Also, what about the apprentice stone? On legendary, is there pretty much still not a chance in hell that greater ward will save me from dragons with mentioned stone?
What are you planning for enchantments? Don't need all that much magicka if you have 100% cost reduction in Destruction.
Pretty much this, as a minimum playing mon Master. If undergoing Legendary, you need enough health to keep from being one shot for most cases.
I would consider a minimum of 300 health. Be that form enchantments or whatever.
The higher your enchanting skill, the less magicka you will need. When leveling my mage I started out by putting most of my points into magicka then balanced health out as I got higher(and enemies got tougher). Eventually you will get magicka regen and spel cost reduction.
I would not use apprentice stone... steed and mage are good for leveling, lord and atronach are great for endgame.
200-300 health is good as your on Legendary difficulty. As your not going into conjuration you'll want a follower to take the attention from you, either a tank (1H & shield) or Battlemage. Start with Mage stone & switch to Lord or Atronach once you feel your character if strong enough.
Mages are simple to build really, I spend 1 point in health starting at level 6 and every 5 levels after that, rest in magicka.
Agreed on the 200 max health. The rest into magika. Even if you cost reduce destruction to 0%, you're still going to want to have a healthy supply of magika for your other schools (assuming you're focusing on other schools). Ive said in so many other threads that your magika is your lifeline. You can never have too much of it.
For a pure mage I start off putting one point in health on every level ending in 5. Easy to keep track of that way. Eventually, once I get lots of manna I'll start putting a little more in health. My pure mages only use robes and use alteration for the mage armor.
Does the atronach stone or absorb dragon's fire or frost breath magic?
Dragons don't know spell absorption. But they know magic resistance.
I'm not sure what happens when you put Miraak's Robes on though -suddenly, spell absorption seemed to work, when I tried it.
sorry, typo
what i meant was, does the atronach stone absorb dragon breath attacks as well?
That's why I said dragons don't "know" spell absorption (what Atronach stone gives you)
But it seems to work when you wear Miraak's Robes -which I have to check again, in case I was "seeing" things.
In my experience, yes, absorption works on Dragon breath and Draugr shouts as well. My old Breton mage cast DragonSkin plus Atronach stone for 100% absorb and took no damage at all from Dragon attacks.
I usually go 2 magicka 1 health up to 150 health and all rest on magicka. After you get the extra effect ability you can have 2 schools costing no mana, but I'd still level magicka, simply because other schools may have costly spells, specially master level.
Now, I do this on Adept, but since you plan on going on Legendary, I'd say it's better for you to have at least 300 health, otherwise you will be one-shotted most of the time, and it would be a waste to have put only a few levels into health.
EDIT: Spell absorption is great (specially with the Atronach Stone) if you don't rely on Conjuration, otherwise your conjuration spells may be absorbed by the effect, which defeats the purpose.
A bit off subject, but can I still cast summon dremora lord with 100% spell absorbtion activated?
dont forget you can simply do Legendary now wich you can have infinite magicka and enough health and Stamina
Not with vanilla, unfortunately. The unofficial patch fixes that on PC. Summoning staves don't work either.
So, if I had 80% spell/magic absorbtion (which Im working towards) then it would be quite difficult to summon a dremora when im in a pinch?
Yes, quite difficult. I usually go for a mix of 50% absorb (which makes staves usable since the patch doesn't fix them) and as much resist as I can get. That way, it's possible to get constant 90%+ total mitigation.
Yes it would. I've even made a thread a few months back saying exactly that... I got 100% spell absorption and never knew about this bug... When I finally got back to Conjuration, who said I could actually summon? So, if you go on the Conjurer's path, forget about Spell Absorption.