Its not that it was useless, it was redundant. Magic IS Mysticism. Besides, they technically didn't get rid of it. Sure its no longer one of the schools of magic, but the spells are still there and they've been moved around to the other schools of magic where each spell fits appropriately.

not if your player has completely used all perks to maximize your magic power and enchant power magicka wearable items, remember enchant has been re-added, and im sure you will be able to create powerful items from powerful souls like in morrowind

I guess Burma still exists, right? Time doesn't change things, does it? Vietnam is one country, cavalry still fight on horses, Pakistan doesn't exist, it's just a region of India. We all still live on Pangaea because the continents don't move. It's always been there since 300 million years ago.
My point is that things change. Heck, we even saw that in the game itself. Oblivion gates opened when they weren't supposed to be possible. Vivec, Alexima, Sotha Sil, and Dagoth Ur all lost their powers. The champion of cyrodiil broke Sheogorath's cycle and became the prince of madness.
It would be stupid to think that things Didn't change. Although disbanding a school of magic in 200 years is probably fairly quick, dragons are back. It took them a while for the setup, but I imagine they came quite quickly once the powers that held them out of Nirn broke.

i know i dont want to argue ive already done this for days all im saying is maybe like myself and many other tes fans we are traditional and do not agree with the change because something weve known for so long seemed so serene in its own right, but it will work, and yes all forms of magic is a form of mysticism, but some fit the bill more than others through a point of view, and besides, i guess the auther of the book ''Mysticism'' was completely wrong and didnt know what he was talking about then eh?

I'll miss Mysticism, it my favorite school too...

Bethesda could come up with lore on how Mysticism went away like for example when Martin became the Avatar of Akastosh that could have done something to mysticism. Now granted it's a terrible example but it's something that they could come up with Lore wise to explain why they got rid of Mysticism.

hey off topic where the do you find ''Sotha sil'' and ''Almalexia'' played that game for a year and a half and couldnt find them for the life of me, someone said Sotha sil was near the ghost gate but he always evaded me.

It's been 200 years. Anything could have happened.

thats not possible mysticism is a force to harness and manipulate energy, you could wait 100.000.000.000 years and fire wont just vanish from the universe if you spark two stones together you are gonna get fire, saying what you just said would be like striking two stones together and no sparks happen, its laws of physics and in the elder scrolls universe mysticism is a law

Mysticism may be a law but that doesn't mean that a player's character should necessarily be able to improve the generic "mysticism" skill.

Schools of magic are like scientific terminology. When scientists decided to create a new definition of planet, Pluto lost its planet status. Pluto and other bodies of similar size were shuffled into a new category but they still exist.

The same thing with mysticism. The schools of magic have been redefined but mysticism, as a law, hasn't been lost.

so are you agreeing with me or....

it wasnt useless until oblivion got a hold of it. one of the most important spells in morrowind was mark and recall which were in mysticism. with the introduction of oblivion "ez4noobz" fast travel system, it was eliminated altogether. all you left with is life detect which i avoided cause it ruined the game by showing you were everyone was thus removing any possible surprise attacks by npcs.

no it wasnt eliminated, they swapped the cool means of fast travel from a magical way to just point on the map way, which svcks id rather tax my self with remembering to mark a spot and traveling across the country so i could recall back, and if i forgot to then you have to make the journey on foot which would be better than map fast travel, it would make you think twice

The two main reasons I want it back - Soul Trap, and Telekinesis! (The latter is just funny as hell in some situations, and if throwing/dropping objects on people actually hurt them (as traps do) then it would have a combat application - imagine luring an enemy close to a rocky pile/log pile above them, and blasting it with TK - epic win!)

some people are going to get mad at me but wasn't restoration kind of useless, i would rather have mysticism than restoration, the problem is restoration dosne't really fit into any other school of magic but all it does is heal yourself, heal other, and cure disease, ive never met anyone who had that as a main skill

I can't do a FRAPS for you, my laptop isn't fast enough to record while playing.

But it's very simple. You are sneaking around. You're wearing your Spell Absorption Ring, your Reflect Damage ring, Reflect Spell Amulet, and Detect Life Helm. You see an enemy. You draw your Soul Trap Bow (which also is enchanced with Shock damage, and had been previously recharged with a soul gem that held a soul, thanks to the Bow). Fire. Then, time to boost Spell absorption, spell reflect, and damage reflect. The enemy mage shoots a weakness to magicka spell at you. You use Dispell to remove his spell from you. Then, time to disarm him. You use your side-swipe attack. His weapon falls to the ground. You use your telekinesis spell to launch the weapon to the other side of the cave, and paralyze the enemy mage. You then beat him down to a crisp. He dies. He is mannimarco, OOO's version.

You make it sound like they simply removed all the mysticism spells.

The GI article I just read clearly says they just removed the school and rearranged the spells into other schools.

That aside, and getting at the core question of the topic,

Yes. I do find mysticism quite useless. Really, the only reason I ever got it up at all was to be able to cast Soul Trap to enchant stuff. There are more useful spells in the school in Morrowind, but I really hated the magic system as a whole in Morrowind, so I didn't play many casters.

The prime problem with Mysticism was that during the transition from Morrowind to Oblivion the devs cut out most of it's most useful spells (or relocated them). This resulted in it being pretty bleak. Also, it didn't have a single spell that actually helped with combat, which is why many people found it impractical.

I like the fact that the miscallenous spells are distributed into other schools, making them that much more varied. I don't see why it should return other than for the sheer sake of having another school with a different name.

Do you have a source for this? I can't remember reading it in GI or hearing it in the podcast or in a video. Removing attributes sounds like the dumbest thing they could do, in my opinion, as they are the basis of all kinds of calculations in the games, and are quite essential to feel like you're developing a unique character.

OT: As long as conjuration is in, I'm happy! However, there should be a better way to learn new spells, that fit more with the text you see when you level up the skill. If you discover more creatures to summon by conjuring things, then you should "discover" those without also having to buy them.

Those spells, including intervention, are teleportation spells. There is no getting around that fact. Mark may be not, but Recall certainly is, and it only makes sense to maintain Mark in the same school not only for simplicities sake, but also because it doesn't fit anywhere else anyway.

Lets see what the Oblivion manual has to say:
"Restoration heals, restores and fortifies the body's attributes and abilities, cures diseases and protects it from other malign influences."
According to your above statement Cure and Restore spells are not Restoration because they don't restore any thing beyond a normal state. Try again.

Yes, they are Restoration and I never disputed that. However, Dispel is dealing with magic that has affected the body. Cure and Restore are dealing with physical problems that have affected the body. If we are just relying on the keyword "restore" then yes you could throw dispel into Restoration. But the cure and restore spells are dealing with more with physical ailments (that may or may not have been caused by magic, but are not magical issues in of themselves. Notice how no restoration spell stops magic unless it is directly countering the physical damage being caused by magic) and dispel deals with magical ailments. Thus, dispel belongs in Mysticism because, as others have said more simply than I, mysticism is the fabric of magic. Thus any spell that deals purely with no specific kind of magic (dispel affects everything except enchantments and alchemy, which are different from regular magic) like dispel belongs in mysticism.



Sure, but that is skipping over the point entirely. Enchanting is not a magical skill like destruction or illusion is, and throwing a spell into that school really doesn't make any sense whatsoever except in pure gameplay, which is not necessarily what I'm arguing about here.



Key word: properties. Though the definition there might leave it up to some speculation, the fact of the matter is that traditional Alteration spells affect internal properties of objects in the physical world, not their external properties. The only alteration spell that even comes close to affecting external properties (technically really) is Open/Lock spells, and I personally think those should be mysticism anyway, having so many similarities to telekinises.



Yes it does, but it does so not by affecting the living, but by connecting with them. That is where the power of detect life comes from. And again, refer to what Mysticism is defined as in not only the real world, but in TES as well. The power to sense the location of souls, which detect life does, is an ability that can be better connected to mysticism rather than illusion, which is more dealing with toying with the minds of others and enhancing your own perception. Sensing life is not included in this, as the perception that illusion can enhance deals with physical perception. Seeing in the darkness. Seeing life is very different from that.



In Oblivion, it was. But it had no business being there. Restoration was and should never again be a school of pacifistic magic. In Morrowind, no restoration spell could harm another being, and it should have stayed that way. Again, you are missing the point and relying a little bit too much on how Oblivion has defined the skills and spell set.



No, it can't reflect. Elemental shields only reduce the damage done by elemental damage as well as the physical blows behind them. And even if they could, that would then make Reflect a pointless spell, and I don't think it should be.



Spare us the love it or leave it tactics. They're old and terrible arguments. We hold a legitimate concern and if you don't like that, then you don't have to argue.



Of course it is, but what do you call people who purely practice magic as far as the schools of magic go? A mage who was too esoteric to take up a specific school of research? No, mysticism should stay in even with the fact that it is just magic, as there should be an option for a plain "Magic" school of magic. And so much more could have been done with it to make it useful, especially with the new physics engine. Telekinetic damage anyone?



Of course things change, but it is stupid to think that something like this could have ever been reasonably changed. And yes, while it is still there technically, it just doesn't make any sense. Spells that used to be in mysticism belonged in mysticism. Nowhere else.

Do you have a source for this?

The article said that now rather than putting points into attributes, we put them directly into health, magicka, and stamina. Or something like that.

The skill itself was useless. The spells that fell under it were not. But I approve or relocating the spells and then deleting the skill. You can make a game with 100+ skills but if there isnt enough content to support so much skills then what is the point?

I loved the spells in the mysticism school, but as a whole it was a very support oriented school of magic. Now, it would seem, the spells from that school have been doled out into the other schools, which I am not opposed to. I always hated making a stealth character and having to invest TWO primaries in magic schools, for illusion and mysticism, and that isn't counting alchemy...

Unless you have the Tribunal expansion, you'll never find them. If you do, Almalexia is not at all hard to find, she's in her Temple on the mainland (in the quarantined inner city, which you can only leave via teleportation). Sotha Sil is very reclusive though, and his city is rumored to be in any of several different places on Nirn, or not to be there at all. You need to play the expansion's Main Quest to meet him.

Personally, I enjoyed Mysticism in MW, but felt that it got gutted for OB. As with almost everything that gets "short changed" in a TES game (Medium Armor, Spears, throwing weapons, Unarmored), it then gets removed from the next game "because nobody used it".

My current Breton character in MW is a sort-of "spellsword" custom class, with Mysticism as a Major skill. Between moderate use of Absorb Health as a ranged attack, teleportation to various places, Soultrapping, and the occasional use of Detect Life to better time spell shots for when a moving opponent appears in an opening, it's a VERY useful and powerful school of Magicka. I've even used Telekinesis to grab an item from a table, from a spot where my character was just out of line-of-sight from some rather nasty potential adversaries.

In OB, there was almost no point to it, aside from a couple of Telekinesis spells to pull Ayleid crystals down from their holders, and the rare Soultrap (paying for recharges was far more practical in most cases, it seemed to me - coming from a player who enjoyed playing an Enchanter character several times in MW).

As long as spellcasting isn't "trivialized" like it was in OB, where "skill" was meaningless other than to trigger the next casting level, I'm not upset by the consolidation of spell classes.

In Todd Howards recent interview he mentioned something about "Slowing down time."

Kovacious makes a great point. Mysticism would not have been so useless (and it wasn't, even to people who claimed it to be so, as they all most likely used a spell out of it at some point. It was just the fact that Oblivion was so tragically skewwed towards enchantments rather than normal magic. Even in Morrowind most used it way more than they think they did) if it had not had so many of its spells taken out.