk to boost the effectiveness of illusion against them, so eventually they will all be immune again. Invisibility is really powerful still, and makes this whole spell school worth having, even though it isn't as gamebreaking as in Oblivion.
Restoration: You will really really need this spellschool. Well, you will really really need the first spell of this spell school. Restoration is kind of disappointing, the regular channeled heal is so good that there is little reason to cast anything else. The whole absorb thing is a nice idea, it functions as sort of a shield against spells, but in practice its worthless. Like I said before, things in Skyrim have stupidly huge HP pools, so the notion that you could somehow win a fight with a caster while bleeding magicka from active defenses simply goes out the window on high difficulties. You don't have enough mana to kill anything in the first place, you certainly don't have enough to kill something and use it for defense at the same time.
Alteration: This is the spell school you will always wish you had top knotch skills in but you somehow just can't ever find a good reason to use it. The perks from this are killer, no doubt, but the spells in Alteration are just tough to level. Armor bonus spells are nice, but having to recast them every minute is tiresome, and you'll eventually just forget about it and do just fine, and an hour later you'll go "Oh yea, I wanted to train that skill" and start doing it again before you forget again... Basicly nothing has changed from Morrowind and Oblivion about Alteration, except Paralysis is now in Alteration. Bad news though, Paralysis is worthless in Skyrim, since now everything that's tough enough to be worth paralyzing cannot be paralyzed.
Additional skills that are useful:
Archery. This is useful for Bound Bow. Of course you can just use a regular bow then, but yea, if you use this thing a lot to cover your damage needs against enemies that just take a looong time to kill with magic you might as well ge the skills for it.
Sneak: Because you want your atronarch to take all the hits.
50 Points of Pickpocket. Because you will never ever have the luxory of putting levelups into Stamina, and those extra 100 carry weight go a long way towards reducing the horribly svckness of full inventories.
