
Why limit yourself when there’s an entire world of ridiculously weird, insanely powerful (or absurdly weak) character builds available to experiment with.

You level up, the world levels up with you, and you have not increased your ability to deal with the challenges of the world.Skyrim gives players an entire nation to explore - the world is packed with quests and characters to meet, but most of us are only going to go through all that content with one character. One thing to remember always in Skyrim anytime you are using skills that are not your main combat skills, or directly supporting those skills, you are by proxy making yourself weaker. You want to take perks in whatever school of magic you want to build your mage around (alteration mage armor perks are essentially a necessity) and you don't want to use other skills too much. If you're going to play a pure mage, you want to be wearing clothing ie the outfit they give you in the very beginning of the game that is perfect for a mage character.

They don't trust the magic system or something, so they wind up wearing armor, and using swords or bows or whatever. I have found that most of the time when people say stuff like that they weren't actually playing a 'straight' mage. The very beginning can be a little tricky, yeah conjuration will help a lot with that, and grab a follower. I've played through as many builds of vanilla Skyrim characters as I could possibly think to make, and mages were usually the most over-powered. I never understood why so many people seem to feel magic is underpowered in Skyrim. I can't honestly say much more about them as I've never used them only discovered recently, and I'm in the middle of a play-through. At least, that's how he (and users) describe his mods. But Simon's are much more lightweight and closer to the mechanics and implementation of vanilla. Simon Magus is a great mod author who has sort of followed in the footsteps of EnaiSiaion, making mods very similar to Ordinator, Apocalypse, etc.
