Thinking specifically of the enchanting effect, but I guess the same question applies to Alchemy as well.

It seems like the effect of, say, a Fortify Light Armor enchantment would be pretty miniscule. My math is probably off, but a quick perusal of UESP seemed to indicate that at 100 skill, with all relevant Enchanting perks, you'd be able to make a Fortify Light Armor enchantment that grants something like 33 points of AR.

Is that right?

Anyone use these enchantments?

You can still reach the armor cap with any armor, right? I think that's the case.

It might be designed for those who don't want to use smithing as much, but still want a pretty good armor score. I suppose how useful/useless it would be depends on how many perks you want to use on smithing, and how much you want to use smithing.

Yeah, I didn't bother to compare the enchantment to the benefit from smithing. You're probably right - Smithing by itself just gives a modest boost; it's only when it's combined with armor perks, enchanting, etc. that it allows you to produce really strong stuff.

I guess too you could get a good benefit from putting that enchantment on multiple pieces of gear. It's just that, when you have the option of Fortify Light Armor or something like Resist Magic, it seems so much better to go with the latter.

Again, though, I haven't really played with it myself, so I'm curious what people think of it.

Given that most of the AR benefit comes from armor perks and smithing, I would tend to think fortify armor skill would do little to increase AR. I've worn the enchantment once and it did not seem to increase AR much if at all but I've not used it enough to know what effect it actually has.

True... I don't recall much increase in effectiveness just from skill increases.

I also wonder how useful that enchantment would be as the character's skill reaches 100... I assume any value beyond 100 isn't going to have an effect.

To a large extent, things like this use caveman counting systems: "One, two, three, many. (More than three.)" After a certain point, factoring in Skill, perks, Smithing improvements, enchantments, and potion usage, a character will be all but untouchable. Buuuutttttt, there is always something out there that WILL bypass armor to negatively affect the wearer of the armor. For example, my most recent character's Armor Rating is >2300 -- which is effectively only as good as 2000, or 1800, or 1500. Most of the time, attacks hardly ever inflict hit point damage. Yet, if I go shuffling through a a pile of bones, I WILL suffer a couple of hit points by being scratched by a sharp bone or two. Also, there are some opponents that can still smack my character as few as three times and kill him outright.