Hello everyone,

I was wondering, if I wear two different armor types (heavy and light for example) do they both raise at the same time? Also will they raise proportionately to how much of each I wear? (For example, if I wear 60% heavy armor and 40% light, will 60% of my skill raises be for heavy and 40 for light?)

I tried Googling this and can't find the answer, I figured this would be a good place to ask. Thank you.

Good questions, good questions... I'll start answering something I can think of. :read:

It mostly depends what your major, minor and miscellaneous skills are. Majors raise the fastest and miscellaneous the slowest. Against this, though, goes this: the higher a stat, the slower it developes. I don't actually know what is the relation of these two seemingly opposite factors... but I'd like to know!

Anyway, cuirass is 40% of your armor rating. All the others are 10%: helmet, pauldrons (5 and 5?), gauntlets/bracers (5 and 5?), greaves, boots and shield. This info is given in the manual.

It would seem that if you take for example a heavy cuirass and helmet (50%) and make other armor light (also 50%), and take both heavy and light as, say, Major skills, AND their starting numbers will be the same (like both Heavy and Light Armor are 35 once you've created your character), they SHOULD develop in the same time. It's not that simple though, because the pounding you take can direct at any part of your body. So it's highly unlikely that they develop the very same time even if eveything's even at start.

Some questions of my own...

- How does Unarmored affect the armor rating?
- Are pauldrons and gauntlets/bracers always plain 5% and 5% or does it affect to this ratio if they're different quality?
- Just what is the ratio between this "Majors are faster than Misc." and "Lower is faster than higher stat"? Surely a Misc. Light Armor at 5 will raise to 6 with less hits taken than Major Heavy from 99 to 100, or...? Where's the limit? What's the formula?

Hmm, interesting. Thank you for the reply.

Your answer was actually pretty close to what I was planning to do- heavy and light armors both as major skills. The cuirass/helmet thing sounds like a good idea though, I didn't know about that. I'm trying to make my character a bit of a jack-of-all-trades, mostly combat oriented but with a little stealth and magic. Ultimately I kind of want to use glass armor, but going all-light for the whole game makes endurance hard to raise, and all-heavy is, well... heavy. I like to carry lots of stuff.

Well I suppose I'll go give it a shot, though I'll check back on this thread in a little bit.

I've played a character with both heavy and medium as majors, and wore a more-or-less even mix of the two for a little while. I can't speak to the exact mechanics, but both skills raised at similar rates, though they seemed much slower to level than normal.

The main problem with this style, however, is that eventually it reached a point where I started favoring one type, and it began rising faster, leading me to favor it more, until I stopped using the other altogether. This could be a particular problem with light/heavy if you grab a full suit of DB early on, as by the time you start finding superior heavy armors they may not be worth wearing. So if you want to try this, I'd highly recommend some armor balancing/overhaul mods.

When I mix armors for efficiency purposes, I tend to mix Light with either Medium or Heavy. It's rare that I mix Medium with Heavy because the same thing happens to me as happens to Farengoth.

If I'm mixing Light and Medium/Heavy, I'm mostly doing it to help with boosting both Agility and Endurance at level-ups. I'll favor an armor class depending on which attribute I most want to raise.

Sometimes I'll just mix armor classes without any efficient plan at all, doing it just for looks. My Orc barbarian, for example. He has a mix of medium, light and some parts are bare of armor altogether. With chars like this I don't care about the attribute raising*. Yhe character is going to end up a brutal death-dealer one way or another anyway, even the most sloppily played melee character will end up brutal in the end, and if the total AR is 50pts less than it could be - whatever, I'll live with it.

*(and even when I do I don't bother keeping a mental count of modifiers I'll earn this level-up, that's just anti-immersive for me)

I'm currently training up all 4. I'm playing as a samurai so I don't use a shield I've got a medium imperial chain cuirass & greaves, leather boots pauldrons and gauntlets and a heavy dwemer helm.

I say just level the skills through trainers if you have any intention of mixing them. And keep them as miscellaneous skills. I made the mistake of taking Light and Medium because I wanted to wear like the dark brotherhood gear + ebony cuirass. But as I play the game I'm using medium and heavy armor and don't have a single piece of light on.

Wearing a mix of light and either of the other weights makes some sense, because they affect different Attributes. Mixing Medium and Heavy just slows down both.

At low skill levels, a skill requires less experience points to reach the next level. A Major skill gets more points for a successful action than a Minor, and a lot more than a Misc. There's some nebulous point where it crosses, and it becomes easier to raise a low Misc. skill than to increase a high Major skill even further, but I don't have the formulas.

A number of characters of mine have worn a light item or two along with mostly either medium or heavy armor. It benefits Agility a bit, while retaining the majority of the increases in Endurance. I suppose that if you want to "powergame", switching between the armor types at each level would give you the best multipliers, but reduce your overall armor rating. I use either GCD or MADD Leveler, so that trick doesn't offer any advantages for my characters. Also, "style" matters more than pure armor value, to a point.

It takes 100 points to raise a skill level. The number of points received for the completion of each
successful action is governed by the following formula:

(5/T)*F*S*80/(L+1)

Where
T = 3,4,or 5 Depending on Major (3), Minor (4). or Misc. (5)
S = Specialization Bonus = 1.25 For the 9 skills in COMBAT, MAGIC, or STEALTH
L = Skill Level
F = A skill specific constant

Values for F

0.75......Shortblade
1.2 .......Axe
1.0 .......All other weapon skills
1.0 .......All armor skills (including Unarmored)
1.0 .......All castable spell skills
2.5.......Block
0.4 .......Armorer
0.15......Acrobatics - Jumping
3.0 .......Acrobatics - Falling
2.0 .......Security - Lockpick
3.0 .......Security - Probe
0.5 .......Alchemy - Eating
2.0 .......Alchemy - Mixing
0.1 .......Enchant - Casting a spell using an enchanted item
5.0 .......Enchant - Recharging an item using a soul gem
sec/4....Sneak - sec = ~time in sneak mode
sec/50..Athletics - sec = ~time running
sec/17..Athletics - sec = ~time swimming
Mercantile: Depends on the % difference between the offered price and the bartered price.
The higher the %, the higher the F.

(The F values are listed in WIKI in the upper right hand corner of each Skill page).

...Wow. Now I know where those mathematic formulas go that cannot be put into practise right away. Video games. 0.0

Except for the part where agility is painfully easy to level through sneak and block.

Medium/Heavy/Spear are the only things that affect endurance.

Right, but using them both won't really speed up your endurance gains, since they'll both level more slowly.

IMO, the only real reason to take both Medium and Heavy is for RP value. The character I mentioned before was RPed as a knight from a noble family, and I felt he should be equally capable of using mail and plate. It was not, however, the best use of my skill slots from a gameplay perspective.