Battle Mage
It is assumed you have already read through the Gear and Arena sections on this site before ready this guide, if not, you should do so first as there are concepts there that need to be understood first.
Skill points and Races in this build section should also be read first.
It is also assumed you have read both the Mage and Warrior sections before this guide, as this is a hybrid concept of those 2 and the spell and abilities strategies are not covered here.
The Magicka/Stamina Slider
Deciding how to set your Magicka/Stamina slider depends on how you fight. You can set either one anywhere from 200 to 690. You need to assess both how you fight, your attack strategy and how you defend yourself. Let’s assume someone you fight is going to start hitting you with a double ravage weapon like Serpentstrike. 400-450 Stamina means you’ll get to use all the buttons once if you’re quick (meaning 400-450 Stamina means you can use 3 abilities once, provided you don’t hit a shield and ravage/drain yourself). 550-650 Stamina means you’ll probably get to use all your abilities twice. Anything north of 700 means you’ll probably die before you get ravaged. It gets a little more complicated if someone’s draining your Stamina with frost or a Stamina weapon, but that’s more about tactics than builds.
With Magicka, it depends on how expensive your spells are. Most abilities cost between 150 and 240 Stamina if they’re at level 1 (which they generally should be). Spells can vary wildly, but they’re always more expensive. So as a Stamina fighter, you want to check what your most expensive spell is (often, that’s RE-5, which costs 315 Magicka). Ignoring shock damage and Magicka weapons for a moment, your worst case scenario is someone ravaging your Magicka too much for you to cast. Heavy weapons have stronger primary and secondary enchants, so 53 ravage is a problem. If someone hits you the start of the round before my RE lights up, you want enough Magicka to still cast it, so 315 cost + 53 ravage = 368 minimum, therefore set your Magicka at 370, and you should be able to almost always get RE off once if you cast it as soon as it lights up. If your most expensive spell is WoF, you would set your Magicka based on that. Now, if you want to cast more than one spell, you need to boost Magicka much higher. 450-500 Magicka means you can use all your spells once (depending on your regen, how expensive they are, and what your opponent is doing to you). 600-650 will usually let you cast twice, and 750+ means you can cast until you die.
So how to decide?
As a mage vs a non-mage, it’s fairly straight forward. Use magic to overwhelm your opponent’s defences, then incapacitate them Ice Spike (IS) or Paralyse (Para) and cut them down with your weapon. More Magicka is better. Mage vs mage is quite a bit more complicated, and having a bit of Stamina might give you the edge if you can land a few strikes or shield bashes. Warrior vs Warrior, then obviously you want to be as strong as possible, with a late-round quick strike, when your opponent is completely ravaged, can give you the win.
Some examples
1) 2x Health Battlemage
Pros: decent amount of health, fairly durable
Cons: extremely susceptible to double ravage
You’re going to want a way to regeneration both Magicka and Stamina very quickly, as neither are going to last very far into the round.
For Magicka, you can use
a) full divine elven armour (52 added regen),
b) divine elven shield + Magicka neck (56 added regen),
c) Magicka pots, or
d) Sorcerer rings and gloves.
For Stamina, you’ve got divine hide armour, hide shield + Stamina neck, Stamina pots, and Subsuming rings and gloves (same stats as above). The goal is to use your resources as quickly and effectively as possible, in exchange for as much damage as possible, so that when you are double ravaged, you have a leg up in the fight.
2) 1x health Stamina Mage:
Pros: Plenty of magic power, enough Stamina to last a while
Cons: you are very fragile; if you can’t stop the other guy from attacking, you die.
Stamina regeneration isn’t nearly as important here, so you can focus on increasing your offensive spells’ damage as much as possible with elemental gear, and either spread your abilities throughout the round, or dump them all at the start and sling spells while your Stamina comes back on its own. If you keep the other guy on the back foot trying to deal with your spells, you can generally get 5 or 6 abilities off.
2) 1x health Stamina Mage:
Typically, the idea is to set either Magicka or Stamina at 600, and use 2 Stamina or Magicka pieces to boost the other stat from 290 to roughly 650. I prefer to set the Stamina low for PvE sake. I can get by with 290 Stamina when I have to wear 3 elemental resist armour pieces in certain Sigil events, but not with 290 Magicka, since my RE-5 costs 315.
Pros: more resources than the 2x health version, so more mayhem to cause
Cons: still fragile, still susceptible to double ravage weapons and shields (although much less so)
Notes
You can of course also do an even split of 450m/440s and wear one Magicka piece and one Stamina piece, but the lack of Enchantment Synergy will cost you ~60 points of Stamina/Magicka. It might be worth it if you like being able to bounce between heavy Stamina/low Magicka, heavy Magicka/low Stamina, and balanced simply by selecting a loadout, which you can do using the armour strategies covered in the gear section.