Walkthrough - Skyrim Mage Leveling Tips

Welcome to Walkthrough. Today, I am going to give you tips on your way to increase your character's skills as a mage whether you are playing a mage character or trying to reach 100 skill level in all eighteen skills. Here is what you need to know.

The Mage's Skills are: Alteration, Conjuration, Destruction, Illusion, Destruction, and Enchanting.

Alteration - This School of Magic deals with the manipulation of the physical world. The following spells yield experience:
- Waterbreathing - Experience gained only when swimming underwater.
- Detect Life - Experience is gained when living creatures are nearby. The more creatures detected, the more experience gained.
- Telekinesis - Just pick up stuff with this spell. Be careful, when magicka runs out, the object you're levitating will shoot forward and if it hits someone, you'll get a bounty.
- Armor Spells - If you're in combat while the spell is active, you gain experience.

The spell combination I used was Equilibrium and Detect Life while in a Hold or Fort Dawnguard. You never run out of magicka, but you can die from Equilibrium's effect. You can use Healing to also level up your Restoration at the same time.

Conjuration - This School of Magic deals with the summoning of creatures like Undead, Atronachs, and Daedra. It also helps summoning Bound Weapons and banishing enemy summoned Daedra.
- Soul Trap - A short range spell that gives you experience per hit, even if they're already soul trapped.

Find yourself a slow enemy like a Horker and cast Soul Trap on it over and over again. Starting off a battle with a dual cast of Courage and Soul Trap, then switching to your weapons or Destruction Spells, help level Illusion and Conjuration at the same time.

Destruction - This School of Magic is where you bring the fire, frost, and shock to your enemies. This is the main weapon of the Mage. All spells give you experience as long as they do damage whether it be friend, foe, or innocent bystander.

If you want to use it out of combat, use the spell combination Conjure Familiar and Flames repeatedly. You summon a familiar and use the lowest level Destruction spell to kill it, you can even charge the next familiar while you do so. This technique can be used while travelling, though it will take you longer to get to your destination.

Illusion - This School of Magic mostly deals with applying status effects to your enemy. All spells that can be used on another creature gives you experience.

The best technique I found is the same as leveling Conjuration. Find yourself a slow enemy like a Horker and cast Soul Trap on it over and over again. Starting off a battle with a dual cast of Courage and Soul Trap, then switching to your weapons or Destruction Spells, help level Illusion and Conjuration at the same time.

Restoration - This School of Magic is for healing yourself or others. By healing damage, you gain experience in this skill.

Using the spell combination, Equilibrium and Healing is ideal. You don't run out of Magicka and the life draining effect is lessened while you cast it. Travel along the road if you choose to use this, but with all the particle effects from both spells, it will get more lag and loading times while doing so.

Enchanting - The Crafting skill for the Mage. You can enchant your armor and weapons with magical abilities giving you a better edge. To use Enchanting, you need access to an Arcane Enchanter. They are inside the Jarl's Residence in each Hold where the Court Wizard works, Every player house except Breezehome can have one, and they are even in some dungeons.

First off, you need to know magical abilities in order to enchant your armor and weapons with them. Use the Disenchant option at the Arcane Enchanter on any enchanted weapons and armor you have. By destroying the item, you learn the ability. Not all abilities can be used on all items.

You need three things for Enchanting: An item to enchant, an ability to give the item, and a soul gem to get it to work. The stronger the Soul Gem and stronger the Soul inside, the stronger the enchant will be. Soul Trap traps the enemy's soul into an empty Soul Gem if they are killed within 60 seconds.

The weakest Soul Gem is a Petty Soul Gem(Petty) with the strongest being Grand Soul Gem(Grand). What's in the parenthesis is the level of Soul inside. Like everything else explained here, the stronger the enemy, the stronger the Soul.

If you're leveling up Smithing at the same time, you should have more than enough Iron Daggers to use as enchant fodder plus they sell real high when enchanted.