Illusion & Levels

[Mr. J.D. Gumby]

Alright, the player gets 81+ levels to mess around with. Most enemies'll scale with you. How do these puny "...up to level XX" effects on (mainly) Illusion spells stay useful throughout the game?

[wowszer]

They scale with you up to a point, then level off. A few boss opponents and dragons go higher but don't reach 81. And then there's Legendary level, if you reach 81, you can reset your skills (illusion for example) back to 15, and raise it back to 100 again, and again. I was at 172 level when I ran into a glitch, could find a work around, started a new character.

[End-of-Infinity]

Illusion spells have many perks that affect the maximum "xx" level of said spells.

For example, Fury, the lowest avaible frenzy spell (up to level 6), can be perked up with the Kindred Mage perk and the Rage perk to change its xx level to 28. With the Dual Casting perk (and if dual casted), fury will affect enemies up to level 61. A fully perked novice Illusion spell can therefore be used throughout the game succesfully.

You should also note that most enemies do no scale beyond a certain point. For example, a lowly "Bandit" will not scale beyond level 20, while a Dragon can scale to level 81. Illusion spells are therefore still useable if you reach very high levels, as most opponents you meet will remain at lower levels. You meet more "Bandits" than you do Dragons.

You can also download many mods that change these functions, such as making your spell damages level with your skill-levels, or your character levels.

Hope this helps

[Mr. J.D. Gumby]

So, basically, for Illusion to be at all useful, you're going to 1) need a far better memory than I have so you're not wasting precious mana firing off at foes that are actaully too large for your spells, and 2) level and perk out Illusion almost to the exclusion to everything else. Ugh.

[Daddy Shark]

Originally posted by Gumby:

So, basically, for Illusion to be at all useful, you're going to 1) need a far better memory than I have so you're not wasting precious mana firing off at foes that are actaully too large for your spells, and 2) level and perk out Illusion almost to the exclusion to everything else. Ugh.

You're just trying to find something to cry about. You can apply your own weaksauce chain of reasoning to anything in the game.

[End-of-Infinity]

Not really, you need a few perks, but you don't need to perk out the full tree. I rarely, if ever, fully perk out a tree.

And the example I gave you was for Fury, the lowest level spell. There are 2 more higher level spells with a higher base xx level to start off with. Frenzy will affect up to level 36 (79 with dual cast), and mayhem will affect up to level 47 (this one is an aoe spell).

Memory is not so much an issue as you think. It's fairly simple to learn to tell the difference between a tough opponent and a weaker one. If you do happen to target a tough enemy, then you'll find that illusion paired with sneak is absolutely awesome.

My current character uses Illusion, Sneak, One-handed, Block, Alchemy and Mercantile. No armor. When I casted fury on a bandit boss, it failed and he started searching for me with his friends, so I casted fury on his friends instead and watched him kill them. I then silently went in to slit his throat. It was also quite amusing to walk into a cave, be spotted by 4-5 bandits and just casting fury on all of them so they stop targeting me and instead started targeting each other. The surviving bandit had 1/4 health left. I beat it to death lol.

[Sasparillafizz]

Illussion is a crowd control ability. No, it probably wont affect the boss. But you can use it on everyone ELSE. While the bandit chief is immune, you can cast freny on his cronies. They will turn and attack the boss and eachother. Thats a NPC doing damage to other enemies for you, AND eliminates one of the multiple enemies attacking you. Same with fear and calm. Outnumbered 6 to 1? Cast a fear or calm spell on a pair of guys, and they will stop attacking you. Now you aren't horribly outnumbered. Or cast calm on the toughest guy in the room dual cast and finish off the weaker guys, and when calm ends he is fighting you alone. Illusion isn't a skill meant for fighting, its more of a debuffer to make difficult fights and crowds more managable.

[Gramarye]

In my first character, I almost completely ignored the Illusion tree because I thought, looking ahead, that I'd run into exactly the problem you described (useless against later enemies). However, EoI is spot on with the scaling with other perks. My second character, just to "challenge myself" (so I thought), I decided that I would perk Illusion at every chance, since it was the one I completely ignored the first go-round. It turns out that Illusion is absolutely dynamite, and I call it far more than just crowd control. Calm- and Fear-type spells might be crowd control, but Frenzy-type Illusion spells are outstanding offensive weapons against the vast majority of the game's opponents. Note that at higher levels, with Necromage (from the Restoration tree) and Master of the Mind, you can even affect Draugr Deathlords, which are serious threats to anyone playing without mods (which I was at the time), even with daedric armor smithed well into the legendary category. Even without Master of the Mind, it's great when going up against Falmer Shadowmasters (I only just got the expansions recently, so I haven't run into the Warmongers yet) and other high-level living threats.

As noted above, not so much against dragons, but very few direct offensive spells are truly useful against dragons.

[Ilja]

Using the Illusion is fun, especially if you have completed the Thieves Guild main questline. It would be worth to mention, that master level spell Mayhem is actually slightly less powerful than dual casted adept level spell Frenzy. Mayhem, however, has a vastly larger area of effect.