I'm playing a stealthy mage on master difficulty and it has been tough. Illusion, Conjuration, and Sneak are my 3 perk trees so far and it has been rough. Every 2nd or 3rd npc has like 5x the hitpoints of the normal npcs and is too buff. Generally they can 1 shot me with any power attack and the only way I can take them out is by abusing stuff. I'm finding myself forced to abuse the CALM spell just to take out bandit thugs. Fury is good but the npc that survives the fight is always the strongest, of course, and makes it very difficult to advance.

I remember other threads where people were having success with this sort of build and I was hoping for some help. What tips can you guys give me? What is the most efficient backstab; should I power attack while dual wielding daggers or just swing with 1? How do I maximize my backstab damage. Should I put points into the One-Hand tree?

Thanks in advance.

Playing a similar type as an illusionist/assassin.

Yes, you should ABSOLUTELY put perks in one-handed. You want that base damage as high as you can get for backstabs. My character kills everything via backstabs. I use a dagger with the 15x damage, if you also are wearing the shrouded gloves/handwraps from the DB than that means 30x base damage for stealth attacks.

As for the illusion magic..... Calm/fury are your friends. Multiple opponents? Fury them until they have killed each other, then calm the last one. Its almost broken how easy it is to do multiple backstabs on a NPC. Backstab them.... calm them.... sneak around behind them and back stab them again if they didn't die the first time.

This character almost has to be played at expert/master difficulty or it gets really boring.

Oh and I should mention, while this type of character is VERY strong against most enemies..... You will have a tough time with most dragons.

Summon two storm atronarchs and things should change a bit, as long as the dragon doesn't go for you hehe.

Maximize BS damage:
Level up one-handed, take the basic perk that increases damage.
Join the dark brotherhood. That way, your backstab will do double damage if you wear the gloves you gain from it.
Improve smithing to be able to upgrade your dagger to legendary, this way you'll once again do double damage compared to if you wouldn't spend time increasing smithing.
And of course the sneak perks. Assassin's blade for a base x15 for daggers.

The game is super easy once you one-hit kill everything with sneak attack. (the things that can't be sneaked on will be a problem, but anything that can't be sneaked upon can be killed with double summoned storm atronarches (or frost atronarches) and then running and hiding again and see if your atronarches kill the enemy. If they don't, try a new backstab. I'd put some points into destruction though, if you plan to fight dragons. If you don't, you don't have anything to worry about.

Appreciated; Perks should start opening up in a little bit and I'll be able to grab some 1h damage perks. Would the dual flurry perks let me get in an extra set of swings before the enemy unsheathes his weapon and turns around to attack me?

Should I do the dual wield power attack from behind? Will that give me the most backstab hits?

Invisibilty- sneak perks, silent casting, one handed perks. DB gloves, Invisibilty in one hand, blade in the other. = win.

There are more than a couple threads on this now.

To add: there is no reason to dual wield backstab, since the single hit will kill everything with DB gloves anyways.

To add: there is no reason to dual wield backstab, since the single hit will kill everything with DB gloves anyways.

TBH you can cut down your "core" skills to illusion and stealth. Decent dagger + stealth + invis = everything dead on master. For a really tough boss, maybe pull out a second dagger, but typically i can kill those guys with a couple of swipes with one weapon before they notice me.

When you get discovered, the answer is invis + stealth roll into a shadow and wait til they ignore you. I don't see much value in conjuration other than providing help against dragons that engage you in the wild (sneak attack while they're on their perch = awesome). Alteration has some value if you want to be a bit more tanky, especially against mages. Magicka resist perks + armor spell is great. The expert/master spells are really powerful.