Hey, I just don't see the point of having totally separate skills for magic.

the 5 schools atm are very defined and each seem to serve deep purposes now.

Merging 1 "grabback variety pack" school into them is fine. I'm not sure how you guys are equating this to "OMG DUMBED DOWN 1 SKILL IN TESVIII"

Well, the point is ...

I'm the good guy, i slay the bad guy, i win.

Just like this is not exciting, diversity in magic skills means a diversity in lore, because every magic skill has to be explained, and has a backstory. And, call us oldfags, but some of us rather see 50 skills than 1 skill and 50 perks. Don't ask me why, but 50 perks for one skill seem like 50 times the same thing with a slight variation, nothing more. Some of us like long lists of Skills and Attributes, dice rolling and such things.

It's like having only one musical instrument. Rather boring if you ask me, even if you can make every kind of music with that Instrument. I mean, i can make every kind of Music with my electric guitar, from Death Metal to Justin Bieber to Ambient, but it has the same tone every time.

@booheads: Killing part of the lore is kind of dumbing it down.

Useless? No.

Redundant? Yes.

Its spells and effects are better off being pawned on another school of magic. There weren't any spells that were inherently tied to Mysticism.

exactly this

Other than the lore and the backstory of how the school of Mysticism came to be, the relevant part of keeping mysticism in the game is just the spells.

I do agree that removing the school creates some issues with historical lore about the Psijics, however, removing a school of magic as an option for the PC to learn doesn't necessarily change the historical texts. In the past few centuries, for example we have discovered that infections are not caused by bad humors, but by germs, or we have reclassified certain stars as planets,etc. Also, one of the things that Todd stressed in his interview was that since all the lore comes from books written by ancient authors, some of them could have been wrong.

It could simply be the case that new discoveries in "praxology" over the course of the two hundred years since Oblivion have led to the reclassification of certain spells under the school of alteration, etc.

And wouldn't you agree that all of the schools of magic and all spells are already mystical in some way?

There's no reason why the important spells, such as soul trap, couldn't be assigned to something else, like conjuration, etc., precisely as worm82075 mentions above.

The thing is though that all of the schools are named as such because the spells that fall under them all share a common way of being used. Restoration spells all have the common trait of curing physical ailments. Destruction spells do the opposite. And so on. Mysticism is pure magic that deals purely with magic that doesn't affect the physical world in any conceivable way other than this: "the object was magically affected". Mysticism also dealt with more esoteric stuff such as souls and the very invocation of the gods, something that cannot be lumped into any other school. People have been saying that Mysticism is just the waste bin of the magic system, but thats because most everyone does not seem to want to understand WHY all the spells that fall under mysticism actually fall under it. And I outlined that in the original post.



Has to do with not only how magic works in TES, but also with general game mechanics. Magic in TES depends solely on how you put it to use, and as I said above, how you use your magic defines which school you are using. Yes, technically schools do not matter, but for the sake of gameplay it most certainly does. And this also has to do with the skillsets in general. The other skills are split up and rightfully so. That would be utterly [censored] to have one magic school and 14 other separate skills in the other specializations. Hence, magic schools as skills.



Yes, there were. Read my posts, especially my first one.



Yes, there is.

Sorry, missed this. Uhm, it was part of making Destruction more based on Elemental magic. There are endless possibilities you can put into, let's call it Elemental Destruction, by means of various spell effects caused by Fire, Frost, Water, Air, and Earth. We're currently limited to fireballs of varying size, and weaknesses. Classic example of Water Elemental Magic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qxxfrdYvl8
And *now* having Disintegrate Weapon and Armor spells make no sense in this updated school, but is more fitting in Alteration; "Alteration is the magic of altering the physical world" - if Feather is there to influence my weapon and armor by making them lighter, it makes sense to me to have Disintegrate effects on my foes weapon and armor since it's not Elemental Destruction. Don't be narrow minded about it; spells have been moved around before, to balance out the lists. If we add a lot more new spells to generic Destruction, the list becomes unbalanced.

If it makes more sense to you to remove an entire school of magic, the most important and basic school of them all, then fine - you do that. I'm trying to come up with solutions to keep Mysticism bu shifting spells around and sometimes *into* Mysticism and maybe have a lot of cool new effects added to (Elemental) Destruction because the potential is so great. But don't attempt to ridicule others and call them forum trolls for trying different approaches, even if you disagree. Personally "Destruction as a school of magic" never made any sense to me at all; Disintegrate touches alteration or mysticism, Drain touches Restoration (Body Magic) for Health and Fatigue, and Mysticism (Fabric of Magic) for Magicka.

you still have all the spells and then some. crying over labels...lmao...

Sorry but quite frankly you'll have to prove you even read anything I've said before I begin to acknowledge you.

I'm tired of seeing them removing any skills at all. Period. I can maybe let them get away with Enchant, but that's about it. Mysticism was somewhat useless in Oblivion perhaps, but not In Morrowind, oh no. Teleportation, Soul Trapping, and Absorb/Reflect enchantments were the way to go.

-DL :chaos:

I am okay if they merge mysticism with the other schools and have a story around why they did so - such as it being an obscure art and so many favoured learning other spells.

Mysticism to me was more akin to enchanting and alchemy - it was about manipulating magical forces beyond the boundaries of the physical world - lore wise i think it was very important with both of the 2 breakaway groups of the Altmeri - the Chimer and the Psijic Order - having an interest in mysticism - Indoril used the absorption aspects of mysticism in his fight against the Dwemer and the Dunmer as Chimer descendants retained a higher skill level of mysticism

Teleportation and Telekinesis were good examples of bending the world - the idea that mysticism used the spent energy of spells was also an excellent idea that imo was not really developed to it's full potential - someone trained in mysticism could have increased their magicka by tapping into that spent energy of spells.

I believe the developers have aimed to reduce the skills into branches that get used more often only because they have not yet thought of ways in which mysticism could be used in interesting quests.

Am pretty sure if the modding tools are available it would be easy to bring it back into the game - meanwhile i look forward to seeing how they handle it lore wise to explain why it has disappeared.

i dont know but mysticism was a useless spell, i would rather have it taken away and a new skill put in instead

So what. The other schools add a bit more to the teaching, whopedy do. It happens in real life all the time. Class teaches X subject, but maybe they no longer teach Y at the university. they never could get enough students for the class, so they incorporate the important parts into a related class.



It has nothing to do with how magic works in TES. You seem to have a fundamental missunderstanding about this. It is how magic is taught in TES, not how it works. If we taught physics and chemistry in the same class called Chemics and that is how we always did it, the laws of the universe would not change. Science works how it works, how we understand it and teach it can and will change. And yes it is also a gameplay mechanic. One of which is better now that mysticism is gone.



No there isn't. No spell is inherently tied to any school. It is tied to magic and magic alone. This is explicit in the lore. The schools of magic are just teaching and classification methods.




No there isn't. Again magic is just magic, How it is taught is through the schools. Teaching both kangi, hiragana and katikana in a Japanese class doesn't make it less Japanese. If they choose to take spells out of mysticism and teach them in the restoration class nothing has gone wrong, you just learned things in a different way. No different than one person learning a language through their local community college and another person learning it at home with Rosetta stone, it is still language X, they just had different teaching methods to reach there.

Mysticism wasn't useless but it wasn't as useful as the other magic schools, and I agree that it seemed like a cluster of spell effects that didn't fit anywhere else.

never thought mysticism was useless at all. BUT, if you take schools as areas of study one would devote oneself to entirely, in a world like Tamriel, mysticism would be the last school I'd choose.

Master of mysticism, can move inanimate objects, but nothing alive or cause harm with it. Can soul trap but can't harm or kill. Can reflect damage, but can't fight back.

Mysticism was never a self-supporting school of magic. the yearly convention at the arcane university kept the mysticism table in the back, unlit corner. club of pushovers. most defensive skills of mysticism could fit very well under alteration since "shield" is already there, detect life under illusion, telekinesis could be alteration, or destruction depending on the route they take

All that I am saying is that with perks there honestly isn't a reason to have more than one magic skill. I feel the same way about armor, ranged, and melee weapons (unarmed maybe lumped in, but that one is a little more debatable). Note that I am saying "with perks". You could easily specialize in one school of magic through perks if there is only one magic skill. Now, on the other hand, if there weren't perks, then by all means have separate skills for almost everything.

Mysticism in OB ended up being weak. By moving spells into it, it can become strong again. By reactivating lost spells that once was there, it can become strong again. I think the Japanese anology fails badly. I prefer Magic as Science anology; nothing that goes into Rocket Science fits into Archeology. Being a Biologist doesn't make you a Physicist. What do they share in common? They all make you a scientist. But before you can become a Physicist, you need to learn thinking like a scientist. Science hooks into all branches. In my world, Mysticism is that connection, that elemental school you need before you start specializing.

  + Alteration and elemental deals with physical properties of this world.                         +Body (restoration) is the only one on top of Mysticism, the gateway.                                                      +Illusion and Conjuration both deals with other beings.                          Body (restoration)    Alteration                                         Illusion  <-- Alteration and Illusion deals with objects of this world, one physical, the other living others.                              Mysticism                          <-- Mysticism is what binds everything together, the center of the all.               Elemental (destruction)    Conjuration            <-- Elemental and Conjuration deals with "hidden", or "non accessible" elements of creatures not of the common world.

I'm going to say the same thing I said last time it came up: Mysticism has a cool flavor, but it's just not coherent enough mechanically to justify being its own spell school.

Why is magic in the Elder Scrolls divided into schools in the first place? Why not just have one "magic" skill? Because this way, you can choose to specialize in certain schools. But this doesn't make sense unless those schools are mechanically distinct. In other words, being an Illusionist must play differently from being a Conjurer. Each school must have a mechanical identity, or what's the point in having it at all?

Five of the traditional schools have a well defined mechanical identity:

- Destruction gets elemental damage and debuffs
- Alteration gets utility spells and can give you new abilities
- Restoration heals you and gives you buffs
- Illusion controls visibility and messes with the AI
- Conjuration summons new creatures.

Or, to put it more succinctly, Destruction destroys, Alteration changes, Restoration heals, Illusion deceives, and Conjuration creates. All these schools do something. They can all be reduced to a verb. And that means that being a "Conjurer" can be meaningful - you specialize in creating things.

So, what does it mean to be a Mysticism specialist? Well, you can capture souls. And you can dispel enchantments. And you can teleport. And you can reflect magic. The effects just don't really fit together. There's even a book about this in Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion that flat out admits that Mysticism is an incredibly schizophrenic school but handwaves that away with lore excuses. This is a mistake. There's... really just no reason for Mysticism to be a separate school. It doesn't pull its weight.

I can understand eliminating it, but in Morrowind Mysticism was my favorite school. Trapping souls as you svck the life out of your opponents,teleportation,hunting for enemies with detect life. In Oblivion with mods you can pull or push away enemies,teleport yourself to the top of a wall and run that annoying archer through. The grey beards are supposed to be powerful Mystics, and I was looking forward to learning how to blast an opponent to ash with thrum.

I liked the collection of spells that comprised mysticism, and I like the word mysticism But as long as the spells are still there, I don't care. Most easily fit into other schools. I would like to see the return of teleportation spells.

:clap: Very well said. Explained it much better than I did the last 25 times.

Ditto. Another thing is that they probably removed at least one of these spells from mysticism before they even decided to get rid of mysticism. Due to new game mechanics, of course. Once they removed another spell, the school must have been so limited and useless that there is no way they could keep it, because nobody would ever use the skills that remained. I'd put my money on Soul Trap as the original culprit that seceded from the school.

Since Enchanting is now it's own skill, I expect some other method of accomplishing that task or trapping souls, and even if there is a spell or ability involved I expect it to fall under Enchanting. It also means that if your skill points affect how well you enchant, the difficulty in enchanting well is no longer tied to the same exact formula: mysticism level (quality of spell), soul gems acquired, knowing your enemy's soul quality and being able to find them, fight them, and kill them while the enchantment on their soul is still active. See what I did there?

So, I've established that the soul trapping system will probably be different... maybe even so much so, that you might not even use a spell or ability to trap a soul. For all we know we can't trap souls anymore. Either way, it seems very illogical to make Enchanting its own skill and not have related abilities fall under that skill. Wow, I leveled up my Enchantment skill. Looks like my __ANY SCHOOL___ is still too low to make this useful, taking away the ability to benefit from one of the 18 major skills due to an illogical crossover. Just try and make an argument that Soul Trap is still in one of the magical schools. You really can't. Bethesda is trying to make the game more logical, not less so.

On a side note, I really hope the mark and recall spells return for those of us who don't use fast travel. It wouldn't take much work to do, and they could even do simple Oblivion style spell animations and I wouldn't complain.

I always thought of Mysticism as the Elder Scrolls equivalent of theoretical physics. Its not particularly useful in everyday life but important in understanding the the underlying nature of things

Why dont we just put all the spells in one skill: magic. herpdurp it would make the game more streamlined and would make more sense because ITS all magic anyways.

/s