Is it just me?.. most of my other magic skills are in the 90's.. but restoration is down there at 40.. (so is alteration) I use candle light constantly and heal myself as much as possible with just spells but there's just not enough chances to do so. My character regenerates and if it's in the heat of battle I'm better off taking a potion. As for alteration.. I have no idea what will level this skill.. Doesn't seem to have anything useful to level it very well. Looks like there are higher spells like telekinisis that I might use if I could find the bloody spell.. but aparantly it's too low of a skill level (37 at the moment in alteration).. to be able to even buy it.

When you compare it to skills like smithing or illusion where you make one dagger or cast muffle once and the skill magically rises .. Restoration and Alteration are the worst.

Buy better Restoration powers.I'm not sure about Alteration...but take that too.And keep spaming.

My Alteration leveled very fast. At Level 43 now and it's at 80. I use Stoneflesh all the time because I am in cloth instead of armor and have the Mage Armor perk. I Transmute Iron Ore into silver and gold and sell it (actually I make jewelry and sell that) . There's Detect Life and Paralyze and Magelight...it's just one of the schools of magic I use the most.

For Restoration, I'm constantly healing myself and my companion. At Level 43, it's at 64. It's always been one of the most difficult skills to level up. Turning the Undead more can help with that skill too.

Alteration levels pretty fast once you get a few of the spells. The armor spells level it fairly slow for sure, since you only get XP when in a fight but once you get detect life, telekinesis, transmute you can level it up fast and without grinding. Restoration though yeah that one seems to be slow, the spells level it on the slow side I guess under the assumption you can get his a lot but the spells take so long to cast you rarely cast them in a fight since potions trump it in every way, so you use it for when you have time hiding behind some cover, or to speed up after fight healing, or the initial over time healing for keeping your health up against breath weapons(you can choose to play inefficiently I guess and use the spells instead). All of which occur sure, but not enough to level the skill fast. While I eventually leveled it, it was the slowest of the magic skills to level. On a second playthrough I found out the one semi effective leveling tool in its arsenal is the turn dead spells, if you get on those at level 3ish you can use them to spam turn all the dead you encounter, and if you keep buying the next turn spells and target duerger heavy dungeons you should be able to get it leveled fairly fast. Sadly if you miss out on the early part you never can catch up because the turn dead spells scale incredibly poorly. On the high end once you get wards or equilibrium you can grind it if you want to.

Alteration will rise pretty fast if you cast the armor buffs in battle, chances are you'll need to do it as they don't last long. Other than that, Detect Life spell
Or you can just go the cheap way if that doesn't bother you with Equilibrium+Healing dual casting

Alteration leveled the quickest for me but i do use Detect Life and Stoneflesh a lot. I guess it all comes down to play style.

I concur with the others in regards to using your Oak/Stone/Iron/Ebonyflesh and Detect Life spells.

Also, don't forget about using Ward spells.

For alteration equilibrium levels it really slowly. And the healing over time thing levels restoration really slow as well, as does the apprentice level fast heal spell. Still if someone has got the ability to resist that much boredom it might be worth it for them. But telekinesis is stupid fast, just say I'm a mage and I am too lazy to pick that item off the shelf with my hands and use telekinesis to pick up everything. And without grinding since you are actually roleplaying(I know I'd use it all the time if I could pick crap up with magic)you can level the skill fast. I think once you get near 50ish in skill you can get your first restoration ward and that levels the skill fairly fast as well it is getting to the ward that will be painfully slow if you didn't get ahead of the game with turning undead spells.

You could try equipping a low level spell and spamming it as you walk around, but it's extremely tiresome.

Alteration: use transmute. Seriously.
Restoration: use fast healing/close wounds

Or train 5 levels of anything each level at the mages college.

I had trouble with restoration until I found that when I got hit hard and used a healing spell where the spell actually manages to cap out in terms of hitpoints gained it gave me much more experience. This can be abused of course.

Use wards liberally. Also, equilibrium and then close wounds raises it quickly. The more health the spells heals in one shot, the more it raises restoration.. so just using heal all the time wont work as well.

Use Turn Undead and Ward spells to level restoration. It levels much faster that way than just using it to heal. Alteration levels slowly until you get access to Telekinesis, Water Breathing, Detect Life and Detect Dead. Then it started shooting up for me.

It's probably because I'm at level 72 that it seems so hard to level.. I'm trying to level it naturally but since I'm not able to put perk points into any of the magic skills.. (just putting perk points into the original skills I'm trying to complete...theiving skills.) there's not many chances to use these skills.

This is where the game has become goofy to me and where perks just seem off. To complete the skill trees I originally started with I now have to use skills that aren't "me" to gain perks. How does leveling destruction help my lockpick skill? It doesn't make any sense any more. Seems to me perks should be raised and only able to be used in skills that you use... and if you master a skill then you should also master the perk tree.

Easiest way to level alteration is with telekinesis. As long as you have a deep mana pool with good regeneration you should get a level every cast. You can get to 100 in about an hour.

I can't get my Restoration up neither, I use it constantly, always have I've never used a single potion on any of my character so I always have to heal in battle but it's still only got upto around level 40. So slow, slowest of the magic skills by far.

yeah.. but I'm not trying to exploit the skill.. just use it naturally in game play. Candlelight is the one I use most and it doesn't seem to raise the skill at all. If push comes to shove I might just end up exploiting telekinesis if it truly is the only way to level this darn skill. Only problem is I have to reach whatever level it is that the guy at the college will sell it to me. The place where every site and even the guide say that you'd find the telekines spell in the game world .. I got the waterbreathing spell book instead. Waterbreathing raises it but I've only had to use that spell a few times.

I think I've read that higher-level spells will raise your skill level more quickly...so try some higher-level restoration and alteration spells?