I apologize if this been asked before but I can't seem to find the answer.

I am in 'The Eye of the Magnus' and I am supposed to defeat Ancano. I have thrown everything I had a him in the way of weapons and spells. I even changed the setting to novice, still no luck.
I am at level 13.

Any tips on this?

You're level 13. Leave.

But if your problem is not actually doing damage to him, you have to cast the staff of magnus onto the eye (holding down the cast) till the eye becomes a sphere again, then you can hit him. I had to do it twice to do damage though, for some reason.

Same.

Level 13 is fine... If you got past Morokei, you can beat Ancano. I actually found Morokei like 2x as hard.

Use the Staff of Magnus and just cast it at the Eye of Magnus, it'll weaken Ancano in stages which you are able to attack.

I never even got to do any damage to Ancano, because some conjured wraith from the sphere started to attack him and killed him before I even got to him.

Tolfig or whatever that other mage's name is, killed him for me. I just kept using the staff of Magnus on the sphere and other the other mage did the killing. Sad thing is, when Ancano died there was one of those magical energy things in the room to kill, so Tolfig raised Ancano as a zombie to fight it and then left when his zombie after the fight, and I never got to loot Ancano's body.

This happened to me as well, but I managed to close the gate before zombie Ancano left. He just stared a me until he turned to ash. Then when I looted him there was nothing but what he was wearing...

^This - except there were 3 of them. I just stood back while they killed Ancano. Pretty disappointing.

I loved this quest and just finished it. In mine, I kept using the staff on the eye and Ancano was extremely tough; my spells didn't seem to do much. The anomalies did some damage, maybe I did some, but it was the other mage from the college who came in after a while and kept fighting him while I was aiming at the eye (wasn't sure if it was weakening Ancano or not?) and that mage ended up punching him out and beat him to death. I was fine with that at that point because it went on for so long. I'm only Level 26 and probably was in over my head anyway. I hope the resources in the Arch-Mage's quarters are good, haven't checked them out yet. Great quest, great fun and I'm looking forward to doing more in the Labyrinth area. It's so huge.

Why don't you just use the staff of magnus on Ancano? It'll drain all his magicka then his health. He'll start punching you when he runs out of magicka. At that moment he's easy. Use your dragon shouts too.

I did do those things and it didn't seem to be working. I'm not going to go back and run it again but in the next game, I'm going to try different things with him. I tried punching him to but that didn't seem to work. He was really strong.

I wasn't able to do any damage to him regardless of the state of the eye, but fortunately those "magic anomalies" killed him for me.

The same happened to me. I just saw him dead on the floor after everything was over.

Use the staff of magnus..

You have to use the staff on the eye.

The quest is a little buggy. Those pesky magic anomalies kept running around and killing him for me. Once Ancano was dead, some other mage resurrected him to help him defeat the magic anomalies. I tried to get a screenshot, but my entire conversation with the mages about "yay ancano's dead. you're the archmage now!" featured a reanimated Ancano running around the Hall of Elements lol

or u could stop doing the quest at such an early level and actually level up before becoming arch mage...

lvl 13 arch mage is a disappointment