He's a Breton raised Imperial, and the Breton's understanding of magic is different from those of the Cyrodiilic Empire.

So, as stated above, it depends on what you deign qualifies as a 'battlemage': an Imperial-trained mage who cut his teeth in the Battlespire, expected to fight for the Empire once he graduated? No. A mage who fights in battles? Yes.

Lucilla Caprenia in the Dread Cellar and Abnur Tharn in the Main Quest are your two in-game examples for the common usage of battlemage in Tamriel. Bastian wasn't raised nor trained like them. But, being an Imperial, it's possible there's battlemages in his bloodline. Perhaps that's where his affinity for the magical arts comes from.

JMadFour wrote: »

Oh see, I thought a Battlemage was just a generic classification for a Mage who uses heavy armor and fights in melee with their magic, as opposed to being a pointy-hat stand-far-away-and-blast-em spellcaster.

I didn't think there was more to it than that, but clearly I was incorrect on that.

It's both.

Battlemage is a class players can choose in all the previous TES games (except Skyrim, which didn't have pre-made classes), and it's available to all races and there's no implication that you trained at the Battlespire or joined the Imperial Legion if you pick that class. As a result of that it also gets used by both players and characters as a generic term for an armoured mage even if the skills they're using don't exactly match the pre-made class.

But it's also the short name for a specialist group of Battlemages who are part of the Imperial Legion, and a role in the Empire's Elder Council.

It's like the difference between a thief - someone who steals from others and a Thief - a member of the Thieves Guild.

So Bastian might well be a battlemage, a heavy armoured warrior who uses magic in combat, and he is also coincidentally an Imperial. But he's not an Imperial Battlemage.

Rebirthment wrote: »

Wasn't Bastian suppose to be a Breton but they changed his race for some reason at the last second?

I don't know if this is true, but it's possible that it was due to High Isle being the next chapter and they wanting a Breton companion from the Isle but didn't want two Bretons, but they had done all the work of Bastion's story being set in Daggerfall, so they made him Imperial so they could keep the work done but not have two Bretons.

Rebirthment wrote: »

Wasn't Bastian suppose to be a Breton but they changed his race for some reason at the last second?

I've not seen it officially said, but that's how many people read it.

Technically, he can be anything. He can technically be an Imperial who was brought up Breton.

Does it feel forced? Yes. Does the whole thing feel organic? No, not at all.

As an aside, I get this feeling on occasion with ESO, where things feel like they've been created within a sensible framework, and then face a last minute change which often makes it feel forced or contrived.

Regarding the battlemage thing, I think his appreciation for the martial and also the magical very much feels like that's coming from the supposed original Breton conecpt, which tends to embrace both worlds. However, given his appearance as an Imperial, I felt like making him a Battlemage was the best fit.

Rebirthment wrote: »

Wasn't Bastian suppose to be a Breton but they changed his race for some reason at the last second?

He was. As the change was late enough that ESO and gaming sites referred to Bastian as a Breton. So from a writing PoV the character was never really built with anything Imperial about him which makes sense given how he's built into High Rock zones.

Though the change is funny in the whole being a repeat of the creation of Imperials by being ripped out of the Bretons and being called a Cyrodiil/Imperial.