Lol, what I meant is use the build that I've posted and make the changes which you deem necessary in it. I'm tired of this and it has been going on for too long now honestly, so I'll just stick with whatever you edit into that build.

Honestly, get rid of Marksman, Enchant, and Alchemy and replace them with Mercantile, Speechcraft, and Athletics and you're good to go. Enchant isn't very useful personally, Alchemy can be difficult to level if you aren't dedicated to it, and like I said Marksman is a bad choice as a secondary - and unnecessary for someone with destruction. Pick whatever race you want, but I'd advise Dark Elf personally.

Im late but here is my advice


Breton/apprentice *OR* High elf/atronach

Specialisation : Magic (combat skills being much much easier to increase)

Favored attributes: Endurance, Luck (the earlier you start with endurance the better, as for luck it has no skills to help it increase)

Major skills: Destruction, Restoration (the two most useful colleges), Long Blade, Light armor (best combination IMO), and last one is up to you (i'd take alteration or conjuration)

Minor skills: Mysticism (mainly for mark/recall) , Alteration (or conjuration), Block, Heavy Armor (for levels after 30 or so, when you get daedric tower shield hopefully), Illusion (used sometimes for invisibility or paralysis, least used college in my experience)

Dude, are you sure? Mercantile, Speechcraft and Athletics? I mean Speechcraft seems good, but I've been to many other builds and almost all of them suggest against athletics for it being a fast leveler. I'm sorry, but this is my first play through and I want it to be nice and long. Also, do I really need Mercantile that much? I mean, I'm not really "pro" or anything, but I've managed to get myself around 800 septims from doing quests in Seyda Neen.

Take my advice or don't.

If you disagree with someone then try it your way and it will probably work out if you give it enough time or effort.

@HeWhoOwnsManyGames
Just settle on one that YOU would like. We all have our favorite builds, and you can see that no one agrees on one thing. In my case, I almost always go with Bretons and flip flop between Atronach and The Lady because I like Bretons. I like mixing melee and magic and prefer to think of my chars as 'battlemages', but my concept doesn't match what the guy at the Seyda Neen tradehouse describes as a 'battlemage'. You'll find that regardless of what you choose, you can still take your char all the way through the end. It just requires patience and accepting that there are times in which your char is outgunned and needs to retreat and return when more experienced and/or has better equipment. Believe me, I've lost my chars many times because I didn't get him out once it became obvious he was out of his league and was doomed.

I choose the skills based on how I want to play the char for the specific game. Sometimes it's fun, other times boring. I agree that athletics and acrobatics can really speed up your char's leveling because those are things you do all the time, not just fighting. My experience is that marksmanship takes a lot of time, and I find it boring after awhile because you do need to be dedicated to using it; OTOH, it's pretty satisfying to take out a monster at such a long distance that they can't get to you before you kill it. You also can use it while sneaking, which is pretty neat. Alchemy can level pretty fast if you're willing to bend one part of the game play (which I do all the time shamelessly). Of course, that's true for nearly every skill in the game. If you're looking for skills that take longer to level up, I'd suggest mysticism, enchant, marksmanship, armorer, security, sneak; those are the ones that I have a hard time leveling up fast. I'm probably in the minority because I prefer to raise my skills the old-fashioned way - practicing them rather than training - so those take me a very long time to get to increase. However, even now my current char (Khajitt generic fighter (lol - not sure how to describe him but definietly not a magic user) is building up his magic capabilities by casting customized 1 pt spells before sleeping; he has only 24 pts magicka and it doesn't re-gen fast, but that's still enough to cast several restorative, conjuration, alteration and intervention spells in emergencies. He may even work on destruction later down the road - piddling stuff that might let him get out of arm's length of the monster.

Speechcraft and mercantile can make sense because both affect personality. But, again, once you look at how they work, it's easy to change your char's game behavior so as to increase them fairly quickly. At the start of the game, mercantile may get you more gold, but as you pointed out it's not a make or break skill.

You know what? I've finally decided. Instead of making one single character who's amazing at everything(which is what I intended for at the start of this thread, to be honest), I'm just going to make multiple characters. First, I'm going to start with an Orc warrior. I don't want a pure warrior though, more of a "paladin" class if you'd like(as in having restoration, alteration and I think that's just about it, but I'm interested to see what do you think about a Paladin class). Also, does the weapon that I choose really make that much of a difference? I mean which weapon skill would be better in the long run? I heard that Long Blade's good because it has a lot of artifacts and stuff. Which weapon skill would really recommend for someone who's new to this game?

Sorry, but you're going to get a lot of different replies for the same reason re: battlemage Keep in mind that some replies will be based on knowing the uber weapons at the end. I've played through MW, so you'd think I'd have a good suggestion, but I don't. I guess the closest to a 'Paladin' style class would be MW's Knight. Hard for me to say because I almost always customize my char rather than use MW's pregenerated classes.

It's okay guys. I finally made myself a Dark Elf Battlemage and I'm settling with that decision. Thanks to all of you for your continuous support on the subject and your great suggestions. Just one thing though. I've installed a few plugins lately, the official ones from Bethesda(all of them) and I didn't really know that I had to tick them first. So anyways, as I was playing I've discovered that. I activated them way after I actually created my character and I started developing him and stuff, then I activated them. Would something wrong happen because I didn't activate them from the start or something? Like, would something happen to my character? Oh, and I also downloaded the unofficial patch 1.6.5 beta. I'm just asking guys, because I have this feeling that maybe when I reach a far part of the game, it might start messing up my character or something. I just need a bit of reassurance on the matter.

It almost certainly will not affect your character.

All magic schools, heavy armour and a two handed sword?