Cinnamonics

Whatever Mzulft is (and no spoilers please!) I die quite frequently as mage, so I believe you. Going from Novice to Apprentice Destruction spells and conjuring Flame Atronarchs certainly gave me a boost though. Until higher levels force me to upgrade once again, I'm sure.

djchameleon

I just finished RE 6 not too long ago and it wasn't as bad as other people were complaining about.

Each set of characters were a throwback to old resident evil games. The only slight negative I have to say about it is that the few puzzles were stupidly easy.

I'm interested to see how the gameplay for Cyberpunk 2077 will turn out.

debaserr

I'm not gonna get too jazzed about a tech demo. I always reserve judgement until I at least see gameplay footage.

PS: I finally broke down and bought a 3DS (XL). For now I just have Mario 3D Land, which has been really cool so far.

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LoathsomePete

Jesus Fuck tell me about it. I got a 320 gb hard drive for my 360 a few weeks ago and finally got around to installing Skyrim to it so it doesn't take forever to load. It does freeze up on occasion, but it's a Bethesda game and bugs are just part of the experience with them. Anyways I started a new character, a dark elf mage and doing the College of Winterhold questline was one of my first major quests and Mzulft was a massive pain in the ass. Even with my previous assassin character I always had trouble with Dwarven ruins, but my character was just not equipped to handle the Falmer or the dwarven spheres. I had not died at all prior to entering those ruins, but I must have died at least 15 times by the time I beat it.

Still despite all that my mage is a badass, although he is a bit of a mixed class as I've been leveling up my one-handed quite a bit with a war axe. I've never actually played as a magic user in any fantasy game besides World of Warcraft so there's a bit of a learning curve. A part of me kind of wants to start over again so I can make a couple of changes, but for the most part my character is doing pretty well.

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gunnels

The amount of times I died would be exponentially higher if I didn't invest a little bit into one-handed and block. Otherwise, when you run out of magicka and potions your only option would be to prance around like a jackass until it refills. Despite that, I do find magic users to be the most rewarding, even if it means I can't have a follower due to the splash damage of destruction spells. I still feel bad for burning my dog alive. =\

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RVCA

I think melee classes have a big advantage in Skyrim because they get a free pass on magic due to shouts, which is why I played a 2-hander melee orc (and eventually ratcheted up the difficulty as far as it would go).

midnight rain

Was Mzulft the mage with the dragon mask at the end of College of Winterhold? If so, MOTHER OF GOD that was unreasonably difficult. As a mage I found it virtually impossible to kill the guy on normal difficulty at the time, and didn't feel like trekking all the way back through the cavern to level up and come back later, so it was the one time I cheated and brought the level down.

And imo mages can be just as awesome as warriors if you really take advantage of the enchanting skills. That way you can actually wear armor and survive more than one arrow to the knee.

LoathsomePete

No Mzulft was the dwemer ruins where you have to try and get to the observatory and use flame and frost to meld this piece of machinery back into place so you can deflect this beam of light to create a map and figure out where the Staff of Magnus was. I really dislike exploring dwemer ruins because I never seem to find anything I want along the way and they just seem to stretch on for ever.

As for that last battle to get the Staff of Magnus, it took me a couple of tries, but after the pain that was Mzulft, I decided to enlist Lydia's help for that trek. I found an exploit where the guy would pretty much always stay out of cover, even when I had to pop back into cover for my magicka to regenerate and found that I could kill him pretty easily with Fireballs and the Staff of Jyrik Gauldurson I got from an earlier quest. Unfortunately, Lydia decided that a frontal assault was the best maneuver and I couldn't perform Healing Hands on her without having to get out of cover and possibly mess up the exploit, so she died. I have been leveling up my Conjuration though, so I may see if there's a way to bring someone back as a permanent zombie.

As for warrior mages... I've actually really only been using robes up until now, with a piece of Elven Armor enchanted for Destruction spells. I've also decided to shuck conventional weapons in favor of Conjuring weapons in order to level up my Conjuration skill as well as my one-handed, but I am a bit miffed that I can't conjure a war axe, only a battleaxe and a sword.

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Circe

Honestly bound weapons are probably among the least useful spells in the Conjuration school for anything other than training, even with the perks behind them. By the time you've got them to their maximum power you're probably also hoarding at least a couple of Ebony or Glass weapons. The real power in Conjuration comes with the permanent/double thrall spells. If you can take down a powerful mage and resurrect him permanently you become next to unstoppable. Magic is a very punishing specialisation to deal with- Conjuration and Enchanting don't really come into their own until you've levelled them up sufficiently and other schools like Destruction and Illusion don't pack enough of a punch to be viable by themselves mid-game onwards. Despite that it's probably the most entertaining way to play Skyrim. Running around everywhere in heavy armour with a great big battleaxe may be an effective way to kill everything that comes near you but it's also boring as hell, and sneaky types can often find themselves in situations beyond their control. I do wish there was a bit more magic variety in the vanilla game (I use mods so it's not that big of a worry but I doubt I could go back to the original magic system) but it still makes combat fun and your disadvantages encourage you to think tactically while you're at it.

gunnels

Ebonyflesh+ Mage Armor perk= 300 armor with no weight and plenty of magicka left over.

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