I perfectly balanced my 3 attributes and am at max level playing on Master difficulty, (I also only play one character, but I'm on my second because of a corrupted game). At max level with no perk points in any Master level Spell school I do not naturally have enough Magicka to cast the Master level quest spells, but I could cast them by drinking Fortify Magicka potions, or wearing gear if I wanted to. I find that I have tons of magicka to cast any spell that I want to cast though. I am a Vampire with Necromage, have spent a handful of perks in the magic skills, and can spam all the spells I like to use with this build. I also don't use any gear that helps me out with casting magic, and use The Lord's Stone.

The build I went for on this character was to be as powerful as possible naked. I stumbled into a quest on my first character where you get stripped of all your gear, and that first character ended up so weak because of the level and no weapons or gear, I decided to have my revenge when I had to make a second character. I got all of the utility spells, and have accumulated all of the beneficial powers and effects in the game (that I can as a Vampire). Even though I mostly use a One-Handed Sword (with magic in my off-hand), or a Bow, if I ever get stripped of my gear I have the Bound Bow and Bound Sword spells as well as Ebonyflesh, not to mention a healthy arsenal of utility spells and powers like Invisibility, Frenzy, Paralyze, etc.

If you are like me and play one character forever you'll get to max level and be powerful enough to do anything, even if you balance your Health/Magicka/Stamina.

Edit: I think level 35 will be fine for picking up leveled rewards, other than the Thieves' Guild questline (there's 3 leveled items that max at lvl 46, but they are all thieves' guild). Also, level 40-50 is a good time to meet the follower you like the most.
Vampirism also has a unique animation when you feed.

http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Leveled_Items_%28Skyrim%29

The 2 main wikis claim that Harmony's base cost is 1052. So, yeah, I use 4 x Fortify Illusion gear.

I am really extremely thankful for the replies. You guys are really terrific.

Abrinth - would you mind if I asked how your game became corrupted? Which quest or quests were permanently bugged? This is my greatest fear, even after patch 1.5

There are 2 that aren't associated with the TG

Is there anything which caps higher than 46?

I don't think so. Also, the Nightingale Blade is currently glitched at the highest level and can't be tempered, so if you want that one to get stronger you'll need to get the second strongest version of the enchantment.

if you level your 3 crafting stats to lvl 100. You can make it to where your heavy armor suit is enchanted to cost no magika

and that's without using the exploit

Right, but until reaching that point where those are all at 100, one would need plenty of magicka to cast upper tier spells.

yeah I find that enchanting is hard to level up I suggest you do the asuras star quest and just keep recharging your weapon with it enchanting really matters for low magicka cost's

Should be an issue that's now fixed. 1.5 is fine for me, and my current character is past the point where I ran into a problem loading cells on my previous character.
Really, unless you are a rare player like Serethil, you will lose more by having too much prior knowledge of the questlines then you would gain from being able to anticipate possible problems. My advice is to keep a well organized list of hard saves - maybe even name and number them with the console - keep them in order, and delete any that become redundant, rather than saving over them. If you do hit a snag, it will mostly be fixed be reverting to a good save, and my corruption problem would be a very rare one.
This is also a tactic I use when I want to just check out some alternate quest choices, since I only play the one character. I save before I choose something, choose what I would normally choose, then if I am ever curious in a game design way I can load up the save and check out how the alternative was handled.



Oh, must have missed these caps. I am also a player who didn't leave for Bleakfalls and start questing until I was past level 50, and have all these items, but didn't notice they were leveled. My playstyle would mean that all leveled items in the game would have been at their max by the time I ran into them.