What's yours?

I haven't found any of the higher tier spells yet. So far, I like Transmute most. It's one of the few spells that has nothing to do with combat, and it looks sick.

Blizzard LOOKS amazing. But in reality it does bugger all and that same amazing visual makes it almsot impossible to aim straight

I SMELL WEAKNESS

this, i love dremora lords they're just so badass; plus they're really good substitutes for followers.

1) Does the Wabbajack count?

2) Lightening Storm. If Sparks is Emperor Palpatine then Lightening Storm is the Death Star. I can't help but make little BWWOOOOOOSSHHH noises when I fire it off.

1. Dremora Lord - voiced with cool finishing moves that don't awkwardly throw my camera around like PC's finishers do
2. Bound Bow - Animation of casting and equipping it looks great, and I love that it comes with bound arrows now.

There are a lot of spells I like the animations and concepts of, but that fail to be of practical use - like restoration's wards and almost every destruction spell. I was really hoping runes would be good as I've always wanted trap-like abilities for the PC to use in a TES game, but sadly they're not worth casting really. If they had a second effect apart from damage they could've been useful like if the frost one slowed for 10 seconds, the shock paralyzed for 3, the fire feared for 5 or something along those lines.

Runes do the normal elemental side-effects as far as I know.

Those don't give them any real practical use. The perked bonuses only work on very low health enemies - generally not what your runes are going to be used for - and the stamina/magicka drain don't apply to runes, nor does the frost rune slow like some spells. And they don't benefit from the elemental damage boosting perks.

I am pretty sure the frost rune has a slow effect, as I used them a lot at mid level, including in support of my frost atronach as I had magicka to burn, and I remember it saying "Frost Atronach resists Slow" or something. I think elemental damage always does the secondary effects in all circumstances.

Call me old-fashioned, but imo nothing beats setting every enemy in the room on fire with a fireball spell

I like wards. Just a shame they're useless.

I just tested in game using commands to find default vs. current values on a creature after hitting it with a frost rune. The stamina drain is currently working with them, wiki implied it didn't, not the first time wiki's been wrong but the in game info is just as often false. However it doesn't apply a slow at all, making it still completely useless since stamina draining most enemies isn't of any practical value as far as I can tell - their stamina is pretty high plus their power attacks aren't particularly more dangerous than their standard attacks. In fact I'd say I'd rather have enemies spam power attacks as they're easy to avoid.

Mage Light! I love it lol.

Loaded up my mage, and I get the message "Potent Frost Atronach resisted Slow" about half the time. This makes me pretty sure that there is a slow effect being triggered by frost runes, though not always.

Candlestick. I use that all the time.

Mayhem.

Because making your enemies fight each other is awesome. And because doing that to an entire dungeon is even more awesome.