Oh, I can't believe this! You know how much this means to me ? I.... I want to thank my parents, my friend and Mirocu who's just overhere...

Seriously, thank you. :celebration:

thx, mirocu, it was somewhat rude for us not to offer it before giving out opinions, but you kinda fixed it.

I was not trying to bash the OP at all, rather trying to show ti takes a good deal of experience to build some sort of guide. See the debate above about Illusion x Alchemy, and you will see there are very good points from both sides. It acutally could lead one to question why focus on BOTH skills, as they are clearly very diverse.

You don't have to do the killing, though. Paxelle (my non-violent non-killing mage) successfully completed that sub-quest, using basically just Illusion skills. In almost any situation where there are multiple enemies, you can Command creatures to go after each other until you get their numbers down to one, and then you can use a friendly NPC (in this case Savlian or another of the Kvatch guard) to make the final kill. You can assist that person by paralyzing the enemy. Or you can do as Paxelle did, and use paralyze extensively, allowing her Legion companions to do the dirty work.

Also, it's not entirely true that all the creatures have to be killed. Only the ones in the main hall need to be killed, as far as I know.

Your reasoning about alchemy duplicating Illusion's effects is slightly faulty. In order to deliver the alchemy effect, you must use a weapon. In order to deliver a ranged effect, that weapon must be a bow, and you must be at least somewhat skilled at Marksman. Alchemy is useless as a weapon by itself. You also need to apply the poison effect before each use, and if you are going for multiple effects, you'll either need to have multiple poisoned weapons prepared before the fight, or you are going to be constantly "pausing" the action to apply poison. I'm not saying you're wrong about the power of alchemy, though.

I was curious about this, so I did some number crunching. Using the http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Alchemy_Calculator and a http://www.uesp.net/wiki/User:Ong_elvin, I wanted to compare the power of potions vs. spells of the same magnitude and duration made at the Spellmaking Altar.

With mastery of all seven schools of magic and using Master Level Alchemy equipment, here is how the comparison breaks down between a few spells from the schools of Destruction and Restoration. I will list the magnitude of the potion’s effect. The numbers in parenthesis provide the magicka costs of the identical custom spell:

Damage Health: 8pts for 30sec – 240pts of damage (284)
Damage Magicka: 15pts for 61sec – 915 total pts. (273)
Fire Damage: 9pts for 37sec – 333pts of damage (268)
Restore Health: 13pts for 43 sec – 559 total points (687)
Restore Magicka: 24pts for 78 sec – 1872 total points (788)

Bear in mind that these are all single effect potions, which actually gimps them a little bit. Also, custom spells that damage over time carry a much lower magicka cost. If you tried to create spells that did the total points of damage (or benefit) all at once the cost would be exponentially higher. Furthermore, it is impossible to create a spell that duplicates the 51% Shield for 166 secs that you can get from a potion. The best you can do is a shield of the same strength but half the duration for a whopping 565 magicka! There are also effects like 272pts of Feather for 880sec. or the 44% Chameleon for 143sec that are just impossible to duplicate at the Spellmaking Altar.

The bottom line is that Alchemy is by far the most versatile, and potentially the most powerful skill in the game. Its only drawback is one of convenience. Like glargg said, you have to ‘load up’ a weapon to use your poisons, which is something that a pure mage might be resistant to. Also (and this is just a personal opinion) picking ingredients can get old really fast. For a pure mage, I would probably stick to my spells (but even then I would use Alchemy to Restore and Fortify my health and magicka). But for a warrior, Alchemy just owns!

Just go to the Arcane University Garden.

Thanks, but I know where to get ingredients. I just find the act of harvesting them tedious.

You do not need a skill in a weapon to apply a poison, since you have the same chance of hitting at 1 as 100 in Oblvion... the damage of the weaopn changes, except weapons deal almost no damage themselves at high levels compared to poisons, even at high skills. I would use a level 1 blade skill with a dagger and apply 6 poisons before an opponent noticed me leaving stealth and died before it could turn around... without even bothering to level Blade.