If you’re having trouble targeting enemies with focused fire or shock blasts, summon a whirlwind of ice and snow to keep your enemies in place while you snipe them. If you drain your own health with shock spells to do more damage, the fire discipline includes healing spells you can use to offset the loss of your hit points. It’s a great system and works whether you want to focus on a single discipline-fire, ice, or shock-or take a handful of spells from each and use them alongside each other. It’s a risky move, depending on who or what you’re fighting, but damaging yourself can pay off in the extra damage you’ll deal to your foes. Plus there’s sometimes the ability to increase the damage of your shock spells by sacrificing your own health in exchange.
Chaining electrical attacks is a big theme, with certain spells requiring activation by precursor spells. Shock spells are great for doing large amounts of damage, but they cost a lot to cast and are typically more focused than AOE frost spells.
In vanilla Skyrim there’s really not all that much difference between a fireball, a shock spell, or a blast of cold, but in Arcanum there’s far more going on than just flames burning things and ice freezing things-the elements actually comprise wholly different styles of attack. What’s really interesting about the Arcanum mod is the different ways the elements of fire, ice, and electricity differ from each other. This drawn-out process of slowly acquiring your new powers makes Arcanum a great mod if you’re starting a brand new playthrough of Skyrim-though it’s still a good pick for characters with a few dozen hours under their belt too. And there are also spells you’ll need to create by hand at new magical crafting stations that now appear throughout the world. Other spells are tied into custom quests and require defeating some tough bosses added by the mod. Some spells you can buy from the usual magic vendors scattered around Skyrim-though it may require repeat visits if they don’t have them in stock. Even with Arcanum downloaded you’ll still need to put in quite a lot of work to acquire the more than 100 new spells the mod introduces. This isn’t one of those mods where you simply install it and open your inventory to find a whole bunch of new spell tomes ready to be used. Thanks to Arcanum you’ll finally become a truly powerful spellcaster.
With this mod installed you’ll be summoning pillars of energy and tornadoes from the heavens, flinging tremendous and explosive fiery orbs and deadly electrical lances, and even pulling meteors down from outer space and smashing them down onto your hapless enemies.