Character Guide: Mind Flayer

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Yup - I did it. Took a bit of fine tuning, but I built what I'm calling the Mind Flayer. If you want a more intuitive name, it's an illusionist/assassin. Or if you want a more Skyrim-themed name, the Nightingale. It starts out as a character capable of handling anything not resistant to illusion magic, until of course you get the master of the mind perk, and then the only thing that requires a bit of talent on your part is dragons.

Goals: Originally this was planned as a highly defensive character build. Kind of like the exact opposite of the ranger-conjuror stickied thread, which poured everything into offense at the expense of just about everything else. This character does in fact go the highly defensive route, and accomplishes that goal exceedingly well. What I didn't realize until the character was more fully developed was the power of the illusion school, if you're willing to give it a decent chance.

Pros: Here's the beautiful part about this build. Played properly, you'll never have to fight more than a single creature at any given time, and that single creature will be incapable of attacking you. It revolves around heavy use of the illusion spells, specifically the combination of Frenzy and Pacify. (That's right, you don't even need the Master level spells to pull this off.)

You'll also be strutting around at the armor cap, with a shield and maxed block, further reducing the damage you take on the rare occassions you do get hit, and you'll also likely be at the magic resistance cap.

Cons: You have to dedicate yourself to use of the illusion school. While the build is capable of dealing with everything on Master difficulty, you're relying on illusion, and Illusion magic is well, pretty weak when you're using novice and apprentice level spells. It gets OK when you hit Illusion level 50, and can select Adept Illusion and Quiet Casting perks and start using Frenzy. It starts getting really fun at Illusion level 70, when you pick up the Rage perk, which basically makes everything in the game susceptible to Frenzy. Illusion level 75 brings the spell pacify into play, and finally at Illusion level 90, you'll pick up the Master of the Mind perk, which allows your illusion spells to affect things like undead, dwarven automatons, and daedra.

So if you aren't willing to put the time into casting illusion spells as you go along, and you don't get your illusion skill up to a decent level, you won't be able to actually.... you know... use these spells. Fortunately, Muffle levels illusion quite rapidly, and should always be active whenever you're in a dungeon. It allows you to hit Illusion level 50 fairly quickly, which is the point in which illusion becomes the focal point in your game play.

The other con is that the build will require you to have, at a minimum, two pieces of gear with the illusion casting cost reduction enchantment on it, and until you reach the point when your enchanting skill is capable of generating at least 25% reduction per piece, you'll likely need three pieces of gear with the reduced casting cost enchantment.

Character creation: As always, any race you feel like is fine, although there are two options that really stand out to me: Altmer and Breton. Altmers start with 150 magicka, and since the build only calls for about 160 magicka, well, that obivously means you have a lot of skill ups going into life. The Altmer Highborn ability also allows you to really spam spells when necessary. The Breton is the other option, because of it's base 25% magic resistance. While you can get to the resistance cap with the Altmer - or any other race - since the Breton has a 25% head start, it's obviously easier to get there.

Core Skills: Illusion, Sneak, Block
Supplemental Offensive Skills: (especially early game): Archery, One Handed
Anciallary Skills: Speech, Pickpocket, Enchanting, Smithing, Alchemy (the trade skills are listed in order of importance to the build)

I'm going to work a little backwards in the skill section, to follow the natural progression of the character. You're going to rely the most on Archery, One Handed and the trade skills early, and focusing more heavily on the Illusion skills later, so it makes a little more sense. As I stated earlier, illusion doesn't really come into its own until the higher skill levels.

For starters, I'm assuming you're going to pickpocket train which requires Light Fingers, Night Thief, Cutpurse, with Extra Pockets as an optional perk, and you're going to get Speech up to skill level 50 early, and get the Haggling, Allure, and Merchant perks. The advantages of these strategies are discussed extensively here, so I won't go into them again. But those seven perks are included in the total perk count, which is the only reason I'm mentioning them at all.

Archery perks: I consider just 4 mandatory, with the option of going up to 6 after the base build is complete.

Overdraw 3/5, Eagle Eye early, with the option of going to Overdraw 5/5 after the base build is completed.

I've already extolled the wonders of Archery in the Ranger-Conjuror Guide so there's no nead to rehash all that information here. Hell, I wrote six full paragraphs on it. And everything I said there applies here. The only difference is that archery becomes less necessary the further you progress in the game, so you don't really need Power Shot, and upping your archery damage to the max isn't really necessary either. You definitely want to spend those 4 perks early on, but if you go full steam ahead on Archery and spend perks on everything, you may come to regret it at character level 35, when you're looking longingly at those illusion perks you could have had instead. Illusion spells essentially become your ranged combat method. Archery is great early, supplemental late.

One Handed Perks: 6 - Armsman 5/5, Fighting Stance

On the other hand, this character is an assassin, and will make gratuitous use of backstab. While I don't foresee you needing archery much later on, try as you might, you ARE going to have to occassionally get into melee combat, and illusion spells seem not to work particularly well against dragons. Not as important as Illusion, but it's second on the list. There's quite a bit of info on One Handed in the link above, but this is a bit different as it's not a dual wield character, so we can eliminate the three dual wielding perks immediately. I'd also recommend using a sword, and since so much of what we do will be stealth and backstab attacks, there is no need to go way up the perk tree. Which provides a nice segue into:

Sneak Perks: 2 - Stealth and Backstab

Deadly Aim is optional, because again, Archery becomes less and less important. If you really want your arrows to do the 3X instead of 2X damage, I won't complain too much - it will make the early going a bit easier, but honestly, with my character (presently level 58 and still rising), the only time I really use my bow is against dragons, and, if you haven't noticed, it's really hard to sneak up on them.

Block Perks: 4 - Shield Wall, Quick Reflexes, Power Bash, Deadly Bash. (option of going to the full 5/5 on shield wall after base build is finished).

The more astute readers will ask at this point - "Hey! You said we'd have max resistances? So why not Elemental Protection?" Well, you don't need it to get to the resistance cap for one, and secondly, it only works if you have your shield raised during the elemental attack. With mages, it's really hard to time it just right - damn near impossible in fact if the mage uses shock magic. I've taken this perk with other characters, and it DOES greatly reduce the damage of incoming breath attacks from dragons. So I won't complain too hard if you want it. But for me, I prefer to seek cover to reduce the breath attack damage, as opposed to just standing there with a raised shield, taking it.

And besides, the ability to enchant one's shield with magic resistance isn't the only reason we're using one. A shield with the perks I have listed becomes as much an offensive as a defensive piece of equipment. Put simply, if you're going to use a shield, you've got to bash with it. If you don't, you're better off utilizing that equipment slot with a second weapon.

Here's the basic idea. Quick Reflexes is the most important perk, as when you hold block during an enemy's power attack, they move in slow motion, but you move at normal speed. So upon pressing block, and the enemy going slo-mo, you have two options. The better option, IMO, is to side step the attack. The slow motion animation continues througout the attack, even if you release block. The idea is get to the side, and get a few quick slashes in while the slo-mo animation is still going.

The second option if, for example, you're in a narrow corridor or in a corner and you can't really move around, is to power bash to the face. This will stagger your opponent, and will give you enough time to counter attack before the enemy recovers if you do a NORMAL attack. If you power attack, it takes a bit longer, and the enemy may recover in time and block it. Plus, bashing uses up quite a bit of stamina, and if you try to chain power bashes and power attacks, you're going to drain that stamina bar really quickly, even if you have over 300 stamina. So the strategy is shield to the face, quick slash, shield to the face, quick slash. Repeat until dead.

Now a quick stop at the trade skills. For a very informative guide on how you can use your trade skills to easily reach the armor cap, I highly recommend Sir Rechet's Guide, Armor Cap and You.

That's because we are following it to a tee with this character, and I can't say it any better than he already has. We're going 5/5 Alchemist, Physician, Benefactor in Alcehmy, and 5/5 Enchanter, Corpus Enchanter, Insightful Enchanter and Extra Effect in Enchanting. Doing so means we only need Steel and Elven Smithing in that tree (Arcane Smithing optional), and we don't need ANY perks in light armor, and we'll still get to the cap.

Of the three trade skills, Enchanting is far and away the most important. I highly recommend doing the Unfathomable Depths quest ASAP. Not only does it give you a much needed +15% magic resistance, it gives you a couple of dozen soul gems to super charge your enchanting. As I stated earlier, you'll want at least two, and probably three pieces of equipment with reduce illusion casting costs, with everything else having fortify one handed on it, except the shield (where you want fortify block).

That's not to say the other two trade skills are unimportant, and you'll eventually want to get all three to 100. Even though you only need elven smithing, the amount you can improve that equipment increases with your smithing level, and obviously the better your alchemy skill, the better enchanting potions you can create. But neither of those things will offer as big of a return on your investment as getting enchanting as high as possible, as soon as possible. The quicker you can get to Illusion skill level 50, and get three pieces of equipment reducing magicka costs by around 60%, the faster the power of this build takes off into the stratosphere.

For those keeping score at home, so far we have these perk requirements:

Combat:
Archery - 4
One Handed - 6
Sneak - 2
Block - 4

Ease of Use:
Speech - 3
Pickpocket - 4

Trade Skills:
Alchemy - 7
Enchanting - 8
Smithing - 3

We're at 41. And all we have left is Illusion, the cornerstone of the build. And we'll be making a healthy investment here. There are 13 illusion perks, and we want all of them except Master Illusion. All of the other 12 are useful or prerequisites to other useful perks, which will bring our total for this build up to a still doable 53. (See, just like the Ranger-Conjuror Guide, I don't make you get to ridiculously high character levels with these guides. In fact, it's almost impossible NOT to get level 53 if you're maxing illusion, smithing, alchemy, and enchanting.)

This is going to be a bit long, so bear with me. There are definitive break points along the illusion path, where once you reach them, the power of the illusion school increases dramatically. The fist break point you reach is Illusion skill level 50. Do anything and everything you can to get here as soon as you can. I don't care if you train it, spam muffle, cast courage on the cow in Whiterun. Whatevs. Just get here. This opens up the first indispensible tool in the illusion school - Frenzy.

Now Frenzy is an adept level spell, and it comes with a rather steep magicka cost of 209, single cast. That's not going to work. As such, we need just about every illusion perk you can get up to level 50 in order to make it effective. That means we need adept illusion to cut in half the casting cost (which requires novice and apprentice as prerequisites). We need Kindred Mage to increase the level of opponents it affects (which requires Animage as a prerequisite), and we need Illusion Dual Casting to further increase the level of opponent affected. Finally, we need Quiet Casting, because you're insta-detected when you cast Frenzy without it. (Even with the perk, the eye will partially open, and they'll search for you, but with muffle active and a decent sneak skill, you're good.)

It's because of the casting cost that you'll already need some casting cost reduction gear. If you get to 50%, the magicka requirements to dual cast it are about 200. If you can squeeze a third piece in and get to about 60% (3/5 enchanter with a fortify enchanting potion will get you 20% per piece), you're looking at 160 magicka per cast. Fortunately, you shouldn't need to spam it. If there's two enemies, it doesn't matter which one you cast it on - they are going to fight each other. If there are more than two, I'd highly recommend you cast it on which ever enemy you think is the toughest. The idea here is to get the body count up as high as you can. If there are three guys, it's going to be a 2 on 1 fight, and you want the toughest one to be the guy going solo. The most likely result is the tough guy dies after killing one of them and hurting the second. The second most likely scenario is the tough killing both the other guys, but being extremely wounded in the process. Either way, you're left with one badly wounded enemy that's easy pickings.

The second break point on the illusion tree you hit is at skill level 75. This allows three further tools to open up. The first is you can get the perk Rage, which makes your frenzy spells that much more effective. I have yet to find a creature who can be affected by illusion spells unaffected by a dual cast Frenzy once I got the Kindred Mage and Rage perks.

The second is you can pick up the spell Pacify, which is the opposite of Frenzy. It allows you to stop an enemy from attacking. (The apprentice level spell Calm does the same thing, but it only affects lower level creatures, so it loses its punch pretty quickly. Illusion level 75 also allows for the Expert Illusion perk, and you should have picked up Hypnotic Gaze a long time ago. (In fact, you had to if you have the Rage Perk.)

Pacify picks up where Frenzy leaves off. Sometimes, you'll encounter a single opponent (or after casting Frenzy, you're left with a single opponent). While there is no game mechanic that prevents you from casting Frenzy on a single opponent, that is a dubious strategy at best. Since you're the only other target in the area, the only option for the opponent to attack is you. This part is really simple. You cast Pacify, walk up behind the unfortunate soul, and backstab it. With a casting cost of 290, single cast, you probably need three pieces of reduce casting cost gear. Although by the time you get to this point, you'll probably have maxed Enchanting, so three pieces will net you at least 75% reduction, and if you have alchemy charged up at this point, you can even hit 87% reduction. That will also allow you to be able to cast Pacify and Invisibility in quick succession, making backstabs more successful.

The final piece of the illusion puzzle is at skill level 90, when you pick up Master of the Mind perk. This allows your illusion spells to affect basically everything short of dragons in the game: undead, daedra, even the dwarven automatons. It doesn't change the game play - it's still a frenzy-pacify combination, but you get the idea.

There are very few enemies in the game that are immune to illusory magic once you get the relevant perks. Dragons seem to be completely immune, irrespective of the type. They are hostile to everything by default, so there would be no point in casting Frenzy. You cannot calm them with Pacify, nor can you make them run away in fear by casting Rout. Additionally, there seems to be some end-level bosses that are unaffected. For example, in the Ansilvund Burial Chambers, (Holgier and Fjori quest) the boss was unaffected when I had all the relevant perks and dual cast Frenzy). But that's all that I found. Giants and mammoths are affected. All dwarven automatons, inclinding centurions are affected. All undead, even draugr overloards are affected, as are the generic dragon priests. I have not attempted to affect one of the named dragon priests, simply because the only one I've killed to this point is Krosis, and I didn't have the Master of the Mind perk yet. So be careful there, as it may or may not work. I haven't tried it on daedra, but seeing as how the Master of the Mind perk specifically names daedra, I can't imagine it wouldn't work. Bottom line: 99% of stuff you'll find will be affected.

Both Frenzy and Pacify have a master-level version - Mayhem and Harmony, respectively. They have higher affect limits, and are area of effect spells. And I don't use either of them. There's two reasons for this. The first is that Frenzy and Pacify, when dual cast, affect everything I run up against. (Master spells can't be dual cast - apparently dual casting the adept and expert level spells offers identical affects.) The second is that the casting costs of the Master level illusion spells run about 1000 magicka, meaning you essentially NEED 4 pieces of illusion reduction gear to cast them in the first place, making for less flexibility in your enchantments.

Which bring us to the enchantments. You'll be doing it early and often with this character. As previously stated, the first goal is getting enchantments to lower your casting cost. Here's a setup I'd recommend at around character level 30. This assumes that you've done Halted Stream Camp and Unfothomable Depths, so that you've got Smithing to at least 30, and have the Elven Smithing perk, and you have a couple of dozen filled and unfilled soul gems to start enchanting - do the Dragonstone quest immediately after Unfathomable Depths to fill the couple of dozen unfilled soul gems you picked up. That will get your Enchanting skill to around 40, and you should have grabbed all three Enchanter perks available at that point.

Armor/Helm/Ring (or amulet): Fortify Illusion (~20% each)
Shield: Fortify Block (~30%)
Gloves/Boots/Amulet (or ring): Fortify One Handed (~30% each)

So you'll have three pieces with fortify illusion and three pieces with fortify one handed. The shield can't get either of those, and while the resist magic enchantment is tempting, physical damage reduction at this point in your character's career takes priority over elemental damage reduction. I would recommend placing soul trap on your weapon.

If you're having a hard time acquiring these three enchantments (and I concede it would take quite a bit of luck to get those exact three by level 30), then head on over to Radiant Raiment in Solitude with a few thousand gold (acquired by selling enchanted daggers). The shop owner literally has several dozen apparel options for sale, and you can almost always find whatever enchantment you're looking for here. As always, purchase the lowest level version of the enchantment available, e.g., novice illusion robes, not master.

But by late game, I would recommend the following:

Armor: Fortify Illusion and Conjuration both 29%. (With 29% reduced casting cost to Conjuration, and NO PERKS in the tree, you can summon a dremora lord for 159 magicka - just sayin')

Helm: Fortify Illusion (29%) and Fortify Archery (47%) - just because you'll use your bow occassionally on dragons, and there's nothing else on this equipment slot you really need.

Gloves: Fortify One Handed, Fortify Block (both 47%)

Boots: Fortify One Handed (47%) and Choice (I like Fortify Carry Weight)

Shield: Fortify Block (47%) and Magic Resistance (29%*)

Amulet/Ring: Fortify One Handed (47%) on both, with the other enchantment being Fortify Illusion (29%) on one, and magic resistnace on the other (if you played an Altmer and are short of the cap). If you're a Breton you're likely already at the resistance cap, and the second enchantment can be either fortify block or fortify archery.

Weapons: Flaming Soul Trap coupled with Paralyze.

* The 29% magic resistance is only attainable by disenchanting the Shield of Solitude. Any other piece of magic resistance gear will allow for a maximum of 23% resistance when applied to a shield. (You will have two separate resist magic options available on your enchant screen, with the second one only capable of being applied to shields.)

Closing remarks, and what to do beyond level 53 if you get there:

Unlike in some of my other guides, where I allowed for picking up a whole new tree, there is no real need for an additional skill to be introduced that will provide a greater benefit than further improving the ones you've already partially invested in. You can stick a couple of more points into Overdraw, or add to Shield Wall. About the only tree we haven't invested in that I can think of that provides a decent return on investment for perks would be Restoration. Novice Restoration doubles the efficacy of the basic healing spell, and Regeneration adds another +50% on top of that. And you need just level 20 in Restoration (which many races start with) to acquire those two perks.

EDIT: I just realized I alluded to, but forgot to include specific target levels for health, stamina, and magicka. And that's proboably because the answer is that it depends.

I'll start with magicka. It's possible to get away with just two pieces of -29% illusion casting cost reduction, provided you are willing to go up to around 200 total magicka. If, on the other hand, you're using a third piece of reduction gear, you are now up to a total of -87%, which is a ton. Now I would adjust my magicka allocation to how much I need for other schools, as illusion is no longer the highest requirement. As I said above, one piece of conjuration reduction gear at -29% brings down the casting cost of a dremora lord to 159 at conjuration level 75 (and you can't buy the spell before that, so you'll be at least level 75). In that case the target level for magicka should be 160. If you don't want to use any other spells except things like transmute and the basic healing spell, you may even be able to get away with base magicka (with three pieces of reduce casting cost gear), although that would get tedious, especially if you transmute a lot of ore. So I can only give you a ballpark number here. Depending on your exact gear setup, somewhere between 160-200 magicka is what you'll likely need.

Stamina is "season to taste". It all depends on what you like here. Bashing does take a lot of stamina, but since the build focuses on limiting the number of enemies you fight at once, it's not like you should be in prolonged sustained combat. You're also wearing light armor, so you won't tire out that fast while running or fighting. But stamina also affects your carry weight, which for me is very important (I take the extra pockets perk every single build to raise it by 100). So again I'm going to give a range. I seriously doubt that anyone likes stamina as much as me, and even I can never justify taking it beyond 300 with any of my characters - I can't see how you could possibly need more than that. But you definintely need enough for a few power bashes without running out, so I wouldn't recommend going with less than 200 either. So depending on your playstyle, I'd look for 200-300 stamina.

Health gets everything else, and once you get to level 40-45, health will be getting ALL of your level up increases. I'd highly recommend you satisfying your magicka requirement fairly early in the game - nothing is worse that getting a new spell that you can't use because you don't have enough magicka. And I also like to get my stamina up fairly early. So what I did was I rotated between the three until I got all of them to 160. Then I alternated between health and stamina until they were both at 300, and then I went exclusively health after that. My current character has over 400 health.

 

Interesting build, and aptly named.

I know you can backstab from invisibility by activating sneak, but is it possible for this character to spam invisbility and then backstab over and over?

 

Interesting build. I never thought of being an illusionist. My current character is destruction and restoration primarily.

Have you added any spell mods?

 

Sounds like the good old Nightblade!

 

Invisibility works a lot like the Sneak perk Shadow Warrior, in that if you are outisde of melee range, the opponent will lose sight of you and start searching. However, it doesn't seem to work if you're already in melee range. The other point is that unless you want to wear 4 pieces of illusion cost reduction gear (in which case you may as well also use the master level spells), spamming invisibility is a rather magicka-intensive proposition. I suppose it's possible, but I really only use invisibility when it's a single enemy to begin with. It should be pointed out that Invisibility + Muffle makes you COMPLETELY undetectable, short of walking into the opponent, which breaks the invisibility.

My now 5-year old pestered the hell out of me until I bought a Kinect. So I play on a 360. My PC is way old at this point (circa 2005), and I couldn't even run Skyrim on it. So no mods or patches other than the official ones.

Bah! Call it that if you must. Perhaps other people with similar builds call it that, but the foppish version of the Nightblade is the MIND FLAYER damn it! And no, I never heard of no stinkin' nightblade. Nightingale, yes. Nightblade, no.

 

°_°

Ok, I get the message!
Nightingale, yessir. Epic achievement!

 

Thanks for the extended explanation on Illusion. That ought to be an eye-opener for many. And as far as mind-bogglingly annoying monsters go, cheers for picking the REALLY nasty one out of the bunch!

Although it DOES require the mindset of one to actually play this one successfully. Ruthless forcing of your own will upon the poor sods - or you might as well pick something else.

 

And that's why I listed this reason as a con in the opening part of the description. To put it as bluntly as possible, the novice and apprentice skills in illusion suck. Their affect limits are so low and result in insta-detection that they are near-useless until you get Kindred Mage and Quiet Casting, and by that point, you have access to Frenzy, so you never really want to use those low level spells at all.

That's also why I stated that you need to power level illusion up to 50 before it becomes worth your while, and if you have no interest in doing so, this build probably isn't for you. You have to dedicate yourself to its use - going so far as to spend at least two, if not three of your precious enchantment slots on reducing the cost of illusion, at a point in time when you can only place one enchantment on items.

That said, it is very satisfying to have a room full of enemies, cast frenzy, let them have at each other for about 15 seconds, then drop a dremora lord into the fray. I cleared a room containing two draugr overlords, two draugr wights or restless draugr (I forget which), a dragon priest (one of the generic ones, not a named one) using this method, and I didn't even have to draw my sword.

 

Playing this build in my current play-through, and I'm having a blast!

It plays a lot different from how I usually do it, and it has a bit of a learning curve after you first start using frenzy. It's a lot of fun to just sit there and watch them slaughter each other though!

The only situations that are somewhat troublesome for me at this point in my characters career are: Dragons in the wild, groups of Mages (they take forever to kill each other ), and whenever I am forced to have "helpers" with me (Like in Ironbind Barrow).

I haven't leveled alchemy yet (I hate doing it!), which, I suppose, is why the dragons are giving me a bit of trouble; seeing as I have not super-charged my gear yet, and do not have a plethora of powerful potions and poisons at my disposal.

I am considering using the Legendary option on pickpocket as I don't really need to pick pockets any more, seeing as I can always making "Banish" daggers to gain enough money for training, or whatever (I still have 50 or so of those laying around in Breezehome!). Only thing holding me back is that I'd be loosing the convenience of the Extra Pockets perk.
I'd use the perk points on smithing so I can go Dragon Smithing.