The regen bonus does work in combat (Easy to test by watching regen in combat naked vs wearing arch mage robes + morokei), however your regen occurs at a much slower rate than out of combat. As such I usually prefer gear that adds to max magicka over gear that effects magicka regen as your regen is pretty slow in combat with or without regen bonuses.

This

it seems that a batle mage is the only way to go @the mo & your right the bound weapons do look good i just miss the good old days of morrow wind where a true mage could be played Sob LOL

Elric of Melnibone, one of fantasies first anti-heroes, wore armor and was a mage.

Gandalf dons armor in several battles in the books

The Twelve Who Were Taken in Glen Cook's wondrous Black Company series - many wear armor and are incredibly bad-ass mages

All depends what fantasy 'stereotype' you subscribe too

:) J

It's not hard to test with potion powereed crazy enchanting to get an insane restore bonus for it. You can get your mana regen really crazy high so any bonus at all it's plainly obvious.

You'll notice, while the base magicka regen that is being multiplied is much much slower, you are absolutely for sure still being effected by bonuses to it.

I heard somewhere that the magic % enchants aren't as strong on heavy armor, but I could be wrong haven't tested it.

I plan on making my first mage. He will use light armor. Should I just level all magicka when I rank up?

iv never used warding/stoneskin magic and just ear robes, buti cant be beat as a mage

and whats wrong with bow attacks? sure the arrows go a little bit up for soem wierd reason but it is easy to compensate for it

It goes back at least as far as the original D&D.

It's a basic of play balance, though. Wizards are DPS kings but squishy in the four-man-band.

If you took enchanting then armor is far superior. If you didn't take enchanting.... take enchanting.

I do not know either right now I am playing a spellsword but I will definitely test the theory on a battlemage I intend to make. If that was true I guess the armor bonus would make up for the lack of the enchant bonus.

The 100% mana regen mask (maokai) is light armor I believe, so I would go light armor for a mage user personally. Light dragon armor isn't really that much worse than Daedric heavy plate armor.

Also you do benefit from mana regen items in combat, I definately noticed it on my dark elf fighter/magic hybrid when I took off my mana regen items. The thing is, as noted, the global reduction is combat makes it seem as you don't get any bonus.

They literally made zero purpose to wearing robes in this game. They take it one step further adding insult by forcing a player to spend 3 perks into Alteration just to have a relatively high AR...yet the final "skin" spell that you get gives you the maximum possible damage reduction WITHOUT any perks.



You don't have to drop a single point into any of the armor trees to still get a much higher benefit from wearing them over robes. The only time robes are better is if you have Mage Armor rank 1 or 2. Later on those perk points become redundant due to inept planning (Bethesda).



Yes, because instead of your mana taking 10 seconds to refill during combat, with +100% it will refill in 9. The point is, combat regen is so slow that the enchants don't even add enough that matters, even at high levels. Your base mana pool also determines how fast you regen mana both in and out of combat, so adding more mana over +% regen makes you regen quicker....

So in effect, no, they don't "work".



People keep tossing around "Battlemage" on these forums and keep using it incorrectly. That's not a Battlemage, but it is the most powerful build in the game. Not only do the Bound Weapons do insanely good from level 1-30 on any difficulty, you also end up with 1-2 Dremora Lords who are grossly overpowered. You can actually summon them on any character too later on if you simply wear -%Conjur cost gear. Later on you can trivialize the game even more by smithing yourself some better gear.

Reading this thread makes me want to go make myself Gamling, the Battlemage. Aye, that's what I'm gonna do! Even going to try it on Master difficulty.

No you can get 100% magic spell reduction cost for any school pretty easy.

Defo armor, you can enchant 4x 25% less magic cost for a certain skill. End result, no magicka cost for spells for that skill.

By pretty easy he means "dumping more than a few points into Enchanting, while also taking quite a while to level up the Enchanting skill in the first place, not to mention finding the item you need to disenchant for the enchantment". It isn't hard, but it's time consuming and you typically won't have what you need before level 30ish.

Every build needs to drop more than a few point in enchanting

I think his point is that you will be a long time without those benefits. For quite a while, you -will- need a lot of mana. Especially that unless you play full destro (no conjuration, no illusion), you should never really get hit at all, so hp becomes "meh".

Im personally using robe chest (the one from College's last quest), with the Maokai helm and everything else enchanted leather, but thats because I have no points to spare for mage armor (im conjurer/archery/sneaking)

Actually leveling enchanting up is quite quick if combined with smithing and mining and is economical too. What I did was:
>mine gold and silver (100ish)
>smith some gold and silver rings
>enchant them all
Profit: enchanting and smithing combined 70+ skillups (though don't recommend if combat skills are low).
Time consumed: 2 hours max.
Money made: haven't sold them all yet but wager somewhere around 7000 gold.

Again: the point is that it will take a while before you get there. Not how long it takes to get there.

Oh, sure, if you feel like it, just go park your ass in town and plvl those at lvl 5... enjoy the can of whoopass thats about to hit you when you step out tho. Low lvl combat skills vs high level mobs = fun

its more a "spellblade" type of character, but battlemage sounds better or not ??

Mage in armor = Battlemage or Spellsword. Basically mages who specialized in using magic in combat did often learn how to use armor as well as weapons.

When it comes to pure mage however, robes are much stronger than armor in the benefits they grant. Ofc you can go the route of broken enchantment as well and run around in heavy armor with 0 mana cost on spells ... Personally it does not make sense to me that spells would be magicka free just because you are wearing 4 pieces of some armor. The armor would have to have charges replenishable by gems for that kind of mechanic to make sence, but to each his own.

Well a mage in ebony armor and a golden diadem just looks awesome and with enchants can be made to enhance whatever your mage needs. The armor preference in this game is as much a sandbox as the game itself, so create whatever character you can really get into and run with it.

Pure mage=Robes.
Battlemage/Spellsword=Armor.