Sooo I want to play like a monk with my Khajiit.. No weapons just bare fists, with restoration magic, the crafting skills (well at least alchemy and enchanting), maybe a few other magic skills, but I cannot decide whether to go in robes, light armor, or heavy armor. Normally heavy armor would be a write off but the fists of steel perk makes it somewhat attractive, light armor you get bonuses to stamina regen if you wear ALL light armor (which means, no fists of steel) which would help with power attacks. Is there any reason as a partial caster for me not to wear armor at all, even light?

Don't. Even with the perk you will never get past the first dungeon.

Heavy Armor all the way. ur gonna be close range with them fists. Makes sense.

I've taken a naked Khajiit up to the "Diplomatic Immunity" quest without gaining a single skill point or picking up anything except quest items. At level one Khajiit claws are OP.

That perk in heavy armour is essential if you want to use H2H at higher lvl's.
The damage scales with the armour rating of your gauntlets, which means the gauntlets become your weapon.
It is a bit odd for a monk to wear heavy armour but I don't see any other way if you want to be serious about it.

Heavy Armor, since your damage with the perk is based off the Armor Rating of your gloves the higher your Heavy Armor skill the more unarmed damage you do. Smithing will help tons too.

And khajiit unarmed kicks ass early on. You'll need to get stuff to keep enhancing your unarmed damage though, at least until you unlock that perk.

according to UESP Fists of Steel only puts in the base armor (not modified by smithing or even heavy armor skill) into the damage, so basically at most, +18 damage for daedric gauntlets.

So if this is true..

The decision comes between +50% stamina regen (more power attacks) and +18 damage on each hit.

I'm almost still leaning full light armor just because it'll look better.

Does hand to hand count as a one handed weapon for backstab purposes?

A Khajiit monk, eh? Just get some monk robes.

You're so very wrong!

Khajiit Claws do an extra 25 damage, which bests most weapon you get from the start.

Get the Pugilist Gloves, unenchant them, and then enchant your entire armor with Fortify Hand to Hand.

You can take anything down just fine.

Gloves of the Pugilist will help too... :bowdown:

I might, just because this character is kind of just a roleplay character anyway.. but there's no in game benefit to not wearing armor at all as far as I can tell.

Is this build viable for the whole game? I had hoped to create a khajit unarmed and be able to play through the entirety in this play style so does anyone have any experience with it endgame?

You can only enchant gloves and one ring with that effect ...

Well no there's no benifits from plain ol' monk robes unless you enchant it.

It's definitely doable, I got a Khajiit brawler at his forties, and he got past the main quest and all the other questlines I've done so far.

Khajiit natural habilities = +15 damage
That heavy armor perk = + whatever your gloves rating is, a heavily enhanced one would be beast
Strong Fortify hand to hand enchant on your enhanced gloves and ring by unenchanting Gloves of the Pugilist= self explanatory

OP, you absolutely need to go the heavy armor route. You don't necessarily have to wear the armor, but you need fists of steel to be a contender throughout the entire game. I took a Khajiit from lv.1 to lv.30 hitting harder than any other character I had played up 'til that point.

What Fists of Steel does is add the gauntlet's armor rating to your base unarmed attack, so if you have a Daedric Gauntlet with an armor rating of 54, plus miscelleaneous unarmed enchantments, plus the khajiit's natural +15 unarmed bonus, well...you're doing colossal amoutns of damage, and much faster than warhammers and the like.

Two other benefits to the heavy armor route are the two perks that add +25% to your heavy armor rating a) if you're wearing all heavy armor, and B) if you're wearing a matching set of heavy armor. There are so many ways to supplement unarmed it's not even funny. If anyone ever tells you unarmed is not a viable, nay powerful way of playing, proceed to mock and belittle them until they accept your superiority.

the h2h perk is broken and svcks.

it seriously just took me 2-3 hits to kill a fox with 100 armor value daedric gauntlets.

But for RP purposes, i guess go ahead - but it wont be easy

Yay another reply!

Back on topic: Wear Fur Shoes to give an armour boost and give them a stamina boosting enchantment, find the hide bracers and give them the Hand-to-Hand damage boost enchantment and give the robes a resistance enchantment if you manage to find the hood seperately give that a magicka boost enchantment.

Yeah. I made a monk with restoration, smithing, heavy AND light armor. Just to revolve everything around that stupid perk. Now learning that it actually svcks kind of blows for my level 44 main character.
Best build would have been restoration, alteration and enchanting. That is, after there's a mod that fixes alteration magic to scale with your skilllevel.

Once a mod comes out and makes the H2H perk account for full gauntlet armor, it will be so beastly.

I've never had this problem with 54-armor daedric gauntlets. Why?

well I play on master. i also went into a forsworn camp and things were dying...SO SLOW!

I just couldn't stand it

See I'm hearing mixed thing here. Some people say you get the full armor rating of the gloves others are confirming what the wiki says and that it's only the base armor of the item at heavy armor skill 1.. I also didn't think of that, taking the heavy armor perk and wearing light armor instead (I would only want to be wearing a bracer type of glove not a gauntlet, I wanna use the claws.

I may wait on this character until CK and some mods start coming out, I'm less than satisfied with the looks you can get right now.

i just found a pair of pugilist gloves that add ten ponts of extra unarmed damage. i disenchanted them and i actually have the spell effect now so i can enchant a pair of gauntlets and play a drunken master style character.