Illusion magic is way more broken than Necromage and nobody notices

[DragonbornVet]

Been replaying with a pure Illusion build on Legendary and I'm genuinely shocked how little people talk about this. Like yeah, Necromage is busted if you stack it right, but at least you need to be a vampire and do some setup. Illusion? You get Mayhem and Fury spells and the game just stops working.

Cast Mayhem in a bandit camp and watch them kill each other while you stand there. The AI has no counter to it. Enemies don't break the spell, they just attack whoever they think is closest and it cascades into total chaos. Add in Invisibility and you're basically untouchable. I'm not even using Quiet Casting and it doesn't matter because everything's too busy fighting itself.

The weird part is how underrated it feels in the community. Everyone talks about stealth archer being broken or how Necromage trivializes everything, but Illusion lets you literally skip combat encounters. At least with Necromage you're still dealing damage. With Illusion you're just watching the game play itself.

Anyone else run pure Illusion on higher difficulties? Does it ever feel actually challenging or is it just the same "cast spell, wait" loop the whole way through?

 

[ScrollsOfTamriel]

Yeah, Illusion is absolutely ridiculous once you get the mass-affect spells rolling. Mayhem especially - the fact that enemies will just turn on each other and you can basically afk while they solve the problem for you is kind of absurd. I think part of why it gets less attention than Necromage is just... it's less flashy? Like Necromage gets talked about because the damage numbers are insane and visible. Illusion just makes encounters stop existing, which is harder to quantify in a forum post.

That said, I'd push back a tiny bit on the "game stops working" framing. The spells have pretty strict action economy if you're doing a pure Illusion run - you're burning a ton of magicka to cast Mayhem, you need decent Illusion investment to make it reliable, and there's definitely a point in the mid-game where you're still vulnerable before you hit those high-level spells. A pure Illusion build on Legendary isn't trivial until you've sunk serious perks into it.

But once you're there? Yeah, it's kind of a joke. The AI genuinely has no counter - they can't dispel it, they can't resist it effectively, and Mayhem/Fury just breaks the entire encounter design. Even Calm is absurd if you're willing to use it; you can literally pacify entire dungeons.

I think the reason it flies under the radar is because it feels less like "breaking the game" and more like "playing a different game where you're a puppeteer." Less satisfying to brag about than "I one-shot this dragon with Necromage + Elemental Explosion" or whatever, even though functionally it's way more broken.