I have played TES since Morrowind and never used magic, ever.

I have finally decided to try a magic user but have no idea what to do, how to do it.

I am looking for pointers, ideas, anything.

Is there a certain school of magic I should start with? Should I dabble in all schools or just focus on a few? Do I need to mess with alchemy as well?

Can someone give me a few sample builds so I can get an idea or two?

Anything that anyone can tell me would be greatly appreciated!

I would start out as a Battlemage or Spellsword and not a full blown mage. That way, you get a taste of magic.

Use the school of illusion to your advantage when in great danger or if you don't want to fight.
Use Alteration for extra protection, detecting living or dead and lighting dark areas.
Destruction is obvious. It is your damage dealing school.
conjuration is good for a summoned minion to get enemies off your back while dealing a fair amount of damage so you can heal and deal damage. You can also conjure weapons and banish daedra.
Restoration is for healing. it also has spells simmilar to illusion but made for effecting undead.

Trial and error is the best way to learn how to use magic, a spellsword type character would be best suited to learning the arcane arts in my opinion.

Don't ask. Just do it. Experiment. Try out everything. That's what I did. I started with a fire mage, used illusion on the side, J'zargo and Arniel. Very fun. Next I did lighting, conjuration and alteration. Very fun too. Then I tried some other things. Once I tried it, I can't not use magic. To me playing without some sort of magic is boring. Enchanting doesn't count. It's not really magic.

IMO, you should roleplay, and determine what your character does based on what their personality is.

If I play a pure mage, I use all schools of magic, and avoid weapons (and usually armor, too). You probably want to level Enchanting quickly, because you'll need the magicka cost reduction, but it's not strictly necessary. IIRC, a fair number of spells are only available (or only guaranteed to be available) at the college, and the first quest at the college fits well with low level characters.

Conjuration is very powerful and very useful (drawing aggro, dealing damage, etc.). Illusion is also good to have. But you can make do with pretty much any build you try.

I've got two magic users. One is a "pure" mage and uses mostly Alteration and Destruction. No armor, only mage robes or enchanted clothes, did the whole mages' college thing, etc. She relies heavily on a companion - she can hold off baddies with the Impact perk in the Destruction tree, but if she doesn't have a terrain advantage, she can get overwhelmed quick. Magicka / Health / Stamina ratio is approx. 3:1:1.

The other is a three-way hybrid thief/mage/fighter. Conjuration for bound weapons only (plus some utility spells from a couple of mods), Illusion for mixing it up (Fury and Frenzy) or escaping (Calm and Invisibility), and of course there's always Muffle. Light armor, mostly melee, generally backstabs with daggers but isn't afraid to wade into a Frenzy-induced fight with dual-wield bound swords. Stat ratio is kind of sort of 2:1:2, but starting to shift to Health and Stamina as I'm trying to not rely so much on the stealth aspect of the character.

Neither is really a crafter in any respect, though I keep thinking I'd like them both to be Enchanters and the latter to take up Alchemy. But you know how it is - between Dragons and bandits and vampires, who's got time to think over a table?

Edit: Just to add to what's been said since I started typing, both characters are "roleplay" types; the former is an Imperial political type who was forced into an adventurer's life (she's loyal to the Empire, but her family and Tullius' have a feud going on), and the latter is a very minor, mischievous Daedra who had been trapped in an artifact by more powerful Daedra until very recently (lore nerds, spare me your angst!).

Skyrim lacks in complexity so, as long as you have at least one focused damage dealing skill, you will be perfectly viable. No matter if that's one school of magic or all of them. Conjuration coupled with Illusion makes for the most powerful character the game has to offer, no matter the difficulty.

?Invest enough in Health to keep from being one shot. That ranges from totaling of 100 on Novice to 300 on Master. Then put the rest in Magicka.

Thank you for the fast replies.

I just feel a litle overwhelmed since there seem to be so many choices in magic.

I started a new sneaky character so maybe I will just start with some Illusion and see where it takes me.

Perhaps if I just try 1-2 schools of magic at a time then I will be better able to decide good combinations for myself.

I've never used magic as well, and I want to create a battlemage soon. Thank you for making this thread, it actually helped me choose which kind of magic I would start with.

Totally out of the subject, anybody knows how to make a spoiler box?

[ spoiler ] gandalf [/ spoiler ] With no spaces and it becomes

The magic system in Skyrim is different from the previous games, less complex. You'll quickly get the hang of it if you try out different spells. Illusion complements sneaky characters well, it's also a very powerful school when supported by perks. Remember to take Quiet Casting.

You probably don't want Destruction as it tends to be quite loud, but runes can be used as traps. Conjuration will let you drop stealth sometimes by using your summon to draw enemy attention, very useful when your facing multiple foes in close quarters.

I never got the combat usefulness of Alteration, it really doesn't do much if you already wear armor. It has interesting utility spells though: light, transmute, waterbreathing. Not that there's a lot to find underwater...

Highlight the text you want to wrap in spoiler tags and click on the diagonally cut square icon to the right of the "Quote" icon in the edit window toolbar. It will say "Spoiler" when you hover over it.

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Illusion and Alteration work well with a sneaky type character. Add in conjuration for bound weapons and/or summons and it works very well.

I think for a 1st magic character a hybrid is best anyway. JMO

The best part of magic is that it is extremely versatile. With the proper spells, you can do nearly anything another "class" could do. For instance, suppose you usually just blow through everyone with destruction magic but now you want to sneak around a bit. You can cast Muffle and Invisibility and play a sneak character. Maybe you want to get into sword fights with people but you don't have a very good One Handed skill. Equip Paralyze in on hand and your sword in another. Whenever the enemy attacks, hit them with paralyze and then attack them with your sword.

In short:

Alteration is primarily for defense but has many outside of combat applications as well. Paralyze is the best spell, followed closely by Dragonhide. Dragonhide is hax because you can ignore 80% of physical damage, IIRC.

Restoration has some application fighting the undead but is far better for healing. I recommend getting the Respite and Recovery perks as well. Recovery will help your magicka regen more quickly. Respite is useful if you need to refill your stamina, because it causes any use of a healing spell to recover your stamina as well.

Conjuration is incredibly useful as a force multiplier. If you like using Bound Weapons, purchase Mystic Binding. This makes the Bound Bow as powerful as a Daedric Bow. I think it is essential for any pure mage to go into summoning as well, because you're going to need meatshields to protect you as you cast when facing large groups of enemies. It also gives you many tools to handle any situation, as the variety of creatures you can summon is large. If you're facing a Dragon, you might want to summon something with a range attack. If you're facing armed bandits or Draugr, you may need to summon a Frost Atronarch or a Dremora Lord to take some of the heat off of you. This becomes especially useful once you acquire the Twin Souls perk, which lets you keep two summons at one time.

Illusion is very useful but is easier to resist than other magics, so you need to be careful with who you fight with it. It is great for stealth, and Pacify is extremely useful to take the heat off of you.

Destruction is for, well, destruction.

Illusion, Conjuration, and Restoration are my favorite schools. Conjuration exclusively would be fine enough. Get it high enough and learn the Summon Dremora and your golden.

Conjuration is the most efficient damage and also summons tank enemies for you - you can get through most of the encounters of the game with it easily enough, albeit at a slower pace than if you were assisting summons w/damage. Bound weapons are good early game but they are puny compared to what can be made with smithing.

Destruction is very inefficient, but a solid/faster source of damage if you use enchanting to reduce the cost - they take too much magicka away that could be spent on support spells as well otherwise. Higher level spells are absurdly expensive, and magicka also doesn't regen while you're actively casting, and also regens much more slowly in combat, so casting destruction spells can run you dry extremely fast. They really dropped the ball on magic in Skyrim and destruction suffers the most from it.

Illusion is very powerful but also situational - you have to have some idea of the level of what you're casting its control spells on which isn't immediately obvious as there's no in-game indication. You get an idea for what the various scaled enemy types are though eventually. Some things are also just straight up immune to it. It's not a great system, very "all or nothing" and sometimes you'll just waste a chunk of magicka to learn your target is too high of a level or immune. Anything it works on though, you can take out of combat completely for a long duration - you can cycle pacify and sneak attacks on a target, or have groups of enemies fight eachother to death until only one remains. It's also a good supplement to sneak via muffle and invisibility, and the perk quiet casting is amazing for any mage who uses some stealth. I can go through many dungeons without bothering to kill anything in them with invis + decent sneak skill and light enough armor.

Restoration is fairly straightforward, wards are garbage but healing with respite and regeneration is a great way to keep health and stamina up. The undead specific spells are meh - illusion eventually works on undead and kind of makes them obsolete IMO. There are a lot of undead in the game but turning them so they run all over the place possibly deeper into the dungeon to where more undead are hanging out isn't all that helpful.

Alteration has good perks for the magic resist and/or absorb but the spells aren't that great - the armor spells are terrible compared to actual armor and don't last long enough while costing to much magicka to be worth using. It has a fair collection of convenient spells like detect, transmute, candlelight and so on but no investment into the perks is needed to use those.

As far as perks go this is as far as I'd spend in the magic trees to get the most out of each without wasting perks -

http://chrizel.github.io/skyrim/#t/5/h9s0sg,-8t31yc,5q8c,0,0,0,0,0

Master spells for the most part are worthless. Dead thrall is actually good, but you won't be using that in combat so don't need the reduced cost - use a magic fortify item and/or potion to cast it needed when you do need to make a new one. The master destruction lightning spell is also solid, but you should be reducing destruction to 0 cost with enchants anyway so cost reduction from perks would be meaningless.

Conjuration's Necromancy perks are garbage since thralls are the only worthwhile necro spell, and they don't benefit much from any necro perks other than twin souls. May as well pick up better atronachs which are quite useful against certain enemy types or if using elemental AoE since they're immune to their type. Mystic binding is the only bound weapon perk I'd consider if using bound weapons, the others are situational/redundant.

Illusion's fear/frenzy spells aren't as important as calming ones so I'd say save your points there and just get what you need to pacify everything.

Restoration's higher level spells are just less efficient - I find the adept heal the most efficient while healing enough in a burst to save you when you need it. Respite and regeneration are no-brainers, the rest all svck except for necromage which has some great cheese potential but on PC unofficial patches remove that aspect.

Alteration I just grab the reasonably cheap magic resist, the absorb is good too especially combined with the atronach stone but it depends on how you're setting your character up to deal w/magic and your difficult - taking no damage from 30-80% of spells won't save you from getting once shot from the ones that get through if you play on high difficulty. Personally preference whether it's worth the extra perks.