My unrealistic Oblivion Goals

I've gotten tired of my stealth/bow/sword Dark Elf character, after completing the earlier "main plot missions," some side stuff, and the Shivering Isles (in other words, I feel like I've played a full game with that character and am ready to try something else : p). I play with Obscuro's Oblivion Overhaul mod, which changes leveling. The difficulty remains similar with this mod, but NPCs no longer scale so dramatically as your character levels. This gives less incentive to slow your character's leveling by picking rarely used main skills, for fear of getting clobbered by Daedric-mace wielding bandits every time you go outside.

So here's my dilemma: I want to be well adapted for the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild quests, but I don't want to rely on stealth in combat the way I had to last time. Too many situations come up where stealth isn't an option: many of the pitched battle missions in the main plot, for instance. Also, while bows are a delightful when you're sneaking up on bandits, killing things with them is often tedious (lots of back peddling and shooting), even with a stealth shot at the beginning.

So I'm thinking of this set-up:

High-Elf, Mage sign,

Strength and Willpower

Blade, block, restoration, alchemy, illusion, destruction, alteration.

I'm hoping that I will still be reasonably stealthy with illusion spells, and that blade and block with restoration will make me tolerably durable in combat.

Does this sound like a good idea? What character settings have you Oblivion players here at the Org found fun? Which have turned out boring?

Play a pure mage. Ditch Blade for Mysticism, Block stuff with your staff. No physical combat except via summons.

Tried and true: battle/mage

Pretty much what you are doing, although I honed my stealth skills to max; in my build they were minor skills so I could level them to max w/o getting out of step with level scaling.

Do you have Knights of the Nine as well? Some very nice perks in that expansion for a "sword and board" type.

I agree, a High Elf Battlemage was always fun for me, since magic in general in oblivion felt better than it does in Skyrim or Morrowind in my opinion. Oblivion magic has always been fun I find.

High Elf is good for the magic bonus, just depends how much you want your stealth guy to use magic really. If you still want some combat readiness the sign of the Lady may set you up slightly better, what with the endurance for slightly more health in combat, and the additional willpower for faster regen. Of course, that would mean having less overall magicka though...

...decisions decisions... :book2:

Having flashbacks to 2009......
So much time lost......
Wife hogging XBOX, the fights, the fights......
Make it stop

Altmer have weaknesses to elemental magic, the Apprentice has weakness to magic in general - I wouldn't advise a melee character with that build. Blade, by all means, but don't take block because block is only really useful as a shield, and a shield is armour. What you want is a character that hurls as much magic at the target as quickly as possible from as far away as possible - then darts in to finish them off.

Illusion can be good from this point of view, as it gives you chameleon, silence and invisibility. You'll want to level Alteration as quickly as possible to get access to higher level shield spells.... Destruction is pretty self explanatory...

I'd get a longsword, for the reach and speed balance, and enchant it with a damage health or something similar. Another good one is a blade enchanted with Silence....

Can't think of much else for an Altmer Battle Mage.

Illusion is a nice skill, but if you intend to use spells like frenzy on enemies then you can't use a shield or any other sort of armor. The magic penalty for armor isn't that significant for most spells but it makes frenzy and command completely useless above level 23 or so.

Block is still somewhat useful though. Even with a weapon it still removes some damage. Plus having block above 50 prevents your weapon from being damaged by block, which is important for staff wielders because they're frail.


Alteration is easy to raise, but you can easily do without. It's easy to make potions that include two varieties of the shield effect (normal and three elemental). And none of the other alteration effects really justify putting much effort into it. I wish they had carried over levitation from Morrowind, that would have been cool (allthough there's a mod for that I believe)

Conjuration is more useful than alteration, but if you want to be really efficient at levelling your character (I usually was) then you want at least one of the intelligence related skills as a non major skill, so that you can rake up 10 intelligence skill increases before you have to level up. However all three of the intelligence skills (conjuration, alchemy and mysticism IIRC) level up fairly fast.