Heavy Armor + Illusion

[Harry Coxx]

I‘ve recently started a spellsword build with heavy armor and illusion as my major skills. Now I have a few questions about this skill combination.

1. Is it worth combining the two when I don‘t want to wear robes in the Late Game? Illusion is highly dependant on spell effectiveness and the 5% Penalty you get from wearing armor makes alot of spells useless on higher Levels (Paralysis, frenzy, etc.)

2. If I can‘t use spells Like paralysis of frenzy Are there other good spells I can use Like silence? Or is silence also dependant on spell effectiveness?

3. Should I keep Rolling with this character or should I restart? I don‘t want to spend alot of the time on the character if I find out that Illusion is completely useless for my Build. I would rather restart Now than later.

4. What would be another good school of magic instead of illusion? Mysticism or conjuration?

[AoD_lexandro]

Spellsword typically rolls with destruction & something like mysticism or alteration to get more utility from spells on top of gear bonuses.

[AsianGirlLover]

You’re overthinking it. Do both.
When you’re not using magic, rock that armor. When you need to cast a spell, pull a Superman and wardrobe change mid-fight into your birthday suit or your favorite, enchanted clothing.

If you really worry so much about your defenses, either enchant shield and resist magicka into your gear, or level Alteration a bit.

Just play the game however you want and chill, it’s not that complicated.

[Dork_Stalker_310]

I'm pretty sure Paralysis is barely affected by spell effectiveness.
And you can enchant your weapons with Frenzy or Fear, if you feel like it.

[Barry White Black Knight]

Conjuration isn't going to be affected by your magic effectiveness in any meaningful way, nor is mysticism or alteration - destruction only is going to take the 5% damage hit and same for offensive restoration spells and restoration buffs. If you do want to use the leveled spell effects like frenzy, calm, dominate etc then you can always briefly take off your armor to cast them/have an alternate clothing set for that. Paralysis is going to still work well without that 5% as the durations tend to be low anyway. It's only going to chip 1 second off when above 10 seconds duration, which is unnecessarily high anyway

[AsianGirlLover]

Originally posted by Dork_Stalker_310:

I'm pretty sure Paralysis is barely affected by spell effectiveness.
And you can enchant your weapons with Frenzy or Fear, if you feel like it.

Actually, if OP is so worried about spell effectiveness, he could get the best of both worlds by offsetting it by enchanting his weapons with Weakness to Magicka.

For example: let’s say you level Heavy Armor to 100 but you’re unhappy with that 5% ineffectiveness it gives to your spells. Just enchant 5% or greater Weakness to Magicka on your weapon and you’re set. If you were to go so far as to set it to 100% weakness for 4 seconds, then you’d have enough time so that each hit would double the magnitude: 100%, 200%, 400%, 800%, 1600%, etc.

BONUS TIP:

Command Humanoid and Command Creature only need a duration of 2-3 seconds. If you use it while being attacked by a group, like a bandits or wolves, they’ll continue attacking one another even after the effect wears off.

[Thomas D.]

Yeah illusion might be meh because of armor.

But for most other stuff its fine to wear heavy armor, if you compensate for example with higher level spells and a bigger magicka pool.

Early on (or if you play without armor) Alteration is good (shields) but gets kind of useless if you wear heavy armor, later on. Also it has some nice utility but I think its not worth it to take as main school.

Restoration is good / of value for a spell sword close combat fighter if you arent a potion sucker.

Destruction might be handy as ranged option but its always hard to balance 2 damaging skills (like Sword + Destruction) so one or both will be bad until end where you just master everything and get 100 on (almost) any attribute.

Summoning is really nice early on, for the summoned pets aswell as for summoned gear, especially as decoy or as trainings dummy also can help a bit if you are outnumbered. Can be of use later on but probably you will be way stronger than your summons later.

Mysticism can be useful as defensive tool because it can stack with armor.

Alchemy is ultra useful, best money source, aswell as high utility and you basically can cheese anything with potions on demand. But I wouldnt take it as main skill, it even levels quick enough as minor skill.

But for a spell sword I would definetly take:
1. One weapon skill (I prefer Blade),
2. Block (with and without shield, but preferably with shield)
3. One armor skill (if you dont do the enchanched cloth thing, in that case Heavy Armor is the better choice than Light Armor)
4. Armorer (especially if you go with an Armor skill line, but even if not, so you will be able to increase gear beyond 100%)

And then 3 other skills, which might be spell casting skills or something else (even most other skills are meh / not recommend or level already quick enough on their own).

[Barry White Black Knight]

low investment spell: paralyse for 1 second is going to do the same with heavy armor as without. They're also incapacitated for longer than a second with that, as they have to stand back up and that animation takes a few seconds

[Just Chill]

The best Illusion-spell is chameleon.

If you can enchant 4 armor pieces with about +25% chameleon, you are basically in cheat mode, as nobody can see you, but you can still freely attack any enemy.

[R3sistance]

For paralyse, Spell Effectiveness only affects duration. For Frenzy or any spell that affects creatures based on level, that might be a problem.

[☘ Slurri ☘]

Illusion school works best as enchantments. as the magnitude effectiveness of spells are calculated as 100/4. And for spells that don't have an effectiveness the 5% reduction lowers the duration with a minimum of 1 sec. so if you make a paralyze spell that last 1 second it will fail as the duration is net 0, this is because the game only work in whole numbers. 0.99999 of something becomes a 0 as it only rounds downward.
So when it comes to effectiveness using the calculation 100/4, then a magnitude 100 would work on any target regardless of level as lvl 25 = automatic succeed. Now if you have the 5% reduction spells will only work on targets lvl 23 and down. So aslong as you don't level up pat 23 wearing armor and using illusion spells will be fine, but if you want to keep using them past 23 you might want to concider enchatments or losing the armor.

[Dork_Stalker_310]

Originally posted by AsianGirlLover:

Originally posted by Dork_Stalker_310:

I'm pretty sure Paralysis is barely affected by spell effectiveness.
And you can enchant your weapons with Frenzy or Fear, if you feel like it.

Actually, if OP is so worried about spell effectiveness, he could get the best of both worlds by offsetting it by enchanting his weapons with Weakness to Magicka.

For example: let’s say you level Heavy Armor to 100 but you’re unhappy with that 5% ineffectiveness it gives to your spells. Just enchant 5% or greater Weakness to Magicka on your weapon and you’re set. If you were to go so far as to set it to 100% weakness for 4 seconds, then you’d have enough time so that each hit would double the magnitude: 100%, 200%, 400%, 800%, 1600%, etc.

BONUS TIP:

Command Humanoid and Command Creature only need a duration of 2-3 seconds. If you use it while being attacked by a group, like a bandits or wolves, they’ll continue attacking one another even after the effect wears off.

Speaking of which, does "weakness to magica" affect the lvl requirement for "Command Humanoid/Creature" - or only duration?

[AsianGirlLover]

Originally posted by Dork_Stalker_310:

Originally posted by AsianGirlLover:

Actually, if OP is so worried about spell effectiveness, he could get the best of both worlds by offsetting it by enchanting his weapons with Weakness to Magicka.

For example: let’s say you level Heavy Armor to 100 but you’re unhappy with that 5% ineffectiveness it gives to your spells. Just enchant 5% or greater Weakness to Magicka on your weapon and you’re set. If you were to go so far as to set it to 100% weakness for 4 seconds, then you’d have enough time so that each hit would double the magnitude: 100%, 200%, 400%, 800%, 1600%, etc.

BONUS TIP:

Command Humanoid and Command Creature only need a duration of 2-3 seconds. If you use it while being attacked by a group, like a bandits or wolves, they’ll continue attacking one another even after the effect wears off.

Speaking of which, does "weakness to magica" affect the lvl requirement for "Command Humanoid/Creature" - or only duration?

Good question, I’m not actually sure. I’d assume that as long as your spell has a magnitude, it’ll be amplified. https://en.m.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Weakness_to_Magic