I am loving master with my 1H warrior, and now I want to try a mage. I would like some advice from you guys on a good build, perks to get, perks to avoid, etc.

I am thinking conjuration will be a MUST on master. And despite its problems, I want destruction too. How would this do:

destruction
conjuration
enchanting
restoration or illusion or alteration (some advice please)
heavy armor

Thoughts?

How would you perk / not perk those skills?

How would you invest your attribute points? Mostly magicka and some health? 50/50? Other?

Thanks in advance.

Oh, I want a Dunmer, but the 25% magic resistance from a Breton is damn tempting.

I did not use conjuration at all with my pure mage so far. I used only Destruction, restoration and enchanting. Conjuration would probably make the earlier levels easier, but I never had too crazy of a time and at lvl 31 now I walk on everything and everyone in the game. Basically a god lol.

Now that ive maxed out everything I want but restoration, I plan to use some conjured friends for higher levels because as your probably aware destruction does not scale...Thus I won't be a god much longer.

Also hold off an giving yourself zero cost anything, I don't feel too crazy with zero cost destruction because I have nothing reducing the cost of my resto or any other spells. But having zero cost destruction does let me cast the most powerful destruction spells I can get my hands on.

I don't really know anything about zero cost reduction. I don't know how to do it - but you are saying I am better without it? I don't want anything to be too easy (hence the master difficulty).

Playing a pure destruction/illusion mage on adept with 100 health would be more challenging than playing an all of the schools mage with enchanting on master.

Well, once enchanting is at least lvl 75 (I think? need to be able to enchant 5 articles of clothing...) you can easily enchant clothing enough to fortify destruction to zero magika cost. It depends how you want to play it. You could go this route as I chose my first play through as a mage (IDK if I would do it again). The reason I did it is because destruction spells are very weak, even expert spells are weak compared to an ebony bow and arrows are very abundant, magika runs out very fast.

That said I put all my lvl ups into health and very few into magicka. Not wearing any armor I did not want to always get one hit by everything lol.

I have yet to try how it would feel if I put more into magika, maybe I would not feel as restricted. More lvls of magicka and enchant clothing to fortify health and magika.

There are quite a few routes to go, many of which are probably viable.

IMO, having tasted zero cost destruction, my next mage will likely not go that route. IE put more lvl ups into magika, rather than so much health.

I agree.

With 80 enchant and a store bought potion, you can get 100% reduction. Whether or not that's good is up to you. Illusion is a good companion to destruction and makes an entertaining diversion to what can be a boring blast-stagger-blast gameplay. It also gives a serious boost to fire damage through the aspect of terror perk especially if you get it at a relatively low level. A fully perked flame spell can give 59 damage per sec with aspect of terror and dualcast impact.

Conjuration and illusion with a sprinkle of destruction. That's all you need. Illusion to confuse and frighten your enemies into running or attacking each other, conjuration to mop the floor with what's left, and destruction just so you get to do something. Whatever you do don't go pure destruction because it doesn't scale properly and certainly isn't very fun all by itself. My mage is level 56 with nearly 300 hours and he's destruction, conjuration. It wasn't until I was too far in that I realized I wished I had also taken illusion. I had wasted too many points on misc stuff early on since it was my first character.

Ok, thanks everyone. I decided to try Expert with:

destruction
illusion
conjuration
restoration
maybe alteration
light armor

My house rules are:

No fast travel
No creating weapons or armor
No perking crafting skills
Use only what I find as loot

I might try it on master, but I'll start on expert. So which spells from each school are must haves?