At the three guardian stones you would have a choice of being:
A thief
A mage
A warrior
Each of them have special skills you would have for a long time.
Now what I'm asking you is which one would you choose?

The Assassin. I can't even type Thvvvrrrsss...Tefsddddd....Tevrooooods...

You don't need to keep the skills for a long time, I usually switch to a new stone by level 30. As for which skill boost to take, that entirely depends on your playstyle.

My character is a mage. She chose Mage. Then she came across the Atronach stone.

Probably Thief, with the Thief stone. Sneak is my pleasure...

I tend to swap around depending on what skill I'm leveling up, but at the start I tend go with theif to max out light armour and sneak first. This is till I get to the the lover stone, which I pretty much roll with untill all my skills are maxed out.

Wow this is a sad state when there are only 3 lousy basic classes left to talk about. The TES Series truly is dying, IMHO because of crappy dev decisions to simplify the games.

Anybody else find it sad that our class choices have been narrowed down to:

Warrior
Mage
Thief
Assassin
Nightblade
Battlemage
Rogue

Not really no. As long as the three archetypes are there people can be whatever they want to be. People can also play as a Paladin, for example, or a Cleric.

I favor the thief class.

I use the Warrior Stone for my assassin... It includes One-Handed and Archery, and I like to keep my Archery higher then my Sneak anyway. Then I switch to the Shadow or Lord Stone.

What's wrong with thief? All his skills except alchemy fit the thief archetype perfectly. Assassin is just someone who kills for profit; a mage or a warrior could be assassins. A thief only becomes an assassin once he takes some warrior or mage skills like one-handed or destruction. But you could easily roleplay (and I know people do this using arrows to distract enemies) a pacifist thief that only uses thief skills and never hurts anyone.

Crusader

Try making an acrobat or mystic character: it doesn't work, because there is no acrobatics or mysticism skill. You could make a character in Oblivion that never fought, and was a street performer who decided hopping around dungeons would be fun and challenging. This is not possible in Skyrim. With the lack of spell creation, the Argonian witch doctor is no longer viable, because there is no way to create curse spells. You can pretend that your a mystic or an acrobat, but that won't end will for you. The acrobat will just get curb stomped, and the mystic will have to focus an incredible amount of time on alteration, conjuration, and illusion if he wants to have the actual powers of a mystic, most of which are at adept level. Mages can no longer specialize in one school; every one of them must be used just to stay viable.

This...except my spellsword is a he...not a she.

I'm a Necromancer at the moment,that kind of falls under mage but the roleplay is differant.
Theres other classes you can have also like ranger,priest and the classes that others have all ready added.

Refer to my second post. All those neat little niche classes that added a [censored] ton of replay value and made for interesting roleplays are no longer possible.

I always go for the mage stone

You forgot Barbarian! That's how i roll.

Oh and to answer the OP, the warrior stone until I max my warrior skills.

But there are new ones thanks to perks and shouts.

Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand. Simplicity of life, elevation of purpose.


On topic: all three types mentionned here are appealing to me one way or another. Really hard to make a choice but I'd go with warrior probably.

The Guardian stones are there to assist in levelling your character a little faster at first, and they are an introduction to archetypes. Eventually you won't care about levelling and will seek a Standing Stone that has a more beneficial effect for your playstyle. Everyone knows the damned archetypes, we all know an Assassin is a freaking thief, and there are much more than 7 'classes'.

Classes are nothing more than playstyles, and M/T/W is the catch all for every playstyle. Pick which one your character 'majors' in and there's your archetype.

My preferred playstyle falls under the Thief archetype, but its pretty standard practice for me to make many characters to experiment with the archetypes to create sub-classes.

A close second for me is a Heavy Armored Mage who majors in blocking and Restoration, with flairs of Conjuration. Shield Charge is pure awesomesauce, and I guess most people would refer to this as a Paladin or Knight.

Thief, with the Cat burglar archetype

I started with the Mage Stone.

Really?

Because I've played a Cleric character. And there's a difference between necromancy and daedra-summoning, at least as much of a difference as there was in previous games. What you're referring to is that you no longer have a specific skill restriction forced on you when you put on your character's magic class-nametag.