Magicka Unnecessary?

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I've been thinking more and more about a mage character. And I'm coming to the realization that even though you'd think that magicka would be the most important of your three base statistics, that's not really the case, based on the basic game mechanics.

If the top notch spells were castable with a couple of hundred magicka, it would make sense to find a bunch of gear that allowed you to cast all the different schools of magic at a somewhat reduced cost, and pump magicka as much as you could. Unfortunately, the top notch spells require well in excess of 1000 magicka to cast. Looking at the three main offensive schools of magic, the master level illusion spells top out at over 1000 magicka, the master level conjuration spells require 1200 magicka, and the master level destruction spells are over 1400 magicka.

Now if you get the appropriate perks, you can half those requirements to the 500-700 range. Still, with a starting magicka of 100 (unless you're an Atmer), you're looking at 40-60 levels to be able to cast that spell once, And even modest reduction of magicka costs are going to be ineffective for multi-casting of such spells.

So what that really means if you're playing a true mage and not some type of hybrid character, that in order to keep the spells rolling, you're going to need to kit your character out in all fortify [school of magic] and/or fortify [school of magic] and magicka regeneration gear. Of course that swings you all the way to the other end of the spectrum. Now, instead of requiring an unattainable amount of magicka, you now need no magicka for that particular school. Once you get the extra affect perk, it's possible to craft gear that allows you to cast two schools of magic for no magicka cost.

And, given the insanely high amount of magicka required for master level spells, I think it was an intentional decision on the part of the designers to force you to go this route - that you'd have to greatly reduce, if not outright eliminate, the magicka requirements for master level spells, which effectively limit your ability to cast master level spells in all schools. So the more I think about it, even if you're playing a mage, you only really need enough magicka to cast the spells you really want to cast in schools that you don't have the zero mana cost. You'd simply have to resign yourself to losing the ability to cast the master level spells from those schools. This would allow you to get by with around 300-400 magicka.

For example, you can equip yourself with 100% magicka reduction in illusion and destruction. For conjuration, assuming you have the perk for cast expert level spells at half magicka cost, you'll still be able to summon daedras, demora lords, and atronachs for 120-175 magicka per pop. You'd even have enough magicka if you wanted to summon two. With restoration and alteration - except master level - you can cast all of these for around 200 magicka too, even if you didn't want to take the perks to half the casting costs.

It also brings up another possibility - if you're going to be gearing up to avoid the casting costs of certain schools, it obviates the need to spend perks on all of the skills that cut the casting cost in half in those skills. You'll probably still want to get, for example novice, apprentice, and adept spells at half cost, but by the time you're able to cast expert and master level spells, you'll probably be geared up with equipment that reduces casting cost to zero anyway. And saving the perks there allow you to spend those perks in other schools of magic. The main need of magicka will be in the early going when you won't have the equipment you need to reduce the magicka requirements, but those are the lower level spells that don't require nearly as much magicka anyway.

So what's the verdict? Am I crazy here, or does it make sense if you're making a mage to balance magicka, health, and stamina, and not go all out it raising your magicka?

EDIT:

So the basic mage perk plan is:

Illusion: All except expert and master illusion. (11 total)

Destruction: All except expert and master destruction, and I also plan to forgo the 3 fire-related perks, and concentrate on frost and shock. (12 total)

Conjuration: Skip all the undead ones and focus on Atromancy. So Novice, Apprentice, Adept, and Expert Conjuration (I won't be casting master level spells). Along with Dual Casting, Summoner (2), Atromancy, Elemental Potency. (9 total)

Enchanting: 5 Enchanter, Insightful Enchanter, Corpus Enchanter, Extra Effect. (Unless the elemental ones increase spell damage, which I don't think they do.) (8 total)

A few non-mage related perks too.

I would prefer NOT to wear robes, and so I want all the light armor perks from the smithing tree all the way up to dragon, as well as arcane. (6 total)

Sneak: Can't do without it anymore.

Sneak, Muffled Movement, and possibly Backstab (3 total)

Speech: Also too useful to pass up

Haggling, Allure, Merchant (3 total)

Grand total: 52

 

Roleplay you powergamer! The thrill of running around with a whimpy mage with 120hp and 0 armour is reason enough to put points into magicka. That and the fact that it takes quite a while until your enchanting is good for you to be able to get what you want and last but not least, enchanting breaks the game. When I played my mage I never figured out you could get free spells so I went for a massive mana pool and extreme amounts of regen and had a blast.

 

You cannot change what is in the bone. My first two characters really don't cast spells at all. The only ones they ever use are the ones that can be cost for base magicka cost, so 100 or less. I've never spent a single level up towards magicka on either of those characters. Now that the third character will be a mage, that obviously has to change. And keep in mind that I'm not saying I won't spend anything in magicka, but a completely balanced build: Place one out of three level ups in each of the attributes, and just rotate your way through them. So at level 30, you'll have base 200 in all three of them. Maybe I'll make at Altmer so I'll have 200 health and stamina and 250 magicka. But if one of the three is going to get short shrift, it will be stamina. You only really need enough stamina to carry around your equipment, assuming you don't carry around multiple armor sets. That means you're looking at around 200 at a minimum, and ideally 300. My first two characters had weight limits exceeding 400, but that's because, like I said, I spent nothing on magicka.

EDIT: Oh wait, there's one other thing I can do to powergame. Instead of going along the left hand side of the smithing tree with the light armors, I can instead chose to go to the right and get the heavy armors. With the right boots and the muffled movement perk, even a character wearing heaving armor is pretty darn stealthy when he needs to be. I mage clad in full daedric armor sounds really nice...

EDIT2: Btw, it is mentioned that you won't be able to acquire Master level spells until you perform a ritual that is unavailable until your skill level in that particular skill hits 90. Is there anything preventing you from completing that quest in more than one school? If there is, then it would change strategy a bit, as you'd have to decide which school you wanted to get the most out of, which for me would probably be destruction.

 

You can do all and although all the spells look awesome and are theoretically very useful they serve little practical purpose due to massive casting times. They are mostly flavour spells but they do give nice flavour.

Having free destruction spells would be even more unbalanced than a straight fighter, you can just chain stun with the biggest single target spell for all eternity. Nothing could ever touch you ever. What I think really made my mage fun was that I had enough spells to get by but that I had to be a bit careful, I had to run and kite a bit. I couldn't just blast everything to smithereens straight away. With free destruction spells I do not think a single fight even on master would be even slightly challenging especially not if you are wearing heavy armour. Not that there are any for a fully kitted out warrior either.

 

That is something I noticed with the Destruction tree, that the perk "Impact" causes a "Stagger" effect when you dual cast a destruction spell. So if Destruction spells are free, and the "stagger" affect is long enough to get a second spell off, any fight against a single opponent, no matter how tough, would remove all challenge. (Although I can't imagine a dual cast destruction spell would stagger a dragon.)

The real goal of the 3rd character is two-fold. First, I've never played a mage, so that alone will be a new experience. But secondly, I've been slowly expanding the skills I use with each character. The first character was a fighter, and the only thing he placed any emphasis in was the fighting skills, except for Two-Handed, as he was sword and shield. That was fun, but it greatly limited his potential (or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say he reached his full potential very early in the game). He was basically "done" at level 40. My current character did all the thief skills (seriously, I think he'll have all of them at 100 by the end of the game), and also added three of the fighter skills (Archery, One-Handed, and Smithing) and Enchant on the mage side. He's going to top out around level 60.

I'm really thinking that a mage might offer even more possibilities, as the thief skills are more utility-focused. You're going to level them whether you're a thief or not, although at a slower rate without the thief stone. Going this route will allow for further character development later in the game. You wouldn't actually spend many perks in the thief-based skills, but with continued advancement in areas that aren't you're "core" skills would allow further fine tuning of your mage options.

 

Dragons can be staggered, even the end boss. Which is fine if you have to choose between stunning forever or actually doing damage. Either many low dmg spells or fewer high damage spells.

 

Well, that perks is completely overpowered in that case. If any dual cast destruction spell can stun anything, just pick your favorite expert level destruction spell (as I don't think master level spells can be dual cast), and with zero casting cost on destruction, you can stun lock any single enemy in the game to death.

 

Which is the reason I post warning you off from making your first mage with that goal in mind.

 

I see what you mean. I thought it was like the Power Shot perk in the archery tree, where it staggers things that are approximately person sized or smaller. Add in the draw time of the bow (which is probably longer than the casting time of many spells) and the enemy usually was fully recovered and on you before you could get a second shot off (unless he was far away of course). But that extra second or so was typically enough to get a second shot off for any enemy that was decently far away. But the stagger didn't work on big things. It seems to not work on things like bears, trolls, and definitely not dragons.

 

Something I always do with my mage characters is that I always sink my first 10 levels' worth of stat points into magic. After that, I may or may not continue the trend, depending on my needs.

You only need magicka reduction at low levels imo. You have less skill points, limited ways to get more, and little to no capital to craft anything special or buy the spellbooks you need. And yet, you can still end up fighting trolls, lynxes, cave bears, giants... all those monsters you're gonna end up fighting at higher levels anyway. The main difference is that your higher level character will likely have enough mana to summon a Dremora Lord.

Note that there's a huge gap between the mana costs of Master level and Expert level spells, and higher level spells don't always replace lower level ones in Skyrim. Master level spells also typically don't make ideal "main" spells, for one thing they have very long casting animations.

It's very unlikely that spell schools in Skyrim were ultimately designed to work together. It's rather pointless to cast AoE Fury then paralyze all your targets, for example, and the master restoration spells would cause problems for your conjured undead minions.
This is why I think trying to create a mage who could cast all the master level spells is more a character thing than a powergaming thing, especially since you can already cast quite a few master-level spells from scrolls. I know you use the Xbox console so on top of everything you'll have to deal with managing a lot of spells (and I really mean a lot, since you won't be using just the master level ones).

Creating a mage who gets all the useful spells, however, is another thing. Conjuration and Destruction have the best/most unique master levels pells imo. Alteration is a close second, and you can skip it if you're gonna be wearing Light/Heavy armor.

 

That's absolutely true, although it would appear that illusion spells are a noteworthy exception to that general rule. It seems like most of the spells from that school are simply better versions of spells you can get earlier. For example, Fear, Rout, and Hysteria are all basically the same spell, with different levels of what they will affect. Similarly with Fury, Frenzy, and Mayhem. This is true to a lesser extent regarding Alteration, with the various "flesh" spells.

But you're completely right regarding the difference in Expert and Master Destruction spells. Blizzard, for example, does not replace either Icy Spear or Wall of Frost.

Which is why I said they make excellent choices to start a battle, provided you can cast them silently.

That has never really been a big issue with me. You can hotkey two different weapon/spell configurations, and there's no limit to how many spells you can favorite and select from a list. Since you won't be continually casting master level spells, those would be the ones you favorite, but not hotkey. Obviously, the two spell combos you'd hotkey are the ones you use the most.

I'm thoroughly unimpressed with the entire Alteration spell list to tell the truth. All of the benefits of the "flesh" spells can be substituted with armor for a permanent rather than temporary affect, and most of the others are more "utility" skills like Transmute, Waterbreathing, and Detect Life/Death where you're unlikely to need to cast them in the midst of combat, so there's no need to greatly reduce the casting costs. I can see no practical utility whatsoever regarding Telekinesis. I have never been involved in a scenario, nor can I envision one, where I'd need that spell. Somewhat unfortunate, as I do like some of the perks you get with the Alteration tree - I just can't see using the spells often enough to have the required skill level for them.

The current plan is to specialize in Destruction, Illusion, and Conjuration. I am undecided which two I'll work towards reducing the casting costs on. One of them is definitely Destruction, and I'll decide as I go whether the second will be conjuration or illusion. Since I'm picking up all the "spells cost half magicka" perks through adept for all three anyway, it's a decision I have time to make.