Would love to hear from someone out there regarding adding health or stamina for a pure mage build.

I'm thinking 80/20 magika/health - i think i can live w/o the carrying bonus but is there any combat benefit from taking stamina for a mage?

All depends on the type of mage you are playing. Stamina is the least useful except for sprinting to get away, unless you are a conjuration mage using bound weapons. Destruction mages need a LOT more magicka then anyone else. My illusionist mage doesn't use all that much magicka. Fury on multiple opponents and it regens while they fight it out.

If you go the magic cost reduction path, then you should put all your points into health.

I'm thinking a mix of conjuration & destruction. Probably not going to do the bound weapon thing.

Seems like illusion would be really difficult at high levels, many spells won't target past a level cap, from what I read.

Illusion works for me on pretty much everything, I'm level 62. If you have all the perks in the right tree, and you dual cast calm/fear/fury you will be able to hit nearly everything, excluding dragons and some mercenaries I found which must have been level 65+. The expert spells would have worked on them though.

Ah, well with cost reduction (mostly destruction), I never needed more than 180 magicka for that.
It's a lot more comfortable around 230 magicka, though.


As for bound weapons, they're actually pretty nice until around level 18. It was nice to have a stack of souls piled up. When I was finally able, I enchanted a more powerful weapon to capture souls.