Things I've Concluded About Skyrim

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After playing this game constantly for about 6 months now, I think I can now make an ideal character. If comparing it to some of my guides, the closest one is the mind flayer build.

Here are my thoughts:

Illusion school > all other schools of magic (because at higher levels, it works on everything short of dragons)
Conjuration schools > all other schools of magic as a secondary school (because with a minimal magicka pool and no perks, you can still get a dremora lord)
(And in fairness Destruction does work against Dragons, so it's not terrible)

Sword and Shiled > Two Handed > Dual Wield (because bashing is OP)
Crossbows > Bows
Light Armor > Heavy Armor

Enchanting > Alchemy > Smithing (because if the first two are well perked, you don't really have to invest much in smithing at all)

I'm willing to hear counterarguments on any of these...

 

My thoughts:

Conjuration - the single most powerful school in the game because you can select or gear your dead thralls in such a way that they benefit from every other spell/skill school in the game that you think is relevant. They also get to keep whatever skills they had in their old life, which is nice. Summoned minions scale with difficulty so the school remains powerful throughout unlike destruction.
Conjuration removes the hazard of you having to put yourself in the line of fire for more times than is necessary. It gives you an unlimited supply of minions - even the Dead Thrall spell can simply be recast on your fallen thrall. Interestingly I find that the easiest counter to conjuration is conjuration itself, in the form of the dremora control/banishing spells. It's by no means an absolute counter however.

Alchemy - comes a very close second to Conjuration when it comes to power. Although very similar to Enchanting Alchemy stands out in that it is useful from start to finish. It is also a lot more versatile - quaffing a single resistance potion beats having to switch armors or take resistance perks.
Alchemy opens up a whole world of possibilities for your character. Among other things, for example, it gives you access to invisibility; it trivializes every battle that involves elemental magic/abilities; it shuts down spellcasters; it gives you Enchanting (this goes both ways though you still need to take the Double Enchantment perk) and makes it easier for you to be unkillable against anything that can't one-shot you. Conjuration helps with the last part. Finally Alchemy practically offers up early/mid game to you in a silver platter. Alchemy generates gold earlier and far more quickly than Enchanting, which you can use it along with Pickpocket to quickly improve your skills and to buy scrolls, potions and crafting resources. Some scrolls are downright OP in early game.

Following closely are the rest of the crafting skills, and then Speech.

As a natural result of my preferences above, I think Alteration > armor skills since I simply don't get hit often enough and I have plenty of magicka and magicka potions to spare. I'd rank Restoration somewhere just below Alteration mainly because of the Necromage perk. Since my thralls alone already do more than enough damage and I have potions/poisons to significantly improve any skill I deigned to use for a particular battle (compounded by how I can simply create different armor sets to use as I chose - to be carried around by my thralls who are excellent pack mules) all other skills are secondary to the ones I already mentioned.

I call it my wandering potions merchant playstyle/build. This is the character type which worked best for me.

 

I am a big biiiig fan of not having to micromanage everything - taking a more damage-per-second-playing rather than damage-per-second-in-game approach, if you follow.

Thus Blacksmithing is a godsend. Make some gear, fix it up nice, call it good.

Similarly, Conjuration is both wicked strong, and also doesnt require a lot of micromanagement. The elementals you summon dont have to be aimed, just summon-and-forget, while you do whatever else you're doing.

 

OK, but at high levels, Illusion does the same thing. Once you get the Master of the Mind perk, the only thing I haven't been able to manipulate with Illusion magic are dragons. And you don't even need the master level ones to do it. A dual cast pacify (with the relevant perks along the way of course) shuts down anything. A Frenzy-Pacify combination can be used to great effect.

How does Enchanting become less useful as you progress through the game? Or is it just me who has multiple sets of enchanted armor laying around my house? Not to mention all the sets of enchanted armor I sold as my enchanting skill increased along the way, and I could make better variants of what I already had.

All that is true, but doesn't illusion pretty much shut down everything too? And obviously illusion gives invisibility along the way too.

Now that I will absolutely agree with. As far as straight wealth is concerned, there is nothing out there that comes close to alchemy in the early game. The only enchantment even worth discussing in terms of being anywhere near as cost effective as alchemy would be banish iron daggers, which sell for about 700 septims each.

Now obviously there are a ton of potions you can craft that are worth considerably more than that, but the only reason banish daggers can compete is because the raw materials are essentially available in limitless supply. All you need are iron ingots, leather strips, and petty soul gems, all of which are purchasable from every blacksmith, general goods merchant and court wizard. And sure, alchemy ingredients are purchasable as well, but it seems like you get a randomly generated list of ingredients each time you visit, so you can't count on them having the exact combination of ingredients you'd like.

The biggest advantage of alchemy though is that you don't need any base capital to get started on it. Enchanting requires you to either get really lucky by finding the enchantments you want early in the game, or requires you to purchase them. And it's nearly impossible to find a banish weapon, so you're going to have to buy one, and they typically run around 5,000 septims. Needless to say, you can purchase a freaking ton of alchemical ingredients for 5,000 septims.

Hearthfire only pushes you further into alchemy because your garden can produce any growable alchemical ingredient you want (basically any plant or mushroom can be grown). You need to have samples of the ingredient to plant, and unlike other harvestable ingredients, your plants are harvestable every three days. Even better, when you harvest them, you don't get one, you get four. I tend to plant canis root, swamp fungal pods, and imp stool, as all are capable of producing paralysis potions, and I like knowing that each time I visit my house I have the ability to make about 15 paralysis potions just from that, on top of whatever I have in my backpack that I picked up or bought since my last visit.

Oh, you definitely want to smith your own gear. My ranking smithing last among the crafting skills was not to suggest it isn't useful. It's just that you can't get all you can out of smithing without also using alchemy and enchanting. Enchanting makes both alchemy and smithing better. Alchemy makes both enchanting and smithing better. Smithing doesn't make enchanting or alchemy better. Since both alchemy and enchanting improve smithing, it produces better stuff than you can have from having a very high smithins skill, but no perks in alchemy or enchanting.

For example, say you have a smithing skill of 100 and have the dragon smithing perk, but no perks in alchemy or enchanting. You can make a pretty nice set of dragonplate armor and dragonbone weapons. Now, say I only have Steel and Elven smithing, but I have invested a considerable amount of perks in enchanting and alchemy. I can make a higher defense set of elven armor, and a higher damage per swing elven sword than you can with dragonplate armor and dragonbone weapons.

 

I meant that Alchemy is useful from the get-go, as you pointed out in the next paragraph.
Illusion requires no small amount of investment. I understand there are ways to eliminate early game (so when you go exploring your Illusion skill will be decently leveled) but Illusion has its limits. You can't customize your minions' gear and inventory with Illusion, and with Conjuration you don't have to worry about your spells not working.

 

It's true that the novice and apprentice level illusion spells are mostly worthless (with the exception of muffle). They are simply resisted too easily to be relied upon. (But conversely, things like Summon Familiar and Reanimate Corpse aren't particularly helpful either.) Frenzy is the first spell that you can count on working consistently, provided you are dual casting it. The reason why I was comparing the expert and master level illusion spells to conjuraiton, is for an apples to apples comparison.

As far as I'm aware, the only spell where the body doesn't turn to ash after a minute or so is Dead Thrall. And if you're relying on those high level summons, I can't imagine you wouldn't have picked up the Twin Souls perk as well. So there is a helfty investment in conjuraiton as well. (Although you can cut down on the perk count of either school considerably if you're willing to use a lot of magicka cost reduction gear, as you won't need the apprentice-master perks.) So I thought it was appropriate to compare the high end illusion spells with the high end conjuration spells. And I've never had a dual cast adept, expert or master level illusion spell fail to work (except as concerns dragons), so there is no real concern of your spell "not working".

To be fair, if you're ONLY interested in the specific spell Dead Thrall, you can invest nothing in the middle path of the tree with the bound weapons, and you can skip all of the atromancy related perks. Even without using a ton of magicka reduction gear, you can get dead thralls for just 8 perks. A similar setup in illusion would cost you 12 perks. So it is a bit less of an investment.

(And note that I have nothing against conjuration. Even if you invest NO PERKS in it, if you're willing to devote of piece of your gear with magicka cost reduction for conjuration, you can summon a dremora lord for 150 magicka. You can't beat that.)

 

I find all the summoning spells useful. Not so much the early necromantic spells but even Summon Familiar is useful up until Whiterun. The summoned wolf is a lot tougher at higher difficulties and you can resummon it if it dies. Granted, only Bretons ever have access to the spell that early in the game.

The early necromantic spells are too situational. They are powerful - ideally you could drop a really nasty weapon on a bandit leader corpse and it will have no problem killing anything that comes in range once you revive it. I think you could drag corpses with you if you play on the PC, which would make for a very interesting early/mid game playstyle. Console-wise though the spells are, for most situations, impractical.

 

I play on the XBox, and while you CAN drag bodies around with you, it causes you to move really slowly - walk speed to be precise. As in the speed you character walks when over encumbered. So it's completely impractical to do it. The only time I drag bodies is when one falls on top of another one, as it can be difficult to loot the corpse on the bottom without dragging the first person off. The only other time I have done it is when I had to hide the body of the orc you have to kill in the DB mission.