/vr/ - Retro Games

>>2735302
Mages can become extremely powerful, but it's a slow start. The cost of your spells goes down as your skill level in the governing schools go up. The lowest a spell can cost is 5 magicka. By far the most important thing for you is to get access to the Spell Maker. Never use the premade spells you can buy - the spells you can make will always be more efficient. The Mages Guild and the Temple of Kynareth offer the service to their members, but the temple requires you to be a fairly high rank, so just join The Mages Guild as soon as possible and find the Spell Maker in their guild halls.

>whats the fastest way to level?
As a Mage, the fastest way to level is to create the cheapest spells possible. Your level increases when enough of your class skills increase, and your magical skills increase by casting spells with effects governed by them. It doesn't matter what level of spell you cast: one that costs 50 magicka will increase your skill just as much as one that costs 5, so early on you want to exclusively cast 5-cost spells to level the quickest.

Here's a tip when playing around with the Spell Maker trying to optimize your spells: when your spell has a parameter with a range, such as the 1-1 parameters in "1-1 + 1-1 per 1 level", you can increase the high end of the range by 1 for free. 1-2 costs just as much as 1-1, and 4-5 costs just as much as 4-4. Also, if your spell is too expensive even at the minimum values, increase the levels in the "per X levels" parameters to get it even cheaper.

If you don't mind cheesing the game a bit, you could even just grind magic skills indefinitely until you've nearly maxed out your character. Just spam your spells in town and then fast travel cautiously to get your magicka back. It's not very fun and feels kinda dirty, but if your character is simply too weak to dungeon crawl then you may find it more desirable than trying to level up naturally.