Illusion Buff Spells

This guide focuses on the three courage type spells in the illusion tree and how you can make them more powerful.

Introduction

The reason for making this guide was because of the almost forgotten side of the illusion tree. Just in case you did not know, the illusion tree governs three different groups of spells that warrant different play styles.

First is probably the most famous, invisibility and muffle spells. Muffle is most commonly seen (not heard) as ''that spell you spam to level to 100 illusion'' whilst invisibility has tons of 'I's yet you are unseen. Invisibility and Muffle makes you virtually undetected in broad daylight catering well to assassin classes, coupled with sneak it seems grossly overpowered. Then the largest group of spells referred to as crowd control spells are Frenzy, Fury, Fear, Calm, and Pacify. These like Invisibility and Muffle can easily make the game a cakewalk even on master difficulty. Then we come to the forgotten group of spells, often seen as inferior to the other two illusion groups, because they are not as overpowered. In fact, at first glance you may dismiss them as the weakest spells on Nirn, and continue one-shotting mobs or frying enemies with no care in the world for these spells. So it falls to me to bring you the Courage, Rally and Call to Arms spells in the illusion tree.

What the courage spells do

These three spells are meant to be cast on your allies to give them some extra help during combat. Courage and Rally add 25 points of health and stamina to a target for 60 seconds, and Call to Arms also gives a 25% increased damage to all combat skills on top of the extra health and stamina. The spells also prevent your allies from fleeing, but that is much less important (most followers don't flee). If you want to know more about these spells or illusion in general, check the UESP Skyrim wiki.

Some brief notes before heading into the crux of this guide:
1) Followers will not be covered in this guide. Though the courage spells do benefit them, it should be noted you can kill your followers with these spells. If a follower has 300 health, and you buff their health by 400 with this guide to 700, but in combat they lose more than 300 health, when the spell times out and the buff disappears they lose the gained 400 health from the spell and will die. The same thing can happen to you with fortify health potions.

2) I will therefore focus on conjured minions in this guide. If they die due to the effect from above, you can always re-summon them. Also, followers benefit much more from armour enchants, which give a permanent buff to followers that cannot be said of atronachs or dremora. The exception to this is the dead thrall, which can benefit from both and can be thralled again if it dies.

3) Courage spells seem unaffected by level unlike crowd control spells. At early levels I was able to cast courage on Lydia (level 6) and was able to cast the same spell on my dremora lord (who's level was 46)

Buffing the illusion buff spells

Now you are probably wondering that +25 to health and stamina is practically nothing, especially at higher levels. The best thing about the courage spells and the whole point about this guide is that you can increase the health, (and to a lesser extent stamina, as stamina doesn't keep them alive) given with the spell.

1) The easiest way to do this is with the right perks in the illusion tree. The illusion school is probably the most dependant on its perks to function properly, and at first glance the perks all seem geared towards the crowd control spells, however some of them affect the courage spells too. These are Animage, Kindred mage, Dual casting, and Master of the Mind, as well as Quiet casting and your cost reduction perks. The middle path does not have a perk for the courage spells.
Animage adds 8 to the health of animal targets, such as dogs, or the odd armoured troll (that you thought was a waste of gold), so a total of 33 health. Kindred mage adds an additional 10 health for a total of 35 health to humanoid targets, such as undead or the dremora lord. Dual casting is a huge modifier that makes the courage spells really shine. The most important perk though is Master of the Mind, as it allows your courage spells to work on daedra, automatons and undead.

2) Vampirism increases the potency of your illusion spells by 25%.

3) Alchemy allows you to craft potions of fortify illusion of varying strengths. Store bought or found potions can scale up to 100% with Elixirs of Illusion. If you're really good at Alchemy you can probably get higher.

4) The necromage perk in the restoration tree increase the effectiveness of all spells when the target is undead. This includes the illusion tree. It adds a 25% boost to the strength and 50% to the duration of the courage spells against undead targets.

5) This is my favourite part. They're three courage spells, that are different from each other, meaning they can stack. You can do all the above to each spell and then cast them separately on the same target and it will add the health up.

Experiments with the PCSC

This is the experimental section of this guide. If all this works as intended (this is not a glitch), we should be able to crunch out the theoretical health values of creatures under the potent courage spell combo (PCSC) . As noted earlier, I will not be testing on followers as it is easy to kill them with large amounts of health. It will also work better on conjured subjects as they have largely static amounts of health.

Test 1
Dremora lord
Health: 345
Under courage: 43 (vampirism and kindred mage) * 2.2 (dual casting) * 2 (elixir) = 189.2
Under rally: also 189.2
Under Call to Arms: 43 * 2 (potion) (cannot dual cast master spells) = 86
PCSC: 189.2 + 189.2 + 86 = 464.4 additional health
Total health: 345 + 464.4 = 809.4
As you can see the dremora's health has more than doubled, and he is much more tankier than before. At high levels dragons and archers can hit for more than 250 damage which often led to my dremoras getting one shot so this should allow him to last much longer.

Test 2
Wrathman (Dawnguard) (undead)
Health: 800
Under courage: 43 * 2.2 * 1.25 (necromage vampire) * 2.25 (elixir with necromage vampire) = 266
Under rally: also 266
Under Call to Arms: 43 * 2.25 (potion) * 1.25 (necromage vampire) = 120.93
PCSC: 266 + 266 + 120.93 = 652. 93 additional health
Total health: 800 + 652.93 = 1452.93
Wrathmen have much more health than the dremora so this does not benefit them as much as the dremora, however this can be increased further with the dark souls perk in the conjuration tree, which adds 100 more health to the Wrathman. This potentially allows them to take on draugr deathlords (1000hp). Furthermore, undead summons and raised undead can be healed with the restore health to undead restoration spells in Dawnguard. This does not work with the daedra.

Final thoughts and conclusion

One last test involved the atronachs.

Test 3
Potent frost thrall
Health: 590
Same modifiers as dremora lords
Total health: 590 + 464.4 = 1054.4
The thralls last forever and re-summoning them can be a pain but this puts the frost thralls health on par with a draugr deathlord making them extremely hard to kill especially for frost dragons.

I specifically chose the melee summons because the are the ones in need of the health the most, but you can use this on the others such as flame atronachs or storm atronachs or even zombies (again be careful as zombies suffer from the same problem as followers and cannot be raised again, except dead thrall). Call to arms also has the weapon skills enhanced and is one of the few ways to increase the damage of the atronachs and dremora lords. The PCSC is almost completely hypothetical, based off of wiki data and my own knowledge so the results may be far from what is shown in this guide. Indeed when I first crunched out the calculations I was getting numbers at almost 2000hp. At least I can guarantee you'll get more than +25hp! 😁

I hope this guide has given some curiosity in utilising the courage spells and maybe given you some build ideas, such as a pacifist or ultimate conjurer. I've tried to make it understandable to newcomers and veterans alike and change how you see the illusion tree even a little bit. Feel free to leave a comment on how I can improve the guide and I really enjoyed making it so thank you for reading! 😊

Edit: This guide seems to have some wrong points that I can't test atm. A commenter has put some clarifications in the comment section so please check them out. Hopefully I can get round to some more testing about this topic.

[Gwthycs Coelddwfn]

I actually made a mod that adjusts the perks and spells so that the Rally spells would be more useful, but it seems like no one really cares about these spells in general lol. Even the UESP had some mistakes on their pages that could have been readily apparent from simply looking at the Creation Kit, but weren't corrected until I did so recently.

[Lin Huichi]

Thanks for your edits and clarification. Ill have to update this guide once I do more testing, but I'm not playing Skyrim atm.

[Gwthycs Coelddwfn]

Correction, Kindred Mage specifically doesn't apply to undead, so an undead minion would only get

(25 + 25 + 25) * 2 * 1.25 = 187.5 health

[Gwthycs Coelddwfn]

In reality the maximum health boost you can get from having the Kindred Mage perk, casting all three spells on one target, and drinking an Elixir of Illusion is

(35(courage) + 35(rally) + 35(call to arms)) * 2(potion) = 210 health on human followers/dremora

and
210 * 1.25 = 262.5 health on undead minions w/ the Master of Mind perk

the Kindred Mage perk doesn't even apply to atronachs so you would only get
(25 + 25 + 25) * 2 = 150 extra health on atronachs w/ the Master of Mind perk

Also, the combat skill bonuses don't apply to non-NPCs regardless of whether or not you have the Master of Mind perk (the corresponding magic effects don't even exist in the game), so at most you would only be able to boost the skills of followers and the dremora lord by 35*2 = 75 points, which is probably the most impressive aspect of these spells in general.

[Gwthycs Coelddwfn]

For anyone still reading this, this is wrong btw. The Courage/Rally spells don't scale in magnitude with dual casting, they only increase in duration (i.e. they last longer), so that pretty much cuts your estimated health boost in half. Furthermore, the necromage exploit is fixed by the Unofficial patches, which pretty much cuts your output in half again, so you would only get the 25% bonus once when actually casting on undead minions, but that requires you get the Master of Mind perk for the buffs to even apply.

[Lin Huichi]

Lol

[MysticD'MeeM]

:P That name was an inside joke, this is my real name.

[Mellorina]

Great guide! 500 hours of playing Skyrim and I never once touched the illusion tree, unless quickly sneaking in for that quiet casting perk. You've made me reconsider one of the core mechanics of Skyrim and inspired me to have another run of this awesome game.

I don't know whether to thank you or be annoyed at having lost the next few weeks making a new character.

[MysticD'MeeM]

Just pointing out, frenzy and fury are the same spells, just different levels. As are calm and pacify. You didn't mention fear but I think you meant to.