Apart from the problem with restoration/illusion/alteration not affecting higher level beings, the long casting time, and the fact that you can't move, make them pretty much useless. The same can be said about the destruction spells to, except they do indeed damage enemies around you. When it comes to the conjuration spells, they have other issues. Atronachs are bulky, and are almost impossible to bring when you're dungeon-diving. The dead thrall spell is actually pretty good. Obviously, it depends on what you raise, but Forsworn Ravagers, Bandit chiefs, some of the high level mages... Two-handing Bandit marauders, especially if they're orcs, will work well. What I would have liked to see in the video was the spells added by the creations Necromantic Grimoire and Arcane Accessories. Bone Colossus and Ancient Death Priest are really awesome.
That's a fantastic idea for another video if you would like that sort of thing. I've got a few other vids I'm working on but I can start working on aN anniversary edition spell vid. There's some great stuff in anniversary edition but it's more bugged than the main game haha, the houses have a tendancy to delete your stuff from time to time and some of the spells can get stuff like destruction to 100 in seconds
@@UMadBroz1 I can't say that I've noticed SE-content being buggier than the rest of the game. And Skyrim being as buggy as it already is... I mean... What's another bug or two! 😅 Glad you liked my idea! I'll make a suggestion, and you decide if you wanna go with it or not: Make a separate video on each spell, and go deep into what they actually do. When to use them or not. Pros and cons!
It'd be hard with the current schedule to do a full vid for each spell, I do shorts on Mondays and Wednesdays then a full vid on Fridays so it'd be months of uploading nothing but individual spell reviews haha. I could do a full vid talking about them all and then for the best ones give them a short each maybe showing me using it more to go with it when I get through the current vids. There was some baaad anniversary edition bugs at launch, the wabbajack quest couldn't even be started for around 4 months after release it would just crash the game haha. The big house near rorikstead has a very common tendancy to delete weapons off of the racks, I don't think that ones even been patched I lost most of my daedric artifacts on my last account haha. Really good idea though I'll add it to the list of upcoming vids I wanna make, I didn't think to do anniversary specific stuff I could also do a tour of the houses since my newest vids are house related, appreciate the comment ♥️
Dead thrall is OP, because of one thing: you can temper and enchant gear. It must be the gear the NPC wore. There is a whole article that explains it all: "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Dead Thrall FAQ "
That is actually a fantastic idea I've never thought of that, why does everyone keep saying lydia is dead she's never been better. *Undead Lydia in full daedric*
It does I meant more just a normal healing spell that follows you round, maybe like candlelight sort of spell but it heals you rather than having to stay in the circle. I explained it a bit bad in the vid
@UMadBroz1 i am replaying it and, honestly, yes modern magic is watered down but acrobatics and levitate are the real causality. On openmw you can feather 100 jump 100 and go like 20 cells no hitching or slowdown. I am mage guild arch mage and I just punch things but the jumping. 🤌
I love all the great jank with morrow omg skills, there are ways to max them all within the first hour or two and do fun stuff like jump across the map in one jump it's great haha
Hi. Nice video. Little tip on the Master Conjuration spell: Dead Thrall. You can craft Enchanted Weapons and Gear that the Dead Thrall will wear. Think absorb health enchant since dead thrall's do not regenerate health and can't be healed. They can also use conjuration staff's at the start of every battle if you give them one. There are some good guides on YT on how to accomplish this, fair warning, they are pretty overpowered once you give them fully enchanted gear.
Does sound like a solid strat. I'll give you one step further, the ritual stone can revive an infinite amount of corpses and they don't disintegrate when it runs out, so kill a bandit camp, give all 20 enchanted gear, revive all 20 with the ritual stone then walk around with the actual army, every time they run out just wait 24 hours and use it again, plus every time they kill a group of enemies wait 24 hours and use it again, you amass and infinitely growing army until you crash the game haha
The biggest problem with Skyrim's magic system is how obtuse it is. It doesn't really feel good until and unless you develop the skill as a player to make it work for you instead of letting it's totally unintuitive functions drag you to frustration. First overall problems: While most skills will be decently functional as long as you don't totally ignore them until you're level 25+, the magic skills, save conjuration, pretty well demand you stay partially focused around them from Helgen else they'll quickly fall off to nigh-uselessness. Apprentice and Novice spells are quickly outpaced in their effectiveness by equivalent functions from other skills; damage, armor rating, distracting enemies, etc. 50% of new players will be practically slapped in the face with the introduction to the smithing skill when they meet Alvor in riverwood while the other half will have it dropped in their lap when they first arrive in Whiterun with an inventory full of loot. That's great for weapon-users. In fact, it quickly becomes pretty clear that you'll get more out of smithing than pretty much any equipment you could buy, particularly if you're willing to pay a trainer and end up with your ability to create totally new armors outpacing the rate at which the game's leveled lists give you access to them. The problem here is that it creates an expectation that crafting is better than buying, which the community around the game absolutely reinforces, when the best equipment for a mage type character actually *can't* be crafted and most of the rest crafts to a lower degree than what you can buy because of how enchantment scales. You can make robes but they're bugged and don't craft right. Fortify magicka regen doesn't even scale to the same degree as purchased rings and robes to such a degree that you have to complete several unrelated quests from the Dragonborn DLC to actually be able to match the top-tier purchasables. At least fortify (spell school) and fortify magicka scale decently no matter how you get them. Literally *no one and nothing* tells you about the most important one though; elsewyr fondue. It increases your maximum magicka by 100 and increases your regen by 25% and you're left to discover this completely on your own by just browsing the food list at a cook-pot. Speaking of smithing and enchantment, we come to one more problem with being a mage that the game goes out of its way to avoid mentioning: you *need* alchemy. It's nice for a fighter or a sneak-thief but several kinds of magic don't scale fast enough without it unless you stay laser-focused on that school. This, in turn, loops me back around to the previous point: you get smacked in the face with the smithing tutorials and enchantment at least gets a passing mention by Farengar Secret-Fire but you get nothing about alchemy unless you do a minor sidequest for Farengar or just happen to get the right ambient dialogue while you're shopping at an apothecary. It's much more "maybe you find it, maybe you don't" than the other two and, because they absolutely had to have symmetry between the mage, the warrior, and the theif, you never get so much as a hint at its importance for magecraft. Now, let's get to individual school problems from easiest to use to biggest PITA: Alteration's about as straight-forward as it gets. Cast x flesh spell, fight, get xp. Scales fast, does exactly what it's supposed to do, no problems right? Wrong. The bonuses are relatively small unless you take the mage armor perks. Oakflesh is basically a magicka tax. By the time you get to ironflesh, it's starting to matter if you haven't been wearing actual armor up to that point. At least, if you're careful, you can prebuff with it before picking a fight so you don't *need* potions expanding its duration to be useful. Just don't get caught by surprise. Paralyze comes on so late that if you've survived that long, it's just icing. The best part, of course, is that you're only ever getting to about 40% damage reduction unless you're throwing up a souped-up ward on top of your armor flesh until the half-duration dragonflesh master spell. Good luck getting through a drawn out fight in just 45 seconds. Conjuration is the only school that doesn't actually care what you're doing as long as you can provide enough magicka for the moment you need to cast and the most important spell is an apprentice one. If you're building a mage-mage instead of a battle-mage, you'll have no trouble meeting its magicka demands *but* conjuration has the hardest fall-off in the late game. literally nothing scales offensive capability of any of its magic except reaching the next tier of summon and the elemental potency perk. Once you hit 65 in the skill, you're basically done unless you're grabbing the perk at 75. After that, you are done done. Access to a dead thrall upon mastery is nice but, once again, that runs you into the lack of intuitiveness in being a mage; enthralled dead will only equip weapons added to their inventory. If you want to give them custom equipment, you have to reverse pick-pocket it onto them while they're alive and then kill them. Most enchants don't function for NPCs. Worse still, you have to enthrall a humanoid corpse that needs equipment and most of them don't scale any higher than the atronach thralls. The few that do go higher scale with player level and eventually outgrow the spell's fixed capacity. Restoration is pretty forgiving and handy, as long as all you're doing with it is touch-up healing between fights. It's also the effect that gives the slowest xp growth for the school. If you don't use turning effectively, you'll get stuck on fast healing for most of a playthrough. If you're not focused on restoration as your primary or at least second pick skill then you're going to have to use potions to keep up with scaling (this will come up twice more). Wards are so difficult to use well that most people write them off entirely; you need a monster magicka pool, the perk for the level of ward you're using, and to read the enemy you're warding against so you can time rasing the ward to minimize waste. It hard counters magical attacks, including dragons' breath, but also demands being boosted by potions or scrolls of shalidor's insights on higher difficulties. Gotta admit though, walking into Morvunskar just south of Windhelm with your ward up and no-selling the mages' combined onslaught while you blast them to ash wth lightning bolts feels absolutely boss. Destruction... good lord, dustruction. You *will* craft fortify destruction potions as often as an archer crafts arrows, you *will* make it your primary skill and only damage option, or you *will* never use anything but the default flames spell to set off enemy runes. Destruction offers the undisputably highest DPS possible in the game but you have to work for it. In the late game, you must have full mastery of combining gear, expendables, and magicka management to make good use of the skill but if you do, you can drop multiple legendary dragons in moments without any exploits or bugs. Finally, illusion: because illusion checks levels rather than HP, difficulty is completely irrelevant. Also because it scales to level, if you're not leveling it pretty steady then you're going to have to use potions and/or dual casting to actually affect targets. If you ignore it too long, you'll be left with no choice but muffle spam and trainers. It's not as hard to use as some other schools and it offers fantastic crowd control but magicka costs are brutal and it's totally binary; either it works or it doesn't, period. At least destruction can be supplemental to other damaging effects if you're mid at using it. Don't get me wrong. I *love* playing a mage. I fall into it as quickly as others fall into stealth archer. It's just much more demanding than other playstyles and the game itself tells you *nothing* about how to do it well and even actively hinders new players in discovering how to do it. Sorry for the essay. Just kinda gathered up steam and kept going until I was done.
Gathered up steam might be the understatement of the year haha. I read the whole thing it took me over ten minutes it was an impressive essay, you could record yourself saying that over Skyrim footage and upload that as a whole video essay on UA-cam haha. It is a very flawed system and is definitely the area of combat that feels like they put the least effort into, they wanted to make it easier to learn for Skyrim when compared to the previous games but they went too far in the other direction. Spells are so simple now that it's literally pressing one button on the book and boom you fully mastered the spell. And exp is so staggered that if you're using the skills normally they pretty much will never level up but if you Google ways to get them to level 100 you'll find ways to do each school in under an hour, on the channel I have guides for each school of magic to 100, destruction in particular you can get to 100 in a few seconds with a certain glitch it's actually insane, but playing normally you will likely never get it to 100. Especially illusion and alteration, you cast maybe 1-2 of these per cave which will barely get you any exp. But if you google fast ways you can get them all to 100 in minutes it's so inconsistent haha
@UMadBroz1 Like I said, I love playing mages. What I didn't say is I have an abiding hatred of exploitative grinding. I've seen guides like you're talking about. I refuse to do that. I have played leveling all 6 mage skills plus alchemy totally straight more than a dozen times. If you're playing "normally," they'll all be approaching mastery or mastered properly by about level 35. The thing about it is that "normally" is a little off from how most people play. I'm still delving dungeons, fighting enemies, looting treasure, and completing quests but I'm *not* using sneak, any weapons, or any armor. Just mage skills and alchemy all the way and maybe picking the odd lock. I also get married to a traveling companion ASAP and take a nap before every dungeon delve for the extra 15% xp. I did once go out of my way to level *every* skill except pickpocket as evenly as I could. That really does drag on and make you use every part of the skyrim animal to survive. The trick is in knowing how to maximize XP gain. Destruction's easy; don't miss and don't waste your time with dual casting. Impact's great... if you have one enemy. Otherwise you're wasting 10% extra magicka with every shot and you're gonna burn out long before you get through a fight. Runes are for sneaks and you don't want anything close enough for the cloaks to matter if you're not a fighter. Alteration's even easier. Highest level armor flesh as soon as the battle music starts until you're far enough along in alchemy and grabbed a few scrolls of Shalidor's Insights such that you can pop off your second highest on a souped-up dual cast that'll last through several fights. Alteration actually scales decently fast that you don't have to go out of your way with it. Restoration is tricky to level for a straight mage because the difference between full health and dead tends to be a pretty small window but keeping up your turn undead and using it for crowd control in draugr crypts does pretty solid. Always block dragons' breath with lesser ward. It's not worth much xp but every little bit helps and it just totally no-sells the breath because of the underlying mechanics. Conjuration is absolutely trivial. If you're not neglecting enchantment altogether, and you shouldn't be if you're going to continue into late game since you'll want foritfy alchemy gear, then you're gonna need soul gems filled and soul-trap is worth a bunch of xp. Popping off an atronach to help with aggro also helps with xp. Heads up: the flame thrall spell can be picked up in one of the black books and you'd think that'd be great but the spell is bugged and gives 0xp. Illusion is tough. It's great for crowd control with the living but keeping it leveled eats a boat-load of magicka or demands you fill its tree completely. It's the most dispensible of the 5 though. Enchanting is, in my experience, best grown with staves. Make nice with Neloth in Tel-Mythrin on Solstheim (reluctant steward quest) or take control of the Mystwatch keep just outside of Morthal if you're on AE. Once you've blown your load firing off destruction spells from your hands, switch to a staff and keep blasting. Every time you recharge it, you get xp. The expert level incinerate and icy spear staves, in particular generate pretty steady growth. Thunderbolt staff's bugged and does the same damage as chain-lightning. Don't bother with it. Alchemy, you literally farm. Get one of the hearthfire houses and plant at least a few pots each of nightshade and glowing mushroom for fortify destruction potions. If you go with windstadt manor, you can also get some abacean longfin and cyrodilic spadetail in your fishery for mixing with salt to make fortify restoration. If you're gonna go whole hog with growing fortify skill ingredients for all of the mage skills, you'll need more than one house with a greenhouse anyway or to get Golden Hills plantation if you have AE. It is possible to keep up with the needed ingredient farming without literally farming in the dirt since the original 2011 release but it's been more trouble than it's worth since hearthfire. I deliberately challenged myself to check that once upon a time too. Ultimately, it's just a matter of it being that the more skills you try to level at once, the longer it takes to get good at any of them. If you stay laser-focused on destruction, alteration, restoration, and heavily prioritize magicka over health and stamina then you won't need to craft *anything* until level 25+, after you've mastered destruction. You *will* spend a lot of money in the Radiant Raimant in Solitude though. One more mention of Elswyr Fondue though. It really is a tremendous boon. Make friends with Hulda in the bannered mare for easy access to ale, Talen-Jei in the Bee and Barb and/or Lucan Valerius for eidar cheese, and the khajit caravans always have moon-sugar. Rhisa'ad's caravan is always traveling between Whiterun and Markarth, Ma'dran's between Solitude and Windhelm, and Akhari's between Dawnstar and Riften. Just quick travel back and forth between each pair of cities a couple times and you'll find them reliably.
... and I wrote another essay. 😅 3000 hours on just the switch version does things to a dude, I suppose. No idea how much before that on Xbox 360. Got the red ring years ago now.
0:51 The way I always maxed every skill in the game was going to Kolbjorn Barrow in Solsthiem, getting the black book there, and selecting Secret of Arcana. It allows you to not use up any magicka for 30 seconds, so all you need to do is go to one edge of the map with a telekinesis spell, pick something up with it, and fast travel to the other end of the map. Boom, you've maxed out illusion.
You can actually do that without the black book if you don't have the unofficial patch, you just hold something then keep the button held down while you fast travel then it gives you all the exp you would have got if you walked the full way using the spell. It is such a busted method haha. I think they did eventually patch it but uninstalling updates should make the glitch work again ♥️. Haven't tried it with the black book method that may be a way of doing it after the patch which is cool I'll be sure to give it a go next time I do the dlc
Get illusion to level 90-100 then the master illusion teacher at the college of winter hold will give you the quest to get the master spells. The description has a link to the illusion spell guide if you need any help♥️
The Master spells are all crap in the base game. Bethesda REALLY screwed the pooch with that one. Destruction spell damage doesn't scale with level. By the time you're able to cast Master illusion spells enemies are probably already too high level to be affected anyway. Dragonhide is garbage--80% damage reduction for 30 seconds is a phenomenal waste of magicka seeing as how you can achieve that by just getting your armor rating up to 567. (Which can be done with light armor and Smithing.) Those conjured Thralls are no stronger than the base counterparts, but I guess if you want to permanently conjure a couple atronachs to inspire everyone to make snide remarks about "that spell looks dangerous!" and make it infinitely harder to fit through doors, then you're covered.
Alot of the spells are fairly underwhelming yeah haha. There are a few I love like harmony and mayhem are really fun ones to mess around with. The big Lazer beam isn't great damage but I have alot of fun using it. Conjuration is definitely the one I'm most disappointed by it's my favourite school of magic so I was hoping it'd be like conjure dragon or the ebony warrior or something rather than just the basic elementals haha.
@@UMadBroz1 When it comes to magic there's really only a few that I find vital. Invisibility, Chain Lightning, and Bound Bow. Chain Lightning is a hitscan attack that can be dual-cast to stagger everyone it hits (with the impact perk) and with enough magicka or 0% destruction cost, you can easily dominate most mobs. Invisibility is great for breaking aggro, and for stealth characters you can charge the spell before picking a lock. When the lockpick animation completes, the spell discharges, and you become invisible in the split second it takes the door to open and the area transition to occur. So you end up on the opposite side already invisible. And Bound Bow, well hell who doesn't want infinite ammo lol
Ooh invisibilitysn one I haven't actually used that much i find with sneak 100 I virtually never get seen but it's a great spell at early levels when sneaks not that high. Chain lighting is a gooden. Bound bow I love using but with the anniversary edition they added a cool spell called bound quiver which gives you the arrows and you can use your own bow which is great cause it's usually like a legendary daedric enchanted bow haha
@@UMadBroz1 Eh I only ever play the Skyrim VR version now. Never going back to flatscreen if I can help it. Once you've played it in VR there's no going back! So no AE for me. Can't say I'd want to give up the VR experience for the what AE adds!
I'm really hoping they do a psvr2 port of Skyrim vr, the PS4 one was really good but didn't have analog sticks so was awkward to move I would love a much more upscaled graphics and analog sticks on the new psvr
Apart from the problem with restoration/illusion/alteration not affecting higher level beings, the long casting time, and the fact that you can't move, make them pretty much useless. The same can be said about the destruction spells to, except they do indeed damage enemies around you. When it comes to the conjuration spells, they have other issues. Atronachs are bulky, and are almost impossible to bring when you're dungeon-diving. The dead thrall spell is actually pretty good. Obviously, it depends on what you raise, but Forsworn Ravagers, Bandit chiefs, some of the high level mages... Two-handing Bandit marauders, especially if they're orcs, will work well.
What I would have liked to see in the video was the spells added by the creations Necromantic Grimoire and Arcane Accessories. Bone Colossus and Ancient Death Priest are really awesome.
That's a fantastic idea for another video if you would like that sort of thing. I've got a few other vids I'm working on but I can start working on aN anniversary edition spell vid. There's some great stuff in anniversary edition but it's more bugged than the main game haha, the houses have a tendancy to delete your stuff from time to time and some of the spells can get stuff like destruction to 100 in seconds
@@UMadBroz1 I can't say that I've noticed SE-content being buggier than the rest of the game. And Skyrim being as buggy as it already is... I mean... What's another bug or two! 😅
Glad you liked my idea! I'll make a suggestion, and you decide if you wanna go with it or not:
Make a separate video on each spell, and go deep into what they actually do. When to use them or not. Pros and cons!
It'd be hard with the current schedule to do a full vid for each spell, I do shorts on Mondays and Wednesdays then a full vid on Fridays so it'd be months of uploading nothing but individual spell reviews haha. I could do a full vid talking about them all and then for the best ones give them a short each maybe showing me using it more to go with it when I get through the current vids.
There was some baaad anniversary edition bugs at launch, the wabbajack quest couldn't even be started for around 4 months after release it would just crash the game haha. The big house near rorikstead has a very common tendancy to delete weapons off of the racks, I don't think that ones even been patched I lost most of my daedric artifacts on my last account haha.
Really good idea though I'll add it to the list of upcoming vids I wanna make, I didn't think to do anniversary specific stuff I could also do a tour of the houses since my newest vids are house related, appreciate the comment ♥️
Dead thrall is OP, because of one thing: you can temper and enchant gear.
It must be the gear the NPC wore.
There is a whole article that explains it all: "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Dead Thrall FAQ "
That is actually a fantastic idea I've never thought of that, why does everyone keep saying lydia is dead she's never been better.
*Undead Lydia in full daedric*
Guardian Circle heals you over time.
It does I meant more just a normal healing spell that follows you round, maybe like candlelight sort of spell but it heals you rather than having to stay in the circle. I explained it a bit bad in the vid
@UMadBroz1 required you could do that in morrowind with spell crafting
I do miss spell crafting I loved summoning like 20 cheap enemies in one cast
@UMadBroz1 i am replaying it and, honestly, yes modern magic is watered down but acrobatics and levitate are the real causality. On openmw you can feather 100 jump 100 and go like 20 cells no hitching or slowdown. I am mage guild arch mage and I just punch things but the jumping. 🤌
I love all the great jank with morrow omg skills, there are ways to max them all within the first hour or two and do fun stuff like jump across the map in one jump it's great haha
Hi. Nice video. Little tip on the Master Conjuration spell: Dead Thrall. You can craft Enchanted Weapons and Gear that the Dead Thrall will wear. Think absorb health enchant since dead thrall's do not regenerate health and can't be healed. They can also use conjuration staff's at the start of every battle if you give them one. There are some good guides on YT on how to accomplish this, fair warning, they are pretty overpowered once you give them fully enchanted gear.
Does sound like a solid strat.
I'll give you one step further, the ritual stone can revive an infinite amount of corpses and they don't disintegrate when it runs out, so kill a bandit camp, give all 20 enchanted gear, revive all 20 with the ritual stone then walk around with the actual army, every time they run out just wait 24 hours and use it again, plus every time they kill a group of enemies wait 24 hours and use it again, you amass and infinitely growing army until you crash the game haha
The biggest problem with Skyrim's magic system is how obtuse it is. It doesn't really feel good until and unless you develop the skill as a player to make it work for you instead of letting it's totally unintuitive functions drag you to frustration.
First overall problems:
While most skills will be decently functional as long as you don't totally ignore them until you're level 25+, the magic skills, save conjuration, pretty well demand you stay partially focused around them from Helgen else they'll quickly fall off to nigh-uselessness. Apprentice and Novice spells are quickly outpaced in their effectiveness by equivalent functions from other skills; damage, armor rating, distracting enemies, etc.
50% of new players will be practically slapped in the face with the introduction to the smithing skill when they meet Alvor in riverwood while the other half will have it dropped in their lap when they first arrive in Whiterun with an inventory full of loot. That's great for weapon-users. In fact, it quickly becomes pretty clear that you'll get more out of smithing than pretty much any equipment you could buy, particularly if you're willing to pay a trainer and end up with your ability to create totally new armors outpacing the rate at which the game's leveled lists give you access to them. The problem here is that it creates an expectation that crafting is better than buying, which the community around the game absolutely reinforces, when the best equipment for a mage type character actually *can't* be crafted and most of the rest crafts to a lower degree than what you can buy because of how enchantment scales. You can make robes but they're bugged and don't craft right. Fortify magicka regen doesn't even scale to the same degree as purchased rings and robes to such a degree that you have to complete several unrelated quests from the Dragonborn DLC to actually be able to match the top-tier purchasables. At least fortify (spell school) and fortify magicka scale decently no matter how you get them. Literally *no one and nothing* tells you about the most important one though; elsewyr fondue. It increases your maximum magicka by 100 and increases your regen by 25% and you're left to discover this completely on your own by just browsing the food list at a cook-pot.
Speaking of smithing and enchantment, we come to one more problem with being a mage that the game goes out of its way to avoid mentioning: you *need* alchemy. It's nice for a fighter or a sneak-thief but several kinds of magic don't scale fast enough without it unless you stay laser-focused on that school. This, in turn, loops me back around to the previous point: you get smacked in the face with the smithing tutorials and enchantment at least gets a passing mention by Farengar Secret-Fire but you get nothing about alchemy unless you do a minor sidequest for Farengar or just happen to get the right ambient dialogue while you're shopping at an apothecary. It's much more "maybe you find it, maybe you don't" than the other two and, because they absolutely had to have symmetry between the mage, the warrior, and the theif, you never get so much as a hint at its importance for magecraft.
Now, let's get to individual school problems from easiest to use to biggest PITA:
Alteration's about as straight-forward as it gets. Cast x flesh spell, fight, get xp. Scales fast, does exactly what it's supposed to do, no problems right? Wrong. The bonuses are relatively small unless you take the mage armor perks. Oakflesh is basically a magicka tax. By the time you get to ironflesh, it's starting to matter if you haven't been wearing actual armor up to that point. At least, if you're careful, you can prebuff with it before picking a fight so you don't *need* potions expanding its duration to be useful. Just don't get caught by surprise. Paralyze comes on so late that if you've survived that long, it's just icing. The best part, of course, is that you're only ever getting to about 40% damage reduction unless you're throwing up a souped-up ward on top of your armor flesh until the half-duration dragonflesh master spell. Good luck getting through a drawn out fight in just 45 seconds.
Conjuration is the only school that doesn't actually care what you're doing as long as you can provide enough magicka for the moment you need to cast and the most important spell is an apprentice one. If you're building a mage-mage instead of a battle-mage, you'll have no trouble meeting its magicka demands *but* conjuration has the hardest fall-off in the late game. literally nothing scales offensive capability of any of its magic except reaching the next tier of summon and the elemental potency perk. Once you hit 65 in the skill, you're basically done unless you're grabbing the perk at 75. After that, you are done done. Access to a dead thrall upon mastery is nice but, once again, that runs you into the lack of intuitiveness in being a mage; enthralled dead will only equip weapons added to their inventory. If you want to give them custom equipment, you have to reverse pick-pocket it onto them while they're alive and then kill them. Most enchants don't function for NPCs. Worse still, you have to enthrall a humanoid corpse that needs equipment and most of them don't scale any higher than the atronach thralls. The few that do go higher scale with player level and eventually outgrow the spell's fixed capacity.
Restoration is pretty forgiving and handy, as long as all you're doing with it is touch-up healing between fights. It's also the effect that gives the slowest xp growth for the school. If you don't use turning effectively, you'll get stuck on fast healing for most of a playthrough. If you're not focused on restoration as your primary or at least second pick skill then you're going to have to use potions to keep up with scaling (this will come up twice more). Wards are so difficult to use well that most people write them off entirely; you need a monster magicka pool, the perk for the level of ward you're using, and to read the enemy you're warding against so you can time rasing the ward to minimize waste. It hard counters magical attacks, including dragons' breath, but also demands being boosted by potions or scrolls of shalidor's insights on higher difficulties. Gotta admit though, walking into Morvunskar just south of Windhelm with your ward up and no-selling the mages' combined onslaught while you blast them to ash wth lightning bolts feels absolutely boss.
Destruction... good lord, dustruction. You *will* craft fortify destruction potions as often as an archer crafts arrows, you *will* make it your primary skill and only damage option, or you *will* never use anything but the default flames spell to set off enemy runes. Destruction offers the undisputably highest DPS possible in the game but you have to work for it. In the late game, you must have full mastery of combining gear, expendables, and magicka management to make good use of the skill but if you do, you can drop multiple legendary dragons in moments without any exploits or bugs.
Finally, illusion: because illusion checks levels rather than HP, difficulty is completely irrelevant. Also because it scales to level, if you're not leveling it pretty steady then you're going to have to use potions and/or dual casting to actually affect targets. If you ignore it too long, you'll be left with no choice but muffle spam and trainers. It's not as hard to use as some other schools and it offers fantastic crowd control but magicka costs are brutal and it's totally binary; either it works or it doesn't, period. At least destruction can be supplemental to other damaging effects if you're mid at using it.
Don't get me wrong. I *love* playing a mage. I fall into it as quickly as others fall into stealth archer. It's just much more demanding than other playstyles and the game itself tells you *nothing* about how to do it well and even actively hinders new players in discovering how to do it.
Sorry for the essay. Just kinda gathered up steam and kept going until I was done.
Gathered up steam might be the understatement of the year haha. I read the whole thing it took me over ten minutes it was an impressive essay, you could record yourself saying that over Skyrim footage and upload that as a whole video essay on UA-cam haha.
It is a very flawed system and is definitely the area of combat that feels like they put the least effort into, they wanted to make it easier to learn for Skyrim when compared to the previous games but they went too far in the other direction. Spells are so simple now that it's literally pressing one button on the book and boom you fully mastered the spell.
And exp is so staggered that if you're using the skills normally they pretty much will never level up but if you Google ways to get them to level 100 you'll find ways to do each school in under an hour, on the channel I have guides for each school of magic to 100, destruction in particular you can get to 100 in a few seconds with a certain glitch it's actually insane, but playing normally you will likely never get it to 100. Especially illusion and alteration, you cast maybe 1-2 of these per cave which will barely get you any exp. But if you google fast ways you can get them all to 100 in minutes it's so inconsistent haha
@UMadBroz1 Like I said, I love playing mages. What I didn't say is I have an abiding hatred of exploitative grinding. I've seen guides like you're talking about. I refuse to do that. I have played leveling all 6 mage skills plus alchemy totally straight more than a dozen times.
If you're playing "normally," they'll all be approaching mastery or mastered properly by about level 35. The thing about it is that "normally" is a little off from how most people play. I'm still delving dungeons, fighting enemies, looting treasure, and completing quests but I'm *not* using sneak, any weapons, or any armor. Just mage skills and alchemy all the way and maybe picking the odd lock. I also get married to a traveling companion ASAP and take a nap before every dungeon delve for the extra 15% xp.
I did once go out of my way to level *every* skill except pickpocket as evenly as I could. That really does drag on and make you use every part of the skyrim animal to survive.
The trick is in knowing how to maximize XP gain.
Destruction's easy; don't miss and don't waste your time with dual casting. Impact's great... if you have one enemy. Otherwise you're wasting 10% extra magicka with every shot and you're gonna burn out long before you get through a fight. Runes are for sneaks and you don't want anything close enough for the cloaks to matter if you're not a fighter.
Alteration's even easier. Highest level armor flesh as soon as the battle music starts until you're far enough along in alchemy and grabbed a few scrolls of Shalidor's Insights such that you can pop off your second highest on a souped-up dual cast that'll last through several fights. Alteration actually scales decently fast that you don't have to go out of your way with it.
Restoration is tricky to level for a straight mage because the difference between full health and dead tends to be a pretty small window but keeping up your turn undead and using it for crowd control in draugr crypts does pretty solid. Always block dragons' breath with lesser ward. It's not worth much xp but every little bit helps and it just totally no-sells the breath because of the underlying mechanics.
Conjuration is absolutely trivial. If you're not neglecting enchantment altogether, and you shouldn't be if you're going to continue into late game since you'll want foritfy alchemy gear, then you're gonna need soul gems filled and soul-trap is worth a bunch of xp. Popping off an atronach to help with aggro also helps with xp. Heads up: the flame thrall spell can be picked up in one of the black books and you'd think that'd be great but the spell is bugged and gives 0xp.
Illusion is tough. It's great for crowd control with the living but keeping it leveled eats a boat-load of magicka or demands you fill its tree completely. It's the most dispensible of the 5 though.
Enchanting is, in my experience, best grown with staves. Make nice with Neloth in Tel-Mythrin on Solstheim (reluctant steward quest) or take control of the Mystwatch keep just outside of Morthal if you're on AE. Once you've blown your load firing off destruction spells from your hands, switch to a staff and keep blasting. Every time you recharge it, you get xp. The expert level incinerate and icy spear staves, in particular generate pretty steady growth. Thunderbolt staff's bugged and does the same damage as chain-lightning. Don't bother with it.
Alchemy, you literally farm. Get one of the hearthfire houses and plant at least a few pots each of nightshade and glowing mushroom for fortify destruction potions. If you go with windstadt manor, you can also get some abacean longfin and cyrodilic spadetail in your fishery for mixing with salt to make fortify restoration. If you're gonna go whole hog with growing fortify skill ingredients for all of the mage skills, you'll need more than one house with a greenhouse anyway or to get Golden Hills plantation if you have AE.
It is possible to keep up with the needed ingredient farming without literally farming in the dirt since the original 2011 release but it's been more trouble than it's worth since hearthfire. I deliberately challenged myself to check that once upon a time too.
Ultimately, it's just a matter of it being that the more skills you try to level at once, the longer it takes to get good at any of them. If you stay laser-focused on destruction, alteration, restoration, and heavily prioritize magicka over health and stamina then you won't need to craft *anything* until level 25+, after you've mastered destruction. You *will* spend a lot of money in the Radiant Raimant in Solitude though.
One more mention of Elswyr Fondue though. It really is a tremendous boon. Make friends with Hulda in the bannered mare for easy access to ale, Talen-Jei in the Bee and Barb and/or Lucan Valerius for eidar cheese, and the khajit caravans always have moon-sugar. Rhisa'ad's caravan is always traveling between Whiterun and Markarth, Ma'dran's between Solitude and Windhelm, and Akhari's between Dawnstar and Riften. Just quick travel back and forth between each pair of cities a couple times and you'll find them reliably.
... and I wrote another essay. 😅
3000 hours on just the switch version does things to a dude, I suppose. No idea how much before that on Xbox 360. Got the red ring years ago now.
Oh my sweet talos I'll read that when I wake up haha
Hate from Australia
0:51 The way I always maxed every skill in the game was going to Kolbjorn Barrow in Solsthiem, getting the black book there, and selecting Secret of Arcana. It allows you to not use up any magicka for 30 seconds, so all you need to do is go to one edge of the map with a telekinesis spell, pick something up with it, and fast travel to the other end of the map. Boom, you've maxed out illusion.
You can actually do that without the black book if you don't have the unofficial patch, you just hold something then keep the button held down while you fast travel then it gives you all the exp you would have got if you walked the full way using the spell. It is such a busted method haha. I think they did eventually patch it but uninstalling updates should make the glitch work again ♥️.
Haven't tried it with the black book method that may be a way of doing it after the patch which is cool I'll be sure to give it a go next time I do the dlc
4:00 "diddy diddy diddy"
It took me a second to realise what that meant haha, I've not had anyone make those jokes in yeaaars it weirdly feels so nice to see them again haha
P diddy
Giggity giggity giggity.
I would have loved more vanilla poison spells tbh. It’d be more fun if there was some master level restoration spell that poisoned enemies.
Yeah like a giant poison cloud sort of like a smoke grenade. Maybe a rune you place on the floor that does a big smoke cloud when stepped on
@@UMadBroz1 yeah, I believe the rune is the only poison spell actually in the game but it’d be fun to have some variety.
Great video 👍
Much appreciated ♥️
Great video man
Much appreciated ♥️
thanks for the video
No worries ♥️
Dobrý video, greetings from Czech republic
Cool to hear my videos reached the Czech republic haha ♥️
Where can we find harmony 🙏🏽
Get illusion to level 90-100 then the master illusion teacher at the college of winter hold will give you the quest to get the master spells.
The description has a link to the illusion spell guide if you need any help♥️
2:21 Say that again............
Thick of it? I'm confused haha. I feel a jokes going over my head
The Master spells are all crap in the base game. Bethesda REALLY screwed the pooch with that one. Destruction spell damage doesn't scale with level. By the time you're able to cast Master illusion spells enemies are probably already too high level to be affected anyway. Dragonhide is garbage--80% damage reduction for 30 seconds is a phenomenal waste of magicka seeing as how you can achieve that by just getting your armor rating up to 567. (Which can be done with light armor and Smithing.) Those conjured Thralls are no stronger than the base counterparts, but I guess if you want to permanently conjure a couple atronachs to inspire everyone to make snide remarks about "that spell looks dangerous!" and make it infinitely harder to fit through doors, then you're covered.
Alot of the spells are fairly underwhelming yeah haha. There are a few I love like harmony and mayhem are really fun ones to mess around with. The big Lazer beam isn't great damage but I have alot of fun using it.
Conjuration is definitely the one I'm most disappointed by it's my favourite school of magic so I was hoping it'd be like conjure dragon or the ebony warrior or something rather than just the basic elementals haha.
@@UMadBroz1 When it comes to magic there's really only a few that I find vital. Invisibility, Chain Lightning, and Bound Bow. Chain Lightning is a hitscan attack that can be dual-cast to stagger everyone it hits (with the impact perk) and with enough magicka or 0% destruction cost, you can easily dominate most mobs. Invisibility is great for breaking aggro, and for stealth characters you can charge the spell before picking a lock. When the lockpick animation completes, the spell discharges, and you become invisible in the split second it takes the door to open and the area transition to occur. So you end up on the opposite side already invisible. And Bound Bow, well hell who doesn't want infinite ammo lol
Ooh invisibilitysn one I haven't actually used that much i find with sneak 100 I virtually never get seen but it's a great spell at early levels when sneaks not that high.
Chain lighting is a gooden.
Bound bow I love using but with the anniversary edition they added a cool spell called bound quiver which gives you the arrows and you can use your own bow which is great cause it's usually like a legendary daedric enchanted bow haha
@@UMadBroz1 Eh I only ever play the Skyrim VR version now. Never going back to flatscreen if I can help it. Once you've played it in VR there's no going back! So no AE for me. Can't say I'd want to give up the VR experience for the what AE adds!
I'm really hoping they do a psvr2 port of Skyrim vr, the PS4 one was really good but didn't have analog sticks so was awkward to move I would love a much more upscaled graphics and analog sticks on the new psvr
cool
Returded voice
My favourite kind of turded
I prefer thriceturded but it's just a personal thing. And your voice is very soothing, i like it a lot.
Glad my quadturding voice can be soothing haha
4:00 my nan having a stroke in the nursing home
Or being electrocuted perhaps 👀