I have a question for you guys.

I want a pure mage character. And for that matter I want to know if you use heavy armor w/enchantments or just cloth armor?

And if you would be so kind to tell me why.

Thank you

The best way to play is mage is use heavy or light armour.
This because it does not matter for how effectively you cast spells and the protection spells are rather weak and not easy to use.

If you get your enchanting up you can use a destruction reduction cost enchantment on your gear, to make spells cheaper to cast.
Eventually you will be able to reduce cost by 100%, allowing you to cast spells in that school for free.

well i play a sort of battlemage, mainly magic, but i use a sword in one hand in case i have to slug it out in combat, so i wear light armor because i can run faster, but theres nothing to stop you using heavy, your armor rating doesnt affect your magic on skyrim, unlike oblivion.

All cloth armour will have some type of enchant already on it like faster mana regen or lowers the mana cost of a particular school. Finding similar enchants on heavy and light are is a lot rarer as they would normally have one's that benefit people going for the warrior/thief path. You can always disenchant items with the cloth items and put them on the heavy and light armours but depending on your enchanting skill and type of soul gem used the effects will be much lower.

Okay, cheers!

How far up the Heavy armor tree would you go?

Well you could do that. It makes the game to easy, no fun, for me anyway.

I'd go with cloth and alteration flesh armor. With ebony flesh (the expert spell) you can get 300 armor for 3 minutes, add the lord stone onto that and you have 350 armor. Which isn't to bad.
Dragonhide master spell is affected by dual casting (this is likely a bug, master spells aren't usually affected by dual casting) so you can get 99 seconds of 80% damage resistance, which is the armor rating cap if you were to use heavy/light armor, IMO 99 seconds is long enough for the battle to finish.

Cloth also has better enchantments for when you start. Basically don't listen to this guy, you can enchant anything you want, even cloth.

Also for my sneak mage character, I don't use robes that already have enchantments on, I make my own enchantments on blank robes as I can do better than the enchantments given.

Alteration has the coolest spells.

Telekenesis, Paralyze, Mass Paralysis, Water-breathing, Dragonhide, Transmution, light, detect undead, detect living. Useful for combat and peaceful purposes.

For best results combine some with quiet casting perk and invisibility.

Go alteration+enchanating+light armor. Your good to go. No need for any armor perks.

Hi

I play full high elf mage wearing nothing but cloth. Just doing it for RP reasons. Unlike other games I don't think there is benefit to wearing cloth (except weight?) because spell effectiveness isn't in this game that i've noticed, I'm sure the board will correct me if i'm wrong.

I went down the conj route, which help deflect the physical damanage away from me. Conjuration only got interesting though when I completed a certain mage quest not related to the main quest and also go the skill high enough for Dremora Lord summon. I found it quite tough up until that point. I'm not a great min/maxer and haven't gone out of the way to powergame.

My next one will be a Breton wearing heavy armour and concentrating on Destruction.

I think for my heavy armour mage I only have one or two perks in heavy armour.
Ive spent most perks in the magic skills.

Uhm, okay. It was this I thought about, the ebony flesh in the alteration tree, if it was any good. And the alteration tree has some nice spells and opportunities in it, like magic resistance and so on.

What about Illusion, would you recommend that? For some crowd control.. and the coolness

I use illusion all the time, invisibility is very useful. I can use fear/calm/fury dual casted on pretty much everything, even at my level of 60+. Fear/calm/fury are just the basic spells as well, you do need most of the illusion perks, in the illusion tree you will need all the perks to the right.

I think its more fun to go cloth, more of a challenge.

I wear heavy armor with my mage. Once you get your heavy armor skill to 80 you can choose a perk that reduces encumbrance to 0. heavy armor then weighs nothing, less than wearing a robe, and each piece can be enchanted to boost your mage abilities. I love the fact that mages in the elder scrolls games can wear armor. one thing i always hated about D+D mages is that a crippled half blind kobold weilding a rusty old dagger was life threatening at early levels so i wear heavy armor in elder scrolls games because i never could in D+D, and the armor not weighing anything at later levels is awesome.

yeah the problem with illusion is that it totally svcks without taking the perks with the exception of invisibility. I'm still pissed off I had to use up 4 PERKS just so I could get quiet casting for my alterationist.

My main problem with using armor on a mage is that it takes far too long for the skill to improve to be of much use. In order for the skill to improve you have to actually be hit --- a lot. My mage playing style makes sure I am not taking hits..... as I don't have a lot of hps for it.

The answer to OP's question depends on one's definition of "pure" mage.

Some think it means only using spells etc. from the magic group.

My shaman likes to wear hides and fur, etc. Perhaps not a "pure" mage, but she stays with her role-play profession.

Edit: As her enchanting improves, so does her armor.

A little OT in my own post, but a shaman sounds fun How is she build up?

And by pure mage, I meant only using spells, and no swords etc.

Pure mage? No armor, only clothes.

i played with robes and circlet with 0 armor. can't see any other way to play a pure mage. i got armor from alteration school and i used conjuration as main, killed everything very easy with summons + conjured weapons.

I play a pure mage( specializing in all magical schools) and alteration spells are just fine especially with mage armor. Do you really plan on getting hit anyways? With twin souls and destruction magic....if they get close then your doing something wrong.

"Pure" mages do not wear armour at all. They wear robes or cloths.

Armour on a mage, means their a battle-mage! You want to be a battle-mage, not a pure mage.

Sorry to nit-pick in your thread, but it's one of those things that just rubs me the wrong way.

I play my mage with just cloth. 0 armor rating.

I don't bother casting the alteration spells for armor either. I don't use summons or npc followers. I only use destruction to kill things. I do not use 100% cost reduction because I have no interest in easy mode.

It's far more interesting to focus on not getting hit while blasting away.

I play on master difficulty.

Pure mage in this game means you only perk in mage related skill trees, in other words you only spend perks in Alteration, Conjuration, Destruction, Enchanting, Illusion and Restoration. As such there is no armor perks which makes using armor harder as you do not get the defensive bonuses (with full perks increases armor rating by +150%) and so you'd have to rely on cloth armor and the flesh perks for taking any real damage, personally I just ignore them and avoid taking damage all together. You can still wear heavy/light armor tho, as some of the best mage items are considered light armor but naturally the best mage chest pieces in the game are cloth.

My advice is good usage of Conjuration, when you get good old frosty most things can't help but target him first and as he seems to have frost cloak on permanently it's not hard for him to hold hate at all.

This. Conjuration really will be your true armor when you get the dremora spell.

I haven't played a mage in Skyrim at all but it seems like there's no real incentive to go unarmored beyond just RP and a little less weight for low stamina players.

Why enchant a robe for defence when you can just enchant armor and get defence plus another enchantment?

Seems like for it to be a fare trade off, robes should be able to carry a lot stronger enchantment's then armor can.