I've played over 300 hours and just now found out about this armor cap from you guys. I don't think that's true, or at least it helps to have over 1,000 for enemies who ignore 75% armor, right? In my playing I've noticed Giants doing less damage to me with 1,000 armor vs 700 for example. Post proof of this cap please?

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Armor

Its simple math, 567=80% damage reduction, if you really think something different is happening well then you keep believing that.

667 provides the 80% armor damage mitigation cap (0.12% per point). There are 100 hidden points for wearing a full armor set. Like in Fallout 3 and New Vegas, it seems NPCs cannot have perks, so I don't think any of them ignore armor.

That's 567 armor with 4 pieces of armor equipped. More if you have fewer pieces; less if you have a shield.

Do no Enemies have ignore armor skills?

Gaints are invalid because for some reason they do physical and (abit) magic damage, I noticed when the astronach stone ability absorbed an attack

What's this about secret 100 point of armor? In New Vegas there's DT and with max DT I didn't notice much benefits like 52 or something, Deathclaw still kill you in 2 hits with 660 HP from the lvl 50 Karma bonus.

Personally I'm not a fan of the curve, given how OPed smithing, enchanting and alchemy are it just makes hitting the 80% armor cap too easy. By level 40ish most melees builds and even some thief builds are already capped on armor rating...

IIRC, the chest armor gives you 40 points of non-displayed armor rating; gloves, boots, helmet and shield give you 20 each. The upshot is that the 'real' armor cap is at about 667, but people wearing 4 pieces of armor hit the cap at 567 of displayed armor rating.

:teehee: And in Pacman, there's power pills

Seriously, NV has something. OK, fine. Why does that mean Skyrim is the same?

Smithing isn't really all that helpful if the cap is so low. With Weapons I guess you want 300+ damage though.

Smithing allows you to hit the cap with whatever armor you like. So besides the uber-weapons also very useful regarding style

Ive actually gotten decapitated by chief bandits, so some enemies do have perks for their main skills. Dremora summons also decapitate enemies.

So maybe a chief bandit using a warhammer spawns with ranks in the armor ignore perk.

I was looking at that UESP page on armor, and now I'm seriously rethinking if I even care to master smithing. It appears that the game was designed with the idea that if you master smithing, you don't need to take any perks in Armor to hit (or get within spitting distance) of the armor cap anyway. Since I'm levelling up Heavy Armor (and perking it) on my current character anyhow, it seems rather a waste of points to try to fully perk out smithing too, cause it'll just put me way, way over the cap and waste perk points I could use elsewhere.

I suppose that's not a completely unreasonable design choice, but it would be nice if players could find these things out more easily without digging through forums, wikis, or spending a bunch of time and perk points perking out a character (or several) and doing "experiments" to see what the actual results are of various build choices.

I've also been decapitated, and I've seen companions use the sneak role and watched enemies charge dual-cast spells before throwing them at me. Without being able to look at the data files in the Creation Kit, I can't yet know how that's handled. What I can say is that in Fallout 3 and New Vegas, perks absolutely could not be assigned to anyone but the player. Using AddPerk as a console command or in scripts wouldn't fail, but it also wouldn't do anything (and HasPerk would always return 0). You could fake it for some things by assigning enchantments or huge duration spell effects (spell effects with durations that last multiple real years won't glitch or anything), but things that required entry points to function couldn't be done, because those only worked with perks. For example, the Psycho chem in both of those games has no effect on anyone but the player, because what it does is add a hidden perk with a Calculate Weapon Damage multiply value 1.25 entry point. Now in Skyrim, it's obvious the perk system is built off of the perk system in those games, and using the AddPerk console command on NPCs seems to have no effect.

By the way, hilariously, the Turbo effect in New Vegas is actually just an actor value, and actor values apply to all NPCs. If you use the console to set any NPC's Turbo actor value to a positive integer (true), that character will zip around at insane speeds.

Regarding the sneak roll: It has been shown via console that some NPCs using these did not have any sneak skill. So the roll might be rather a sole beauty effect. I have been decapitated as well, but it is not yet clear what causes this.

It's still useful if you want to have weapons that hit harder than wet paper mache, or if you want to craft a certain set of armor to put your own enchantments on. But in general, yes, that does seem to have been their train of thought.

It makes me sad though. Should be a way to remove the cap, to reward those who made a point to have high armor.

Removing the cap would mean having a damage reduction with no bounds. ie > 80%. When you do this, the game will become easier than it already is.

I don't understand; I have gotten my armor rating to over 830 in upgraded Daedric

The displayed Armor Rating is not capped. Rather, any Armor rating over 567 (or 667 without a full set), is redundant.

Yeah my last character, thief/assassin and I made him some dragon scale. My displayed armor was 776 or something, well above the cap. he could barely be injured in that stuff. I switched to fur ... it was more fun and fur looks way cooler

This playthrough I am playing a Nord 1h warrior + shield + bow ranger/scout type character. I took the first perk in smithing for Steel and I I am going to try to stick with that being my only smithing perk. So far I have ignored enchanting and unless I start feeling way too weak I will contnue to do so. The theory is that this character is a strong believer in freedom and nature above all else and enchanted items are created using trapped souls, which seems against nature and not very promoting of freedom. He feels even his enemies deserve their souls to be free.

Nice of Bethesda to tell us. :facepalm:

Unfortunately, very rarely do game companies explain to us in detail their underlying game mechanics, even in the so-called strategy guides.

On a similar note, Magic resistance is capped at 85%.