Are mana using abilities considered spells?

Madae

Even if they aren't necessarily spell-like? Such as Assassination/Shadow abilities.

Madae

Basically wondering if my Breton racial "Magicka Mastery" (reduced magicka cost *of spells by 1%) is going to affect my class abilities that are weapon hits and such, but still use mana.

Madae

Also, if that is the case, it seems like it would make more sense to just have Magicka Mastery say "reduces the mana cost of special abilities" or something to that effect.

Hmm, kind of wondering now if having attribute points in magicka are affecting my special abilities too, because that doesn't really specify either. Seems like I should be dropping more points into stamina because that, for some reason, affects weapon damage and "weapon ability" damage.

This is kind of confusing, to be honest... "Weapon abilities" make sense, since you have weapons and they have abilities, but those all use stamina... then I guess staves which use mana? Are those considered weapon abilities or spells?.. My brain hurts.

Madae

Let me preface this by saying that I'm not really saying it is an issue... yet... since the game is still young and there aren't as many 50's.

I'm really kind of curious now how it would work for archers and mages. Theoretically, you could not spend a single point in magicka (archers) or stamina (mages), since a mage will be using mostly spells anyway that require magicka, and archers could easily get away with using only abilities in the bow weapon tree, which would all use stamina (these, however, are assumptions)... so there is practically no need to dip in to those attributes (except maybe mages who want to sprint a lot... but this doesn't matter in PvP really since you already get a ton automatically)...

I can kind of see this being a balance issue, because, especially in my case as a melee Night Blade, I see melee characters wanting to dip into both their ability trees (that use magicka) and their weapon trees (that use stamina).

This is how I run;

Killer's Blade (first assassination ability/mana)
Rending Slashes (first dual wield ability/stamina)
Rapid Strikes (second dual wield ability/stamina)
Surprise Attack (second shadow ability/mana)
Shadowy Disguise (first shadow ability/mana)

So, basically a pretty even split when it comes to magicka and stamina use. This is forcing me to spread out my points, where someone like an archer and mage wouldn't necessarily have to, and since all of their damage is going to come, apparently, from having points in magicka and stamina, you could theoretically stack just stamina and magicka for those two classes and deal what I think would be considerably more damage on a whole, versus spreading out like I did and doing, say, half that.

Granted, I'm not entirely sure how much melee damage weapons do versus spells or bows, since I don't use either of the latter. Those two particular builds could, also, easily kite their enemy, where a melee character would be forced and rely heavily upon snares/stuns and staying close by... which can be fairly difficult if you also include the snares, stuns, knockbacks or whatever that those two classes you're fighting could have.