stamina vs magicka

antman850

I am pretty new to this game and I am starting to notice that a lot of players are placing all their points in either stamina or magicka. Is there a huge disadvantage for just trying to balance all three attributes?

Lynx7386

In a word, Yes.

Now for the lengthier explanation:

There are three types of armor in the game: light, medium, and heavy. On their own, the armor pieces dont do much other than provide some physical and spell resistance based on their armor rating. When you get into the passives provided by your armor skill trees, that changes. With 7 pieces of the same type of armor, the passives will give you the following perks:

light armor
21% reduced spell cost
28% increased magicka regeneration
Increased spell resistance
Increased spell penetration
Increased spell critical chance

Medium Armor
+21% weapon critical chance
28% increased stamina regeneration
21% reduced stamina cost
12% increased weapon damage
Increased movement speed
Reduced sneaking cost
Reduced detection area while sneaking
Reduced dodge roll cost

Heavy Armor
28% increased health regeneration
7% increased health
20% reduced block cost
7% increased healing received
Increased armor and spell resistance
Restore magicka and stamina each time you're hit

you can equip 7 pieces of armor: head, chest, shoulders, gloves, belt, legs, boots. For some of those passives, you need at least 5 pieces of that type of armor, which means a hybrid build is automatically going to lose out on either stamina or magicka benefits. You can wear 5 medium + 2 light, but that's going to be gimping your spells significantly. You can wear 5 light + 2 medium, but that will be gimping your weapon damage significantly.

Additionally, magicka and stamina (the attributes) contribute directly to weapon and spell damage. Whenever you cast a spell, a formula is used that adds your spell power (taken from your equipped weapon) and maximum magicka to determine the spell's damage output. Whenever you use a melee (or bow) attack, a formula adds your weapon damage (taken from your equipped weapon) and maximum stamina for the attack's damage output.

What all this means is that if you try to hybridize between the two resources, you're making both of them less effective in the long run. You may be a little more versatile, but not enough so to compensate for losing focus.


Ultimately, if you want to be a melee fighter or an archer, you need to focus on stamina. Magicka is there as a secondary resource used for non-damaging abilities (invisibility, buffs, so on and so forth). If you want to be a caster or healer, you focus on magicka, and then your stamina becomes a secondary resource pool for blocking, dodging, sprinting, bashing, etc.