I've got my Amazon gear all enchanted with Resist Normal Weapons and it really helps. But I also have high alchemy and can make Shield potions 69% for 240 seconds. This has saved me several times against OOO 1.33 ancient vampires with Kuertee's Attribute-Based and Skill-Based Damage Modifiers. Since I have been visiting Ayleid dungeons, the loot has added up and I'm overflowing with wealth. When I find some glass gauntlets I can enchant the whole set with something. Is it better to have Shield or go with Resist Normal Weapons again?

Advantages of Shield:
- it's a lot cheaper (Resist Normal Weapons costs 3x more)
- no weapon can ignore it

Advantages of Resist Normal Weapons
- it isn't capped at 85 and can go all the way up to 100%

The cost usually isn't such an issue so what it boils down to is that shield is more reliable, but can only go up to 85% while Resist Normal Weapons can go all the way to 100% but enchanted, Silver, and Daedric weapons ignore it completely.

How big are the Resist Normal Weapons enchantments?

A full set of Glass Armor (including shield) gives 75 AR at 100 Light Armor skill. Without the shield (for example when using a bow or 2-handed weapon) it's 52. So one option is to enchant your gear with about 30 Shield and then enchant the rest with Resist Normal Weapons.

If you have other choices, I'd go with one of those. I don't use OOO, but at least in vanilla oblivion, resist normal weapons isn't a very useful effect, and once your light armor skill is 100, you're only 10 points short of max armor, making shield also ineffective. At lower levels though, I would use shield or one of the elemental shields.

I'd go with shield out of those options because resist normal weapons is worthless against enemies with silver, Daedric or enchanted weapons, I'm also not sure if it works against enemies that don't use weapons at all, like animals or unarmed humanoids, or not. Shield, on the other hand, resists all non-magical attacks, while it is capped at 85, I'd take being able to absorb 85% of damage from all weapons over being completely immune to the damage from a few myself. Although depending on the armor you're wearing and your skill, you might only need a certain amount of shield, having more of it once you've hit the armor cap would be pointless. So if that's the case, you could try some other enchantment, which one dependas on what you want to accomplish, really.

May I suggest elemental shields? Like Fire/Frost/Shock Shield.
It gives both armor bonus, and resist to the coresponding element.

I pretty much always just sell items with "Resist Normal Weapons" enchantments. At about mid level and abovelot's of enemies carry enchanted or silver or even Daedric weapons, a resist normal weapon rating is worthless for many enemies.

I agree with the above, elemental shields are great way to go.

Does resist normal weapons protect you against monsters? Hand to hand do damage and I believe summons do damage on undeads with immunity against normal weapons.

Summons like Clannfears can definitely hurt Ghosts and Wraths.

Like I say above, I rarely if ever use Resist Normal Weapons, so I can't say from personal experience. However the wiki says:



http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Resist_Normal_Weapons

Then I'd say Shield is clearly the better choice.

I would only enchant 1 piece of equipment with shield, or better yet use a unique item that has shield along with some other useful effects. You don't need a lot of shield enchantments if you are wearing armor. I would recommend putting resist magicka, absorb magicka, or reflect spell on the other armor pieces to give you a better defense against magic. Any leftover pieces you could add fortify magicka if you use magic, or other useful enchantments like water breathing, feather, and anything else you can think of.

Oh, and use transcendent sigil stones for it all if you can. If you are also on PC I would recommend the quest award leveler mod that levels up leveled items with you with the option of leveling up your sigil stones as well.

Thank you all! I think I will go with elemental shields because I am using OOO 1.33 and Race Balancing Project, which is giving my character 25% weakness to frost ( charioteer ) and 50% weakness to shock ( azura's spell ). With Kuertee's Damage Modifiers, I'm going to add MMM 3.7b3. Actually, I will not use the glass armor if it is so strong, but an Amazon set.