The Apprentice Stone’s Blessing

Being one of the five stones which offer persistent statistical bonuses not relating to skill gain, the Apprentice Stone is useful for affecting you character’s abilities when applied in specific ways. As mentioned previously, the blessing itself grants a boost to magika regeneration, coming out to +100%. However, you will also suffer +100% weakness to all magika effects, thus negating the stone’s effectiveness considerably when used in combat with any sort of casting enemy or where magical traps and damaging effects may be encountered.

In Skyrim, you can never have a full resistance to magika in the first place, capping off to a relatively high extent, but still allowing spells to cause you limited damage at high resistances. Since your weakness is effectively doubled, using this blessing for combat oriented purposes or those where you would face spell damage is a significant risk and advised against, even though you will be able to cast your own offensive spells more frequently. If you do decide to use it for combat, keep in mind you will need a ridiculous amount of perks or items that boost your resistance to compensate.

Instead of using the Apprentice Stone to boost your combat prowess, you will find far more use in the blessing granted by applying it in non-combat situations such as skill boosting. For example, transmuting Iron and Silver Ore into Gold Ore can be quite expensive magika wise, thus before you start on a batch of ore transformation, you can pick up the Apprentice Stone blessing since you will not have to worry about harmful effects during this process. Other methods like repeatedly casting Water Breathing or Detect Life to quickly raise skills in areas that you are safe from attack will also benefit significantly from this boosted regeneration. Basically, this is a boost assist stone.

Remember, you don’t regenerate magika while actively casting spells, so this effect simply reduces the downtime till your pool regenerates.