Optimal enchants

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I finally stumbled upon an enchanting setup that addresses the most pressing needs applicable to a widest possible set of skills, using as few item pieces as possible AND not resorting to swapping items besides adventure/city modes. I'm referring to the broad spectrum high maximum level builds, not your average one trick ponies where there really isn't anything to balance.

Notable features:
- One maxed physical damage skill. Either Archery, One- or Two-handed. You can't/shouldn't be using any combination of these concurrently anyhow!
- One magic school at zero magicka cost, or two seriously reduced ones.
- Maxed Magic Resistance.
- Maxed (or very close) thieving skills.
- Waterbreathing.
- Maxed Barter, Carry Weight AND Unarmed for city strolling & brawls!

Adventure set
Head: -%Magicka and Archery (or Waterbreath/-%Magicka)
Having WB here relieves the ring slot for Magicresist if you're all of these things: a) not a Breton b) want to avoid MR perks c) not an archer. Doubling up on magicka cost reduction here is an option is you ALSO want two reduced magic schools instead of one nullified so that you can have your MR from Neck slot.

Neck: PhySkill and -%Magicka/Magicresist. Boosting your physical skill is non-negotiable, it's just a matter of choosing between -%Magicka (almost always) or Magicresist (in the very specific conditions outlined above).

Chest: -%Magicka and -%Magicka+regen/-%Magicka. Three magicka cost reductions together with the combo enchant is enough to nullify manacost even without Alchemy skill. Use two different ones if you're aiming to reduce in two schools.

Hands: PhySkill and Sneak. Of all the alternatives here, the only things having real long term value are boosting your primary dps skill and the only thieving skill worth boosting. +Magicka is nice, but it's easily compensated by devoting a few level-ups to it rather than sacrificing enchant slots.

Finger: PhySkill and Waterbreath/Magicresist. All but Argonians would like to have WB from somewhere, and it’s either here or from your helm, whichever causes less trouble elsewhere.

Feet: Sneak and One/Two-handed/Carry. I find the feet slot being the one with the least conflicts. Archers get the luxury of going for secondary stats such as Carry Capacity here, reducing the grand total amount of items needed by one as it now doubles in both sets.

Shield: Magicresist and Magicresist (stronger). You don’t necessarily need a shield, if you want to use two-handers and satisfy at least two of the following conditions: a) Breton or Argonian b) have perks in Magic Resistance c) use Lord Stone.

City stroll set
Head: Any one of Thieves Guild Hood, Guild Master's Hood, Masque of Clavicus Vile or ultimately Volsung for the +barter bonus and other goodies. Alternatively, put -%Magicka/+Magicka on a random circlet if you want to do plenty of in-city casting in style or just keep the one from your adventure set on you.

Neck: Barter and Carry. Both non-negotiable best options when heading for or actually at a city. Although Barter is debatable if you’re already at max level and literally swimming in money (could take a while…), then I’d go with Sneak instead.

Chest: Cicero’s Clothes is the only one sporting anything even remotely useful in a city environment, but if you expect lots of casting for some.. um.. intra-city training, why not don the Archmage’s Robe?

Hands and Finger: Unarmed and Carry/Sneak. Actual mortal combat in cities is rare indeed, but brawls both exist and can become tedious, if not impossible, against sufficiently levelled Master difficulty NPCs unless you’re a Khajiit. Need I say more? Carry should provide lucrative for the packrats amongst us, while a hardcore shadier personality might prefer to stay unseen with Sneak.

Feet: Carry and Sneak from your adventure set covers quite a bit of ground, but all of Muffle, Pickpocket or even +stamina might be helpful in the early game if you want to take your pickpocket training a bit past the magical 51 skill mark or just like running to places with your heavy armor on. However, by the time you have the means to create such a pair, they might already have passed their best before date.

But what about other enchants?
- Alchemy and Smithing could see use so sporadically that they’re best stashed away in your home for when you decide to do a bunch of stuff at once, rather than be carried around permanently. Less clutter ftw!
- Block would be nice, but my experience is that it’s already powerful enough using a shield together with its key perks or just plain not going to become significant enough when a weapon is used to block to warrant multiple enchant slots.
- Heavy and Light Armor: The effect is just too pitifully low to matter, but better than none as a secondary effect on your follower’s suit, especially since they get almost four times as much benefit out of them.
- Lockpicking: Lockpicks are both dirt cheap and all over the place, so even if you haven’t yet fetched the Skeleton Key, you surely have more pressing issues at hand?
- Pickpocket: This looks promising, but fails. It does absolutely nothing to raise the maximum value of items you can snatch, and only multiplies (instead of adding to) the low percentages themselves near the maximum value. Even the maximum boost of nearly +200% would only extend the 90% success rate limit by mere 600 gold, and your chances would hit zero very abruptly after that.
- Health/Magicka/Stamina: While stats are straightforward addition to the ones you get at every level-up, there just aren’t so many occasions where that additional amount becomes a deciding factor. You can’t ever get enough Magicka, enchants or no, to cast most Master level spells, but just three (or four) magicka cost reduction enchants will let your mana bar last all day with minimal stats and/or perk investment. A boosted Health bar still drops to zero just as fast if you happen to fall an inch past the terminal velocity limit, drown or stumble upon enemies way past your league. Stamina is the odd one out in that you actually have an incentive in putting in the points yourself as it also increases you carry capacity.
- Regen Health/Magicka/Stamina: These are even worse than the direct stat additions, as regeneration rates are also improved by adding to their corresponding maximums. Even worse, regeneration halts totally for a while when casting or using power attacks. Only health constantly regenerates, albeit way too slowly to be a significant factor in combat situations.
- Resist Disease: Join the Companions, do a few rather easy quests and you can become a werewolf, which is 100% immune even in humanoid form. Resist the urge of completing the last part of their questline for the first 99.9% of the game’s content, and you’re set for good. The only downside is that you can’t get Well Rested bonus. Failing that, embrace your inner vampire for the same immunity plus a whole bunch of other, much more serious assortment of mixed blessings.
- Resist Fire/Frost/Shock: It’s beyond me why you’d want to boost a single resistance when decent Magic Resist already reduces all of them to pretty much nothing. Even if you’re a vampire, as very little doubled is still not much. For followers that lack better alternatives, these are actually handy.
- Resist Poison: It’s rare and even then it doesn’t hurt all that much, so why bother? Even in the rare case that I didn’t need my body armor slots to reduce magicka cost, I’d still choose Stamina over this.

 

Agree with most of it, although have you tried Dragonborn DLC? It's possible to add another 10% to your enchanting power. -29% casting costs go to -32% (it's a big difference as now 3 slots gets you to -96%, or essentially free) and the +47% damage mods go to +52%. Good stuff.

 

Oh, forgot the REAL selling point of this setup!

As we know, daggers are an oddball in that they don't benefit from One-handed enchants. However, due to Assassin's Blade, they can still (nearly) match other one-handers in terms of sheer backstab damage, and being totally silent weapons is HUGE advantage in close quarters. So in essence, you can get BOTH Archery and One-handed (sorta) with just one set of enchants - daggers for fast kills and bow for sustained dps!

As for magic schools, it's also pretty well established by now that only three schools can really be called magicka intensive, as in containing spells that you can expect to be spamming in large numbers. Conjuration's best bang for the buck comes from Dremora lord, and Mystic Binding is a small sidestep to pay for excellent weaponry at the very beginning of the game, just as everything about pickpocket training was. And if you're spamming Restoration, you're either doing taking water over your head or fooling around.

Of those three remaining, Alteration is the catch 22 problem child - you need at least 75 skill and quite a few perks to unlock Expert level to access Paralyze, costing a metric ton of Magicka still, and essentially only accomplishing what Illusion could much earlier. Besides, you'll need that cost reduction gear for Mass Paralyze anyway, hence nullifying the whole point of spending the perks! Either way, Alteration becomes a consideration for the late game AT EARLIEST.

This leaves us Destruction and Illusion for early and mid game. Destruction has multiple issues with being too magicka intensive for too long, and if you try to skip past the hurdle by early training, you might as well train it to 90 and leave it rot, as you're not likely to endure the pain of (trying) to level it yourself. Finally, Illusion is very lackluster until you get the level booster perks into play, and doesn't really start to shine until Master of the Mind extends the types of enemies it works on.

Hence, my strategy to tackle this corundrum is threefold.
1) Early game - no dual enchants. Use your scarce resources on boosting your primary dps skills instead of magic, train Illusion with Muffle as you go. Get early level-ups on Alteration during your initial Transmute frenzy, AVOID Destruction (both yourself or via trainers) completely for now.

2a) Mid game - dual enchants. Add full Destruction rig to the mix and let loose the carnage on the mid level enemies with unperked Destruction spells whenever and wherever suitable, acquiring the early level-ups fast. Keep on inching forwards on both Illusion and Alteration, both still unperked. (Personal preference depending on how long you tolerate - could be zero length.)

2b) Transition to 'real' mid game. Relegate Destruction to "trainers only" status, switch over to Illusion-heavy setup but with at least so much in Alteration so that you can start using heavy-duty stuff such as Telekinesis, Ironflesh and Waterbreathing in much more regular basis. Perk up to Quiet Casting into Illusion, NONE into Alteration. Dual-cast like crazy with your now functional mid-level Illusion spells.

3) Later on. All you need is a gear switch between full Illusion and full Alteration/Paralyze setup. Both provide excellent crowd control, so it's a matter of taste, really. Now that you actually CAN choose between them at the blink of an eye.

PROFIT!

 

One thing I will say about your suggestions is that I usually DO carry around my alchemy and smithing gear, just because it weighs so little. Sure, you'd never use anything beyond leather anyway, but there's no reason to take on that much weight even. Why use a 2 weight leather helm, when you can use a 0.5 weight hat? Or a 7 weight leather armor instead of a 2 weight blacksmith apron? Seriously - you can have a dual alchemy-smithing setup carried with you at all times for less than 5 total weight. The ingredients you're carrying around will take up far more weight than that.

I've completely given up the thought of using anything but archery - and specifically crossbows - for ranged damage. The only time I ever level destruction at all anymore is if I want to hit the level cap, and it is done exclusively through training and skill books/quests. There's just no point of carrying around a bagful of fortify destruction potions just to make it even kind of worth while. With the additional skills you get with the Dragonborn DLC - and the ability to respec at will at the cost of a dragon soul per skill tree, it's extremely easy to optimize your character however you want - and the payoff for destruction just isn't there.

For example - with melee weapons (besides daggers) and crowssbows, you are easily capable of reaching 600 damage per swing on the weapon (just a regular steel scimitar will do - and you get style points to boot) and in excess of 700 damage per bolt with a crossbow. Even legendary dragons have a hard time standing up to such a pounding. And while I completely agree that daggers - if you're sneaky - offer just as good of a damage option as a well enchanted set of fortify one handed. However, for me, since don't ever use more than two schools of magic (usually conjuration and illusion) with any frequency, there's no reason for me to not use some slots for +%one handed, and just skip the assassins blade perk altogether.

To reperk system is also quite nice since you'll probably be at least level 40-50 or so when you get through dragonborn. The way it works is you open the black book and you have the option of wiping clean all of the perks you put into a given tree at the cost of a dragon soul. So you can go back into say, conjuration, and remove all the perks, as you no longer need mystic binding or soul stealer.

For smithing, I do always take dwarven smithing, so I can improve the dwarven crossbow, but everything beyond that is strictly an asthetic choice. In my current game I went up to advanced armors on the left side, as I do like the looks of scale armor for my light options, and the carved nordic is a fine looking heavy armor set. Plus the base damage offered by carved nordic weapons is very high. It appears to be comparable to daedric weapons. But you could just as easily stick to the heavy armor side - since you're getting dwarven smithing anyway - and for the cost of two more perks to get orcish and ebony, you'll be able to craft stahlrim armor and weapons. Since those are available in heavy and light varieties - and come in a cool blue hue with fur on the frills - you'll have all you need with that options as well. (Although you would have the issue of not having access to any craftable set of light armor - besides leather, chitin, and fur - until you got to smithing level 80, which can take a whilie. And then there's the issue of stahlrim not being sold by vendors - you actually have to mine it yourself, although it is available in great enough quantities that it should not be too hard coming up with enough to make whatever you'd like.)

As for the decision between Alteration and Illusion, I really see no need to carry around a separate set of gear to be able to do both. As you already noted, there's nothing offered by Paralyze and Mass Paralyze that cannot be accomplished with the illusion spells, and I have never found things like Telekinesis and Waterbreathing to be so magicka intensive that I needed to worry about the casting cost. (Telekinesis does cost a lot, but you typically only have to activate it for a second or two.) The only gear I possess with -%alteration enchants is my alchemy and smithing setups, as there's absolutely nothing else worth placing as the second enchant on the head and body, so I may as well greatly reduce my transmute time.

That said I completely agree about the general uselessness of many of the enchants - specifically resist shock/fire/frost, pickpocketing, and block. (Not that I don't like using shields - in fact I'd say that the one-handed/shield combo is the best setup, as bash is just so useful - it's just that it doesn't need enchants - just perks - to make it so.)

 

Thankfully I played my first character who was a mage before I knew how crap destruction is compared to anything else. When I played it I found it powerful because I compared it to destruction in Morrowind and Oblivion where it is really useless. In Skyrim you can play as a pure mage in the previous ones you couldnt. The problem isnt really that destruction is weak but that archery and melee is incredibly powerful.

 

But isn't that really saying the same thing? When you say destruction is weak, you are necessarily comparing it to other damage projections using things like melee weapons a bows. So saying archery and melee is very powerful as compared to destruction is essnetially the same as saying destruction is weak compared to archery and melee.

 

Well, since you get by perfectly fine as a pure mage on all difficulties it isn't weak. When I play melee or archery I have to crank up the difficulty to max and even then after lvl20 there is no challenge left in the game. When I played my pure mage and didnt know any better the game was challenging on a good level all the way through on the normal difficulty.

 

I finally got 100 Smithing to be able to test my brand new Dwemer dagger (with Assassin's Blade). I'm one-shotting lvl 50 guards, and as long as they're a bit spread apart, I don't even have to break cover to pick them off one by one. Works like a charm.

Even if I just lazily hack away with a dagger, it's still surprisingly effective. Sure, it takes quite a few hits to down a guard that way, but I'm still at like 25 in One-Handed skill. Considering how fast it strikes, I'll give the increased attack speed shout a whirl and leave the dagger unenchanted for now. Having a shield in the other hand gives me all the time in the world to take on just about anyone, and pretty much guarantee a win if it's one on one.