After playing over 80 hours as a Warrior and finishing the main quest, I thought about starting a Mage and playing on Master...Then I decided after a few failed attempts to get to Whiterun after escaping Helgen (lol), I'd go for expert instead.

There not being any cloth armor/unarmored perks (except for alteration bonuses), what are the disavantages for going light armor? The only one I've noticed thus far is the INSANE caster bonuses on cloth.

Any ideas?

you can wear anything, it doesnt really effect magic in the game.

cloth only really gives bonus to mana regen or spell mana cost. not to damage.

personally i wear light armor and do everything, too many people wear heavy and i like being diffent sometimes.

Well, buff your enchanting up and you can put those enchantments on armor. I think you can make it so that one school has no casting cost, something like that eventually. Enchanting's not hard to build up with all the soul gems so easily available.

I wore robes in the beginning for the cost reduction and mana regen.
But later on switched to daedric with custom cost reduction enchants.
You'll lose the mana regen, but it doesn't matter at that point.
And the steed stone easily takes care of armour weight without having to spend perks in non-magey things.

That's what I had planned on doing, but I wasn't sure if there was any detriment except for being slower (sans perks). Thanks for the input!

There aren't really any drawbacks to wearing armor as a mage, since the regen bonus from robes is basically worthless and bonuses to mage armor spells just result in an inferior amount of protection that requires you to recast every minute and sacrifice part of your magicka pool. You won't really be needing stamina unless you're planning on running away a lot, so you might be better off using heavy armor for a bit of extra protection in the early and mid stages of the game (end game you'd be able to smith light armor up to the max, so its a wash there.) Light armor is a bit better for stealth, but there's a muffle spell for that.

As long as you enchant them with increase regen/total Magicka you're fine.

My Mage does not like to get hurt. He wears only robes and is parked because he is so ridiculously OP.

I think a better question might be; is the any point to wearing robes?

Well I have a Battlemage as well and he wears full Deadric kit. Now a Mage is a different thing entirly in my book.

Just have both cloth and light armor in your inventory then use whatever's necessary on a certain situation. That's what I do.

I'd choose the atronarch sign any day.

i wear a master robe of destruction, glass boots, glass gauntlets and glass helmet, all double enchanted, and so i have plenty of armor protection, i also use the lord stone, thats 50 extra armor right there, its harder to be detected in lighter clothing plus robes are kinda cool and do give you some enchantments. so i like em over anything else.

My Mage don't get hurt much and does not need armor. I sort of thought that was the way it was done actually. What do I know I'm new to TES.

Anyway after 100 hours building him I parked him as I just got a bit bored with his ability to just own any situation or opponet in short order. I then built a Kajiit for about 65 hours parked him. He will be played again. Now I have about 125 hours into my pride and joy my Battlemage. Now he wears armor and has hit the cap.

Well I'm playing a battle Mage right now as well and I really wanted to wear ebony boots/gauntlets with master robes but when it come down to it the cost/reward for wearing robes just doesn't add up. So I wear dragon scale with the ebony and a dragon plate helm, looks pretty sick!

IDK maybe robes make sense if you have the alteration perk that doubles armor spells, haven't tried it. But on master difficulty I use armor and armor spells. I just don't like dying in one hit.

I've been wondering about this as well. I thought certain pieces could only accept certain enchants, making robes and cloth good for mages so you can enchant with Magicka based enchants.

But if I read right, you guys are saying I can wear a full set of light armor, enchant them with Fortify Magicka/Regen, Foritfy , or anything else Mage like?

Having said that, is it worth taking light armor tree perks?

There's no drawbacks to wearing armor, but mages robes provide much more powerful magicka regen enchants in general. You can probably get a similar level of enchantment with enough time and enchanting skill, but for the most part you aren't going to be able to cast for as long.

I think the reasoning behind wearing robes is that in order to take advantage of light/heavy armour, you will need to invest perks in the heavy/light armour tree, the enchanting tree and the smithing tree. Without the perks there wouldn't be much advantage in wearing heavy armour over robes.

Assuming that a pure mage will want to invest all their perk points in the magic trees, there would not be enough spare points left over for armour related trees as well, so robes + mage armour would be the most economical way to go.

Manehead has a point. Still, Battlemage and Arcane Archer builds that only pick two or three magic schools would be perfectly viable if grabbing Light or Heavy armor, though.

Thanks guys, that clears it up. I'm only lvl 20 now, first play through, going full mage. I'm not against wearing some light armor, but I could never tell which way was better. Then throw in trying to figure out if the Alteration perk was worth it and I was really confused.

I'm using all the mage skills and Alchemy, so I don't have any points in, nor do I see being able to put points in, Smithing or Light Armor.

I'm maxing out Destruction, and throwing a couple of points into Alteration and Restoration, but no other schools of magic. So far, I have 80 smithing (woohoo leather pelts = leather bracers), but no relevant perks yet. Working on Enchanting and Speech right now.

Is it practical for a Mage to wear light armor such as glass, or dragonscale?



no.

But the EVEN BETTER question is... does a pure mage even have to wear armor? The answer is a resounding NO!!! If you've advanced in multiple schools of magic to at least the expert level and smartly distributed your perks, a pure mage character becomes untouchable in battle. I ever HARDLY cast ebonyflesh anymore because I can take multiple enemies out at a distance with destruction, illusion, and conjuration with expert level spells at a distance... even in dungeons. If you have to wear armor and you're a pure mage, not a hybrid like a battlemage, then you're not very good IMHO.

A robes faster regen is very useful when your character has a large mana pool. Mine has a mana pool of ~700 with augmentation. If my regen is augmented at 1.7 (~70% regen from enchanted armor from max enchanting+ base in combat), than my regen rate would be (0.017 * 700 = 12). If my regen is 2.5 (150% with Master robes + base value) my regen rate would be (0.025 * 700 = 18) These values are assuming rounding. After 5 secs of battle that's 60 with enchanted armor and 90 with robes. It would take an extra ~2.5 secs for the enchanted armor to catch up. The ability to cast higher level spells quicker or cast lower level spells an extra time can mean the difference of winning or losing many battles in the last second.

Now, I realize that if you set two school to zero via enchanting, that is a moot point, but IMO, that makes the game play pretty cheesy. This especially goes if you set destruction to zero and spam impact over, and over, and over again. IMO, they should have kept cost reduction in no more than two slots.

An armored "pure' mage... ambiguous term I know...is probably one of the most OP characters you can make. You'd be whittling down the vast majority of enemies before they even touch you and once they do, they take a sliver of health. If you want a god-like character, then go this way, but I can't think of a more boring playstyle. Maybe a tank melee character that dual wields 300+ dmg to opponents or a sneak characer with 300+ archery ON TOP of sneak bonuses. The armored mage definitely falls in this category.

In all honesty i prefer to wear clothes and enchant them I want to be light and free to move and the visuals are more appealing. I love the circlet you can put on your head and the variety of clothing you can put on.

Vaermina robes for the win!

i do use steed stone and daedra armour (double enchanted with magic regeneration and destruction cost reduction) and work fine for me. I also spent some perks into heavy srmor to increase its functionality against close combat as im battle mage and somethimes even cloacking in fire or frost isnt enough to repel the un lucky who dared to cross my path:-)