I made this post to give my feelings about how magic and magic classes should work. First, I have played every ES game including arena although it wasd a pain playing that one for more than a half hour w/o crashing back on my old pentium one lol but anyway: I would like to suggest that the magic system in the earlier games was better than current ones and has been going downhill slowly with each new game.

Remember such spells as passwall? Levitation? These abilities and other "cool" effects should be in the game I have no idea why you would phase them out as well as not include spell making in skyrim? Now... I can hear you thinking already : "dude this is a mmorpg" classes have to be balanced that is op!" ok well this is what im saying:

Mages do not need to do high damage! Let the rogues and bow wielders be the damage dealers i dont care! Warriors tank, rangers damage but why would you take away all these cool abilities that I want to use the whole purpose for picking a mage class? Let us mages fly around, pass through walls, move objects and people from a dictance, etc. thats what we do! Learn to balance the game around it : make me die in one hit to anyone and let me not do much dfamage with a fireball i dont care but geeze.... i mean... let me be a mage at least? Its time to reverse this stupid notion that all classes have to be dumbed down into all of them being the same thing. GW2? everyone can heal? what is the point of this idea it makes the game totally boring because everyone has the exact same abilites. This is not the way it should be. If I want to make a mage but I want heavy armor then yes you need to hinder my magic points or lower my damage or whatever while I'm wearing armor. Stop trying to create games where your class choice does not matter and for C^$% sake go back to letting mages be mages!

Some of the skills you asking for would not suit a MMO, passing through walls and mages flying would be over the top for a MMO. If you had those skills they would be seriously dumbed down that it would take away how epic those skills felt in the SP game. As for skill like levitation, many mmo have that skill so it's not unusal to see that skill in MMOs.

EQ had levitation and Vanguard has levitation but more modern mmo don't have it for some reason.

Mages need to be something more than just a ranged attacker with a different graphical skin. Each of the 3 class types: tank, damage, utility can be balanced as previous games have shown.. Sure if i pass through a wall in order to steal the enemies elder scroll it is very powerful and useful but I mean thats where the developers come in and you know... balance the game around it???? Soon as i pass through the wall im a sitting duck and very squishy anyway so that is another element that adds strategy to the game? I am not asking for godlike unbeatable power im asking for different types of power that add strategy and fun to the game that benefits enjoyment of all classes. Make mages all about utility and make them low damage and the easiest to kill I am fine with that.

I think mages will be very dificult to balence, and these ideas are usually the first to go - whilst being epic. Considering the nature of magic in TES, i imagine the pure mage class will involve either necromany or healing, with battlemage clases providing desruction magic. Magic seems like a suplimentary force rather than a directly offesnive thing. Of course, you could simply balence it with a system of mages do more damage against heavily armoured opponents, but take high damage be melee.