your right

and I would say we will see "magic" damage AND poison damage and "physical" damage (like bone shards and ice spikes)

I am more concerned about FORTIFY skills / attributes being left out rather than DRAIN / ABSORB skills + attributes

Fotifying skills or attributes is what all my oblivion characters were about... All my mages had fortify magicka 50 on various pieces of clothing / armor

Also, when one was a master of Restoration they could create crazy powerful fortify speed / acro / athletics spells which would have awesome affects

Im desperately hoping that in skyrim u can fortify Magicka and Stamina (hopefully stamina functions as a combination of athletics, acrobatics, and speed functioned in oblivion)

Being able to abosrb/damage/fortify skills was stupid and didnt make any sense. Attributes made more sense. Health stamina and magicka were useful and made the most sense tho.
I never understood how you could use magic to take away someone's skill with a sword.

Also, disintegrate better be out. I don't want my favorite sword to get destroyed by some spelldouche.

Of course not, absorb and reflect spells will be in along with soul trap, resto, summon. It is 85 unique spell types not 85 individual spells people, that's been said several times on this forum. :whistling:

That's enchanting and totally OT and irrelevant. Just because we haven't seen them in the demos doesn't mean they are not there, I am sure fortify skill/attribute spells are in.

Speaking of enchanting, I recall that some magical affects are only available for Enchanting, not in Spells. I'm assuming old spells like Fortify would be a good enchantment magic.

That said, I suddenly wonder if Alchemy has its own unique effects as well.

What a novelty! It would be a huge leap forward from the humdrum lamea$$ canned spells that so many game makers saddle you with! :turned:

It sounds like they're mainly eliminating superfluous spell effects, or spells that no longer have a use in the game.

As for spell-making (and I've said this before)- it's not even close to game-breaking. The most "creative" people got with it was "I want to create a spell that shields me, shoots fire at all my enemies, summons a horde of skeletons and gives me a nice pedicure all at the same time". Or spells like "This-totally-isn't-Fireball-it-just-hurls-fire-in-a-ball-and-does-damage".

Given two-handed spell use, there really shouldn't be any need to custom-craft spell effects. And if anything, it will be better for balancing, because no one will be able to craft their own god-mode spells.

Also: dragon shouts.

- Dragon shouts are nothing more than a gimmick to give non-magic characters access to high level spells.

- In an open world game there is no such thing as a spell that no longer has a use, though in this case you are partially correct as there is so much game world content being ignored in SR....

- your mischaracterization of spell making is odd...why do you care what other people do with spell making? Why would you argue to limit options for other players?

fortify skill spells SHOULD NOT BE IN GAME .....

because they are easy to abuse

100 alchemy for 2 seconds anyone

fortify health and magic should be in game however so that we can use in enchanting.

- You don't like them. Ok. Does that make them not-spells?

- When I hit level 50 (heck, when I hit level 20), I will no longer be using spells that heal 5 points, shield 5%. I just won't be doing it. I had so many spells in Oblivion and Morrowind that ended up just sitting in my spellbook after a certain point, because I simply never had a reason to use them anymore.

- I'm not mischaracterizing it, and I don't care what other people do with it. I bring it up because I'm trying to demonstrate that it's only breaking the game for people who wanted to play god-mode mages in the first place. I don't see the need to have the ability, since all it does is combine effects from spells that you already have access to.

One of the big reasons why they removed Spellmaking, was to prevent people from making cheap cast spells like "Heal 1 point for 2 secs on Self" that they used to power level their spell skills quickly. Tricks like that have made leveling magic skills a joke from TES II: Daggerfall to TES IV: Oblivion.
In TES II: Daggerfall, you could make a Mage with all the magic skills as his Primary/Major skills and have him up to lvl 20+ within an hour. However, Daggerfall did have 3 exploits that allowed that. If your char had Spell Absorption, you could cast the spell as an AoE at a wall in front of you and regain the magicka. You could go to cast the spell, which would consume magicka, then cancel the spell before selecting target, which refunded the magicka but still counted as a spell cast for skill gain. Or you could empty your magicka bar, then go to use a magic item with a "On Use: " effect and then cancel the targeting to regain the same amount of magicka as the last spell you had cast, rinse and repeat for full magicka bar.