Anyone done something like this? The idea intrigues me, as Impact makes a lot of fights boring. I was thinking of doing a pure mage build focusing in only one damage type (maybe fire, as it's the most fun. Fireball!)

Any special tactics to use...especially for slowing down melee characters? I know frost spells are supposed to slow people down, but it never seems to work for me.

I'd like to have more fun with fury and fear spells this time as well.

Also, I want to try to get by without relying too much on enchanting. I love finding new useful items, but that never seems to be the case once I enchant the best possible gear.

I haven't grabbed the Impact perk and I've never used it so I'm not sure whats so OP about it and I use fire and ice and switch depending on what I'm fighting. It's working well so far w/o impact.

Well, since you have Illusion planned, slow them down with calm or make cower in corners with fear. I'm doing something like that now with one character and it's fun but it requires a very different mind set which I'm still working on. I think I'm going to restart to make use of what I've learned in the first 20 levels.

Definitely use fury to get them to fight each other. You will need the distraction to keep them off you. But beware, to use the illusion school at all levels you need to take all the perks for it remain useful for level scaled enemies. BTW, illusion doesn't work against dragons.

What I've found to be the most effective is to follow fury with invisibility. The only part I'm not crazy about is that it's a little passive and not offense-oriented at all.

Yeah, I only used invisibility as a last resort escape hatch if I was about to die when playing my assassin/thief type. Most of the time he sneak attacked everyting while fury was creating chaos. As a mage you don't get the one-shotting effect with spells. Playing a sneak mage seems lacking that way.

I much prefer not taking the impact perk anyway. Illusion, as said above .works just fine. And if it doesn't, summon an atronach.

I tried using a mage without impact and zero-cost spells. It's fine most of the time, but when you are in a cramped dungeon, with no place to run or kite a high-level enemy...you die.

Better make sure you up your health then or I hope you can deal with dying a lot. Maybe not so much at lower to mid levels but at the upper levels it's possible to be one shot by many things. Of course once you toss in illusion, and conjuration, I'm not so sure how much more of an easy mode you could get compared to impact. At least with impact you can only hold off a single enemy. I never felt impact was a huge advantage once more than one enemy was engaged and that was very often. However with illusion and conjuration you can pretty much sit back in a chair with a bowl of popcorn and watch everyone kill each other. Not challenging at all.