TES Skyrim: Healer Playing Style

Skyrim Play Style: Healer (Support Role)

Role:

Primary - Keep your follower in tip top shape through healing and buffs
Secondary - Undermine your enemies with turn and banish if they are undead or summons and cause everyone else to stop attacking or run away

Arcane Schools:

1. Restoration - primary focus if going for early survivability
2. Illusion - illusion will ultimately be better than restoration given the spells available
3. Conjuration - This is a viable replacement for Illusion as it serves a dual purpose; summon draws aggro and deals damage. This can really help both you and your follower and a master conjurer can have up to a total of 7 helpers on the field at once (Dragon Priest summon, Dragon Priest's summon, Follower, Follower's summon, Follower's summon's summon if it is a Demora Lord summoned by Sanguine Rose, Dog, and Horse)

Races:

High Elf - Provides a higher illusion boost and the highest magical boosts. The magicka regeneration power really helps if you are able to stay out of trouble effectively.
Breton - Provides survivability edge early one with passive resistances towards magic and Dragonhide power, but you tend to run out of magicka faster.

Early Game:

You are completely useless early game save against the undead, so the basic strategy is simple; stand behind your follower and heal. That being said, remember that your role is still support. This means that if they are almost downed or dead, step in the way of that Thunderbolt if you have to. It is easier to heal yourself then finding another follower or waiting for him to get back up. A good way to keep your follower alive would be to stack him with the majority of the health potions and keep the magicka ones for yourself.

Earliest actual follower you can get will be Sven or Faendal. While both are not ideal followers for supporters (they lean towards staying in the back and shooting arrows), it is better than nothing. The best way to utilize these followers will be to to run in to draw enemy aggro and then run and hide behind them as the mobs chase you. My suggestion is to wait until you get to Whiterun and wail on Uthgerd in Bannered Mare until she becomes your follower. She is a much better tank as she specializes in HA, OH, and blocking, meaning she is always up close and personal. If you somehow managed to accumulate 500 gold, Marcurio (spellsword) is a GREAT follower for you. He is an all-around spellsword with sneak and can use OH fairly effectively.

My suggestion is to b-line to the College of Winterhold via carriage in the Whiterun stable and if not start the quests for the college, at least pick up a free ward spell from Toledfir during his lesson. You should also make sure to pick up a target healing spell and other spells (restoration and conjuration/illusion)

Recommended Followers:

- Mjoll the Lioness
- Aranea Ienith
- Marcurio
- In truth, any tanky DPS melee or mid range casters will work those I prefer those mentioned above

Skill Trees to Avoid:

- Any offense minded skill tree (destruction, OH, 2H)
- Speechcraft
- Alteration

Heavy Armor VS Light Armor VS Clothing

- HA provides the most protection, but really limits your mobility. Good mage players learn how to kite effectively, so armor in general can be entirely avoided. However, if you are having a hard time staying out of range, HA will be able to protect you when melee mobs get close.
- LA, while not nearly as protective as HA, offers a good amount of protection without sacrificing too much mobility. The downside is that neither HA or LA have as good benefits for casters as normal clothing does.
- Clothing offers no protection, but are very light and tends to come with the best enchantments for mages. With clothing, you significantly lower your CW and move at top speed.

Hope this helps people!

Destruction spells are definitely helpful and a viable alternative to conjuration or illusion. Thing is, not only has that been overdone by players, there are plenty of destruction and restoration specialist NPC's in the game as well. The real purpose of this guide was to introduce another way of playing Skyrim that is viable and can also be enjoyable.





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Enjoyable is a subjective terminology, especially since there are people who do not enjoy three-shotting Ancient Dragons. You can find plenty of people in the Skyrim Discussion and Impressions thread who actually find the game too easy and resort to not wearing armor and using lesser weapons to make it more challenging. I personally found my army of summons and follower enjoyable and plenty powerful. It requires more micromanaging to keep them all healthy and topped off, but they are still more than useful on Master difficulty. Now this play style is not for everyone. It is primarily for people to consider who have become bored at the more common TES classes and would like to try something else that is still viable. Would I suggest this for everyone? Not at all!

It also depends on how you are playing too. You level XP is determined through leveling skills, such as sneak, illusion, one handed, ect. This means that if you do nothing but smith and enchant, you can still gain levels, but your combat skills will be lacking. IMHO, increasing your levels without actually increasing your combat ability is not a great idea.