I only just started playing Oblivion about a week ago and am just wondering, is it worth it developing a Mage type char?

The spells don't seem to have any range, you seem to have to run right into the enemy's face practically to do any damage. Does that get better in higher levels?
Or do you need a staff as weapon for the casting to be more effective?
I always play a mage in all games but here in Oblivion it seems very tedious and ineffective. Also mana is a real big problem. You can get three casts in and your mana is depleted.
Also, I summoned the skeleton and it just stands there doing nothing.

Advice would be appreciated. I don't want to further develop a mage char if maybe I need to make a fighting char (even though I much prefer magic), but the way it is going
I seem to be a mage that has to do all the fighting with a sword because the spells are pretty useless.

I am also a bit concerned that after a whole week of at least 6 hrs/day playing I am only still level 1. Maybe it is all taking so long because there are so many NPC's and every conversation is so long winded and you have to go through it all just in case one of them has maybe a quest. I realize I can go by walkthrough but I think a game should be playable even without having to consult a walkthrough the whole time.

Just get an electrocution spell that shoots at range. Magic is so easy to exploit in Oblivion. I beat the game only using magic and never carrying any weapons at all. I just made my electrocution spell really strong. In fact, the Arena match thing you can do, I got all the way to the top rank in 2 hours real time. So yes, you can conquer the game easy with a magic-only character.

Yes as Tes96 said. I see you only have used touch spells so far? Magic has wonderful range. Ranged magic although isnt as powerful as touch spells. You can easily ride through morrowind with a magic only user. Just keep your distance.

I would say mages are overpowered; previous character was a pure mage who always used ranged attacks, ranged magic has the same benefit as an archer but with far larger firepower.
Some tips, at low levels: Drain health 100 for 1 second kills everybody with 100 in health or less but it will not hurt them if they have more than 100 in health. Very nice for killing weaker or wounded enemies, frenzy: make one on target, an area around 20-30 feet and around 5 levels higher than yours, only work on npc but the way to kill groups of enemies.
Get the weakness to shock and fire effect, now make a spell with shock damage 20 + weakness to shock 100 in 3 seconds, next spells will do 40 in damage if you hit before the 3 second time is out.
With weakness to magic you can add that after weakness to shock and you have a real destructive spell as in cast on gatekeeper some times and he dies.
Don’t forget summons, nice if somebody else get beaten up.
At high levels command creature, humanoid is insanely overpowered, pack of goblins, cast on warlord and he fight for you. Yes you can use command humanoid on everybody and have them follow you but it might not be an good idea to forget essential npc in oblivion worlds.

In my opinion, and in my experience, a Pure Mage character is without a doubt and by far the most powerful type of character you can have in the game.

That is eventually. It can be difficult to start because of low endurance, and the cost of spells, and the need to get skilled. But eventually it pays off big time.

And keep in mind Magic is not just destruction. You don't even really need destruction to be very powerful Mage.
It's too bad, I think, that lots of people tend to think Mage = Destruction.

Even though my fave char is an archer who backs herself up with magic, I will readily agree with Savlian above that a pure mage can easily be the most powerful of characters.

It takes lots of study and effort on the part of both the player and the character to get there however. Fighters are strong and simple. Mages are stronger, but more complex.

Your character's first objective should be to gain entrance to the Arcane University. I then have my mages stay pretty close to to the Imperial City as they learn and test and grow and create their own enchanted equipment and custom spells. Building a pure mage is a slow and careful process that takes some study and knowledge of how to optimize magic.

The player's study is well served right here on the forums, as well as at UESP wiki. http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Oblivion

Agreed with Savlian. At higher levels, the mage will be the most powerful character in the entire game. What are your stats? What Birthsign? Give us some details to help you out with. Early on however, you tend to get owned a lot. I run away a lot. Speaking pure mage, strictly, hybrid mages (for me, mage/archer) can take the punishment better early on.

Just keep practicing your spells. Btw, your conjured buddy won't do anything unless you are in danger. And the skeleton is lame, but he is good practice for early on. As you increase your skill level with various spell skills, the mana cost of those spells goes down. When you gain entrance to the Arcane University, is when the real, ahem.... magic begins, when you can craft your own spells. Get going on those recommendations!

Yes you can totally destroy with a mage in this game.

It gets pretty easy once you get into the arcane university. Once you can make your own spells and use enchantments you get more effective.

One idea to get more power: choose an element, and make a ranged spell. Do damage (something like 10 for 3 sec.) and weakness to the same element (like 75% for 6 sec.). Then once you get the mages staff, choose your mages staff with the same element. It should provide a lot of power for little mana usage. Just remember to trap enough souls to recharge your staff.

About still being level 1, have you ever slept in the game? You can only level up once you sleep, so maybe you'll immediately jump several levels.

Thank you all so much for all the great advice. I am so happy to learn that I will be able to play a mage and do not have to re roll and also know that it is a game I will really enjoy, because I like the atmosphere. I played Fallout for a long time and loved it, but the atmosphere in Oblivion is more my cup of tea. I usually play Multiplayer games for years on end and only started on singleplayer games recently due to lack of new MMO's and being sick of Wow etc etc.My problem with singleplayer games was that they seemed 'too short'. But this game seems to have a huge content and I will probably be playing it for a very long time..................great!

I am also surprised that even though the game was released quite a long time ago, there are still so many active people on the forum, that is a good sign that a game is great.

Check Unofficial TES pages it will tell you how to exploit the system much easier once you learn some information mage characters can be godly, IMO oblivion has the easiest to play Mage class out of any elder scrolls you don't have to worry about running out of magika since it restores over time so you don't have to sleep as constant here are my tips.

? Join the mage guild as soon as possible it is critical for your success the mage guild allows you to make custom spells and enchanted items which is crucial for purist who refuse to pick up a melee weapon.

? Do not jump straight to dungeon crawling without joining the mage guild and getting custom shield spells and robe enchantments this will make the game a lot more forgiving.

? Mods although not required greatly enhance the experience try to not get any buggy spell mods Like ones that enlarge or shrinks characters there glitchy and the novelty wears out pretty fast.

Definitely. See why below.

Sounds like you're using Touch spells. Use Target spells to use magic from a distance.

A staff is nice in a way, the downside is that you cannot use it in melee, other than blocking with it.


Use potions or other effects to restore your magicka. Sounds like you may use too strong spells. The stronger the spell, the more magicka it drains.
The skeleton, or any other summoned creature, does not do much outside of combat. Summon it in combat and it will fill its purpose.
(Remember, though, he is dead. You can't expect him to do much.)


A Mage character is by far the most powerful character type at higher levels. A Breton Mage is an ultimate win, in my opinion. Warriors may look tough with their heavy armour and gigantic swords, but if they face a pure mage they're usually toast.


It does take time, but it's worth it, don't worry. It all depends on how much and often you use your major skills.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhVD63fP0Kg

Oblivion is a joke. Get 100% chameleon (permanent invisibility even when attacking) through gear and spells then proceed to kill everything without fear of being attacked. Easiest RPG I have ever played.

Except, you're not playing it as an RPG though are you? Sounds more like god-mode shooter.... just sayin'....

Yep. If you treat it as a an FPS, Oblivion is "easy." The whole concept of "easy" doesn't really apply to roleplay; in roleplay, the character drives the action, and the process is more about character development than "beating" the game.

On topic: The key to using a summoned "assistant" effectively is to cast the spell near enough to the enemy that the summons "draws" the enemy. Your summons will appear in front of you, so you want to be facing your enemy, so you will be "behind" it. It can be helpful to sneak up on the enemy, rather than marching right in. If you have chameleon or invisibility, you can cast that after summoning, and it will keep you from being attacked.

Mages are a lot of fun and are usually really powerful as well. The most important things for you to do are gain access to the arcane university and to learn ranged spells. Once you are in the university and are a modest level one of the most fun things to do is just make really creative spells and see how they do in battle. Like someone else said if you post your character build then everyone here will be able to help you a lot more.

I now play with a heavily overhaul modded build (OOO+MMM mainly) but I played alot last summer with a more or less vanilla build. I played one Altmer pure mage character using the vanilla levelling system. Based on that little experience, I'd agree that a pure mage is probably overpowered in the game.

Warning: wall of text coming your way!

First of all, I bet you will really enjoy Oblivion, if you give it some time to get used to some things that may seem weird or counterintuitive at first. This game is quite different from WoW and other rpgs in some ways, but you'll learn to appreciate (or mod) it. But indeed, the game has a lot of content, and as you will see many people say on these forums, once you're done there are tons of mods that are of really high quality and offer extra content, or even give the game a huge overhaul.

As said above, the mage is a very versatile choice. Indeed, you run out of mana fast in this game. As a mage, I always get my willpower up as fast as possible. With 100 willpower, it takes 30-something seconds to refill an empty magicka bar. (38 I think). Suppose you have 380 magicka, it amounts to 10 mana/second (or 50 mp5 to speak in WoW terms ). You can examine the costs of your spells and figure out how many spells you would be able to cast in a constant rotation (e.g. keep a shielding spell up, a conjured creature, and cast a heal once in a while). Since every second, a percentage of your mana bar is regenerated (opposed to a fixed number of magicka), once you increase your intelligence, you also increase your mana regen, because the percentage regenerated every second amounts to more magicka. So really, the sky is the limit, especially once you start enchanting gear with fortify magicka. But I'm playing an Atronach at the moment (which means I don't have any mana regen except spell absorption), and I can tell you, I've learned that a mage does not need that much mana in the average fight, provided you use your brains when picking your spells. If you DO need a lot of mana, just make sure you keep mana regen potions on you. Alchemy will make you a lot of money and plenty of potions in no time. It's probably the most powerful thing ingame.

As someone said, a lot of people think mages are about destruction, but in my opinion a powerful mage will never need to resort to destruction. I repeat, alchemy = win. Make sure you get your alchemy skills up high, because you can make a number of extremely useful potions, and sell the rest for good profit. Specialize in a few magic schools, one way to go is illusion, to get to high levels of chameleon and good invisibility spells (sort of magic-based rogue). A good combination is using 'command ...' spells to let enemies fight for you, while you maintain invisibility. Another option would be to specialize in conjuration, think of the warlock in WoW. Restoration is always good to have, once you can craft your own spells, you can make nice HoTs, and the standard heals you can learn from any trainer are good immediate heals. Like said above, combine 'weakness to [element]' with a 'damage [element]' spell, and get a staff with the same element. This will make you burn through foes, but remember that some foes (partially) resist some elements. A nice all-rounder is 'weakness to magic' with 'damage health'. This will hit everyone the same, but is generally a bit weaker compared to the mana cost.

Anyway, plenty ways to go by. You also mentioned leveling, which is important, with you coming from WoW and all. In this game, it's done very differently and somewhat counterintuitively. And it is potentially indeed very slow, but I will tell you how to deal with that. You can find plenty of info about the leveling system on this forum and various sites, but I will go into some detail below. After that I'll mention a mod that makes leveling more similar to WoW, I use that mod personally and it made the game much more enjoyable for me.

As you know, you pick a number of major skills at the start of the game. Each skill is governed by an attribute. Naturally, once you start the game you will pick the major skills that you intend to use a lot (in your case, most (if not all) magic schools (and alchemy), because you will start out at a higher skill level and they will also increase faster when you use them. But, in practise this will not work. Once you level up, you can increase 3 attributes by a certain amount of points. The amount of points (1-5) that you will be given depends on how many skills you have increase this level that governed the particular attribute. Example: if you have alchemy as a major skill, and you would level up by increasing that skill 10 times without increasing any other skills, you would get the following. (I am not sure if alchemy is governed by willpower or intelligence, but in this example I'll assume it's willpower). You will level up, and get a +5 bonus on willpower. The other two attributes you choose (probably intelligence and e.g. endurance), will only have a +1 bonus. This matters, because in Oblivion, once you level, the world levels up too, and foes become more powerful. In order to not get weaker compared to your enemies, you have to get those attribute bonusses as high as possible. The way to do this is to increase minor skills enough to get the attribute bonusses up, and then use your major skills to actually level up. The best way to do is is to choose major skills that you don't use often, and can increase in a controlled manner. This means that you will only be choosing 1-2 magic schools as major skills, and for the rest you choose semi-worthless skills. Again, if you want a better explanation, search the forums, or check the oblivion wiki. To summarize, increasing your level will be slow (at least until you learn how to increase skills efficiently), and you need to do some paper-and-pencil work to make sure your get your attribute bonusses right, plus it forces you to pick major skills you don't actually want, making the game harder at the start (but hopefully easier once you progress). If you ignore this system, the game will start out reasonably easy but get progressively harder.

If you come to dislike this system (the best way to get to know it is to give it a try), there are great mods out there to beat it. The most obvious choice, seeing as you come from WoW, is to install Oblivion XP. This mod will give you an experience bar like in WoW, and instead of leveling through using skills (thereby increasing them, eventually leading to a levelup) you get experience by completing quests, killing enemies, making potions, and so fort. Once you level, you get a certain amount of points to increase attributes, and a certain amount of points to increase skills. It's less realistic, but more intuitive for many. You can pick the major skills you actually want to use, and level them up just the way you like it. It allows you to specialize, so you can totally design your own custom magic-based class, using the schools you like. Another important thing to realize is that in Oblivion, while leveling is slow, it will not get slower as you get higher level (for me it tends to go faster at higher levels). In WoW, you start out much faster, but the last levels are very slow. Oblivion XP is like WoW, the first level requires only 1800-ish XP, while the really high levels go as far as 50000 XP. (you can also configure this yourself.)

A different approach is to install a mod that changes the game, so that instead of the world leveling with you, you get a static world where enemies have a set level. This will mean that some content will be impossible to do in the beginning, and other content will get really easy after a while, instead of all the content being pretty much of the same difficulty, which will increase as your own level increases. A good mod for this is Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul, but that mod also changes a lot of the game's content. There are also mods out there that just alter the world-leveling system, but I don't know any names.

Also, Oscuro's Overhaul and Oblivion XP make a great mix. That's the way I'm playing now, and I absolutely love it. The leveling system is powerful and intuitive, and the game's more interesting content is appropriately high leveled, so that you have to stay on your toes all the time and be sensible about where you go and what you do.