I have a personal question following this topic:
Imagine I would invest every level up into Magicka. This way, I would be very fragile. That is what I want.
Next step, Destruction. Sure, they can cause stagger to most enemies but not all.

What about end game dragons? If I have no rock to hide behind. Wouldn't a Ward spell be very useful?

I've never been able to get much use from wards, they seem to break too quick, and cost too much to be worth it to me.

I'm sure someone will post the exact opposite from me below, so I guess its all about taste.

Yes they are useful against dragons, but they break far to easy. Better to just abuse the stagger perk, unless you deem it to cheap...

Are wards at least good formtraining restoration? No matter how much I heal, I struggle to get above 40s

When they break, do you use the dual power to defend yourself from the dragons attack or just ordinary dual? (Or do you just use one hand for ward and the other for damage?)
*Btw* I notice there is a perk on Restoration that give you magicka back when you block spell damage, so if you are good using the block at the right time, it could save you from dying without costing too much.

When you go Destruction mage, you don't get hit that often once you get impact, and restoration pretty much stops leveling. You will have to get hit on purpose or use some other means of artificially raising restoration skill.

Playing destruction mage and deeming impact too cheap is like going assassin and deeming backstabbing too cheap.

I'm doing an almost pure destruction build, with just alchemy on the side. My guess is that you can do it without alchemy also. I was trying it but it was getting way too frustrating not to be able to make all those wonderful potions out of all the ingredients lying around. I rarely use potions though, although it's nice to have them as backup.

I could never find a use for them honestly.

So Impact works against Ancient Dragon when they fly above you in the air, spitting fire\frost?

Staggering most opponents lol XD
The description should change to stagger all opponents!
I haven't met a single oppenent I couldn't stagger, including ancient dragons.

I realized a week ago that wards actually give you protection from spells and adds to armor rating.
The only time I used them was against dragon breathe attacks and the wizard to dual blast (shooting two not one powerful) destruction spells lol XD
Hate that wave of frost one.

How is your play style as a mage?

I read that wards will work against shouts, like unrelenting force and disarm. That alone may make them worthwhile against the most powerful draugr.

It def does, nothing worse than trying to fus ro dah a mage enemy and then he brings that ward up and the shout, it does nothing!

A pure destruction mage will stop leveling at around 20 and will never see an ancient dragon.

What? Where did that come from? When is using Illusion for crowd control and Alteration for more crowd control such as Paralyze being pure Destruction?
Wait, I didn't get what you just said.

I don't think anyone just plays by using one spell thru the entire game.

By far, the best spell for a mage is the Dragon's Hide.
Caster ignores 80% damage! For 30 seconds lol XD
Increase duration with potions and you'll be like a full armored fighter!

Use that before turning into a werewolf and you're a werewolf ignoring 80% of damage, for the amount of duration of course.

The only ward I've ever used is the one on Spellbreaker. Useful shield, that.

i just use healing hands to heal followers to level up restoration. once you get ur conjuration to 100, and get to summon dremora lords, you will never have to worry about healing again:)

Well. I'm currently doing an experiment doing just that. It's a viable build, and not as boring as you might imagine. It's not using just 1 spell. You have the choice of literally dozens of spells you can choose from. Well, one dozen. Yes I use Fireball 90% of the time.

Even the lowest lvl Ward can completely defend you against an Ancient Dragon/Elder Dragons breath attack.

Dragonhide is 45 seconds if you have Stability perk. 99 seconds if you dualcast. It's quite useful with those 2 perks.

Or a mage can go through an entire play through staying at 0 armor. It's quite viable. I'm doing this in my current playthrough (well my armor rating is 5 because of a dragon mask I'm using) and I haven't had a situation where I could not avoid getting hit.

I play the game on master so, I'm just paranoid of random arrows hitting him lol XD.

Getting back on topic, I just really don't like wards. They drain magic fast. If you only use magic for attacking, I'd say stay away from wards
They are useful if you can't avoid spells or breath attacks ( and I guess shouts, never tried. ) It is just easier for me to drink resist to fire, frost, shock potions.
Of course, I always spend perks in alchemy.

Quiet casting in the tree is great too! Summoning two things and let them fight the battle!

You need to be constantly bombarded by magic to make them cost effective and apart from dragons breath attacks there are rarely any other times in the game when that happens. Especially good with the ward absorb perk as your magicka hardly depletes. I didn't know they work against shouts though. The one time I tried was when a dragon shouted fire breath at me and I still got burned, maybe I wasn't holding it straight?

In the perk tree there is a perk that allows your wards to absord 40% damage of a spell that's cast towards you and the convert it to magika

I do this. On master difficulty too

In order of usefulness when doing pure magic:

1) Illusion. You can dodge an entire fight with some well-placed Frenzy spells. Also I take J'Zargo with me and giving him courage makes him serve as a bodyguard longer.
2) Conjuration. Gotta have a body guard.
3) Destruction. Gotta deal damage and Impact makes it defensive as well
4) Restoration - Alteration. Alteration really has practically zero use spellwise until you get paralyze, whereas Restoration I only use to seldomly heal myself or J'Zargo.

As pure magic you don't want to get hit. AT ALL. The first three make sure that happens, the latter two are defensive. The problem with defense on a pure mage is that magicka is limited, so you really can't waste time defending when the resource you consume to defend (and attack) is finite.

This is very good point. When I was playing a warrior, I used alteration and restoration to take advantage of the 100 magicka that was sitting around and was not doing anything useful. But a mage doesn't have any magicka to spare in battle.

No they drain magicka too fast, i prefer to stuck up on resistances,