In the the mag a quote said there would be dozens of spells i think there should be more than a hundred

It's a figure of speech, it's not as if they counted. They do seem more focused on the elemental damage for Destruction magic, which is something I've been asking for for awhile. I'm glad to hear it, damage health is so lame compared to an ice bolt.

Pretty sure they're refering to spell-types..

yes but it also said you can equip a spell in each hand and combine the two. That could lead to near limitless number of spell combos

so mathematically speaking, here's what that means

assumptions made:
you can combine two similar spells to make stronger spells
any two spells are combinable

obviously this is incorrect to some degree but i don't know enough about the spell types to make a more informed assumption. Even so, with these assumptions you create a large enough pool of spells that subtracting a few is insignificant because even just 12 spells on two hands equates to 2^12 = 4096 spell combinations

What if by dozens them meant 30 dozen? Still a multiple of 12 and is well past a couple hundred. Figures of speech are indeed like that.

um. fuzzy math? picking 2 unordered outcomes from 12 possibilities would be more like 66. Dozens implies at least 24 so

n
- =
k

24
- =
2

276

...if you wanna talk math. I think that "dozens" mentioned in the mag is probably hype-speak and should be ignored by people that know what the game is about and don't need to be sold on it. In other words, mag article writers are paid to say things to sell games, not to tell us what's actually in the game. If else then they would have wrote more about what everyone here wants to know and less about what everyone that played OB already knows.

from what i understood from the article, you can only combine two similar spells to make the effect stronger.

To ease your worries, there are 85 spell effects that can have it's stats modified, mixed and matched with other effects to create countless spells like Oblivion. Dont worry, there will be hundreds of spells, plus the unique scripted ones with cool effects.

In addition to that there is spell "dual wielding" that can be used to combine two spells at any time to maximize power and create a dynamic and fun casting system.

I wonder if this means we can make water bolts by combining fire + ice spells

Pretty sure it said 85 spells

Yup, however that was a typo and Pete Hines explained via twitter that those are spell effects.

Would you want to have actual spells rather than spell effects? Instead of having spells that are more or less all the same (fire damage, frost, electric etc) have fewer spells with unique effects like boil their blood or turn their underwear to wood? Magic in Oblivion just seemed another kind of gun to me, just like in Borderlands...
My opinion

Scripted spells. Just look at the PC mod Midas Magic, with scripting you can make unbelievable spells, and I'm sure Bethesda will add some if not a bunch.

And you can combine effects to create awesome spells, in vanilla Oblivion there were no freezing spells so I combined paralysis with frost and armor desentragation (typo? I cant spell this ) to create a freezing spell that stopped the enemy while applying frost damage while making the enemy vulnerable to my attacks.

Oblivion had about 85 spell effects too (not counting non-castable effects) so no real change in volume. Hopefully that means they consolidated or removed some stuff that was never used to make room for some of the stuff the community has been keen on... like Levitation :hinthint:

oh, and having spells that costed 900 magicka in oblivion when you could get maybe 400.....what was with that????????????

id rather have a small number of well done and individually unique spells that can be used in the worldspace itself instead of the generic "insert shader/damage type here" magic that has been a staple of past TES games. as much as i like TES games frankly the magic aspects have been the weakest link. they are just boring cast damage modifire on target or touch. in two worlds...........yes the first crappy one, i could cast a fire wall that allowed me to retreat in combat or use as a barrier and force enemies to go around............and remember two worlds was a svcktastic game of epic proportions. dark messiahs magic is often pointed to as actually fun to use because of the different ways you could use it albeit a couple of spells like charm were a bit OP.

i would love to see some of midas spells in skyrim....i hope he mods for that game as well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yymBkioFY3A

Source? I checked his twitter.

^ Really sorry, but.. um.. bump? Confirmation of 85 total spell effects would take a lot of worry off.

EDIT: Confirmed, thanks and sorry.

I'm just worried that they'll make magic very overpowered.

Boy I hope so! Take this flame atronach! *Casts waterbolt* .... -Flame Atronach- :flame: -Me- :bolt:

Oblivion had closer to about 35 spell effects, it had about 111 standard spells. Most effects were the same thing just a different color. Im assuming the 85 effects in Skyrim are all special and different.