Mods help this. Race-Balancing project, LAME and Integration: The Stranded Light made it far easier to play a pure mage.

I am seriously thinking about starting a completely new Oblivion character with all different mods for a different experience.

are you serious. i had to use mods to nerf my magicka regen rate because it was ridiculously high. it sounds like you just missed.........ALOT. using potions would have been better if they were hotkeyable which i hope they fix in skyrim. if you magicka never ran out it would make them pointless and magic in oblivion was so noobified anyways such as being able to cast spell while holding both a shield and weapons..........no thanks. i dont want the game any easier than it was. no more games designed around people who svck at them.

Yeah, hopefully whatever the quick-selection/hotkey system is in Skyrim, it's not burdensome and won't interfere with what spells I have "equipped." I don't want to have to unequip a spell in order to use a magicka potion.

You mean absorb?

The point was to have a small magicka pool and the most powerful spells have huge magicka costs. That way you don't go on a killing spree, owning everything because your spell that is capable of instantly killing someone is only a fraction of your magicka cost. It makes it so that you will have to balance spell strength or else you will run out of magicka in a multi-enemy fight and be doomed. Plus, I never have to use magicka potions so I'm not sure what you had, maybe you had the sign of the atronach but otherwise I've never had to have a magicka potion, I just jumped around dodging blows while I waited for my magicka to regen enough to cast another spell.

This.
Oblivion's mana regen was WAYY too fast.

Although it would be cool to have some alternative to potion chugging. Perhaps a 'focus' ability that regens magic at a decent rate, but renders you unable to move/fight etc.

alot of people said hotkeying. ive been using mods for so long and the one i was using didnt work with potions since it only allowed one at a time. did the vanilla game allow for hotkeying potions?

Yep and you could use the potion without switching off of spells also.

I did. I tried it for like 10 minutes and gave up.



I just want a large enough magicka pool and fast enough magicka regen to not mandate constant magicka potion usage.



Well you can't back-pedal anymore to allow your magicka to regen. Also, that's just boring gameplay. Shooting a few fireballs then running away until your magicka regens is not fun.



Well from my experiences on the default difficulty level, spells that were powerful enough to cause decent damage to enemies drained my magicka very quickly, requiring me to drink magicka potions often. Also, like I said earlier, running away and hopping around during a fight until your magicka regenerates is not fun.

Try playing Morrowind if you want to see how REAL magic is used! Back in my day, we teleported to and from the academy, through the Aetherius, during a black moon! And we liked it!

Seriously though, if magic gets any easy we might as well just give every magic user an automatic bazooka with infinite ammo.

Agree with this - potions, especially in Oblivion, were too powerful. I liked alchemy but it was overpowered no doubt. My first character was an alchemist mostly because it leveled so fast and then everything scaled so ridiculously I had to abuse potions to survive, but with 3 potions going my alchemist was pretty much invulnerable to harm with unlimited magicka, and my poisons could kill almost anything in one application. My shield potions were stronger than anything I could cast while lasting much longer.

I think the main problem though, is some spells are just too powerful to be able to cast them indefinitely. I think more powerful spells should cost much more mana while medium-weak spells that wouldn't be overpowered compared when used frequently for damage would be much cheaper, OR perhaps place cool downs on certain effects such as invisibility. Another solution would be making them more difficult to cast - longer animation before it goes off + chance of being interrupted by damage for example.

I've actually kind of hated the mana system in almost every game I've played with it though, so I guess I'm kind of biased against it.

Why isn't dodging attacks fun? It's more fun to stand there and have infinite magicka killing everyone and everything?



They were hotkeyable and they didn't even remove your spells from the active spell slot.



There was a limit to the amount of potions you could drink at any given time.

There's a difference between dodging attacks and running away.

I agree if only to prevent potion chugging. Same goes for health. I think Health and Magicka should regenerate at a similar rate. Potions would be hard to make and expensive. But one potion would bring you back up to full.

Potions are for immediately after or sometime before your battles. Not in the middle.

If you need that much magicka to kill an enemy you are totally doing it wrong

Cost effective spell that kills enemies in 1-4 shots depending on their level and whether or not they are leveled to the player character

100% weakness to magicka x3 seconds (2 if you're a good shot)
100 pts drain health (don't add time)

If you have this spell you can kill most enemies in 1-2 shots 3-4 for tougher enemies (usually those damn goblins that level with you) and still have quite a bit of magicka left over especially if you have fortify magicka enchantments (even then you don't really need it)

You know what ? My first character was intented to be a pure warrior and have nothing to do with magic,but I had spells and my magicka was replenished by itself and I think it didn't stick well.

At my mage character I did found the use of magic impractical,but for different reasons.

If you choose the right race along with the right birthsign and a custom class,you can create a mage with a large amount of magicka from the beggining.

My problem was that the enemies where moving fast enough to do side steps and dodge the fireballs I was throwing them,and the time you needed to do to get close enough to someone to use a touch spell on him was more than enough to take a blow from his club.
It was just so hard to actually hit and beat some enemies with magic that even as a mage I fought with a sword.

I'm hoping the passive magicka regen is decent, last thing I want is potion-spam combat.

This exactly, except I don't think health should automatically regenerate. If magicka regenerates at a good speed, then you could just use healing spells to restore your health.



Well that's kind of an exploit with the whole drain health 100 points for 1 second + 100% weakness to magicka thing. And in an article I read about the combat in Skyrim recently, Bethesda said they recognized the spell exploits in Oblivion, and will correct them in Skyrim.

Pure Mage has always been one of the most overpowered professions in TES. There needs to be some downside to it. This would be like myself arguing that stamina runs out too quickly and that there should be some sort of quick regeneration for pure melee users.

agreed. I'm hoping they balance it without making the combat tedious and less visceral/fun than melee. (potion-spam comes to mind)


Possibly reduce the % on vulnerability spells, chameleon, relfect, etc.

Well you can still do everything as a pure warrior when your stamina is drained. As a pure mage, if your magicka is drained, you are powerless.

The reply was in regards to Oblivion not Skyrim (just wanted to address that)

However, although it is overpowered I don't see how it is really an exploit. If I weaken you 100% and then weaken you again another 100% why wouldn't the spells stack and you'd be weakened by 200%? The same could be done to my character and often is considering race and birthsigns that can effect how weak I am to magic.

The way I see it's a completely legitimate magical tactic multiplying the weakness of an enemy.

As far as Skyrim goes I'm okay with them for taking it out that will just add more fun to figuring out the system once again (it would be no fun if I could use the same tactic over and over again in every TES game)

Not really... Your basic attacks do severely less damage. You cannot do any special attacks (power attack, etc.). Your chance of also being knocked down is greatly increased due to having no stamina. If you call that still doing everything, then sure... Warriors are in the same boat.

Magicka regeneration slow?

Alchemy is your friend. you just drink one or two potions and you have fast Magicka regeneration which will last easily long enough.
Also what is the point to make mages even better if majority of people are complaining that they are "overpowered"?



I wouldn't mind if they returned back to Morrowind style. But I don't want that they render potions useless. And making spells
less effective and increasing magicka regeneration is not good idea. I rather shoot one powerful spell than pew-pew all day with
weak spells.

Saying magic was fine in ob because of how weakness to magic worked is like saying combat in morrowind was fine because you could kill anything just by enchanting everything with restore health and just press a button all day long.

Something working and something being FUN... not the same thing. Magic in ob wasnt fun.