User:Jean-Velejeanne/Sandbox

Combat is a way of life in Cyrodiil. If you want to survive the many challenges it offers you're going to need to know how to fight, whether it is with blades, blunt weapons, magic, bows, or fists. This guide is mainly focused on blade fighting. You may want to check out the combat article as well; it provides more general information.

This guide will go in-depth and cover almost every aspect of fighting with a bow.

Fighting with a bow is fairly straightforward in Oblivion, you need a bow and atleast one arrow to use one but many arrows are required for efficient use.

Bad Habits

There are many bad habbits you can get into with ranged combat in Oblivion. This section will help you identify and rid yourself of them. There also might be some habits listed to watch out for if you haven't started them yet. Below are a few things to watch out for.

• Not keeping distance between you and your enemy. Bows alllow you to be a great distance from your enemy, why wouldn't you exploit that?

• Not checking how many arrows you have often. This mistake is not so common but still a very bad one. It's self explanitory, you run out of arrows and you're standing with a bow in your hand, with no arrows equipped and a bow equipped you will only be able to block.

• If you have enchanted bows, always make sure they are charged. You don't want to be caught needing a flame enchantment to use on a Frost Atronach only to find you forgot to charge your bow.

Good Habits

These are the things that you may want to incorporate into your ranged combat. Some of these may not suit your playing style but all are useful and may save your life.

• Always make sure you have a backup bow just in case you have a disintegrate weapon spell cast on you. Since you can't repair items when enemies are nearby you'll have to fight with a blade or your fists.

• Run away from the enemy then shoot them. Distance is your friend use it.

• Jump onto a ledge where your enemy can't touch you. This will only work on sworded opponents but it helps.

• After you fire your arrow it will fire straight adead but slowly descend untill it hits something so aiming high for far away opponents is an obvious tactic.

Assisting Ranged Combat with Magic

Restoration Restoration is a must have for any type of combat heal yourself and drain your enemys health. You can also fortify your speed or ranged skills. On top of it all, Restoration has Absorb spells: pull their Attributes, Skills, Fatigue, or Health to really tip the scales in your favor. Absorb Health is by far the best Restoration choice for enchantments: every time you hurt them, your Health is restored, making it very hard for them to kill you.

Conjuration Summoning a creature offers an effective distraction to draw your enemy's attention to it instead of you. Be aware that your enemies will always attack the most powerful creature first (unless you are continually blocking; if you do so, some enemies will leave you to attack a conjured creature), so summoning Scamps will most likely not distract them at all. Summoning bound armor will give you more protection and freedom of movement due to its light weight. The downside of these is that their duration is very limited (15 sec.) However, if you are a member of the Mage's guild or have the Frostcrag Spire official plug-in, you can create your own spells with significantly longer durations. And don't forget Turn Undead. A fleeing Gloom Wraith is a Gloom Wraith that you don't have to deal with at the moment, and a summoned creature which you set on the run will probably not bother you again before it disappears.

Illusion Illusion cannot be used to directly damage the enemy. However, it more than makes that up with its indirect damage. The whole school of Illusion is all about crowd control. Without swinging a mace or throwing a fireball, you can manipulate even the largest of hostile forces down to one injured survivor with a few command or frenzy spells. At higher skill levels, paralyzing is extremely useful for pinning a hostile down and can be used at touch or at range. It is needless to say that you should also use silence on mages, forcing them into melee combat. Lastly, it can be used to provide a quick escape route (or front row seat!) if you ever find yourself in danger. Casting a 30-second invisibility spell is usually enough time for you to escape a nasty situation, or to watch a hero-inspired mutiny come to a close. Calm spells can be used if you are attacked by multiple enemies to allow you to take on one at a time. Rally spells can stop those pesky mages and archers from running towards reinforcements. However, you'll find that constantly using Illusion in this way will drain your magicka fast. It is more suited to a hybrid type of character(like a thief).

Destruction Direct damage spells are always a good choice (of course you should be aware of your enemies' resistances and weaknesses towards different kinds of elemental magic). The elemental weaknesses come in very handy for your weapon enchants, and aren't very expensive. For example, hit an enemy with a strong weakness to both magicka AND fire. Using a proper drain weapon skill spell (marksman, blunt, etc.) will help reduce the damage you take from attacks. Some other spell effects to take note of are Disintegrate Armor and Disintegrate Weapon; these can come in handy when you need to decrease an enemy's armor rating or destroy their weapon. Also, Weakness to Magic/Element will increase the effectiveness of your enchantments and Drain Health/Damage Fatigue are useful too, if applied to the proper situations. However, the problem with destruction as a whole is it's simply too expensive for a character who isn't focused on magicka. It can take hundreds of magicka to end a hostile, and don't even bother with destroying armor at endgame, when daedric armor can have thousands of health. This said, Destruction is best used either in emergencies or when opponents are almost defeated. Weakness to Magic/Element will increase the effectiveness of your enchantments. Also, Drain Health/Damage Fatigue are useful, if applied to the proper situations.

Mysticism The school of Mysticism contains some very useful spells that can assist with ranged combat. Dispel can, for example, be used to easily eliminate summoned creatures and to get rid of shield spells from various enemies. Soul Trap is very powerful for keeping your weapons charged, so that you can always deal top damage. Having "Detect life" on in a dungeon is almost a must, as it allows you to prepare yourself for a fight coming up. Spell absorption is the answer to both magicka regeneration and hostile magic, but it's recommended to keep it on your gear. For the benefits that it gives, Mysticism is a fairly cheap school of magic to use. Absorbing and reflecting spells are quite expensive unfortunately, but you should still be sure to have it on when fighting powerful magic-based creatures such as Liches.

Alteraion Alteration is a useful magic school. Casting a Shield spell to give you more armor is ideal; it can also be combined with the Bound Armor spells that Conjuration offers for tons of protection. Feather allows you to carry more, though it is especially important to watch your timer with those spells. Feather's ability to lighten your load also increases your speed. This is especially useful for heavy armored archers that like to carry around lots of stuff. Also, Water Walking/Breathing gives you a chance to escape from an opponent to a place where they can't go. Works wonders with Undead, because they can't go underwater.

Alchemy Though technically not Magic, Alchemy is considered by the game to be a magical skill. Every character can benefit from creating their own potions and poisons to be used in combat. This skill does require pre-planning as it is not directly usable itself in combat. However the results of the use of this skill will allow the character to create effects that can bolster your abilities, keep you alive, or weaken the enemy. Advanced use of this skill allows the creation of poisons with as many as three damaging effects. At Expert level or higher Alchemy you can create a five effect poison. Additionally, poisons can be made to paralyze, silence, or weaken your opponent. While not all creatures in the game are affected by poison, poisoning a weapon can help turn a 1 vs 5 combat situation into less of a problem. Be careful with the 4 potion limitation though. As a warrior, you will want no more than 3 potions active at a time so that you can quaff a healing potion as needed. Here again, creating potions with multiple effects (restore health + restore fatigue + shield for example) can be exceedingly helpful in combat. Combining restoration effects with Invisibility in a potion can even give you a quick breather in the middle of heavy combat.