I thought that it might be interesting to list our eight "go to" hot-keyed items/spells. My current "great eight" are:

#1 - "100% Chameleon for 10 seconds" spell. More than enough time to open a door or stab a baddie.

#2 - "100% Weakness to poison/fire/magic" spell. A sort of GP target prepper.

#3 - "48 points of fire damage for 10 seconds/invisibility for 12 seconds" spell. With the above, this never fails.

#4 - "Summon Daedra Lord for 60 seconds/Invisibility for 65 seconds" spell. Die churl!

#5 - "Command Humanoid/Command Creature for 6 seconds" spell. Long enough to get the ball rolling.

#6 - "Heal 50 points for 6 seconds/Invisibility for 10 seconds" spell.

#7 - "Open very hard lock" spell.

#8 - "Invisibility/Night-eye for 60 seconds" spell. My GP recon spell.

That's it. Now it's your turn.

This is going to sound really dumb but I don't even use hotkeys on about half of my characters. A lot of my characters just use one weapon so I really don't have much use for hotkeys with them. The rest of my characters generally swap between melee and ranged weapons so for for these characters I use two hotkeys: melee on 1, ranged on 2.

Mine vary by character. I have a "generic set" that gets used with most characters (except mages) early on:

1. Main Melee weapon

2. Main Ranged weapon

3. Secondary Melee weapon

4. Utility slot A: Poison for poisoners, Shield spell for others.

5. Utility slot B: I often put a spell here

6. Healing potion

7. The starting Flare spell

8. The starting Healing spell

A mage's list would look more like this:

1. Touch Destruction spell

2. Ranged Destruction spell

3. Absorb Health spell

4. Shield spell

5. Light spell

6. Restore Magicka potion

7. Restore Health potion

8. Summon "helper"

For my current character (Phoebe) the list has evolved extensively. It's now:

1. "Spike" - a glass longsword enchanted with Weakness to Magic, Absorb Health, and Fire Damage

2. Hatreds Soul

3. "Hammer" - a custom spell created to work with Spike, consisting of Weakness to Magic, Weakness to Fire, Weakness to Poison, and Fire.

4. Poison

5. "Phoebe's Fancy" - an Amber bow enchanted with Weakness to Magic, Damage Health, and Soul Trap.

6. Restore Magicka Potion (Phoebe is Atronach birthsign)

7. Goldbrand

8. "Troll This, Fetcher!" - a multi-enchanted soul-trapping shortsword.

(Phoebe is obsessed with weapons, and carries several others.)

I have an ergonomic keyboard so there is a visual distintion between keys 6 and 7, 8

mine change depending on level but follow these guidelines:

1. shield spells
2. elemental defense spells
3. invisibility (near night-eye and chameleon in the list in my modded game)
4. detect traps or night-eye or another temporary defensive spell
5. detect life
6. heal
7. key that I need right now for whatever
8. same as above

@glargg - I too have a character with a blade named "Spyke". I spelled it with a "y" because I thought that the tail of the "y" would look like a spike.