Does it say anywhere in the Creation Kit why exactly enemy mages in Skyrim seem to have infinte mana? I absolutely hate going to a room and seeing 3 or 4 enemy mages because they will all cast some sort of armor spell, put up a ward, start blasting me with Ice Spike and make me go to a crawl, and conjuring atronachs or something. And when do you kill a few of them, one of their comrades will resurrect them and they'll continue as before. All said and done, it's pretty difficult with mages since they seem to be able to cast infinite spells. And this is when I'm playing with a warrior character - fighting this many mages as a mage is damn near impossible when they're using sparks and your already pretty gimped magicka is sapped even further.

i actually find they do have limited magicka(on 360), the can cast all those spells but then they wind up not being able to and whipping out the dagger to attack me. Though it does take far longer for them to run out of magicka than the player using spells the same way, even with the perks. i guess unless you are a glass cannon and have huge boosts to magicka

I think Bethesda did that because otherwise they would use up most of their magicka in the first 50 seconds. Its the same with the +1000 hit points enemies have at higher levels; enemies don't have the same intelligence that a human player has and to make up for it, Bethesda gives them a lot of health/magicka.

THey do run out, because I've hit mages with lightning based spells and have had them retreat because of no magicka.(the priest in Labyrinthian comes to mind.)

Although all their spells do scale, which is BS because I'd like mine to.

Because otherwise past level 50 there'd be no challenge? Melee characters are easy to kill after that point, but without suitable elemental resistance a fight against mages is a struggle, as you say. There needs to be times when you enter a dungeon and still have to be very tactical. Gotta love stealth though...