Well i made a character that will probably level VERY slowly.

Its a Redguard with a Magic specialisation but agility and willpower as focus attributes and 'the lover' as starsign. Its meant to be a rogue, marksman, magic wielder and fighter all in one, using bits of all three to prosper. Its meant to be an effective light armor fighter (and it is) - so ive got Light armor, security, blade, mysticism, illusion, marksman and alteration as majors. Conjuration, destruction, athletics, sneak, acrobatics, mercantile and speechraft i use often, and expect to go up quickly - hence i avoided putting them as majors to avoid levelling too fast, as in stock oblivion.

Now i like this character, it gives me the ability to try magic and alchemy with all the benefits of fighting and sneaking, but i feel i have designed it for the old ruleset, spreading its specialisations too broadly to maximise what i get out of each level. Perhaps OOO levelling is supposed to make character creation logical again, with important skills being better as majors (like in morrowind), instead of hindering you by levelling you too fast, like in stock Oblivion. But i seem to have designed a character for stock Oblivion instead, and i think its going to level VERY slowly. So either i make a new character, edit it while in progress ('show racemenu') or speed up the levelling.


I should point out that ive already played stock Oblivion through to about level 20 and through much of the content, so ive 'seen it all'. Its not about 'stretching the content' for me. What i aim for is to have got past the mid end by 150-200 hours, with somewhere around level 20 (I played Morrowind for a few hundred hours as well and also hit around level 25 by then) and to have 'seen it all', if i keep playing that long, by 300-400 hours with a level somewhere above 40.

Keeping in mind that levelling slows, i dont think im going to hit anywhere near that at this rate

Nice. Will try this one.

Oscuro's default leveling rate is x3 slower than vanilla but in the options folder included with the download are a selection of leveling rates that this can be adjusted with by loading your choice after all the OOO files.
Something you may not want to hear, but OOO plays very differently from the vanilla game and Morrowind in the respect that leveling is geared toward using major skills.
Major is minor isn't really a good strategy using Oscuro's mod, and you may wish to review this idea before you find yourself playing a severely gimped character. By level 20 I feel that you may well find yourself underpowered to the extent that your avatar may not be able to survive the challenges ahead.
Enemies like Mannimarco and Mankar Cameron are made obscenely difficult in OOO compared to the vanilla game equivalents.
My own feeling is that even with default leveling rates you will find it very difficult to complete the added content in a 200 hour game.
For some character build ideas it's perhaps a good idea to have a look at the http://devnull.sweetdanger.net/ooospoilers.html thread. Skip and scroll to "A Beginners Guide to a Survivable Character" if you don't want to know about what lies ahead.

Good luck and enjoy the mod.

That may be so, but here i am kicking bandits and closing oblivion gates at level 1. I dont think the character is weak or that putting easily levelled skills as minors and difficult to level ones as majors is a bad strategy. I know the game well enough to use the extras i get from it like poisons and magic and how to turn fights to my advantage well enough to make it work. By the time i hit level 20 im sure my character would definitely not be underpowered - a whole host of major and minor skills would be high level, unlike more specialised characters whose minors level much slower.

The only problem, of course, is that if it takes forever to hit level 20 than the point is moot. If the game slows levelling to the point where acceptable progress can only be made by putting everything into focussing on majors - an extremely narrow focus of 7 skills just to counter powergaming or save the player from levelling 'too fast', then it undermines the point of minors even being there. We lost a whole middle ground of skills with oblivion from Morrowind with the removal of the 'minor' skills category, and if you make levelling non-major skills just as slow as Morrowind then you have a system where you can effectively use something like half the skills you could in Morrowind.

Now i know that you were just giving good pragmatic and sound advice and i will change the levelling rate if i feel it is appropriate. However, i do want to make the point that these levelling rate changes may be based on a very bad rationale. Oblivion's system is inherently meant to allow you to level quicker, to the point of levelling 'too quickly' even, and missing out on x5 multis and falling behind in minors, to compensate for the removal of 'minor' skills. This leaves us with elevating some minors by specialisation either in their type (magic/stealth/combat) or governing attributes, making them de-facto 'minor' skills in the Morrowind sense. If Oscuro approached this from the angle of matching Morrowind's rate of levelling, then he may well have undermined the rationale for the new system and the removal of minor skills and forced us into character builds that are far more specialised then they were meant to be.

I can see some valid points in your argument for using the major is minor strategy.
Most users are looking for longevity of character when using OOO and more often than not add a leveling mod like nGCD or Realistic Leveling that does away with the attribute multipliers, thus in many ways taking away what I and many others feel is an exploitable feature of the TES leveling system.
This type of mod obviously isn't going to suit if your aiming at a game of approx 200 hours though.
As was mentioned in a previous post, Progress could well be a mod you'd find of immense value as it will allow customization of advancement right down to individual skill rates, which using your current strategy I feel could well suit your playing style.

If i hit level 15-20 in 200 hours, ill be satisfied. Ive seen much of this game before so im not looking to breeze through or anything.

At the moment im almost level 2 and despite what ive said, im not dissatisfied with how long it has taken (ive closed the Kvatch gate). If gaining levels continues at this rate itll be fine.

However, im worried by one unknown, and that is - will levelling get even slower? For example, in Morrowind levelling from 1->2 was much, much quicker (time wise) than from 20->21. Stock oblivion seemed to change this somewhat to make the slowdown less harsh, but has OOO reversed this? If its taken me 5-10 hours of gameplay (albeit slow and relaxed gameplay, although thats still quite a bit of time) to go from 1->2, how long can i expect from level 20->21? 40 hours? Obviously that would be a problem id want to nip in the bud now

My problem is that i know how to fix the problem (change OOO options about leveling), but i dont actually know if i have one

I am not going to plot you a graph but to give you an idea with 5 times slower:
lvl 14, 96hrs.
lvl 13, 86hrs
lvl 12, 76 hrs.

edit: This is with dungeon crawls inbetween questing. So it does involve some fighting.

OOO doesn't add global slowdown if that's what your asking.
You will find advancing in levels has the same learning curve as Morrowind.
Obviously raising from 45 to 46 is going to take a longer period than upping the same skill from 15 to 16.
I can only offer advice, but once again I'll stress how difficult some of the upper echelon enemies can be.
Under normal OOO rules you'll be doing exceptionally well to complete the main quest at level 30. You'll need several skills at expert or even master level if you hope to survive some of these encounters.

Perhaps its too much to expect, but I find these mods dont really fix what is wrong with the game.

For example, back in 2005 or 2006, when Oblivion was released, I posted about why the game's armor system was completely fubarred. In short, each piece of armor has a certain 'Armor Value' (AR), and these are added to produce a final armor protection for the player. These AR values are percentages of damage dealt that are blocked by the armor, literally. So if you have an AR of 8, you are blocking 8% of damage you would otherwise recieve. Some may already see how this is problematic - particularly at low levels, armor you THINK is twice as good (eg total AR 20 vs 10) is actually just saving you ONE NINTH of damage dealt more - in other words, if it takes 9 hits to kill you in the AR 10 armor (because it blocks 10% already), it will take 8 to kill you with armor 'twice as good', AR 20. Pretty underwhelming.

The problem gets worse when you factor in the values that armors in the game have been assigned and the huge increases due to levels. At low levels you basically see about 10-20 AR at best, and that hardly makes a difference to having no armor at all (it takes 1/10 or 2/10 hits less respectively to kill you - might save you in a tight spot, but generally not worth the massive increases in money paid to get from AR 10 to AR 20). At high levels and with the best armors, you begin to see HUGE increases in armor protection. For example, if an armor gives you an AR of 85, and you decided to take off the shield or use a slightly worse armor with an AR of 70, you might THINK you have an armor almost as good, but IN FACT, you have an armor protection TWICE worse - because where before 15/100 damage would go through, now it will be 30/100. Armor degradation at high levels exarcerbates this.

Theres another problem that exarcebates these issues - I dont remember exactly, but basically it seemed the values for each armor piece were saved as integers, not floating point, so 13.75 turned into 13 before it was added with the other pieces (not AFTER, as would have been appropriate), meaning some armor types had NO actual difference at all.


All in all, the Oblivion developers not only failed to account for the basic arithmetic of their system, and counted UP by the percentage damage blocked instead of DOWN by percentage damage still dealt, but also made mechanisms and armor values that only exarcerbated the issue. When they tried to, for example, make daedric 20% better than ebony (AR 80 instead of 60, lets say) or mithril twice as good as chainmail (AR 40 instead of 20, lets say), what they actually did was make daedric twice as good as ebony (20 damage suffered vs 40) and Mithril 25% better than chainmail (60 damage suffered instead of 80). Then they failed to count the values up properly (13.75 turns into 13, 13.25 turns into 13, 5.9 equals 5, 5.1 eqauls 5, for every single seperate piece of armor) and the result was a system of armor protection that completely failed to reflect the differences between these armors in lore that the developers had intended to convey.

With all the other issues the game had back then, i did start reworking the AR values to make larger differences between basic armors and smaller differences between high end armors (for myself though - i never made any public mods). What i was doing was converting intended differences into actual - so for example, if the developers had intended daedric to be 20% better than ebony, I would give ebony 75 AR and daedric 80. If the developers intended for mithril to be twice as good as chainmail, i would give mithril AR 60 instead of 40. This is what the developers should have done in the first place, but i stopped when i gave up on the game entirely (and because i didnt know or have the will to go changing the mechanism behind armor skills and how it affects final AR values - necessary to have, eg, heavy armors blocking decent damage even at low level).

It dissapoints me to see that, all these years later, such basic details escape even the esteemed modders who are overhauling Oblivion's failures. The majority of armor and weapon changes in OOO, particularly at low level, are EXTREMELY expensive and yet almost entirely cosmetic. The game is still broken. Oh well, ill try and enjoy it for what it is

I realise im perhaps being very demanding overall, but I really was hoping that these things might have been sorted by now. Many others certainly are in the overhauls, and that i appreciate. But modders like Oscuro have actually made the problem worse in the way they have treated armors. It really does show that modders cant fix deep issues with the way a game has been developed. Still, thanks everyone for your help

It sounds like you were looking for an armor rebalancing system more than an overhaul if that is al you have to report after playing OOO. That is a harsh view of an author's work, when the description of the mod does not say it "fixes" this particular issue. This did not bother me at all. It would be ridiculous if you were immune to damage just because you picked up a nice set of armor at low levels. Armor should be expensive. If you want a mod to overhaul the prices of items, go add Living Economy or Enhanced Economy. OOO does not change everything. I do not see how running around immune to most attacks would be fun. I guess you would prefer only being able to carry one suit of armor and two potions too...

Ehm, wouldn't increasing the AR for high level armors at the rates you suggested make the armor skill totally useless? The protection provided by the armor is also based on your skill level.

I mind to add that the damage calculations are done in float. So X.Y does make a difference. It is not int as said above.

For a start, that was not an indictment of OOO - i merely said it did not fix this either when it added and rebalanced armors and weapons. Second, i have those mods installed (living economy etc), they are unrelated. Third, you have not understood my point - there is a fundamental problem with the way the armors were given AR's in this game - this is not a matter of preference, the AR values are added incorrectly and do not reflect the relative strength the developers had intended - and neither the developers nor the modders have really addressed this in four years. Hence my point - if a game has as many fundamental flaws as Oblivion did, it is unlikely these will ever be completely fixed despite the hard work of modders.



This is unrelated to what i described - skill levels are not something i had mentioned changing.

What i described were examples of how the arithmetic used was incorrect. The numbers i gave were examples (although it is possible to reach AR 85 in the game at high levels, that is the max i think) of how what you might think are comparable AR numbers (eg 70 and 85) actually represent very different levels of protection - in the actual game these would differ according to skill level (although the extremely large spread in which they would vary is a related problem). The developers did not keep this in mind when they assigned AR's, and as a result, the best armors and particularly heavy armors in the game are much much better than the lower armors and light armors, which are not very different to each other.



So the actual damage dealt calculation uses float? Interesting - well although the equipment screen adds using int, this remedies that issue in practise. However, the damage dealt vs damage blocked oversight still means armor balancing in the game is fubarred. Right now, armors at low level are mostly cosmetic and differences between them almost non-existent, particularly in OOO

LE and EE are not unrelated when you complain about armors being expensive, and what does "which are not very different to each other" mean? Are you saying that you think the protection that they offer should differ greatly in game...nevermind. OOO does not contain the "fix" you want, and that is it...

I am saying that the protection differs much less than you think, or than the developers intended, at low AR values, and much more at high AR values. LE and EE are entirely unrelated to this because i am not talking about armors being expensive as the problem - i am saying that mithril is barely better than chainmail, and that is the problem, not the cost.

If you refuse to listen, understand or see the problem, then it will be a fix that only i ask for. But does that mean there was no problem?

Here are the total AR values for various armors taken from the editor (stock oblivion, 50% boost from light armor master perk not applied, since that is an end game perk)
Fur = 16 AR (84/100 damage dealt)
Leather = 25 AR (75/100 damage dealt)
Chainmail = 30 AR (70/100 damage dealt)
Mithril = 35 AR (65/100 damage dealt)
Glass = 50 AR (50/100 damage dealt)

Iron = 40 AR (60/100 damage dealt)
Steel = 45 AR (55/100 damage dealt)
Orcish = 55 AR (45/100 damage dealt)
Ebony = 60 AR (40/100 damage dealt)
Daedric = 75 AR (25/100 damage dealt)

Essentially the problem is that if i add 25 AR to 0, i reduce damage by 25/100, as i do if i add 25 AR to 50 AR. But the percentage change in damage suffered is much greater, as in one cases the damage is reduced by 25%, where in the other it is reduced by 50%, That means you cannot balance armors in the high AR ranges the same way you do those in the lower AR ranges, but Bethesda does, with the same range between them and general increases of 5 AR between both light and heavy armors. This produces drastically different results

Assuming 200 health and 50 damage per hit, this is the number of hits needed to kill your character
No Armor = 4 hits
Fur = 4.7
Leather = 5.3
Chainmail = 5.7
Mithril = 6.1
Glass = 8

Iron = 6.6
Steel = 7.2
Orcish = 8.8
Ebony = 10
Daedric = 16


Note in particular that the range is 35 with heavy armors and 34 with light armors - almost the same range - but most of the light armors show little to no real difference (Fur 4.7 hits -> Mithril 6.1 hits = 30% more hits needed) while most of the heavy armors show a moderate difference (Iron 6.6 hits -> Ebony 10 hits = 51% more hits). Note also that Daedric is twice as good as Glass, despite only a 50% increase in AR (50->75 AR). Overall, despite a similar AR range, the difference is 70% more hits needed from fur->glass, while its 142% more hits needed from iron->daedric. Moreover however, from Fur->Mithril there is almost no point in upgrading except for aesthetics, while heavy armors enjoy an excellent progression.


Now lets see how many hits it takes when we assume our character is lower level, and the AR is halved;
No armor = 4
Fur = 4.3
Leather = 4.5
Chainmail = 4.7
Mithril = 4.8
Glass = 5.3

Iron = 5
Steel = 5.1
Orcish = 5.5
Ebony = 5.7
Daedric = 6.4

As you can see, with AR's halved the reduction in effectiveness is not linear, but much more drastic. What does this mean? It means that without armor our character will take 4 hits, with fur->mithril 5 will kill them, with glass->ebony 6 will be enough, and only daedric will allow this character to take 7 hits. For our character, Daedric is not even twice as good as no armor.

The point where armors really start to make a difference is 30-40 AR, which is what Ebony and daedric are around when used by lower level characters. It basically means that for lower level characters light armors fur->mithril are almost pointless, with only cosmetic differences, and all heavy armors or glass, except daedric, are only slightly better than no armor at all. Only daedric provides a decent boost (for a massive weight drag). Armors thus only start to come into their own at higher levels and AR numbers over 30-40, but by that point the player will generally have upper echelon armors rendering the rest obsolete.

I guess some (or many) users do not see that as a problem, but you could request or make a mod that addresses this part of the game. It makes sense to me that the the difference would be much more noticeable at levels where the damage is greater. It is easier to distinguish between colors when they are brighter. If you are used to playing the game as it is, then you know relatively what an increase in armor rating means for your PC. For me, this is not a problem, but that is why every mod list can be different. Different users want to see different changes made to the original game. If the change you want to see has not been created, create it yourself or see if someone else would be willing to implement the changes for you.

I really did not like this part of your post:


Modders have fixed a number of "deep issues" that are of concern to other users. I thought that was a bold statement when it only considers your own issues with the game.

I should not have suggested issues escape modders, for only a few do not and there is a lot that they do fix. What i meant to say is that there are certain kinds of deep issues for which you will almost never see a satisfactory fix unless developers do so. There are certain kinds of issues modders are not well equipped to handle (eg bad story, bad lore, bad game mechanics, inconsistent content, poor AI, poor animations, problems with the game world (most total conversions have much lower production values) or lack of focussed content - note that when i say 'satisfactorily fix' i mean these are important parts of a game that modders are often unable to repair to the production values needed for a good game) The trouble is that open source and modders are great at adding content, but not so much at standardising it. If a developer has not made mature and varied quests, hand placed content and sound game mechanics for their game, modders will rarely be able to fill the void.

That is what i meant to say


As for rebalancing armor, the trouble is that while taking current % differences between AR values as the 'intended relative difference' and translating this instead to the difference in the damage that will still go through is easy enough (and i was doing that before) and not all that much work, without access to skills and the range between AR's for low level characters and AR's for high level characters the effort is pointless - a low level character will still find almost no difference between armors, and most useless. I gave up on rebalancing armors for this reason, and also because i gave up on Oblivion.

I will play OOO a bit more and if im still playing it i might look at doing that. If theres interest, i might even release such an armor rebalance. But again, without reconsidering the skill effect on AR values, its pointless

I think modders have done a great job with poor AI, poor animations and so on. The game engine and hardware limit just how much a modder can do to advance certain aspects, however. Some modders have even extended the lore quite a bit. If you want a good story, add an awesome quest mod or four. If you have those kinds of issues with the game, buy a different one. I do not know how much of this you are directly relating to Oblivion, but your expectations are seriously high. I think that modded-Oblivion I play is barely lacking anything. It is a wonderful game, especially for one I bought in 2006.

My expectations are not high for modders, im glad for what they give me. My expectations were much higher for Bethesda, who i felt dropped the ball with Oblivion (but did great with Morrowind and to a lesser extent Fallout 3).

If you are satisfied its really quite pointless for me to convince you otherwise. However let me break it down a bit

- AI - modders have used the AI system to implement more routines and sometimes even extended the behaviour (eg animals fleeing or reattacking in OOO). However, the AI system remains woefully inadequate in comparison to most contemporary games. Try playing Halo, crysis, or company of heroes. All i am saying is that it takes proper developers to make advanced AI systems.

- Poor animations - these remain largely untouched. Some have been added with, for example, the 'sixy walks' animations, but this fits in with what ive said; modders are good at additions, not replacing every animation in the game to a uniform standard (although the sixy walks does that for women, youre out of luck if you dont like the way a dog walks). Animation is also something that most modders are not specialised in (have a look at the Dark Mod, on which my brother worked, to see that modders often produce excellent models, but rarely animations) Subpar animations remain in the game, for the most part.

- game engine and hardware limits - yes, we all know most (though there are exceptions) modders cannot change or rework engines. Bethesda themselves cant

- lore - i would dispute that modders have been able to extend lore in the consistent and uniformly high quality way that game developers are paid to do. Most often you get amateurish or a mishmash of content. Its still all greatly appreciated, but this is something that is the game developer's job to do (no fault of modders if they let them down)

- story - see above, really. But as you say, modders are very good at providing additions like a quest or two. Just not at reworking every quest in the game to fit a more mature theme, for example

- High expectations - I would say i expected something more like Morrowind. When Bethesda failed to deliver, I did not consider it a wonderful game in 2006. OOO and mods have REALLY helped, despite what might seem like negativity here - but underneath, Oblivion still has many faults, in my eyes

Well, at least I also agree that Morrowind is a better game out of the box.

Edit: amended

I don't have any real comment for you mr. irrational as I don't necessarily see the armor issuse as a real problem - things like that do not bug me as much as things like having no children (nor good mods that add children) in tamriel.

but perhaps you may like this (maybe not): http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=19095

maybe of less interest (but still cool): http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=23062

Now there are other mods out there that address the damage formula inadequacies in other ways - mods that increase blocking efficiency (making the skill very useful).

Again - not an issue for me as I've got mods that handle combat as best as I can imagine. I highly recommend mods by Duke Patrick - most of which can be found on Nexus. I'm one of the few who wish that OOO/FCOM came without combat behavior/weapon stat adjustments so that other mods could handle it without conflict and leave FCOM type overhauls just to the encounters and leveled lists.

Obviously the lower your armour skill the less protection it will offer. Your simply don't know how to use it at level 15 compared to if the same armour is used at 90.
Protection increases quite dramatically if you take methril as an example at levels 5 and then compare it when your skill is 50.
There's also a huge difference in AR between fur and glass if compared at the same level 50.

As far as you PC is concerned of course there's little differential in AR for the various armours until he knows how to use them properly.

Or am I missing something?

Yes, you are missing the fact that the difference between armors is smaller than intended in the lower AR range, and larger in the higher AR range. For example, have a look at Ebony->Daedric.

Ill post the numbers i did up earlier - have a look in particular to the number of hits it takes to kill characters with armor. Do you see how for much of the game, armor and in particular light armor is not worth the weight it costs to carry around with you? Even at high levels (but without the 50% boost from master light armor) light armor is only good for an extra hit or two over wearing none (and enjoying the speed and lower encumberance). The top light armor doubles the number of hits your high level character will take. The top heavy armor quadruples it.

Moreover. however, at the start of the game, when your heavy/light armor skill is low, almost all the light armors in the game are good for only an extra hit, and the best heavy armors good for two. There is almost no difference between them - so upgrading and paying lots of gold for it is rendered pointless - and most of the armors in the game are as well. Thats not how it was meant to be and its like this because Bethesda evenly assigned AR progression (eg 34 range between light armors, 16-50, and 35 for heavy, 40-75, often with 5 AR steps and 15 AR between top and second best)

In a game that slows levelling to a crawl, like OOO, these armors are even more pointless because youll quite literally have chainmail or steel by the time you are level two and can sit tight with that armor for the next ten-fifteen levels while you slowly collect pieces for the best armors. Youll never really need to walk into a store and buy an expensive piece of armor or weaponry with such small effective differences, and that renders much of the point of living economy and merchant rebalances pointless as well.




What it should have looked like, and i think Bethesda themselves intended the actual relative effectiveness to be, is that the range across light armors (remember that is 34 AR from top to bottom) and heavy armors (35 AR from top to bottom) should have produced EQUAL changes in effectiveness, not ones that were much greater at the higher AR, heavy armor scale (quadrupling of 6.6->16 hits vs 4 with no armor) and much smaller at the lower AR, light armor end of the scale (4.7->8 hits, vs 4 for no armor)


What Bethesda seems to have failed to realise is that going from 25 AR to 50 AR produces an armor 50% better, while going from 50 AR to 75 AR produces an armor twice as good.

How do you know what was "intended"? I am sure they tested the armor formulas. Fine, it is not what you would have implemented. You would have to seriously up the damage of the game at low levels for making armor that sturdy at low levels. Armor should also be much more expensive if you are suddenly immune to the attacks of low level creatures at any level after throwing on a nice suit of armor. At low levels the enemies (in general) do less damage, and your armor prevents less damage. It is a balance thing.

I can guess at what was intended by examining AR values, or what is said in lore. I can also reason from the diversity in arms and armor that these were intended to have qualitative differences other than cosmetic effect.

Put simply, the AR values across light armors and heavy armors follow a certain pattern - they range by ~35 AR and follow 5 AR increments. The number of different light and heavy armors were also supposed to give the player a meaningful choice as they progressed in both light and heavy armors. As is, only heavy armors give that meaningful progression, because their AR values are in a range where each AR increase has a progressively larger effect than in the range for light armors. Light armors, in comparison, basically stagnate until glass.

The effect of armor at lower levels is problematic, because as you say, this is probably intended. But i would put it to you that it was not intended to be THIS bad for light armors.

Finally, we are not talking about being immune to attack. Stock oblivion already had a major deficiency in terms of the huge health increases in enemies as you levelled yet with little ability to deal more damage, so that in the stock game when most enemies took 2-3 swings to kill at level 1, at level 15 it was more like 15-20. So the problem you mention was already there in stock oblivion. OOO changed this to make combat deadlier with fewer hits.

In both cases, changing light armors so they show a similar spread in effective protection as heavy armors (by balancing them in terms of the health they let through) would not make you 'invincible' by any means. What it would do is make combat rely less on health as a mechanism for resisting damage to AR as a mechanism for blocking more of it. Your character would be less survivable without armor and would be more survivable with better armor - rather than almost as well protected naked as clad in mithril chainmail. The spread would change, not the deadliness of combat.



Yes, except that at low level (and even at higher levels) its basically your health that does the bulk of protecting you, and armor hardly does a thing. Thats much more immunity than if you had to actually wear armor to survive encounters.



You wouldnt be immune, you would actually need armor to survive as you do now, rather than just health, and so youd actually have a reason to upgrade armors. Armors are already very expensive, and price is used to put armors beyond the reach of certain levels. Right now in OOO, its already fairly pointless to spend money buying armors. Upping the price would just produce more money for the player when he sells them




Thanks for these links, i will check them out. the first seems to get the idea, actually, its pretty much exactly what i was hoping to see already - evening out AR benefits across the entire range, rather than leaving it skewed for higher AR's

And with the way that these mods handle these armor/damage formulas id have to agree - id prefer to be able to apply a fix that actually understands the way AR's are skewed and weapon damage progresses rather than be stuck with some very minor tweaks to them


TomLong, the description for that first mod pretty much sums up the problem:
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=19095

In vanilla Oblivion, increasing your AR grants you much more benefit if your AR is already
high (>75) than if it is low (<25), but no benefit at all if your armor is maxed out (>= 85).
This mod changes the formula so that increasing your AR grants you about the same amount of
benefit no matter what your current AR is. Well, it still maxes out eventually, but not until
over 120. This mod changes the formula for enemies too, not just the player.

In vanilla Oblivion, the amount of weapon damage you take is equal to:
base_damage * (1 - AR/100.0)
With AR reaching a maximum of 85. This means that the marginal effect of each point of
armor gradually rises to about 6 times its original benefit, then falls abruptly to 0.

In this mod, the amount of weapon damage you take is equal to:
base_damage * (1 - CONSTANT_B/100.0 * (1 - pow(CONSTANT_A, AR)))
The default settings are:
CONSTANT_A = 0.983709
CONSTANT_B = 110
Up until total damage reduction reaching a maximum at 96% (requiring over 126 total points
of armor).
Some example damage reductions at default settings:
With 0 points of armor, your damage is reduced 0% (compared to 0% in vanilla).
With 10 points of armor, your damage is reduced 16% (compared to 10% in vanilla).
With 20 points of armor, your damage is reduced 30% (compared to 20% in vanilla).
With 30 points of armor, your damage is reduced 42% (compared to 30% in vanilla).
With 40 points of armor, your damage is reduced 52% (compared to 40% in vanilla).
With 50 points of armor, your damage is reduced 61% (compared to 50% in vanilla).
With 60 points of armor, your damage is reduced 68% (compared to 60% in vanilla).
With 70 points of armor, your damage is reduced 75% (compared to 70% in vanilla).
With 80 points of armor, your damage is reduced 80% (compared to 80% in vanilla).
With 90 points of armor, your damage is reduced 84% (compared to 85% in vanilla).
With 100 points of armor, your damage is reduced 88% (compared to 85% in vanilla).
With 110 points of armor, your damage is reduced 91% (compared to 85% in vanilla).
With 120 points of armor, your damage is reduced 94% (compared to 85% in vanilla).
With 130+ points of armor, your damage is reduced 96% (compared to 85% in vanilla).

Note in particular that the difference between Daedric (75 AR) and Ebony (60 AR) would now be ~40%, rather than 60%, and the difference between Fur (16 AR) and Mithril (35 AR) would be 43%, rather than 30%