So I'm level 15, and I've finally gotten around to "In my time of need" - I have lydia and Meeko as companion/pet - I managed to clear the first two rooms with 0 effort, but there is a mage in the mess (on the cliff so I can't melee her) that can kill me with one lightning blast. I'm playing what would have been a battlemage in older games. (heavy armor, Duel wield (sword and dagger) & school of destruction specializations) - and giants/dragons don't give me any issues anymore, but this one freeking mage can one-shot me!?

any help?

magic resistance enchantments to your heavy armor. Rolling as a breton. Using the steed stone that gives extra magicka resistance. Abandoning the cave, taking your conjuration to 100, speaking to the conjurer in winterhold, perhaps doing his quests but mostly just looking to buy his daedra/dremora spell books, and perking so you can cast 2 daedras or reanimate 2 strong corpses to be your walking gods, corpses that you can actually reanimate over and over when killed because they don't turn to ash with the proper spells. That works better if you have high enchanting so you can reduce the cost of casting the spells to zero though so that may not work.

Barring that you could take block up a bit and put up your shield for magic resistance... but by far the most powerful way is to get good at enchanting. Don't even need alchemy or smithing either they just make it more powerful. Enchanting can be used to make armor to improve smithing as well as alchemy too so you can get a bit more out of them without having to spend so much time on them. They go hand in hand though, since you need items to enchant, and iron daggers work great.

If you've difficult with mages at level 15, wait to see master conjurers at level 25+ Battling them looks like a damn FPS, without the ease of controls and speed of an FPS.

The best way is to exploit the terrain or the interiors, find some cover, use and abuse sneak and turn them into pincushions for your arrows.

When I fight powerful mages I either use "ice form" or "unrelenting force" to freeze/stagger them, then close the gap between us and hack them to pieces. I find the problem is they can shoot you and backpedal, half-killing you before you can even hit them so this works really well.

summon a storm atronach

get magic/shock resist

beat it. thanks guys.

(got damn'd lucky though)

tell me about it. My warrior can stand up to a giant no problem and most mages are just little bugs... but the master mages, conjurers, necromancers are a pain! They can nearly one shot me if I am not careful and that is while using peryite's shield for magick resist and the heavy armor perk + block perk for resists. It is ridiculous! Why can't our mages be that strong later?

It must have just been something with the number of enemies/layout of that cave, (i'm level 16 now) and I have taken out several other mages without any difficulty.