Hello all. I recently deleted my Imperial who I had put 90+ hours into. It was an accident, but honestly I wasn't going to use him anymore, so it isn't a major loss (still 90 hours, woof). Basically, I just wanted to get some advice from the forums. I have two main questions.

First off, I have already made a Dunmer and have started playing him. I am about 2 hours in, so it isn't a huge time investment yet. When I first started playing Skyrim, I was struggling picking my race. Dunmer is definitely my favorite race, since I started off playing Morrowind, so I have a soft spot for them. I always named my Dunmer the same thing and play the same general class. I feel like a Dunmer fits my personality as well as I like their lore and looks. Or at least I did. The way elves look in Skyrim is cool in a certain way, but it wasn't what I was expecting. That was one of the things that pushed me away from them. The other was that I really liked to immerse myself in Skyrim, and I liked to play a character that I thought of as myself. Obviously, I am not a pointy eared dark elf, so I have kind of attached myself to Imperials.

I have actually grown to like the way the elf races look, but I still feel trepidation about playing as one. My question is, how important is identifying with your character for you? I like dark elves, but I get hung up when I look at him on screen and think "that's me". I understand it is just a game, but I don't want to sink hours into this guy and end up regretting that he is an elf. I guess, just some general advice or tips on this will be appreciated.

The second question I have is about my playstyle. Generally, I always used two handed weapons, however, when I was power leveling my old guy, I was using dual wield and I really started to like it. I am one of those guys that really likes the way two handed weapons sit on your back, and I also dislike having arrows on my back, but I want to be an archer as well. My solution is to use Conjured weapons for all my fighting. I really like how this is working so far, but I have some questions about it. First off, I want to have sneak as part of my build, so I want to take the perk that increases one handed sneak damage. I know that casting always causes you to be detected, but if I got silent casting from illusion, would I be able to conjure my weapons without alerting anyone, even if I was standing behind them? Also, conjuring weapons eats a lot of mana. I like to use restoration, so I realize that if I am dual wielding and switch to healing, I will then have to resummon my weapons, when it seems I won't have the mana to do so. I am taking alchemy to supplement this and I think it will help, but I was curious to know if anyone has tried this out and ran into the same problems. Basically, if anyone has tried this particular playstyle, I would just be interested in hearing about it, pros and cons and all that jazz.

Thanks for reading, I apologize for the long post.

The looks of the race are always the hardest for me, until I took a good piece of advice and started RPing. When I create a character I don't think of myself, I think of the person they are going to be. Do I have longish dark brown hair and a huge beard like gandelf, no, but my Nord barbarian does, do I have a scar and one blind eye with red warpaint? No.
I would try to get away from the idea that your character is yourself.

Playstyle, yes if you took the silent casting perk you could cast spells silently, also going with illusion is good because it opens your character up to muffle and invisiblity spells, if you want them. Really the whole school of illusion is great for sneaky builds IMO. I see the problem with summoning and healing spells, as you said alchemy is the best solution. Though If you had a sheathable 2H weapon hotkeyed then you could quickly swap between dual wielding them then dual restoration spells.