I've recently started playing again and noticed that while playing my armor skill (heavy and light armor) aren't rising properly because I block almost all of my attacks. This ends up with my armor skills only increasing when there are several enemies near me or when I get jumped from behind. I could resort to "exploits" like letting all three everscamps gang up on me and let them hit me, but that's too immersion breaking. I thought about it and came up with increasing my armor skills gradually as my block and weapon skills increase. Something like 1 armor skill level for every 2 to 3 points gained in weapon and blocking skills (while taking into acount mixing armor types). This won't be hard to implement, but since I'm also using a levelling mod and a stat/skill cap remover, I've got a few questions.
My levelling mod just checks the player's base skill levels and forces a level-up after 15 major skill increases. Attributes are calculated on the fly when enough skills have been increased to warrant a stat increase (a skill increases several attributes slowly). I can't remember the cap remover I'm using unfortunately, but it's not a .esp or .esm file.

My question(s) are about the AdvSkill command. I think it used to be that using this command glitched the skill and forced you to basically let the skill catch up. I'm also not sure if it would continue to work above an armor skill of 100, although I might want to avoid this anyway as it's easy enough to get to the armor rating cap.



Another thing I came up with is the player being immune to magic and melee damage (with 100% magic resistance and 100% reflect damage). I personally find this very game-breaking, but on the other hand don't want to avoid using good equipment. Since my new character is a Breton, 100% magic resistance won't be hard to reach at all.
To solve I want to have a quest script running that lowers the players magic resistance and reflect damage actor values (I don't want to use spells that show up in the active spells tab). Is it possible to assign negative values for magic resistance and reflect damage using SetAV (I avoid ModAV like the plague).

I have tried making negative magic resistance and reflect damage before, using the SetNthEffectItemMagnitude and ModNthEffectItemMagnitude functions. Didn't work. To get negatives you might have to find some other way to do it.

As far as I know, weakness to magic works exactly opposite of resistance to magic, so you can stack on a weakness effect to counteract however much magic resist you want. However, reflect damage, reflect spell, and spell absorption don't have an opposite. Check out this link for more info: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Magical_Effects#Reflect_vs_Absorb_vs_Resist

Is the issue here that you need the resulting stat increases (Endurance or Speed) or does the Armor skill itself have importance? It appears that you're not dependent on the benefits that increasing level in the skill would provide, so it should be irrelevant. I frequently end up with most defense coming from shield enchantments rather than the base armor, so I can wear light-weight items instead of Heavy Armor, and still get the defense. That makes the lowered encumbrance a non-issue (as well as not needing to repair so much). It looks like you're going the same way, and I'd say that you really won't have a problem.

According to http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Console_Command_Tutorial#Player.SetAV_ActorValue_.23 a negative resistance should work. I was afraid a negative version of the reflects and absorb wouldn't work. I'll just have to wait and see if OOO doesn't have too much reflects/absorb on items. If there is too much, I will have to go tweak those items a bit in the CS.

To Ghastley:
Part of it is lacking the resulting stat increases, in my mod a large part of potential endurance gain comes from heavy armor (as well as from Armorer, which is also rather slow to increase). But the main reason is that I find it odd that the game sort of rewards playing poorly, ie. letting yourself get hit.
My character is also a paladin, so heavy armor is almost a must. My armor rating is only around 20 points with a shield equipped. So most of my combat at the moment is done by kiting due to being a bit too squishy (level 12 + OOO + melee = bad). I don't have much trouble against lowly bandits and marauders, but against stronger opponents like bears, trolls and raiders I struggle.

Wow I never thought of using setav with negative values. I might have to try that out sometime.