Grim in Rim - Back with a Vengence. Part 3.

This really shouldn't be its own part. Thanks dA. Sorry folks.

Mage

Note: All spell schools contain perks of novice, apprentice, adept, expert and master spell casting. These all do exactly the same thing, which is decrease the cost of spells at that level by half. Generally you are forced to take these to branch out to the actually useful perks in each skill. As your main goal is to have 100% free magic casting, these perks are to avoided as much as possible.

All spell schools also allow you to dual cast most spells once you choose that perk. Dual casting eats magic like crazy, but allows you to have a slightly more powerful spell. Because of the extreme similarities between each school, only the unique perks for each shall be listed.

Alteration

Alteration is easily the most ignored school of spells, though with good reason. Almost nothing here is useful for a very long time. Only upon reaching the higher ranks of the skill do the perks become worthwhile and the spells actually have a genuine use.

Atronach - 30% spell absorption. This means everything except your own healing spells, for good or for bad. Great for decreasing the threat of mages and dragon breath even further, since magic resistance and magic absorption are two totally different things. The only downside is if you use summoning spells, they now have a 30% chance to fail and simply get absorbed back into your magic. Combined with the Atronach standing stone, you will have an 80% spell absorption. Truly a powerful defensive perk... if you can spend the time and the perks needed to get to it. Conjurer mages stay away though.

Mage Armor - Up to 3 ranks. Increases the power of armor spells up to 3 times their original power... but ONLY if you have no armor ranking to begin with. Have a helmet? Too bad, no effect. An extremely questionable perk to bother with, since armor does not effect spell casting in any way unlike Oblivion. You can wear the heaviest armor in the world and you'll still cast spells like a champ, same as if you were just wearing a robe. By the time this perk could be of any use, you'll likely already have far superior armor already equipped, as the highest armor you can have with the best armor spell only gives you 300 armor. And since this is a spell... only got 60 seconds before that armor poofs away. Simply not worth it under just about every circumstance.

Magic Resistance - Up to 3 ranks. 10% damage decrease of incoming hostile spells/dragon breath per rank. With a dark elf or nord, you could nearly max out magic resistance of fire or frost attacks even without any armor.

Stability - All alteration spells last 50% longer. This also effects the Slow Time Dragon shout. Between that and lengthening paralysis effects, the only reason to bother with this perk.

Spells of Alteration

Ash Rune - Dragonborn DLC spell only. Plop it on the ground and whatever enemy it hits cannot attack or be attacked for 30 seconds. Good for thinning the crowd for a short time.

Candlelight/Magelight - Magelight sends out a glowing orb to fly towards whatever you're aiming at. Candlelight is the same, it just floats above you instead. Magic torches that don't take up weight, essentially.

Detect Life/Undead - Mostly for assassins who need to plan ahead, this spell is exactly what it sounds like. While being cast, these spells let you see thru walls to determine what and how many are lurking nearby. Of very limited use however without some magic cost reducing equipment, because the magic cost per second to cast this is absurdly high.

Dragonhide - A useful spell hampered by its laughable length, spell cost, and animation to actually cast. Dragonhide instantly increases your armor rating to the cap of 542... for 30 seconds. It also takes 5 seconds to cast, so forget about using it again in the middle of a battle. Because of the length of the spell, it's just not worth it. Even with increases to make it 45 seconds, that's just pathetic.

Equilibrium - Transfers health to your magic reserves. Almost exclusively just used by people to farm restoration magic training. Hurt themselves with this spell, then use healing spells to gain it back. There are better ways to farm restoration magic, but if you happen to stumble across it, might as well use it while traveling to slowly gain exp.

Oak/Stone/Iron/Ebony Flesh - Armor buffs for a minute. Quick to cast and easy to use. A shame the mage armor perks are so utterly picky,  but these spells on their own are handy helpers to bump up your armor just a little bit more, even those who don't focus on magic at all.

Paralyze/Mass Paralysis - Exactly what they sound like. Expensive to cast, but can totally shut down a one on one fight. Can actually affect the few enemies that the paralyzing poisons can't effect.

Telekinesis - Pull something towards you from far away for a ridiculous amount of magic. More for training alteration skill than anything of actual use. No pulling things thru grates in a doorway, no flipping switches from far away, just a sad and useless spell.

Transmute Ore - Iron ore becomes silver ore becomes gold ore. Each time cast, one piece of your ore gets upgraded. Gotta find this spell on your own, but not a bad way to enhance your money making. Iron mines are plentiful in this game.

Water Breathing - Better off as an enchantment, but if you can't find one, this spell has you covered.

Final analysis: The spells are of extremely limited use beyond the beginning spells of candlelight and the armor buffs. The skill tree is laughable beyond the extreme magic defense you can gain if you're willing to sacrifice about ten levels of perks to get them and spend a few hours grinding for alteration experience. An almost completely forgetable spell group.

Conjuration

Tied with Illusion as the best spellcasting group, the usefulness of spells in this group only grows the more you level it up. The only downside to this school of magic is that it's vulnerable to your spell absorption defense if you have any. Having a 50% magic absorption will mean you will fail your casts 50% of the time when summoning helpers.
Because there's QUITE a bit of things you can summon in the game, especially if you have the add-ons, I'm only listing the basics of each spell.

Dark Souls/Necromancy - Direct upgrades to the raise dead spells. Dark Souls gives your new undead minion 100 extra HP and Necromancy keeps them active a bit longer. Necromancy perk loses usefulness at end game since you eventually obtain a final raise dead spell with no time limit.

Elemental Potency/Atromancy - Direct upgrades to the elemental summon spells. Elemental Potency makes your elemental beings 50% more powerful, and Atromancy keeps them active a bit longer. Just like with the Necromancy perk, Atromancy also loses usefulness upon gaining the final versions of the elemental spells with no time limit.

Mystic Binding/Oblivion Binding/Soul Stealer - Direct upgrades to the bound weapon spells. Mystic binding upgrades the weapon to deal more damage and in the case of the bow upgrades both the bow and the arrows to deal quite a bit more damage than even your smithing will be able to do with it for quite some time. Oblivion Binding will banish (instantly kill) anything that enemy mages can summon when hit with the bound weapon. Soul Stealer allows you to steal the souls of anything killed with your bound weapon, effectively acting as a much more effective soul trap than the actual spell of Soul Trap.

Summoner - 2 ranks. Each rank increases the range you can cast reanimate dead or summon elemental spells. While always better to have your summons ready to roll before combat even starts, if it dies during the fight you can use the extra range from this perk to let it throw some spells at the enemy before they get within attacking distance.

Twin Souls- You can have 2 summons active instead of 1. Get the army growing.

Spells of Conjuration

Banish - Instantly kill enemy summons. Better off just used naturally on your bound weapon.

Bound Weapon - With the right spell you can summon a magical dagger, battleaxe, sword or bow. Bow is especially handy to keep on hand since it not only gives you the best arrows in the game, it also always supplies you with 100 arrows when cast.  Extremely useful spells to have, especially if you don't bother to level smithing up.

Reanimate Dead - Even the odds in any fight by bringing someone's dead friend back to life to join team dragonborn. Even if they're completely useless in the fight, they're still an extra target for enemies to focus on and take the heat off you for a short while. Think of it as body recycling.

Soul Trap - For a short while, if an enemy is killed their soul may get absorbed into a soul gem you're carrying, if you have a soul gem with a large enough capacity for it. Better off just used naturally on your bound weapon, since you won't have to worry about the duration of the effect. Since you can SEE the bound weapon, you know you can still soul trap the thing as opposed to vaguely guessing how much time you have left to kill it with this spell.

Summon Elemental - Fire, ice, and electricity elementals. They're completely immune to their respective elements, so keep em handy when those annoying mages come by.

Final Analysis: I fully realize I'm giving the conjuration spells a very basic coverage here, but there really are so many things you can summon and of various strengths it'd just be a constant repetition of names that mean nothing to you until you've actually played the game. There are two INCREDIBLY useful conjure spells that are worth your time to get that didn't get covered in detail. Dremora Lord and Arniel's Shade. They can only last for a minute in battle, but they're wicked powerful and worth a try.

This skill and its skill tree are pretty rock solid. The perks are all direct upgrades to your overall spells with very little waste. Even the spells themselves are constantly upgraded versions of the basic version, and while the spells of Banish and Soul Trap are useless on their own, it's understandable they're available on their own for the sake of choice.

Destruction

It's necessary to state that destruction magic's usefulness is completely dependent on your difficulty setting. Since you CANNOT raise magic damage in this game to anywhere near the levels of physical attacks, using destruction magic above any difficulty level beyond Adept is akin to suicide or absolute tedium. At Adept rating, damage is 1:1 for you and your enemy, no bonuses or penalties to either side. Bothering with this spell class beyond that difficulty is not enjoyable or rewarding in the slightest.

That said, just like with the melee weapon skill trees, you'll likely turn specialist if you dive into this skill tree unless you REALLY want to spend a ton of perks. Fire deals extra damage for a short while. Frost damages stamina as a secondary effect and slows the enemy down for a short while. Electricity damages magic as a secondary effect and can shut down an enemy mage, but costs the most out of all three elements to cast.

Just like with conjuration, I'm only listing the basics of each spell type, since they're available in each element and almost all behave the same way.

Augment Element - 2 ranks for all 3 elements. 25% damage increase each time towards the damage dealt with that element, INCLUDING enchanted weapon damage. The only way to raise damage on spells, aside from dual casting.

Deep Freeze/Disintegrate/Intense Flames - These unlock a third effect for each elemental. Deep Freeze acts as a paralysis spell once an enemy gets below 20% health. Intense Flames acts as a fear spell once an enemy gets below 20% health. Disintegrate instantly kills an enemy below 15% health and turns them into ash, so they cannot be used for necromancy. Or... it's supposed to. I've seen multiple instances where disintegrate simply never activates, even after completely killing an enemy using nothing but spark spells, the body will not turn to ash.

Obviously the advantage goes to Disintegrate, but let's not ignore Deep Freeze too much. That paralysis along with the constant stamina damage your frost spells are doing will really put the hurt on melee enemies. Since they can't do power attacks if stamina is shot, you're taking a lot less damage as well. Intense Flames... is more of an annoyance than a perk. If you wanna use fear, cast fear spells. Humans below 10% health drop to the ground and beg for mercy, so really you're looking at a 10% window of opportunity to get any use out of the thing. Do you really wanna spend time hunting down folks that you're trying to kill now that they're running away from you? Unfortunately, having intense flames unlocked is also the only way to unlock the bonus damage from the illusion perk aspect of fear. Extra damage if you can lock em into a corner though.

Impact - Dual casting spells allow you to stagger enemies. Entirely possible to lock someone down with this and slowly kill them. Not of much use otherwise, since if you're fighting more than one person, staggering them only stops them for a second and the other folks are right on your tail the whole time.

Rune Master - Can cast rune spells up to 5 times farther away, making the rune spells all the more viable to use.

Spells of Destruction

Cloak - Element wraps around you dealing 8 damage a second to enemies for a short time if they're standing right next to you. Exactly the same as the Dark Elf race power. A very weak spell of very limited use, especially considering the magic cost of it. Save your money and your time, get something else instead. Mages shouldn't be in melee combat range anyways.

Handspray - Shoot element out of your hand for 8 damage a second. The basic opening spells that do the basic job that they were made to do. Flame spells can ignite oil spills that you may come across in dungeons, doing even more damage if enemies are standing in it or wander into it while it burns. Because of the absurd magic costs for most of the other spells, this will likely be your go-to spell until you obtain 100% magic reduction.

There is a second version of the handsprays called walls. They need to be fired onto the ground and enemies need to walk into them, but they do quite a bit more damage (though the game LIES about the amount of damage it deals) and stay on the ground for a short while. Consider it a direct upgrade.

Walls claim they do 50 points of damage a second. They actually do only 20 points of damage a second. Be extremely aware of this.

Missile - 25 damage for the light variation, 60 damage for the heavy variation and 40 damage for the area spread variation. Fire spread missile acts as a giant explosion. Frost spread missile continues in whatever direction you fire, damaging anything and everything it touches. Lightning spread missile is the weakest of the bunch. 40 damage to the first target, 20 damage to the next it jumps to and it CAN jump to allies.

Rune - 50 damage to enemies. Quick to cast, decent damage. Handy to use while retreating since you can just throw em on the ground in front of you, run over it and let the idiots behind you eat death. With rune master perk, you can easily set traps from a distance before the fight starts to give yourself an advantage.

Storm - The final spells, all drastically different. They all take 5 seconds to cast and demand you stand still while doing so. This is nearly unforgivable, and two of the storms are downright sad.

Fire storm is just another giant explosion centered around you, dealing 100 damage plus extra damage near the center and dealing less and less damage the farther away from ground zero. This spell is more than worthless, it's a handicap. The time to cast it doesn't equal nearly enough damage as opposed to rapid firing runes that don't have this "range = damage dealt" restriction. It also sends items flying everywhere, so don't cast it near quest items you have to pick up. Might knock it somewhere unreachable. Just 3 fire runes = more damage done, quicker damage done, AND able to move from enemies while casting. A failure of a final spell.

Blizzard is large ice storm that hurts EVERYTHING in it for low amounts of ice damage, 20 per second, for 10 seconds. Problem: That includes you. Double problem: The spell is CENTERED AROUND YOU. The only real use this spell has is just enemy slowdown. Except that you have to waste 5 seconds to cast the damn thing to start with while standing still. So while they're running towards you, you could start casting, unleash the spell when they get next to you and run away while they're stuck in the storm? I guess? Still better than Fire storm, but another handicap of a spell.

Lightning storm is the only true final spell. Unlike the others, this is actually powerful and useful and is the ONLY spell that can justify its standing still casting handicap. Lightning storm is actually a super powered lightning handspray attack, dealing 75 glorious damage a second AND can be cast for as long as you have the magic. Stand your ground, say your chant, and turn the whole damn combat zone into ash.

Final Analysis: It's a mixed bag all over the place with this skill. Fire spells themselves are mostly useless one shot explosions but many enemies in the game, like vampires, are weak to fire. As such, there are many cases where you will never truly know how much damage you're doing. Ice spells are great for taking out melee damage threats but almost everything in the northern part of Skyrim is part ice/snow so they resist a good bit of ice damage. Nords automatically take 50% less damage because of their passive race bonus, plus vampires laugh off ice damage too. Lightning has no enemies weak to or strong against it (except storm elementals which just absorb it), but its spread damage spell is easily the worst of the bunch. Plus, until endgame gear comes your way, lightning spells are mp hogs. Once you have unlimited magic however, it emerges the victor in every single way especially with the disintegrate perk.

Enchanting

Another part of the trinity of power. Enchanting grants incredible passive powers the further it is refined. Requires outside help however, as items with enchantments have to be found and sacrificed first to learn how to imbue equipment with that particular enchantment from now on. Enchanting is also a way to earn absurd amounts of money as endgame approaches. Buy cheap weapons, throw enchants on it, sell it for 100x what it was originally worth. For example, buying an iron dagger for 10 gold then throwing a banish enchantment on it suddenly sells for a 1000+ gold. Always double check all your enchantments first before deciding on one to use for money gathering, because costs vary wildly and for no real reason.

As a word of caution: Even after I personally thought I understood everything about enchanting, I was still able to learn more and more about just how extremely powerful this can get with the right perks and the right gear setup. I will try to cover them all in the final analysis.

Enchanter - 5 ranks, 20% increase in power to all enchantments per rank. Not very noticeable on its own since the enchanting skill itself increases your enchants by 1% every two points, but is still necessary for squeaking out a few more percentage points on your endgame enchants.

Element/Skill Enchanter- Perks for raising the power of fire, ice, or electricity enchantments by 25%. Combined with augmented element perks, your fire sword could be in a whole new class of power. Two other perks can also increase the power of health/magic/stamina enchantments by 25% and the final one covers every other enchantment in the game. Just simple and straight boosts to your power.

Extra Effect - Two enchants can be placed on each piece of equipment. Doubling the potential of this already incredibly powerful skill makes this the number one perk to get ASAP.

Soul Siphon - Killing living creatures, not humans, fill your weapon's magical energy by 5%. A useless perk in every single way. Your weapons cannot switch off the magical effects, so whatever energy you just gained from killing a wolf or bear didn't matter, since you likely used more energy to kill the stupid thing. It basically only gives you one extra charge of power on your weapon only when its completely empty and only when you kill a bunch of animals in a row. Extremely rare this will ever get used, and even rarer you'll notice it even had any effect.

Soul Squeezer - Get a few more charges worth of energy out of each soul gem you use to recharge magical weapons.

Final Analysis: Unless you're playing a deliberate challenge run, every single playstyle in the game can benefit immensely from the power of enchanting. Double the power of your alchemy creations or weapon damage. Improve weapons so much farther that anything you find naturally in the game, both by the power of smithing and by the additional effects of elemental damage. Need money? 5 minutes with the banish enchantment and you'll find yourself getting annoyed at how little money merchants are carrying, because you already got all the gold in town just by pawning off 3 daggers.

Because enchanting is dependent on so many factors, its hard to give exact descriptions on what exactly is the most useful thing. 5 ranks of enchanter to double its power plus the other perks to increase the power another 25% plus having your enchanting skill at max... and then on top of all that, the rank of the soul gem you use to do the deed.  Even after all this, if you have the perks of elemental damage bonuses from the destruction perk tree, it could contribute even more to offense oriented enchants. They're all connected, and its nearly impossible to yank a piece out of that to examine on its own and say matter of factly "Oh, this part of equation contributed X amount of percentage to the final result."

Be aware that some enchants are flat bonuses. Muffle and waterbreathing grant the same power regardless of the gem used, since you can't have various degrees of completely silent or having to breath underwater or not. They're just switches. You either got em or you don't.

It is with enchanting that magic can become completely free to cast, but it also has a secondary bonus that isn't completely obvious at first. Because you're enchanting the cost of an entire school of magic to nothing that can ALSO effect weapons with spell effects from that class.  For example, fire magic is from destruction skill. As said above, you can increase damage from a fire damage enchant on a weapon with the fire damage increase perk, but that's not all you can do. Combining this with a 100% magic use elimination of destruction magic spells, you also completely eliminate the cost of magic charges on your weapon, since it is now using destruction magic effects. Wearing 100% magic elimination on your armor means your weapon will ALWAYS AND FOREVER be dealing that extra damage. Combine that with extra effect to put a second offensive spell on it and your sword is easily dealing 60+ more damage with every single strike just with magic damage alone.

It's quite common to keep multiple sets of clothing nearby once you really dive into the power of enchanting, because you can do SO much with it. Need to sell some stuff? Equip some clothes with 50% price increases. Need to steal things? 120% harder to see with a full set of sneaking clothes. Taking on a dragon? Swap some pieces of equipment and deal double the archery damage.

All hail enchanting. Ruler of Skyrim.

Illusion

Tied with Conjuration as the best spellcasting group, being an illusion focused mage exclusively is a totally viable way to fight against nearly everything, and a very fascinating one. Doesn't work on undead, machines or dragons.

Animage/Kindred Mage - Basic upgrades to all illusion spells that let you affect higher level animals and humans respectively. Simple and straightforward.

Aspect of Terror/Hypnotic Gaze/Rage - More straight forward upgrades. Boosts the level range of calm, fear and rage spells so you can hit more powerful enemies with it. Of note, Aspect of Terror increases the damage of some fire spells slightly due to the fear effect they can gain with the intense flames perk. Because of that connection to illusion, Aspect of Terror buffs them as well.

Master of the Mind - Lets you be able to cast spells on the undead and machines now. Dragons remain the sole defying force of the illusion spells.

Quiet Casting - One of the best perks in the game for its range of usefulness. Spells AND dragon shouts are now silent to the enemy. Set up runes without anyone noticing. Cast muffle and invisible before walking around a corner filled with enemies and laugh as you waltz right past them without a care in the world. Makes rage spells even more useful, since enemies just assume their ally went insane all of a sudden without looking for any random noises. And most fun of all, using unrelenting force shouts to push folks of a mountain and not have the rest of the base know you're there.

Spells of Illusion

Calm - Chill an enemy out. Handy for looting an area without having to kill someone or just to instantly take someone out of a group fight for a short while. Cancels out as soon as attacked, so if you must attack, use their calm status to set yourself up for a sneak attack strike instead.

Clairvoyance - Makes a glowing path for you to follow to your next quest marker for as long as it's cast. Annoying mazes with crappy maps are no longer any problem with this handy thing.

Courage/Rally/Call to Arms - All the same effect, the target gets bonus health and stamina and doesn't run away. Courage is single target, rally is multi-target. Call to Arms is the strongest and largest of them all, increasing all combat skills for 10 minutes of EVERYONE in the nearby area, which can include enemies.

Unfortunately in almost every situation, courage spells are really of extremely limited use because you're far more powerful than your measly mortal allies. Buffed your partner up with this spell? Great, time to strike! Then you proceed to kill every enemy in the room while your partner is still working on taking down their first enemy to half health.

You COULD make an argument about courage spells if you're playing on higher difficulties, at which point they do (slowly and barely) gain an actual use. Higher difficulty settings only decrease the amount of damage YOU do. Not your allies. So... it's an option at that point. Cast that to buff your buddies up  while you sit back and do absolutely nothing. But even with this extremely specific scenario, rage spells can cut a group of enemies down just fine on its own and it keeps you and your allies completely safe in the process. Bottom line, unless you're fighting something with allies that you just HAVE to kill and HAVE to do it on a higher difficulty, you'll never cast these.

Fear - Chills an enemy out and makes them run away. Just like calm, it can instantly take someone out of a group fight or be used to shoo someone away while you loot. This doesn't make calm completely pointless however, since enemies could always run away deeper into the base and alert others of your location. Obviously harder to set up sneak attacks on someone afraid of you as well. Unlike calm, fear does NOT cancel out when attacked. Get them in a corner and hack away if stealth is not your strong suit.

Invisibility - Exactly what it says. Can still be detected by a few ways even while active however. Bumping into someone obviously makes them aware that SOMETHING is there. You also make noise while moving unless you have the muffle enchantment or the silent movement perk. Unfortunately, upon doing ANYTHING beyond moving or jumping, invisibility instantly goes away. Open a door? Poof. Pickpocket someone? Poof. There is only one strangely specific action you can do that keeps invisibility. Using a vampire calming power on a human to get them to stand still for a bit, you can then feed on them. For some reason, this and only this doesn't break invisibility. Eat with immunity.

Honestly, it's a damn shame. How much more useful could this spell have gotten if it didn't have those restrictions? How much more frightening could some enemy encounters be if they cast invisibility and then struck at you? You can still see an outline of an enemy, you just have to pay real close attention. Invisibility is fine on its own, but it had the potential for so much more. Both for you and your enemies.

Muffle - Makes your movement silent for 30 seconds, and also a very quick way to level up illusion skill. Can become useless later in the game as you can gain permanent muffle effects with the silent movement perk or a muffle enchantment on your gear. It may have a short use lifespan, but getting the skill to 100 while just walking around from A to B makes it a very productive lifespan.

Rage - Enemies attack anyone and anything near them, so be a sneaky mage while casting. The safest way in the game to bring a group threat down to just one person. Enjoy the chaos.

Final Analysis: Illusion is great. The perks are simple and direct, just like with conjuration, making everything more and more powerful. Calm and Fear are similar, yes, but the little differences between them make them both equally useful and recommended. With mastery of this skill, you need fear no group of enemies in the entire game.

Try a pacifist run of the game out. You just might be surprised how much use you can get out of this skill.

Restoration

The ultimate question to how truly useful the perks for Restoration are for you is this: Are you a vampire? If you are, get the necromage perk before you get anything else in the entire game. If you're not, well... there's still a few things here for you, but most of its dead by endgame.

Avoid Death - Upon reaching less than 10% health, you automatically regain 250 health one per day. Sounds great on paper, right? This perk is useless. This perk only kicks in if you happen to reach less than 10% of your health AND CAN STILL TAKE ANOTHER HIT. Get really slammed by something? Oops, too bad, avoid death never kicks in. Get caught in a bullshit cinematic kill? Oops again.

Because of this magical zone you have to land in, this perk sees almost ZERO use, especially on higher difficulties. This perk should automatically kick in and give you an extra 250 hp upon hitting zero once a day. Or hell, even 50 hp. Just bring the player back from death as an accident buffer perk.

Necromage - THE perk for vampires. Officially, this perk is only supposed to grant 25% effectiveness to spells against undead, so your undead repelling works on higher level enemies or you deal more damage against them.

But being a vampire also means that YOU are undead.

Welcome to the glorious world of number abuse. Being undead yourself, all enchantments on your armor and quite a few perks are counted as spell effects... which mean they ALSO get that 25% effectiveness. Smith better, make greater potions, get even more defense potential. With the atronach standing stone and the atronach perk being 25% more effective, they just so happen to stretch out JUST far enough to give yourself 100% spell absorption when combined with the necromage perk. Laugh at mages and stab in the face, they can never touch you again. Dragons can breath fire on you all day long, you can just ignore them now.

HOWEVER. It must be noted that necromage only works on perks and standing stone bonuses if you obtain them AFTER you get the necromage perk. While you can always switch between standing stones to refresh it and get the necromage bonuses afterwards, but with perks, you're out of luck if you got them before necromage.

Recovery - 2 ranks. 25% magic regeneration increase for each rank. Useless at endgame, as said before.

Regeneration - Healing spells do 50% more. A simple and direct upgrade that always has a use for even the non-magic users.

Respite - Healing spells also heal stamina. Another great upgrade to healing spells, which can see quite a bit of use if you like running all over the place.

Ward Absorb - Ward spells absorb magic that hit them. Of limited use because of the absurd cost of ward spells in the first place, and by endgame you're better off going full offense to stop the pain from lasting a second longer than it has to anyways. The only real use it has is stopping a dragon's breath from hitting you.

Spells of Restoration

Healing - First level is slow 8 health a second recovery, but every level beyond that grants an instant amount of health upon being cast making it infinitely more useful. Also variations to heal allies.

Repel Undead - Fear spell for the undead. Better off just using fear spells from the illusion school if you really want to cast fear, but repel undead DOES have a use as a great way to increase restoration levels. Trap an undead somewhere and fire away, easily the quickest way by far to level this skill up.

Sun - An offensive spell to damage undead and only available with the Dawnguard DLC. Just use your destruction magic. Vampires are naturally weak to fire.

Ward - Puts up a magic shield to give you a small bit of extra armor for as long as you're casting the spell. As stated before, of very limited use not only because of all the far better spells you can use to avoid taking damage in the first place, but the block skill is just flat out superior in every single way if you want a shield.

Final Analysis: With endgame in mind, its VERY hard to recommend bothering with this skill at all unless you plan to be a vampire. It really is all about Necromage. Regeneration and respite can be useful, yes, but the skill points required to reach them in the first place require restoration skill grinding. Ward Absorb, Recovery and Avoid Death though? Wastes. Avoid Death in particular I simply cannot forgive for its shoddy execution in-game and was the reason I eventually abandoned my legendary difficulty run.