can you cast spells without a hand?

[Nemesis7884]

do you need at least one hand to cast a spell? therefore you can not cast spells when handling a 2h weapon (or can you cast as long as your not blocking/attacking)?

what does the illusion perk "cast silently" do - do you simply do not make any noise (good for sneaking)? or does this mean you dont need a hand anymore?

[Yorkie-GBR]

Apart from the "Shouts" No you'll need a hand free.

[Nose Nuggets]

you use spells the same way you use weapons "in" a hand. so to select a spell, it occupies a hand. you can have 2 spells up in either hand, or 1 weapn and 1 spell, or 1 spell and a shield, etc.

if you have 2 swords equipped, and selected a fire spell, it would replace a sword with the spell.

so far it seems the cast silently perk is for the sneaking aspect.

shouts, on the other hand don't require a hand. so you can still use your selected shout while having both hands equipped.

[dfpiii]

:) I don't know how you got from "cast silently" to "casting without a hand", but I love that you went there.

You assign spells to hands, so if you want to cast, you need to have a spell assigned to a hand. But you can switch spells and items out really quickly.

I believe the exception is dragon shouts (which come from your mouth) but they're like special powers and have fairly substantial cool down period.

[Nemesis7884]

that also means you need to drop your 2h weapon to cast a spell...makes sense, on the other hand i am not seing a lot of people using 2h weapons then... cause as said, 1h combos are so manifold you would give up a lot of versatility...

can you quickly switch cast a spell, switch back or you have some kind of time constraints in combat?