Um, what? Care to explain?

Make a character. See if s/he is able to cast any spells. S/he is, no matter if you're trying to make a pure fighter. And, when there's no spell failure, he seems to be some sort of master caster even with that 5% Destruction/Restoration. So why not use those spells your character obvisouly has learned somewhere during his/her past? Roleplaying? Pretending they're not there? Googling like hell for the console commands to remove those particular starting spells?

Yes, indeed you are inable to create a non-spellcaster in that game without "cheating" with console.

Yes.

And my melee Warriors do not have spells, plural, they have just one healing spell. And that is plenty easy to ignore...for me, at least.

My melee Warrior also had a destructive spell. Even if you can ignore them, it doesn't mean that the game didn't have a flaw. I can easily ignore TES2 crashing on me every 30 minutes or so, you still think it's fine like that?

To me it seems that roleplaying discussed in these forums means:
1. Pretending that a game has a certain aspect
or
2. Pretending that the game doesn't have a certain aspect

I don't consider that roleplaying, I consider that pretending.

I'm sorry but roleplaying is pretending. Roleplaying happens in the imagination. It is, by its very nature, the creative application of self-imposed limits.

To be quite honest, if your worried about your armor rating as a pure mage....you're doing it wrong. Perhaps one of the best strategies to take with a pure mage is to 'ghost' your (melee) enemies. Basically, make great use of chameleon/invisibility and increased speed/athletics to constantly flank your enemy. A (pure) mage should be the sort of character that fights much like a rogue, dodging hits rather than taking them, except with magic rather than agility.

For example, my last pure mage went throughout the whole game (Oblivion. Morrowind was a bit tougher to ghost in, but still very possible) without getting hit with melee once.

You mean by exploiting flaws which was already stated before?

So even though your character is automatically a spellcaster no matter what, role playing is the denial of game mechanics? Are you the kind of person that doesn't believe in swords?

You guys are nit picking the wrong things. The correct thing to hate is the fact that there was no "delete spell" function. Todd Howard even apologized for that one in an interview. It was a totally rudimentary thing to have and they completely forgot about it. Even worse is that they never patched it in (to my knowledge).

Yeah, my character is a Sorceress (custom class), with her major skills being Mysticism, Illusion, Alteration, Restoration, Conjuration & Destruction (in that precise order as what she studies the most to least). She never ever wears armor and only carries a dagger as backup. When I joined the arena, I made a custom shock spell that used up almost all of her magicka. It was like, damage 100 pts for 4 seconds on target. She has a high mana pool, too. And the arena was boring as hell. Every foe I encountered was killed instantly from a distance. Except for one battlemage I was fighting towards the end who had an elemental shield for all types. So I had to kill him the old fashioned way.
But the point being is that playing as a spell caster in OB made the game super easy. And when you think about it, if you can enchant stuff to have constant effects of "reflect spell", "absorb spell" and "shield", then you're pretty much invincible. No one will be able to silence you and no one will be able to do damage to you. Anyone else agree?

I agree that missing a delete spell key was a blunder, but they don't have a reason to assign everyone a fireball at character creation either.

I would also like to say that the worth of a mage should never be determined by the amount of enchantment slots available, even though they should use the Daggerfall system of clothing that allows many slots. You know; torcs, bracers, marks, crystals, rings, amulets, as well as the standard clothing items like shirts, pants, coats, cloaks, hats, shoes, gloves, underwear, belts, and so on.

I created a pure mage in Oblivion. She only wears robes and a simple sword for dire situations (but a sword I never use unless I have to). I found it challenging, but also very much fun. And there is one positive thing about not wearing armour that no one has mentioned - I'm never overencumbered. All my other characters wear Light Armour. I have one character that wears Heavy Armour for RP purposes, and I - literally - can only carry one apple or else I'm overencumbered. As a robe-wearing mage, you can both run faster without the armour, and can carry more loot (not to mention potions, or stack up on alchemy ingredients on your way).

Well to be fair, I'm pretty sure once you master your heavy armor skill it acts as if it were the weight of light armor (same with light armor having the defense of heavy armor once mastered).

Actually, both armor skills in Oblivion eventually take away the weight entirely, making there literally no advantage at all to being unarmored.

I think that unamoured should be changed, because realistically how would clothing protect you against a claymore? So i propose that unarmoured be closely afffiliated to "dodge" as it is easier to dodge unarmoured than armoured be it light or heavy and even medium. So this would limit the possibility of becoming the jack-of all-trades-master-of-all to some degree.

Maybe dodge could increase not by how many times you are hit but how many times you dodge the incoming blows(duh). A problem then arises: is it character skill or player skill

if they go for char skill then you would have to take dodge and unarmoured as a majors for them to really count (a bit like morrowind spell casting failure and stuff) but this might anger the action-RPG gamers.
if they go for the player skill then for some who are not good or cannot be bothered to dodge it might be problematic and it might lead to a "broken skill" like security in Oblivion.

i say that they should do a mixture of both. In combat the char speed should be determined by their agility, speed and armour specialisation (how comfortable you feel in the armor or unarmored) but the actual dodge would be done by the player. This means that a good ranger could easily dodge the blows as he is quick and well versed the art of dodging as well as unarmoured whereas the sturdy Nord head-chopping claymore-swingger i-wear-deadric-because-i'm-tough could not really dodge blows but he can take it due to the armour he is wearing. Therefore without dedication to the class majors and type the char could not really manage.

And an FPS player that has a twitch on his/her finger(s) can kept at bay. ;p

So the AR could take into account botht the dodge skill and the unarmoured skill.

Actually I must say I kind of liked the unarmoured skill as it was in Morrowind (NOT the fact that it did not work, but the way it was intended to work). Of course that having an AC class without armour and having this AC rise with every hit you take is not very realistic, but I guess it is a decent game mechanic. If Bethesda decided to go back to using dice rolls (That would be wonderful, but I doubt it, because then the FPS croud would go mad) they could simulate dodge skill by decreasing a chance of being hit. Something like the sanctuary spell in Morrowind. If they do not, then anarmoured skill is the only way to make a character oriented armourless defence skill. All this dodging triggered by the player and performed by the character (based on his skill in the better case) has the flaws of both systems. It is like the lockpicking system of Fallout 3 which is even worse then the attrocity Oblivion had. It would still require the player to have decent twitch skills and the character would be there only to impair and limit the player, which is not what the character is there for.
In the TES games so far the armour skills are totally character based. The player gives the character an armour and the character uses it to the best of his/her abilities. Unarmoured players should be given the same possiblity and not be forced to specially triger dodging during combat.

And if Beth continues ignoring the dodge skill, they can always show that they care for mages and give thier robes some sort of armour class, probably even a separate skill like "robe armour" It is a stupid solution, but again, the devs had lots of bad ideas lately.

Not to mention all the feather spells you can make with 10 minute+ duration. I constantly had an encumbrance greater than 1000 for my pure mage.

The problem isn't that Bethesda is trying to "nerf" any particular class, in fact it appears that they're trying to remove every down-side to playing any class. There were no consequences in OB to playing a fighter/thief/mage combination, since you wouldl quickly master ALL of those skills, especially if you DIDN'T take them as Major skills. In addition, by removing failure or the possibility thereof in the latest game, any untrained barbarian can cast spells, brew potions, make enchanted items (using Sigil Stones), or just about anything else without any problem. Any Mage can wield an axe or sword and hit reliably every time (it's easy to deliver poisons that way, regardless of weapon skill), and block with the best of them, although at slightly "nerfed" effect. You can choose just about ANY option throughout the game, and Oblivion won't hold you to the consequences; you get the rewards either way.

Armor in OB is pretty much of a "rat race" mechanism, where the game keeps introducing better and better stat equipment as your level increases. Having an unarmored character bypasses that entirely, which defeats the entire "treadmill" concept, and so was taken out of the game.

Morrowind desperately needed some form of GRADUAL magicka regeneration, but not the ridiculous "quick-charge" that they did in OB, which was excessive regardless of whether you played a fighter or a mage. There was no reason to "conserve" magicka throughout a dungeon, only limits as to how much you had available at the moment. Oblivion also suffered heavily (magic users in particular) from the lack of a levitation spell, which was a bit TOO easy and cheap in MW. I'm still wondering why a pure fighter in OB always started with both a healing spell and a fire damage spell.

Like a Mage, an archer couldn't REMAIN at firing range for long in OB, and opponents took increasingly more damage (and arrows, and time) to kill as the game progressed, which meant that you too had to develop a melee weapon skill if you wanted to survive.

Why? The whole point of being a mage is that you have a thousand and one options when it comes to combat whilst the warrior gets to choose between steel or skin

If an enemies getting too close for comfort then paralyze them, burnden them, drain their speed, frenzy them, make yourself invisible and get to a safe distance. Sure, if you're playing a full destruction mage you're in for a hard time because it's not as simple as throwing fireballs at everything when you reach the higher levels, but a decent mage should always have more options than 'stand in front of them enemy and blindly throw everything you have at it.'

For OB maybe, I wouldn't say its the most powerful, but I would say its the best. IE with invincible/paralyse/conjure over and over. Until they died. It takes ages though, making it less powerful (ie less DPS). In morrowind (and let me say I don't use potions mid fight in MW cause its illogical, unless for example I can roleplay it like paralysing the oponent then waiting a few seconds to simulate taking a potion out and drinking it), mages are definately a lot worse then melee fighters, and archers. They have a WAY lower DPS, damage and conjure spells are way more expensive, and have much less GOOD options in a fight.

you guys always completely mess up...
The thread is not about mages < other characters, it's about unarmored mages being <<< Battlemages.
The only point, where the 5% efficiency matter, is with calm, command etc. So for spells with a level restriction. But who needs that when he can have a full suit of armor with a ton of enchantments?
No matter, what you choose, the armored mage will be way better. The biggest problem for me is armor losing its weight entirely later on.
It's just like a fully armored mage has a huge protective bonus on top of having an additional enchant slot, while mages even struggle to get a fully enchanted suit(just consider the problem of missing gloves!)
Also, Warrior types with mixed in magic are ridiculously strong!
So the main criticism in this thread is NOT about mages/magic being weak, it's about magic not being tones down enough by armor or in general also about magic being too much of a no-brainer...

Well, honestly, the easiest character I've ever played with in Oblivion was my Nord fighter leveled 4/4/1. Seriously, by around level 10, I could take out almost anything with fists alone and I'd never have to worry about health level.

I have to admit something must have gone over my head, because the OP leaves me incredibly confused. Mages in Oblivion have the same amount of non-armour enchantment slots as Warrior types have (don't forget your Wrist Irons), and if you level up your Alteration skill enough you can cast a spell that gives you the maximum possible Armour Rating anyways (I named my spell for this "Invulnerable"). My Mage character wears no armor but I can easily cast a spell that gives me the same defense rating as full Deadric or Glass armour, plus if I really wanted to I could just run around Invisible all the time and cast paralyze on my enemies and then spell-bomb them to death.
If anything, after creating a Mage in Oblivion I got the impression that Bethesda disliked pure Warriors, because if you play a Mage just right you'll never even take a scratch all game.

Agreed. And this is why the magic system needs some tweaking and revamping to make it more challenging, as in the NPCs need to be just as clever as the PC when it comes to using magic. Like them using Detect Life and Chameleon 100% to sneak up on you and paralyze you.

There is most likely a way to bring back unarmoured back in a balanced way but I leave that to Bethesda figure out. Now after playing Morrowind I look at Oblivion and see how many good things were taking out that I wish to be in the next game. Unfortunately I never played Morrowind with a mage character so I don't know how to address that part of your original question.


Yes I agree with this , I took down many Oblivion gates and thought I could use all my sigil stones to make a superpair of armor . Still some problems Bethesda needs to fix.