On the OP.
It never made sense to me that a full body robe for use by the magically minded would actually penalise you on enchantment effects.
For example trousers / skirt, shirt, sometimes gloves and boots as well each with a single good enchantment, vs one robe with a single enchantment.
This is what made me green and orcy.

I realise it was set up for player / game "Balance", but a mages outfit ending up potentially less magical than the gear you start the game with was silly imo.
Hopefully enchantment in Skyrim is overhauled allowing single piece outfits to have several effects enchanted on them.

Off the top of my hat each piece of equipment could have slots or a point limit to how powerful the combined effects can get.
Thus a shirt, skirt, pair of boots may have one slot or X amount of points, enough for a medium enchantment.
A robe would have three and Y amount of points.

I'd like to see some sort of benefit for unarmoured as well. It just seems weird to make a full mage and wear light/heavy armour. I would find a robe in Oblivion and laugh at it and think "that's why I was able to kill that mage so easily!" A robe with 20% shield is a laugh compared to a full set of glass or amber.

I would be all for penalties for wearing light armour if there was a system to cater to mages besides shield spells and the like.

Robe with 20%,Base Ring of Aegis 12%,Grand Ring of Aegis 18% and a Defend spell 15% sums it up to a total of 65. Wich is not bad at all. If you are a Master of Alteration you can easily reach 85.

To be fair, robes only took two slots, just a couple of robes used more slots. This was simply a function of how the game used robes and dresses, and yes it was pretty stupid and you lost an enchantment slot. No non armor gloves except the irons was just as bad.

I am wondering. With the removal of classes, do you folks think that condition also removes any armor restrictions that may have been based on class?

Will the racial abilities remain as in the past. What about birthsigns? In the past these all could impact magic use. What about in Skyrim?

I hope they increase the magic penalty, maybe 25% for light armor 50% for heavy armor and no or limited ways to improve that. I also want penalties for heavy armor when doing stealth activities, there already are penalties for robes and light armor in combat, getting stabbed hurts more.

No armor restrictions on class has ever existed, classes is a collections of skills in Daggerfall to Oblivion.
Magic efficiency with armor was a way to balance it in Oblivion, it was pretty low and decreased with higher armor skill so it had no practical effect outside mind control spells.

Racial abilities are inn but we don't know how they will work, My guess is as strong or stronger effects than in Oblivion. Birtsigns are confirmed to be gone.
Then you level up you can choose to increase magic, health and stamina. If you are a mage you would want to increase magic most of the time. However we don't know how this turns out, in Oblivion it was really no need to raise your health very high unless you did melee without armor.

/sigh

I think people not realizing what classes were is the reason we′ve seen so many flame threads concerning the "removal of classes".

Racial Abilities will remain and very likely birth-signs too.

I′d like to add to my opinions that I think that the system of robes could have worked in Oblivion if they had given robes a 40% enchant capacity. That way being a mage in robes would truly be beneficial since you′d get 20% extra enchanting power compared to those in light and heavy armor.

My mage in Oblivion ended up wearing light armour as the penalty was so small it was well worth it. It will be interesting to see what happens in Skyrim.

Yeah, I tried to be clear that some robes took more slots ( like the Mythic dawn robes ), not that all did.
Thanks for catching that and clearing it up.

I liked the irons for that reason, untill I got off my lazy butt and used mods to add some proper gloves.
I love Oblivion but for a game focused a lot on looks and magic, it kind of failed in the details somewhat.

Alteration made armor pointless. Why did I need to haul around armor when I could cast a simple spell? I'm guessing there will be an alteration perk in that will address this "issue" though.

Alteration cost you magicka, armor did not. Armor was superior not Alteration magic.

Welkynd stones? What kind of Mage didnt have a ton of those on him, not to mention alchemy.

Technically you're both right and wrong.
Alteration cost magicka but at higher skill levels it was practically free.
It did not suffer lowering in condition and you could stack effects, have plenty of shields and elemental resist shields combined.
That all came with the ridiculous time limit of the spells, 20 seconds to 60 ( expensive ), meant you spent more time casting a shield than actually using its effects in combat.

Armour was made of tin foil, required serious skill to be of greater use.
Needed enchantment to make it great, but then was hindered by not being able to repair it on the fly.
However needed no magicka and was a constant effect if kept repaired.
Also sets until later on were uncommon, and apart from Daedric and glass plus 100 in skill could never match shield spells.

Enchantment of 5 clothes, namely pants, shirts, boots, hood, wrist irons was better than either.

That or just bumping up Alchemy, so you could make almost constant high level shield potions that lasted far longer than spells and at greater effect levels.

my imperial warrior character never wears armor or anything in his upper part of the body and well the point of doing that is this one:

im a badass fearless hardcoe player

i dont wanna extra skills or anyrhing for dont wear armor instead i wanna more risks, real injurys, etc. i wanna play with consequences

.. thats my friend is the point.

that isn't unarmored tho, thats armor thats covered up. there will probably be a perk that makes weaing no armor more beneficial, considering how in love todd n friends are over scraping actuall skills for them.


this

And if your characters ambition is to be stronger ? It shouldn′t be too easy, personally I don′t like the percentage way of reducing damage since it′s way too easy to be too bad or too strong, armor should only ever allow for 40% damage reduction with Daedric Armor and spells also up to 40% with the best spells then, I want to have to add both together to be able to reach the best damage reduction.

Read this pertaining to Arena Classes and armor: http://www.svatopluk.com/arena/manual/classes.stm

Thieves could wear leather only, Rogues could wear leather and chain only, and the list goes on...

To be fair Arena was far more a AD&D clone than the later games with fixed classes and experience points. With Daggerfall we got the options to make custom classes so this became impossible, you still had the option to add restrictions in character creation as "no blunt", however this was abused as you added thing you did not needed and gave yourself absorb magic and other nice effects so it was replaced by birtsigns.

Thank you for the link, I have never played Arena. Liked so see that the spellmaker dates back to Arena and the abilities are also the same. How can they think about removing this in Skyrim? Liked many of the spell effects.
Races are the same as Daggerfall, Orcs and Imperials came in Morrowind.

That 15% spell effectiveness lost when I wore armor was a killer.
And the armor always weighed down my options for loot.
If you are a pure mage it should make a big difference, i'd like to see up to 50% reduction, but im sure battlemages everywhere (im a pure mage) will tell you otherwise.
Ehh, maybe it should scale with your skill in a particular armor?

Eitherway, it was enough to make me not want armor.
And a return of unarmored would be nice, but we won't ever see it again...

I'm tired of mages wearing robes. Robes are boring as can be, and mages are supposed to be the creative types. So one day they decide, "Let's all put on the same mumu!" and I say boo. Cut it out with the robes! Look at the Daggerfall mages guild, I think only two guys in it had robes, and they were the really old guys who didn't want to put much effort into dressing themselves.

I've done sketches of what my first character will look like. Boots, pants, belt... That's it. He is going to be the baddest Mage Skyrim has ever seen.

Plus, if your getting hit to the point your worrying about your armor rating, your not playing your Mage to their potential. Summoning, paralyzing, burden, and invisibilty should make you near untouchable.

There was an idea that got brought up in a previous thread that I thought was interesting; instead of armor reducing the power of spells, have armor reduce the rate of magicka regeneration. Combine this with not letting people change armor freely in combat, and it makes spell casting viable in armor, as long as it's supplemented with weapons or potions.

Not entirely true. From a roleplay story telling perspective, it made sense for my character because she doesn't wear armor and just uses magic to fight because that's her personality and style. But game mechanic-wise, yes you're right, it was pointless. Just one more reason why TESIV is my least favorite one.

MIne too.