Breton Build.

[mr.921]

I'm level 42 right now on breton. I'm seeing my character is struggling with enemies now. I have miraak armour on and use dawnbteaker sword. I mostly use the dragonborn powers like shout dragonskin. But now I want to make a build that would focus on spells and different weapons. Any suggestions? I have skyrim special edition and I'm not using any mod.

[ponsemen_bg]

Ask Y-tube ....it will be way easy ,than anyone to wright wall of text here !!!
You got all there...

[Sairek Ceareste]

Unfortunately, magic in this game doesn't scale well at all in the vanilla game. All that happens with higher spell levels is that the spell cost gets cheaper. They however won't do any more damage, which is somewhat pointless when you can eventually have what is essentially infinite magicka by stacking regen effects, and it would be much more efficient if the game gave spells more damage. The only thing that increases spell damage is alchemy via fortify destruction spells, which is already a rather overpowered and rather easy to exploit system.

Also, because of how botched the armor value system is, "skin" spells or similar effects are kind of pointless, especially if you are below 300 points of armor. This makes any mages who are lightly armored and actually dressed for the role exceptionally squishy, as the types of spells that are designed to make them not wilt within a couple hits doesn't do the job. At least wards work. Somewhat. And summons are great at face tanking but unfortunately not much else, especially if you are playing on higher difficulties. Ironically they become better face tanks at higher difficulties and more "wet noodle" in damage as NPCs do less damage to each other the harder the difficulty is, which only exacerbates how imbalanced magic is for the wrong reasons.


In short, there are solutions in vanilla, but they kind of drive away from a sort of "spell blade" build you seem to be going for as anything that isn't a "spell" is going to be the better solution 9 times out of 10, and it's only going to get worse the higher the level you become due to how Skyrim tries to scale encounters to the player's level.


Of course, there are mods that help fix this by giving destruction spells damage scaling as they level up like everything else that does damage gets.

[Skarmo]

If you want to use spells, the trick is to learn enchanting and craft yourself clothing/armor/jewelry that fortifies magicka, magicka regeneration and destruction. Enchanting can be quite easily leveled up to 100 where you can learn to put two enchantments on each piece.

[alexander_dougherty]

Originally posted by mr.921:

I'm level 42 right now on breton. I'm seeing my character is struggling with enemies now. I have miraak armour on and use dawnbteaker sword. I mostly use the dragonborn powers like shout dragonskin. But now I want to make a build that would focus on spells and different weapons. Any suggestions? I have skyrim special edition and I'm not using any mod.

Level 42 is not a great level to start using magic....
You need to grind on low level enemies like mudcrabs to get the skills and perks to the point it becomes viable...

[wicked lester]

There are solutions if you're willing to mod, like Odin or Apocalypse, but yeah, magic is poor at high levels. If you're struggling with dedicated melee, magic probably won't help you.

You could always try stealth archery - I hear that's okay.

[Team Vladof]

Just got done playing a Breton play-through where I focused on trying to do indirect damage. Basically, I had never played Illusion or Restoration as mains, so decided to see if that was viable.

Illusion was fun, b/c you could frezy folks or dominate them. Also, you could become invisible and just hide after you got the party started with a frenzy spell. You could wander through the forest invisible, and nothing would touch you. I levelled up sneaking to round out the illusionist sneaky provoker part.

Restoration was my go-to for fighting undead. I had always treated Restoration as an after-though skill, and usually just got it for perks that helped other mage stuff. But, this time, I went all-in on using the undead spells. The annoying part with undead spells is pretty much all just make them flee. It's not until you get the ritual spell that you can suddenly blast them to pieces. This was when it got fun, b/c I could use illusion to invisibly sneak in, then drop an undead blast in the middle of a bunch of draugr and watch them turn to dust. Honestly, devs should have added more undead destruction spells early on to really help folks get into the whole "Cleric destroying undead" spirit.

Eventually, like you said, the game scales beyond what you're doing. The illusion provocation skills just werent' cutting it (even if I could use them on undead, atronochs, etc), and Resto only worked on undead.

So, I branched out into Conjuration to summon demora lords to tank and wreck for me.

While playing, I imagined my character was a Vigilant of Stendarr at first, starting out with a mace, and trying to be a bit pacifist / avoid combat unless necessary. But, my goal was to experiment with magic I never used before.

I stopped playing, though, when it pretty much turned into "summon dremoras then cast invisibility". Eventually you max things out and get into a play loop.. and, while the play loop was effective, it just got a bit boring.

The fun part was building the character up.. b/c sometimes enemies were too high level for my frenzy spells, or I'd have to find a way to deal with the undead just fleeing instead of dying.

Was entertaining while it lasted.