Just about my most powerful character was a pure mage. Was a little rough early on if I remember correctly, but mid game or so, nothing could stop her.

what really kills me is the utter lack of a creative magic/spell system, its a fantasy game and we don't have 90% of the spells u see in other rpg fantasy games!!! and no cool animations, no freezing, no rain of fire, no awesome necromancy....etc just lame balls of fire over and over and over its boring as hell.
and a warrior with good resistance enchantments and a good weapon will pretty much steam roll everything without breaking a sweat unlike a low hp mage that will get eaten alive (try playing oblivion with difficulty bar all way up with a pure mage NOT FUN).

bow characters had it bad too u know, cause the strongest bow did pretty much as much damage as an iron dagger, and arrows fly like they are made from lead, 30 head shots to kill a bad guy svcks.

and cloths designs are HORRID no creativity whatsoever, I'm an artist and I can draw better armor/cloth designs blind folded with scorpions stinging my hands.

While that may have been the idea behind it, the Unarmored skill had zero impact on your odds of being hit. Its only function was to increase armor class, to dramatically less degree than any armor type, and even that was bugged. If you weren't wearing at least one piece of armor your armor rating was zero, despite the status screen saying otherwise.

There's no need to remove dodging to improve combat, I'd say it only harms it. The problem was that there were no dodge animations, and no differentiating between dodging and missing. You'd never know if the enemy was really competent or if your character just svcked, giving the impression of a lot of "failed" combat. It could be brought back as an active, visible thing and I doubt people would complain if they missed because an enemy is just really quick and skillful, instead of the sword "phasing" through them.


Don't forget Bound Armor. For one of the easiest-to-cast spell effects in the game (for Morrowind at least, I forget how different it is in Oblivion), you got armor that was completely weightless, needed no repairing since it could be recast, had an armor rating equal to the best stuff in the game, and which came with enchantments better than anything you could enchant yourself on permanent armor. With almost no effort a mage could encase themselves in a suit of armor superior to almost anything a warrior would have to spend the entire game searching for and putting together, still having to deal with weight and maintenance after.

There is always shield and reflect spells, once you get your alteration and mysticism at 100 you are pretty much omnipotent.

Can I further emphasize that I do not consider magic being powerful, arguably overpowered, as a counter argument to unarmored being neglected. Magic being powerful doesn't change that clothed characters got a raw deal in Oblivion, with limited clothing variety and enchantment slots.

I don't consider abusing glitches that shouldn't exist in the first place to be a counter argument. I don't consider draining your entire mana bar for one shield spell, forcing potion use so you can actually do something else, as being a counter argument.

I'd prefer that the class was actually balanced, not relying on extremes in strength that try to counter extremes in weakness.

Honestly, may I ask what arguments there are if the mage is wearing armour? If they play like a mage, they just happen to use light armour. All a robed mage would have over that character in the long term is 5% better mana efficiency. That 5% isn't going to go far when they are casting mana bar eating defence spells, just to be on even ground with the armoured mage with no active spells.

Since everyone is talking about maxed out skills, what does the robed mage have over the light armour mage? Given that the light armour mage has maximum AC, is not encumbered by their outfit and has more enchantment slots than the clothed mage?

I think what they are saying is that mages have the ability to cast so many powerful defense spells that they wouldn't really need the extra slots.

I agree that clothing variety should be upped though, but how would you go about fixing the enchantment slot thing?

^ No one has addressed my question yet, so I'll re-ask it again. I don't see how being able to give yourself 85 armor rating for over 300 seconds at a time AND bound armor spells don't make up for having no armor.

They are just rationalizing ways of getting around the problem, rather than addressing the problem itself.

If they want to play the game constantly svcking on a inventory full of mana potions, then they can get away casting 60s/85ac defence spells. But Oblivion was trying to move away from having to do that, which was a significant problem when playing mages in Morrowind. The only thing a unarmoured mage has over a armoured mage is 5% better mana efficiency, they are severally underpowered compared to their armoured equivalent. People here may come up with ways of getting around these problems with spells, but the armoured mage is always going to be better off in whatever scenario they throw out.



It's hard to say because Bethesda cut a lot of possible solutions from the game. You could make it so unarmoured skill helps you dodge attacks, but they cut hit rolls out of the game. You could make it so special clothing has higher enchantment capacity than armour, but they removed enchantment quality from the game. You could make it so clothed characters have more equipment than armoured characters, giving more enchantment slots. But they merged/cut a lot of slots out of the game.

Bethesda has really done a number on stuff that could help unarmoured players, and whatever the suggested solution; it's highly doubtful they will apply anything that would increase development costs like more content. Between Morrowind and Oblivion, Oblivion made it clear they are looking for more cost cutting measures.

All you can really look at is the solution proposed by Bethesda themselves, make unarmoured about avoiding limitations imposed by armour. The problem, as shown in Oblivion, is they favour armour way too much and ended up negating their own solution with higher level armour perks.



1) It would eat your mana bar, making combat constantly about svcking on potions to compensate for the high mana usage.
2) Summoned armour is armour, you're trying to play unarmoured.

Are you guys seriously doing this? First to address the enchantment things, for mages there are: shirt and pants (or a single robe), hood, shoes, 2 rings, and an amulet, that's 7 or 6 if your wearing a robe, now for warriors, legs, shirt, shoes, 2 rings, amulet, and hood/helmet, that's 7, see they're equal there. Now for enchanting, the wiki says "Both follow the same basic procedure. You'll choose an item to enchant, pick one or more magical effects to enchant into the item, define parameters on those effects, select a power source for the enchantment, and give the item a name. After this is all done, the item is complete." I've never actually enchanted an item myself in Oblivion (don't ask why) but doesn't this mean you can get shield and +magicka enchantments on a single piece of clothing? And with magic you can completely destroy any opponent in 1 or 2 hits before they even realize what's happening so therefore magic is not being neglected by Bethesda. And that was my 2 cents.

Having over 800 magicka on the Xbox 360 version of Oblivion, mana is never a problem using shield spells for me. :shrug:
And since that was on a console, and seeing how it was pretty easy to get that much magicka, and since a high willpower increases magicka regen, that means it can be done for everyone without cheating or using the console to add magicka to your character, or from the use of a mod that changes the magic system. Being a pure mage and having armor at the same time while wearing robes is very easily done.

Being a mage is all about being smart and exploiting your enemies weakness

You don't need an unarmoured bonus. What on earth is that anyway, how would being unarmoured improve your effectiveness is anything other than being agile?

Once you got to the stage of creating custom spells, you had the opportunity to become the most destructive character possible, if you played your cards right



Isn't this the entire point if you're supposed to be playing an intelligent mage?

You have forgotten two armour items, greaves and shields.



When enchanting an item with a soul gem in Oblivion, you cannot place more than on effect on an item. You could in Morrowind, but they changed that.



And again, I don't consider magic being powerful an excuse for neglecting unarmoured. I wish I didn't have to keep re-emphasizing that.



Unarmoured is in the state it's in because Bethesda cared more about getting all the armour sets done; than the simple matter of giving robed characters some decent perks and equipment. There is equipment missing from the game, clothing sets are incomplete. You cannot buy gloves anywhere, despite gloves being in the previous game; and armour having their equivalent of gloves in this game. Gloves are even in the game, but they made them part of one slot outfits that take up every clothing equipment slot; but only give you one enchantment slot.

Why did they do that?

What is the point in defending what is an obvious failure on Bethesda's part? Between role playing an intelligent character; and utilizing magic to get around these weaknesses, I don't understand why people refuse to recognise this for what it is. Stop rationalizing around the problem and actually look at it already. Unarmoured is underpowered and incomplete in Oblivion, tip toeing around it doesn't make it go away.

I'll agree with that fact.

I also don't like how in Oblivion you could only self enchant an item with 1 beneficial enchant. You could do more in Morrowind, and there seems to be no reasonable explanation as to why it was changed. As with a lot of things in Oblivion..

I'm not defending an obvious failure because I don't see the problem. Being unarmoured means being faster and being slightly better at spellcasting, until you get to higher armour skills at least. How would an unarmoured skill have worked well in Oblivion? There was no automatic dodging. All it would have been was giving unrealistic armour buffs to a character wearing no armour

They could have actually stood by their chosen system, instead of eroding it away into insignificance. They could have actually made some content for clothed players, instead of giving them less enchantment slots; and a very poor selection of re-textured outfits to choose from.

To give an unarmored mage the advantage over the armored one, they could have set the maximum magic efficiency to 85% instead of 95. That would have been a solid difference in power. As for the arena, simply providing an arena robe would have solved that little issue. Which was fortunately fixed by the L.A.M.E. mod. (bound arena robe ftw)

As for the enchanting slots, adding the possibility of giving 2 effects to an enchanted robe would have somewhat counter-balanced the lost of the other slots.

All simple solutions, but now the question I'm wondering about is how much of it is hardcoded and impossible to mod. :unsure:

You have to keep re-emphasizing it because you keep attaching mages to it. If unarmored is the only point of the thread it should have started and ended with that, but mages keep getting brought up as the ones suffering most for it and drawing the focus away from the unarmored skill itself. Nobody is defending unarmored or "rationalizing around it", the skill was both crappy and glitchy in Morrowind and there was no reason to bother with it in Oblivion, everyone knows it. The power of magic in no way compensates for the crappy nature of that option's design, but it does compensate for the idea that it somehow hinders pure mages, a class that by nature both benefits the least from any plus side to unarmored and is threatened the least by the absence of armor.

Easy way around enchantment-slot issue; give characters a base amount of enchanted gear they can use, bring back Enchanting as a skill, and as part of its abilities have it increase that base amount. Who, after all, would better deserve to benefit from an excess of magical items than an enchanter? It wouldn't be hard to give it in-game plausibility, either. Cast-On-Use items obviously need some kind of interaction from the wearer to be activated. On Strike feasibly could as well, so that the friction of sheathing/unsheathing a weapon doesn't set you on fire. Basically, the idea is that the person needs some degree of magical "awareness" of the item to use it, just as even if you're holding a book and know it's there, you can't read it without looking at it. Wearing a lot of actively enchanted items at once would be like the magical equivalent of juggling, something that needs to be trained, and by attaching it to a skill you're giving characters equal opportunity at using those items, regardless of their fashion choices.

And yet there's nothing stopping you from using the same spells while still wearing armor and carrying a sword. Sure, armor would reduce your spell effectiveness, but when your armor skill was high enough, your spell effectiveness would be at 95%, and having your spells weakened by 5% doesn't make that much difference in the end, especially when you consider that to avoid this, you'd have zero defense. Sure, you could use shield spells or enchantments, but there's nothing stopping you from doing that with armor too, of course since armor rating was capped at 85, you might not NEED shield spells if your armor and skill in it is good enough since even without such spells, your defense might already be at maximum.

However, the issue of unarmored isn't a problem only mages have to deal with. As with a stealth character you might also choose to go without armor, so really, if we're going to talk about unarmored, the discussion shouldn't be limited just to pure mages, but to anyone who might choose not to wear armor.



And yet as I recall, giving unrealistic armor to a character wearing unarmored was exactly what the skill did in Morrowind (sure, the armor bonus didn't work unless you had at least one piece of armor, but it was obviously supposed to work, not working was just a bug. And in any case, it's one that can be worked around by wearing a piece of armor that doesn't encumber you much. And now, it has also been adressed by the Morrowind Code Patch for those who use it.) and I was quite fine with that. Sure, it might not entirely be realistic, but so? Fun and game balance needs to take priority before realism in games, because a game doesn't need to be realistic to entertain people, but it does need to be fun, and proper balance helps to ensure that the game is fun for all legitimate playstyles.

And it's not like letting unarmored players have defense bonuses is the only way to make not wearing armor a valiable tactical choice. If unarmored means missing out on the defense provided by armor, then they should offer unarmored players some kind of perk to make up for this. If we assume that they're going to do like they did with Oblivion and have a combat system without any "to hit" roles, then they could add certain special dodging moves, perhaps similar to the ones added by acrobatics, except these would be restricted by wearing armor. Or maybe they could make it so that wearing armor has a greater impact on movement speed and fatigue, thus players who would rather avoid damage than absorb it might have a real reason to choose unarmored. Really, that's what playing an unarmored character should be about anyway. You wouldn't go into battle without armor and stand in one place soaking up damage, you'd try to avoid damage as much as possible because if someone hits you, you don't have any armor to protect you. It might also help if avoiding combat was more of a viable approach to things, after all, you only need to wear armor if you're expecting a fight, but that's a discussion for another thread.

Also, they need to make sure that unarmored players have access to at least the same amount of clothing slots as armored ones. In Oblivion, the decision to not allow wearing clothing with armor may have seemed somewhat limiting as far as customization is concerned, but from a game balance perspective, I wouldn't say it was a bad idea, as in Morrowind, not wearing armor meant that you missed out on many enchantment slots, as aside from gloves and boots, all clothing items could be worn with armor. Thus, not only could you wear a shirt and pants underneath your cuirass and grieves, you could also wear pauldrons on your shoulders, whereas unarmored players had nothing in the shoulder slot, nor were there any unarmored items that covered the head slot. In Oblivion, by not letting armored players wear shirts or pants and adding hoods, they helped to avoid this somewhat, but the rather baffling decision to make the wrist irons the only unarmored hand items in the game once again gave an unnecessary disadvantage for unarmored players. I do hope that in future Elder Scrolls games, Bethesda can make unarmored a more viable choice. Now, this doesn't mean that going without armor should not have a disadvantage, if you don't wear armor, you should be prepared to suffer from less protection. But if you're going to have an option in the game, it's generally not a bad idea to give players a reason to choose it, and unless that option is hard mode, just an extra challenge isn't really enough reason. If unarmorwed is going to be inferior to wearing armor in every way, then there's not much point in having clothes as items you can equip at all. Not that I'm suggesting Bethesda remove that option, I'd hate it if they did that, all I'm saying is that Bethesda might want to think of ways to make unarmored a more viable choice in the game.

That was the case in Morrowind because combat was largely automated. The perks of being unarmoured were supposed to simulate your chartacter dodging, reflecting and absorbing blows due to their increased agility, not some magical shield that appeared out of nowhere. In Oblivion you had to manually block and dodge. Maybe the problem isn't that the perks don't exist in Oblivion, but that you were unrealistically expected to perfrom them manually. The dodge perks were completely useless in direct combat, and for some reason succesfull parries still resulted in you taking damage

I agree there's a problem, but the fact that there's not an unarmoured skill with direct perks isn't it

I think the problem is not the power of magic as such. I'm not sure I would say that magic is overpowered. In my opinion it is expolitable, which is a different thing. The problem I have with TES mages is that, as I stated above, despite my expectations mages are the least versatile class in the game that suffer more limitations than other classes. And the second problem for me is that especially in Oblivion, the items that are most often connected to mages seemed very rushed and poorly executed. I'm not all that fond of the artistic style of Oblivion, but it is true that at least some armours and weapons were made with a lot of care and attention to detail, while the same cannot be said about items connected to mages.
Those two problems make me agree with the OP and think that the devs are not all that fond of pure mages.

Once again, pure mages have been the most powerful characters in TES since Daggerfall. The reason pure mage items svcked in Oblivion wasn't because of some conceited idea that Bethesda doesn't like mages, but ENTIRELY because of the terrible item system in place.

Mages do not get armor from their garments, but instead get powerful enchantments...except now enchanting has been rather greatly nerfed (caps, no personal enchanting, and, the biggest issue, no cast-on-use, which was one of the mages most useful enchantments). Now that is not the case, so their enchantments consist mainly of pitiful skill increases that don't even count for anything when you reach 100 in those skills.

Besides that, mages were still ridiculously powerful in Oblivion, although sometimes it didn't feel like it with me having to cast 10x of my most powerful spell at my enemies just to kill them. Then again, my brother's level 60 something battlemage using daedric weapons enchanting to the max still had to swing 100+ times to kill a damned goblin, so it really was an issue that everybody had due to the much lambasted level scaling.

What I'm talking about is not only how useful their items are, but also how much work was put into them. I agree with what you said, but it is not what I ment. And the problem with versatility is not how many spells you have to cast to kill something, but how many limitations you have in this compared to other races. In many regards mages are mor limited then other classes without any trade-off. Except maybe for a possibility to exploit a buggy system, which is not a good trade-off form where I stand.

At least in Oblivion there are many types of mages. I love that you don't just have to be a straight destructive magic mage to succeed in the game.

I got the feeling they dislike non-spellcasters, especially in TES4. Since you can't create one!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

IMHO unarmored is a meaningless skill, as I don't understand how "wearing no armor" could be beneficial over wearing armors regarding the defense of a character.

But on the other hand we can have dodge, parry and block skills that should be based on a character's speed, agility and endurance and should be a bit hindered by being encumbered by armors, more for dodge skill and less for block skill.

And in this trend, I think all the armor skills and the unarmored skill are problematic at best, and should be replaced by more visible and active skills, like the ones that I mentioned above, and armors should add their defense benefits and encumbrance problems and be done with.