I reckon it could be rearranged like this.

Detect Life - Illusion

Dispel - Restoration

Reflect - Destruction/Restoration

Telikinesis - Alteration

Spell absorbtion - Restoration

Soul trap - Conjuration/Alteration (Or even do it a different way)

I fail to see what detect life has to do with illusion.

Mysticism was for all the left overs. I'm glad that it's gone, gameplay wise.

I can see it in a way. I mean, you are able to detect life through walls and such so I guess you could call that Illusion through the player's eyes. :whistling:

It would probably be better suited for Alteration though imho.

Well, it's all about perception and such. Nighteye goes in illusion, so it sorta makes sense. Could also be part of conjuration since that deals with summoning life, including spirits (kinda like souls) so it may also be able to detect it.

Or Enchanting (it's a skill once again):

Detect life: Find souls.
Soul trap: Capture souls.
Enchanting: Use souls.

Good point. In fact I think that may be what they do. Thankyou for thinking of it.

I can give a shortened skill list a chance, I think, even thou I prefer Morrowind skill system, but removal of Mysticism is seriously annoying - you don't remove a magic skill from the game where magic skills are part of the lore, how do they explain it: in the last 200 years all mystics just fell of and died? Sorry, lack of enchanting in oblivion could have been explained by us simply not being able to learn to do it - we so enchanted items, so obviously other mages could learn the skill, but just loosing a whole school of magic? That's a barbaric treatment of the games lore.

What a way to 'fix' Mysticism. Nobody using it? False btw, but improve the skill!! Add effects, bring old ones back, whatever. Apparently that is no option. :facepalm:

Would be kinda weird to have to have 1 actual spell for the enchant skill though. I figured it might go to alteration.

ewwww telekinesis in OB was so lame, no wonder I forgot about it.

anyway the way I see it

soul trap: conjuring
telekinesis,reflect: alteration
absorb: restoration

Except it's just a skill, not a magic school.

I often played with custom classes called 'Mystics' who specialised in Mysticism. That being said, I'm still okay with the change. As interesting as the concept of Mysticism is, in practice it always seemed like a half-finished school. I would have, of course, liked to have seen more spells/lore-based factors added and it becoming a legitimate, seperate skill than removed entirely. Either way, though, the colleges will now be more consistent.

As a side note, 'absorb x' spells were already moved to Restoration going from Morrowind to Oblivion. It kind of gave a hint of what they were planning to do.

As for the remaining spell effects, I'd say they're planning to shift them around like so:
Detect Life: Illusion
Soul Trap: Conjuration
Dispel: Restoration
Spell Absorption: Alteration
Reflect Damage/Reflect Spell: Alteration
Telekinesis: Alteration

Because it was essentially DISPEL, LIFE DETECTION AND SOULTRAP? DOES THAT MAKE A SOLID SOMETHING? Put those abilities into something else and forget it.

For example, MW had lots of crappy magical categories, in the sense that each did a small number of miscellaneous stuff that many times didn't even seem solidly grouped. Thankfully Oblivion reduced that and Skyrim even more and by now it will be solid enough even if losing some of the inexplicable charm of those very complex skill systems. Please, because they only make sense even in real life: Acrobatics+Athletics and Mercantile+Speechcraft.

Enchantments don't have to be permanent, and making enchantments should work in the same manner as casting spells. For example, you soultrap a giant and use his soul for a temporary enchantment on your bow to give you forty ice damage for eight shots.

The more we can get away from soulgems, the better. Storage shouldn't be the mainstay of soul useage.

My guess is that when trimming down the skill list, Bethesda wanted to drop a magic skill to keep them from outnumbering skills of other types, and they chose mysticism, not sure why, but it might be because all the spells under it could be moved into other schools, which I suspect they'll do, at the very least, since they're bringing back the enchant skill, I'm sure soul trap will stay in the game. Besides, the other schools tended to have a consistent theme to them, conjuration was, as its name implied, mostly summoning spells, destruction, logically, covered spells that cause direct damage to enemies or their attributes, restoration has, well, spells that restore things, I'd consider fortify attribute spells falling under it a bit of a stretch since they don't actually restore or heal your body, but I guess having it only cover spells that do that might have seemed a little too limiting, and so on. But mysticism seems to be where Bethesda throws whatever spell they didn't put somewhere else, so if one magic skill had to get the ax, mysticism seems as good as any to me, as long as former mysticism spells get moved to other categories where they'd make sense. Now, I'm not saying reducing the amount of skills again was necessarily a good idea, but I don't actually believe that a shorter skill list is automatically a bad thing either, unlike some here seem to believe, but the decision to reduce the skill list COULD prove detrimental to the game, depending on many factors such as how it effects the overall game experience, what skills, exactly, were removed, whether this has reduced the player's options, and so on. But since Bethesda obviously decided that they wanted less skills in Skyrim, and they presumably felt one magic skill needed to go, I'd say mysticism was probably the best choice.



Maybe if you define "Interesting" and "mysterious" as "random", because the only thing really mysterious about mysticism is the logic behind the decision that spells that let you trap souls, dispel magic effects, and move objects remotely should all fall into the same school.

Now maybe I would miss it if it was actually as interesting as the lore makes it out to be. But apparently, in game terms, "The most mysterous branch of magic" translates to "A dump for whatever spells we didn't want to put somewhere else."

This, most of the spell effects from Morrowind were removed or given to other school of magic in Oblivion and only 7 remained:

Detect Life
Dispel
Reflect Damage
Reflect Spell
Soul Trap
Spell Absorption
Telekinesis

They will probably be put in Alteration and Restoration now.

Agreed. This might actually be a very good idea. I believe that with this change 'mysticism' will become more of a shared idea than a strict magical practice, in the sense that these spells will still be considered especially 'mystical' regardless of what college they actually belong to. Mysticism, afterall, is the origin of all magic according to the Psijic Order ('The Old Ways'). That's both fairly lore accurate and useful for gameplay.

I used to make a custom class called Mystic. But the most used magic school was still Destruction, despite the class' nomenclature.

I'm in no way offended by the loss of Mysticism, most of the spells were good but as has been frequently restated we're not really losing anything. I would like to see Telekinesis come back even if it was totally useless.

magic in the lore is mentioned to not actually be in different categories naturally and the diiferent schools where implemented to categorise them easier. so im guessing the world just thought that mysticism was two unused to have its own school of magic and the spells where rewritten into other ones. Theres my theory.

Mysticism magic? As opposed to scientific magic? If you take semantics into account, ALL magic is mysticism, then.
Even if you don't think of it that way, mysticism seemed to just be the miscellaneous category for magic, you know? It was all spells that didn't seem to fit anywhere else.
I mean, I liked mysticism, but a lot of the spells seemed better suited to other schools.
Telekinesis can fit into Alteration. Reflect Damage/Spells can fit into Alteration, too. Maybe the Absorb spells can fit into Restoration or something? Soul Trap could be tied into Enchanting somehow.

It does involve magical actions. You don't just throw a gem at an item and baboom. Therefore, it could be considered magic, and some spells might fit into it.

"Mysticism involves the manipulation of magical forces and boundaries to bypass the structures and limitations of the physical world."

It would be nice to have mark, recall, levitation, and some form of intervention spell back. Oh, how I abused the traveling spells, heheh.

Aside from screwing up the lore, I suppose the effects could be shuffled into another school. Perhaps reflect damage/magicka into illusion, and the rest into alteration. It really doesn't matter; I'm just bummed that the school of mysticism is no more. What will the Psijiics do?

Becuase they're the ones who made it useless. Mysticism was easily the best school in Morrowind.

Of the six schools of magic, five had a very well-defined mechanical identity:

- Destruction was about direct damage and debuffs
- Alteration was about utility spells and buffs
- Conjuration was about creating magical minions and equipment
- Restoration was about healing and buffs (but different kinds of buffs - Alteration gave you entirely new abilities, while Restoration just made you better at your normal ones)
- Illusion was about controlling visibility and screwing with the AI

Mysticism, meanwhile, was the "Miscellaneous" school that got everything that didn't fit well in the other five. What do telekinesis, detect life, soul trap, statistic draining, teleportation, and countermagic have to do with each other? The school never really had a strong mechanical identity. It suffers a lot from overlap with Alteration, which covers a lot of the same ground (how come Open Lock and Levitation spells aren't Mysticism, for example?) In lore terms, it was supposed to be a metamagic school, magic concerned with the nature of magic itself, but only a third of its mechanics (soul trap, reflect magic effects, and dispel) had anything to do with that flavor at all.

Basically, Mysticism just wasn't a very well thought out school.