I'm just curious as to how other people played their sneak-mages. I've just started playing mine and I'm not sure I'm doing it right, as I'm slicing throats more often than Fury-ing bandits into killing each other or tossing a fireball when discovered.

I'm thinking about going down the Conjuration line mainly to add to my chaos-causing actions, as I found that Fury on its own is lacking. I could also go down the Alteration line for the mage armor perk...

So, how'd you play your sneak-thief?

I find the Illusion School's http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Quiet_Casting#Perks perk to be very beneficial when sneaking. I'm primarily a Destruction Mage, but do find Illusion's mind-control spells to be very handy -- and fun, either as a supplement to my own Destruction spells, to assist with a conjured pet or on their own. I almost always sneak when dungeon crawling regardless of how I'm going to play it. Enchantments of Fortify Sneak are essential, as is Muffle. Invisibility can be troublesome -- sometimes I am detected when it runs out such that I doubt if I would have been detected had I never cast it to begin with.

I started to use illusion more often after hitting level 15 or so. It's better to just focus completely on training sneak before that. The later level illusion spells are quite powerful, but I also use alteration because it has some useful spells, mainly detect life and paralysis.

I'm not a pure mage, but an artificer - but I'm sure there's some useful notes here.

I find a potential chokepoint or a large kill-zone, ideally in a nice dark area . I then spray down wall spells and/or runes over the killzone (I also use entangle from midas magic just to further keep them in harms way, but frost wall is a good option in vanilla); with the quiet casting perk this only alerts the enemies, it does not cause you to become detected and if you planned it right they will rush into your kill-zone and start taking damage and getting bogged down/interuppted by your walls and tripping voer your runes.

In the meantime, I've rolled out of harms way and they still don't know WHERE I am, just that they are in danger; so I switch to my bow and begin sniping at them from the edges of the killzone, and then quickly rolling to a new position on the edge of the killzone as they come towards me, by keeping to the edges it keeps them inside it taking damage from the wall spells and done right they'll never detect you, so all your hits are criticals, and the stagger effect of your bow will further keep them inside the walls by preventing them leaving the killzone



While I suppose techncially i could just snipe them from afar, it's a lot more entertaining, sporting and visually impressive this approach. Fundamentally, it should be compatible with a pure mage playstyle replacing the bow with impact-boosted projectiles instead

This is my illusionist assassin build : http://skyrimcalculator.com/#36987

I still have 100 in alchemy and smithing and plan to add more smithing perks after level 50 , in order to improve all my daggers to above 50 dmg ( it's not necessary since i'm dual dagger with double enchants on them , and with the x15 bonus for each dagger(thus dmg x 30) + the DB gloves which multiply everything by 2 (x60 ) , i killed a high level master vampire in one backstab for the Solitude jarl quest with just enchanted flawless steel daggers (that were doing something like 30+ damage per dagger

Basically , the way it plays is that most of my kills are assassinations with dagger after being invisible (slit throat animation) and muffled , i use Frenzy a lot against mobs (works very well at high level illusion ) , calm and pacify are extremely powerful ( you calm/pacify from a distance , then the enemy shows his back to you , and you backstab him or slit his throat ) . I rarely bring companions with this character because the only thing they do is get me spotted , i'm much more effective and it's much safer alone with this build funnily


i use high level alteration because my assassin doesn't wear armour (well rarely to be accurate , cause i use balanced magic mod , and you have casting penalties with armour ) , just enchanted clothes and his daggers , when double casting ebony flesh , you have more than 300 armour rating , it's more than enough when you character is almost always invisible or in stealth mode . When push come to shove , in the worst possible case , i still have all the one handed good perks to handle my own with sword+dagger against any enemy face to face , although it has happened very rarely and usually when i decide to ( you can always turn invisible , calm , paralyze , fear , or sneak your way out) .

What i can't tell you is how this build does against Dragons , because with this character , i never triggered Alvor at Riverwood or talked to the jarl at whiterun , but i suppose it wouldn't be the best build for that because it's likely most of my illusion spells don't work on the dragon and i don't have offensive ranged attacks

Oh , for the attributes points , i put most points in magicka so that i have 400 Magicka when naked and the rest in health and stamina

I play a sneaky necromancer/illusionist, pretty much a puppet master, or Diablo 2 summons/curse necro (if you know what that is ). What I usually do is sneak up to a group of enemies and frenzy/fury the toughest one, the rest will either kill that one, or get slaughtered, then I snipe a corpse with a raise dead spell. I have some better observations however.

Calm spells:

• Calm spells allow you to get out of combat if you are able to calm all hostile enemies, this allows you to take full advantage of magicka regen gear, get out of combat, regen, and cast again. With good magicka regen gear, even a character with a large magicka pool will regen to full in seconds.
  
• Calm spells make backstabbing a solo opponent ridiculously easy even with low sneak skill, simply cast calm, backstab, then cast calm again, this also levels your sneak rapidly since successful backstabs level sneak the fastest.
  
• You can calm a guard who is attacking you and won't accept a yield, then just ask him to go to jail or pay your fine or whatever. You can use this to access quest dialogue as well if you accidentally entered combat with an npc.

Fury spells:

• Frenzy a hostile group and while they are fighting each other/your followers/summons, attack them from behind or lay down fire/frost/storm wall.
  
• Frenzy usually helps your followers/summon survive better.
  
• Try to frenzy the strongest out of a group, like a bandit chief, if you can. They usually make mincemeat out of the rest and take heavy damage or die from being outnumbered.
  
• If you are doing an assassin mission in the middle of a city, you can snipe your target with a fury spell and the whole town will turn on them. You won't get a bounty if you are able to do this undetected.

Fear spells:

• Fear spells allow you to attack your target with impunity, but typically a pain in the neck if you are a solo melee character.
  
• Fear spells work great with frost spells as they are ranged AND slow the enemy down, ice storm is great for this.
  
• Fear spells also work great with ranged followers and summons.

side note:
Paralyze from stealth and cast wall spells underneath, keep them paralyzed and watch them burn!

It is actually much better to train illusion before sneak, see my second note under calm spells.

The only problem I ran into with trying to be a stealthy type mage is the fact that you still need lockpicking and in many cases sneak due to not having any chameleon (admittedly this was rather game breaking) or open spells.

So when playing a sneaky mage I basically did this:

- Use Sneak and Lockpick instead of Illusion
- High Alchemy and Pickpocket to supply frenzied poisons over spell, also Alchemy took care of invisibility
- Fear shout instead of Fear spell
- Paralyze is a good thing to add to a weapon via Enchantment

Interesting that you would invest in lockpicking or Pickpocket , although pickpocket makes more sense thanks to the poisoner perk . I think the illusion skill is the best compliment to either Sneak (for an assassin , or an archer ) or like said Bersekenstein , with the Conjuration skills as you can combine the frenzy/fury with summoning/raising from a distance (although you can use a summon staff ) .

Also in the game lore/dialog/books , they also tell that Illusion and conjuration are "sister" schools . Didn't have the chance to use the Fear shout yet as i didn't trigger Dragons/mainquest with this character , but it's a nice idea
For Paralyze , the benefit of having it as a spell is that you can mass paralyze at high level which adds another option than Fury/Frenzy or Mass calm (Pacify) for handling mobs