That'll be enough to kill random wildlife I should have thought. The monsters level with you, so initial spells should serve you fine until you hit higher levels. You may want to lay off exploring tombs and the like for a little while though.
'Points' are points of health - you can get a rough idea of the damage by right-clicking and moving your mouse over your red health bar which will reveal your detailed HP status. Obviously a rat will have many less HP than you, a barbarian probably significantly more.
Levitate is also surprisingly useful - fighters can't hit you when you're 5 feet above their heads
Well worth investing in a bow at first or the bound longbow spell, because you'll struggle to cope with just your spells at the beginning (at least that was my experience).
Practice your primary skills whenever you can. Just walking through the countryside casting random fireballs will mean you become more skilled, so if you're on a long journey with nothing better to do, that might not be a bad idea.
I ended up downloading a couple of mods to rebalance the mage class, allowing your mana to slowly recharge being the main improvement. I found this kept the difficulty more similar to the other classes, as I thought mages were very weak and the game therefore too hard. Having said that, I'd played through the game a couple of times first - if it's your first game, then definitely don't touch them - play it as the game is meant to be played. Plus it was before I was told the levitate tactic and discovered how useful chameleon was
Above all, avoid letting anything with a weapon get within 50 feet of you
Levitate, destroy.
PS Don't use fire on Dunmer (the grey-skinned elves) - they're rather resistant to it. It will earn you a quick death. Took me ages to realise why they weren't dying... [img]smile.gif[/img]
[ 10-16-2004, 08:17 PM: Message edited by: shamrock_uk ]