In my previous post I attempted to give a quick rundown on some basics regarding Skyrim, but I always seem to underestimate how complicated these games are and how much explanation is actually required just to gloss over the basics.
Long story long I was determined on this retro playthrough to avoid using the most overpowered abilities in the game: Archery & Conjuration. Putting points into these disciplines was outright banned from the start in a self-imposed manner.
I was also determined to use Illusion because I was never able to get those spells to work due to the level requirements. This meant that I'd be dealing damage was with a sword, but I'd still be heavy into the wizard skills so I'd need to figure out how that would work. What I came up with is a strategy I'll probably continue to use going forward when Elder Scrolls VI comes out next year (soon™). It's actually a pretty satisfying playstyle with an interestingly mixed toolkit.
Skyrim has a lot of races... too many races honestly. Hell, there are THREE different kinds of elf alone. Wood Elf (Bosmer thief), High Elf (Altmer mage), and Dark Elf (Dunmer mage/thief). Then there are four different human races (Nord, Breton, Imperial, Redguard), on top of a Khajiit cat race and the Argonian reptile race.
Wow never trust AI with basic math.
Every race comes with a passive bonus and an active power. The active power can only be used "once a day" (72 minutes), but you can also sleep for 24 hours if you want to get it back instantly. Some of these racial abilities are really good and borderline overpowered, while others are completely and utterly worthless. This is the only decision you need to make at the beginning of the game so it can actually matter quite a bit if the player wants to employ any strategy to their methods (which is not required on Adept difficulty but the game is a lot more difficult without a strat).
Right off the bat we can see that both the cat and the lizard have completely worthless racial abilities. In my opinion they are also dumb looking & ugly AF, so it's not even worth picking them for an aesthetic role-playing situation. You don't need disease resistance because a basic potion cures disease. There's also water-breathing potions and spells (which also aren't needed because you hardly ever go in water). Night vision is pointless and doing more damage while unarmed only makes one or two quests a little less annoying. Silly silly races. They feel like a lazy afterthought.
Also pretty bad. But you could at least make a case for picking one of these races for RP reasons or because of their starting skills. Also new (and even seasoned) players often completely forget about the daily power and it can go unused for the entire game, so there is that. Poison resistance is trash because poison is rare and there are full immunity amulets in the game that offer 100% resist.
The Nord 50% frost resistance passive is okay because all necromancers (the most common enemy mage) in the game attack with frost, and while most dragons breath fire there are a few frost dragons out there as well.
The Bosmer Wood Elf also has completely trash passives and daily power. Honestly the Command Animal ability should be permanent rather than lasting 60 seconds... as it can actually get you killed when the animal stops being under your control and turns on you along with whatever it was attacking. However the Bosmer is still worth picking due to starting skills which I will cover after these passive abilities.
The Dunmer Dark Elf has fire resistance, which is surely the best element to be resistant to, as it makes them a dragon killer, and this game is all about killing dragons, as you literally have the title of Dragonborn. Ancestor's Wrath is totally worthless and is basically just a flame cloak spell anyone can acquire later in the game.
If you want a powerful character these are the only options, which is really annoying and feels extremely lazy on the development side considering this is the 5th iteration of the game. When I first started playing this game over a decade ago I always felt forced to pick the High Elf Altmer because +50 magicka at the start of the game is wildly overpowered (you only start with 100). On top of that the daily power basically gives you infinite magicka for 60 seconds... making the High Elf a really good race to pick no matter what you decide to do in the game.
The Orc is clearly amazing if you want a heavy-armor smash-and-grab melee warrior who cracks skulls open at close range. Their daily power makes you x4 more powerful in combat for 60 seconds... meaning every boss fight becomes a trivial beat-down. x2 more damage and x2 mitigation is wild. They don't have a passive ability but who cares when you have Berserker Rage? I've never picked a warrior (it's kind of a boring way to play) but I've always been tempted by the Orc.
I almost picked Altmer yet again for my spellsword, but decided it was time to try Breton. This was the best time to pick a class that gets 25% mitigation to all elemental damage (frost/fire/lightning), and the daily power basically turns you into the ultimate anti-mage because not only do you get 50% more mitigation but every spell it absorbs just gets added to your mana pool making you basically invincible to spell-casters for 60 seconds. As a spellsword at close range this seemed like a good pick, and it actually turned out to be even better than I expected.
Every race starts with different opening skills, which up until now I had always ignored because leveling an ability from 15 to 25 is pretty easy and the High Elf passive/active is absurdly overpowered on a relative scale, especially in the early game. However, I have since come to realize that these starting skills make a massive difference if the player is trying to keep their level low. And keeping your level low is the best way to "twink" out your avatar and make sure that you are stronger than the NPCs of a similar level that spawn around you.
We can immediately see from this grid that there are three "pure races" for lack of a better term. Not only do the Orc and Altmer have the best racial abilities, but the Orc is a pure warrior and the Altmer is a pure mage, making those obvious picks if you wanted to play pure mage or warrior.
While the Bosmer has lack-luster racial abilities, they happen to be the pure thief race, and starting out with 25 archery is a massive advantage because bows are hands down the best/safest way to deal damage.
The chart also shows that while the Redguard has garbage racials their starting stats are quite good if you want a character that uses a shield. It's the only class that starts with 25 points in one-handed, which also makes them the perfect candidate for dual-wielding... which is something I have never tried but appears to be quite good (x6 damage in the endgame).
The One-Handed skill directly increases the damage dealt with one-handed weapons. For each skill level, weapon damage increases by 0.5%. This increase is multiplicative with bonus damage from the Armsman perk for a total of triple weapon damage with 100 One-Handed and 5/5 Armsman. Weapon damage can be further increased by smithing and/or enchanting.
The Imperial also has very good stats for melee, with more of a focus on healing than other races. Argonians are worthless by every metric, and Khajiit are also not-optimal (both are sad thieves). The Dunmer is quite good if you want a pure destruction elemantalist, while the Nord is the only class with 25 points in 2-handed.
And we can see by the opening skills this was pretty sub-optimal. I refuse to use conjuration but I start out with the highest level of conjuration at 25 points. I wield a sword and a shield but I start out at the base 15 points. This build also utilizes destruction & enchanting which start at 15. So off to a pretty not great start except for the ability to absolutely slay mages... which turns out to be pretty damn good when you join the mage's guild and are constantly going on quests to slay enemy mages to get better mage gear.
Taking a good hard look at this chart I see two other solid options for the spellsword/battlemage build. The obvious one is Altmer high elf... which I refused to pick on principal. But the not-so obvious one is Imperial, who starts out with 5/6 of the skills I need (heavy armor worthless)... and also the ability to AOE calm and find more gold isn't the worst thing ever. The Imperial is the only option that starts out with melee combat skills (one-handed & block), so I may try that in Elder Scrolls VI next year if this strategy is still an option in that iteration of the series.
There's actually a somewhat comical nerd debate on the Skyrim forums about the difference between a spellsword and a battlemage. The consensus seems to be that a battlemage is a mage first and a fighter second, while a spellsword is a fighter first and uses spells to enhance their melee prowess. However the counterintuitive bit is that many claim that a battlemage is slow, clunky, and uses heavy armor while a spellsword is more nimble and sneaky. Given these definitions my build is 100% spellsword, as cloth armor is used to sneak around and 100% of the character's damage can be done with the sword if Destruction is omitted from the build.
The main requirement for the spellsword is that they are doing a lot of melee damage up close and personal. Right off the bat this means you're guaranteed to be taking a lot of damage, making both Restoration and Alteration a requirement for defense.
In theory equipping a shield is optional and you shouldn't wear one (go 2-handed, dual-wield, or spell in left-hand) if you don't like slowing down combat to block, but I enjoy the blocking mechanic as it feels like it adds skill to the game and a back-and-forth damage trading mechanic in your favor. A shield also makes archers do significantly less damage when they strike (or zero if you have that perk). On top of that it only takes 2 perk points into block for time to slow down when the enemy is doing a power-attack, which is surprisingly useful because you always know it's coming and can interrupt it every time with a quick shield-bash to avoid a lot of damage.
Illusion is the spellsword's number one goto toolkit for rampaging the battlefield. In many cases the fight is over with a single spell or shadowstrike, or at least a divide and conquer strategy can be employed to make the fight significantly easier should shit hit the fan. Illusion is also the easiest tree to level by far due to the ability to spam cast spells out of combat. You can level up Illusion to max level 100 in something like 3 hours if you compulsively spam spells out of combat (not necessary or even recommended) whereas it might take 30 hours of gameplay to get One-Handed or Block to level 100.
Illusion magic is insanely powerful "mindfuck" magic.
You get inside the enemy's head and change their perception of what's real.
There are three types of crowd-control in the game, all Illusion:
Frenzy is certainly the best one because if you happen upon two or more unsuspecting victims you can legit just force them to fight each other and bust out some popcorn while you wait to see who wins. Then when the winner turns on you, you just hit them once or twice and they die due to already being gravely wounded from the previous battle.
Calm is also quite good because it forces your hapless foe to deaggro and stop attacking for 30 seconds, which is quite a long time in the heat of battle; often plenty of time to deal with another threat and take on fights 1v1 instead of attempting to battle multiple foes at once. It's also quite good at calming someone down who you don't want to kill or just fleeing the battle without having to fight at all.
Fear is a somewhat chaotic spell which forces the enemy to run in terror from you. This could mean that while you run after them they train you into even more baddies, which could be a big problem and result in immediate death. Why use fear instead of calm? Because fear doesn't break when you attack them, so they are completely incapacitated and won't fight back while under the affect, while calm will break immediately and frenzy doesn't prevent them from attacking you if you're the closest target.
Because your character is very easy to level up in the early game. If your character is leveling up and fury only works on "creatures & people up to level 6"... well then fury stops working entirely after you've reached something like level 8 and you're no longer encountering level 6 NPCs. This is extremely irritating as these spells either work perfectly or are 100% resisted by the target and they don't work at all. There is no in-between or wiggle-room here, so you have to make sure you've put enough "perk points" into illusion so that it always works and is up to date, which isn't a thing for any other school of magic in the game.
Another reason why I've always avoided Illusion is that it never works in key situations. You can't use it on dragons, undead, demons, or mechanical units. Bosses will often resist the spells and then you're shit out of luck because you just wasted all your mana on a strategy that had zero affect. Oops. But even with all these drawbacks I'd say it's worth it and fun to use; you just have to know what you're doing.
The best Illusion perk in the game is hands down Quiet Casting. It's difficult to suss this out without actually using the ability... on paper it seems very lack-luster. However all spells make noise (even invisibility) so if you cast a spell while sneaking pretty much everyone around you is going to be immediately alerted and come looking for you.
Quiet Casting allows you to prepare for battle and stack up all kinds of advantages before your hapless opponents even realize what's about to happen. It allows you to cast frenzy without them having any idea where it came from. It's a good perk to have even if you don't care about illusion spells, as you can use it to cast firebolts from the shadows and remain hidden much longer.
Quiet casting requires 4 perks into Illusion, but one of those perks adds +8 levels to your ability to manipulate animals (Animage) while the next one (Kindred Mage) adds +10 levels to your ability to manipulate humanoids. This allows even your basic/cheap crowd control abilities last into the midgame if you make sure to keep your character level low and twinked out.
Another reason why Quiet Casting is a must-have perk is that base magicka regen is 3% out of combat but only 1% in combat. This mechanic also has the affect of increasing overall regeneration just by increasing total Magicka. For example you start the game with 100 Magicka (3/s out of combat; 1/s in combat). Increasing your Magicka to 200 makes your out of combat regen 6/second and in combat 2/sec, effectively doubling it. This is not a design choice I agree with but it undeniably exists.
Normally it would be a problem in the early game that Quiet Casting requires level 50 Illusion, but again Illusion is very easy to level up by casting Muffle out of combat. Muffle is so good at leveling illusion that it seems like it almost must be a mistake, and it's also an ability that the spellsword is going to use constantly anyway because it's almost impossible to sneak up on the enemy to melee range without it, especially in the early game with a low sneak ability. You can also buy Muffle right at the start of the game from the court wizard at the starting town keep of Dragonsreach.
Once you reach level 65 Illusion (which again is trivially easy) you can buy the expert-level invisible spell, making you very hard to see. Having both muffle and invisible active makes you nearly undetectable while sneaking which allows the player to have all kinds of options that are unavailable to all other classes without Illusion, even accomplished thieves.
The primary reason to devote resources into Alteration is to turn your squishy little mage into a heavily armored beast. Using stoneskin spells you can boost your armor rating temporarily from zero into the hundreds, rivaling even warriors with heavy armor. This is accomplished with the Mage Armor and Magic Resistance perks.
The reasons to wear defenseless cloth armor with this build are three-fold. First, by equipping cloth armor you avoid leveling light/heavy armor disciplines, which keeps you from leveling up too quickly; making Illusion spells easier to cast. Second, all the best wizard gear is cloth (head and chest pieces). Avoid wearing non-cloth gloves and boots even if they are upgrades, as this will completely invalidate the Mage Armor perk, which can x3 the effectiveness of all the stoneskin spells for an obscene temporary bonus to armor (up to +300 AC).
It's noteworthy that wearing a shield does not ruin this bonus or level up the disciplines, so either a light or heavy shield can be chosen at any time. I opted for a light shield because it means I can pick up more things and it doesn't make blocking any less effective, although it does provide slightly less base armor and they might not look as cool.
Alteration's Detect Life and Detect Death spells are also quite nice to use on a stealth build like this because you can see where all the enemies are in advance through walls. You can also see if someone is friendly are not (red is enemy). Meanwhile, Telekinesis makes it even easier to steal items while remaining in the shadows undetected.
I was playing this build for a long long time before I started to realize that something was missing. It wasn't till I hit about level 25+ that I decided I needed to add some ranged damage to the build, as doing 100% of my damage with a sword was beginning to get stupid and tedious. The reasons for this were once again three-fold.
The build is weak to undead because undead are everywhere and Illusion spells don't work on undead until late game.
The build is weak to dragons, not only because fighting dragons in melee combat is dangerous (they have an attack that can just immediately eat and auto-kill you), but also because when the dragon is just flying around in the sky and not landing you're just standing their with your dick in your hand waiting around.
This particular spellsword build (cloth armor) gives the character a ton of magicka and magicka regeneration. It needs a Destruction spell to capitalize on all that unused mana, while also granting a ranged attack for all the situations in which that is convenient.
You only need to put a couple of perk points into Destruction on this build to get a massive bonus. I know I labeled it as "optional" but it's honestly probably too good of a bonus to pass up. With 4 points you can crank out a good amount of firebolt damage (+50% fire damage), and for two more points you can dual cast the firebolt, staggering any enemy that gets hit (even dragons and other bosses).
With enough mana you can stunlock an opponent 1v1 and kill them without them being able to do anything. It's pretty overpowered... and fire does bonus damage to undead, is the cheapest elemental spell, and slightly increases melee damage to the target while it burns, making it an obvious choice for the build.
Later you get Fireball and Flame Cloak at the Adept levels... with Fireball doing decent AOE damage and Flame Cloak being the most efficient damage dealing spell in the game because you're constantly in melee range anyway. Flame Cloak often provides what is essentially free damage over time because you can cast it before fights start and regen magicka to 100% before entering combat.
When you get the dual casting perk it does something different in each talent tree. The tooltip just says "stronger affect" so you have to look it up to know for sure. With Destruction the spell will do 10% more damage but cost 40% more mana, making it not worth getting unless it includes the staggering perk. Restoration dual casting is never worth getting in any situation because of this efficiency loss. Illusion dual-casting is the best one because it doubles the level cap of the spell (meaning you can still use Illusion at the highest levels of the game). Conjuration & Alteration dual casting increases duration by x2 which is also quite good considering these are often cast out-of-combat (OOC) and the additional magicka cost becomes irrelevant.
Healing is non-optional for this build but putting perk points into Restoration certainly is. You only need two points to get Respite... which essentially gives you infinite stamina and the ability to constantly power attack because every heal gives you all your stamina back. This also makes it easy to sprint everywhere without getting tired.
Something I didn't realize until now is that the Necromage perk also seems to be wildly overpowered and potentially bugged... and it targets the undead (plus a slew of random enchantments 'wrongfully' tagged as undead) which this build always needs help against anyway. This costs two more points but the one along the way increases healing power by another 50%, which is also probably worth getting for magicka efficiency, stamina regeneration, and time saving.
Technically you also only need 2 perk points in sneak as well.
Once you get Backstab you can sneak attack from the shadows for x6 damage, although I believe it's still x3 without the perk. You can also put 2 more points into it if you want to get x15 damage on daggers, which seems like it wouldn't be worth it but totally can be due to the fact that daggers swing faster and make significantly less noise than swords... meaning that sometimes you can actually get multiple backstab hits in and kill the target before they even realize what's happening.
This one is pretty straightforward as you need it to do almost all your damage. Interestingly enough you only need 7 perk points in this tree to completely max it out. 5 of those points go into the very first option, increasing your damage by 20% each time (which ends up being a massive bonus when combined with leveling up the skill).
From there you just need fighting stance for upgraded power attacks and savage strikes to upgrade it again. Although the best reason to get savage strikes is you literally start randomly chopping off heads and one-shot killing enemies which is just pretty shocking when it first starts happening. I don't think I ever got used to it to be honest. Very metal.
As a spellSWORD I only ever used a sword out of principal, so I thought it might be worth getting the 20% critical strike for another 3 perk points in Bladesman. These upgrades are completely worthless, as critical strike only increases your base damage rather than overall damage, which ends up being a totally negligible increase... unlike literally every other RPG in existence in which crit is always an amazing stat because it acts as a completely separate multiplier to total damage.
Even the level 100 1-H perk is totally worthless... a 25% chance to paralyze on a backwards power attack? You almost never use a backwards power attack... they are actually quite hard to land and also slow. It might be worth it if the chance was 100%. Save yourself a point.
There is an axe perk that does bleed damage, but as many have pointed out: bleed is pointless because fights don't last enough time for the bleed to actually do anything... the mace perk can do up to 75% armor penetration, which I haven't tested but sounds like it would actually be quite good against targets wearing heavy armor. I really don't like maces though because they seem clunky and slow... not really befitting the spellsword's grace and agility.
This is a skill that literally any build can level up and it will be worth it. In fact once Enchanting gets to max level 100 it becomes completely broken and overpowered and creates the best gear in the entire game by a huge margin. This alone is a good reason to not pick up the skill seeing as how overpowered it is (and also underpowered during the early levels) but also leveling up any of the tradeskills (blacksmithing/alchemy/enchanting) is annoyingly tedious and time consuming, giving the player even more reason to avoid it entirely.
With level 80 enchanting you can also create an alternate set of Destruction gear that lowers the cost of Destruction spells by 95%-100%, making them free or near-free, which also completely breaks the game using the perma-stunlock mechanic. Once Enchanting gets to 100 the game is pretty much over and becomes somewhat boring and stupid, so it's perfectly valid to ignore it entirely while making your character's level even lower to keep it relatively powerful.
The only problem is it can be very hard to find good unarmored spellcaster boots/gloves without it. A decent compromise to this issue is to avoid leveling Enchanting but still use the enchanting table to upgrade your boots and gloves when you happen to come across more powerful soul-stones to enhance the enchantment you need (which will probably be a damage multiplier to 1H weapons or magicka on the gloves).
Finding a weapon with a damage enchantment is pretty common and you can recharge the enchantment with soul-stones, which is the only other use for soul-stones other than using the enchanting table. At the same time one of the best Shouts in the game is called Elemental Fury which greatly increases your attack speed... this counts as in enchantment and doesn't work on already enchanted weapons (so it's good to have multiple weapons available). It's also good to find an enchanted 1-hander that will cast soul-trap so you can get souls into your stones without leveling up Conjuration.
Blacksmithing is only worth leveling up if you REALLY want to sharpen your weapon to increase the damage to the maximum (understandable because it's doing so much damage). You can also use it to forge rings and amulets to sell with the gems/silver/gold you find. I'm guessing blacksmithing is not worth leveling up because all the heavy/light armor you produce are worthless vendortrash, but is it worth using the basic grindstone on your sword to get the small free bonus damage without leveling the skill.
I thought Alch would be good on this build and I always compulsively pick up everything on the ground because it's easy and free to do... but alchemy is definitively not good on the spellsword. This character is highly self-sufficient and doesn't need potions, and if you do need potions you can find plenty of them... while stealing is comically easy as an illusionist. Best to avoid Alchemy altogether in this case. This also makes your inventory much lighter as materials can build up quite easily and just sit there.
While this is not the most powerful build in the game, I do believe it is one of the most fun and diverse builds that still maintains extremely high power without resorting to boring or tedious exploits (and the other broken mechanics in which Elder Scrolls games are so commonly famous for). However, I made a TON of mistakes on my first playthrough that made my character significantly less powerful.
legendary on IllusionApparently they added this ability to go "legendary" on a skill once you hit level 100 with it. What does this do? Literally deletes all the progress you've made, reduces the level from 100 back to base 15, and allows you to relevel it all over again.
Why would anyone do this? Because half of the players that play this game are completionist autists, so this allows you to keep leveling your character without a cap, giving you more stats and perk points with every level.
I went legendary in illusion knowing full well it was a bad idea... I just wanted to do it to do it. I never made it back to level 100 illusion even though illusion is easy to level. I gained a ton of extra levels that I did not need or want (got up to level 62), and some of the more powerful undead acquired max level force-push shouts that would send me flying off cliffs and one-shot kill me instantly.
Never ever ever use this "ability" unless you want to go full autist and go higher than the level cap (which is like level 85+ or something). Even then it's completely impractical unless you are cheating with glitches to powerlevel illusion (like casting telekinesis and fast traveling miles away and the game thinks you moved the item across miles of territory). Personally I refuse to play like that. It's pointless and lame.
Totally unnecessary for reasons already explained.
I got my skill level up to 90 before realizing it was totally pointless.
While I did not put any points into Conjuration I did use it in the early game to make things a little easier. I also used Soul Trap to put souls into my gems. It ended up getting to level 60... I should not have leveled it at all (25).
Don't do it!
It's a pointless good for nothing skill on this build.
A lot of books will give you a skill-up if you read them. A lot of those books will show you what you're going to level up as well using a picture of the corresponding constellation on the cover (the title can also be a dead giveaway). Do not read random high-value books that will give you random skills you don't need. This one isn't a big deal as it doesn't happen very often and the XP gained is small, but still it's best practice.
Seeing as I was the ultimate stealth character and stealing was exceedingly easy, I spent a lot of my extra gold training pickpocket just for kicks. Pickpocket is a cool idea but it's really kind of pointless in the grand scheme of things. I do like the lockpicking minigame so I always level up lockpicking (I can even pick a master lock at level 25 lockpicking) but pickpocket is annoying for a lot of reasons including having a maximum success rate of 90% no matter how good you are at it. It's a skill that's never really needed or particularly useful. Very much a novelty skill for players role-playing the thief.
This really made certain situations much harder than they needed to be.
Fire is quite good for the spellsword.
Had I not of made any of these blunders while needlessly leveling up my character into the 60's I would have been quite powerful at a lower level. You should expect to win the game and potentially even start capping out around level 30-40 to maintain relative dominance.
You'll want to get perks in these trees as quickly as possible to maintain dominance:
Looking at these numbers you should expect to be immensely powerful at around level 27. After a certain point your power will taper off.
So essentially under no circumstances would you want to be higher than level 58 (which is actually quite high and difficult to get to using this guide). Even if you get 100 Enchanting you can forge all your gear and then respec the points into something else with the main Black Book in the later game (Dragonborn DLC).
There are a couple of ways to do this without breaking the rules of the guide.
The easiest way is to continue power-leveling illusion up to 100 with muffle/invisibility out of combat.
Blocking can be difficult to level organically and levels the fastest the harder you get hit. If you can survive giant (lvl 32) or mammoth attacks (lvl 38) the easiest way to level it is just sit there and block while backing up to heal once and a while.
Alteration can also be difficult to level because, unlike illusion, you have to cast the armor spells in combat (which is dumb and wastes your mana). The easiest way to level this one is to use detect-life in a town with a lot of people because every life-detected increases the skill further. Telekinesis also does the trick but drains magicka quite fast.
Stealth is also very easy to level... you just need to stay hidden in a place that characters would otherwise see you if you weren't sneaking. The more characters can't see you but would otherwise increases the skill. I believe you can even stand still while this is happening and go AFK to level it in a dungeon or even in friendly towns.
One-Handed and Restoration is quite easy to level just by playing the game.
Destruction is certainly the hardest thing to level here, and you might consider paying for training at the college (easy to get the money back by selling rings/amulets/robes back to the trainer). The Dark Elf trainer is almost exclusively sitting inside her dorm room in the Hall of Countenance 24/7 so very easy to find.
I did not get the chance to mention it but there's an absolutely overpowered stone north of the starting area in the mountains called the Lord Stone. It gives 25% magic resist to all elements and +50 armor... which you can grab right at level 1 for a huge overpowered bonus to defense.
You can then head to Riften later (Thieves Guild town) and do a random non-combat three-part quest from the church called The Book of Love to get another permanent 15% magic resistance. Combined with the Breton passive this gives you 65% magic resistance right at the start of the game (cap is 85% which you can get with 2 points of Alteration... making you nearly invincible to fire/frost/lightning).
Skyrim UI is designed for console, which is great for consoles like Xbox and Playstation but quite terrible for PC gaming. In most cases whenever you want to do anything in the game you have to pause it, go into a menu, and modify what you want by hand. This style of play can be extremely tedious.
I did not find out there are non-mod hotkeys in the vanilla version of the game until playing it for many hours. The console only has 2 hotkeys (somewhat worthless on the left/right D-pad) but the PC version has 8 (numbers 1-8 on the keyboard). This allows you to immediately switch spells/weapons or even use potions/poisons. To utilize hotkeys you have to put the skill into your favorites bar, hover over it, and hit one of the numbers 1-8... this is extremely counterintuitive and not explained anywhere within the game (and also don't exist in the customizable hotkeys options part of the menu). Once again this is a weirdly huge blunder in game design that can be fixed by the infinite mods that are offered by the community.
What a clusterfuck monstrosity absolute TLDR wall of text this is... I can't wait to spend 30 minutes just trying to proofread it. Ew. 6500 words... what... the... hell. I once again always underestimate how long it will take to explain a video game on my blog. It is what it is.
With any luck someone will actually try this Skyrim build out and enjoy the results. With any more luck this strategy will remain relevant when Elder Scrolls VI comes out next year (fingers triple-crossed on that front).
In any case, this spellsword build is a very satisfying one that is versatile in a lot of interesting ways. It doesn't get boring like the other strategies I've attempted. Hopefully some of you will enjoy it as well, either now or when the next game comes out. By then we'll all be crypto rich and have new $3000 computers, amirite?
