» Tue Sep 14, 2010 9:24 am
Ah, I see someone else "luted" that same cave......only it wasn't any "phatter" than any other "lute" in the game, just a different name.
As has been pointed out repeatedly in this thread, the linear progression of "worse" to "better" has to go. Making each type of armor suited for a particular role would make a lot more sense, although there would still be some overall quality differences. Tradeoffs between sheer Armor Value, maximum durability, weight, repair cost, and outright purchase price could give each type a purpose, and your choice of character would determine what was best for them, not just automatically upgrading to "the next thing to come along" because it's always "better" in almost all respects.
My one MW character had about 75% of his "final" medium armor set by Level 2, not because good armor was available at low level, but because he didn't NEED anything better than about one or two steps above the basic starting gear. That character went with a mix of Imperial Dragonscale (midrange in quality, available from a few specific merchants and armorers at any level) and Imperial Chain (not bad, but nothing special, and readily available from a number of merchants and Imperial garrison armorers from day one), with a couple of odd pieces mixed in later.
Another character used chitin throughout the entire game, which was one of the best "common" light armor types, again available at a number of places from the start. I managed to resist the temptation to have him equip the DB set which was left after the TB expansion's "introduction", because it would not have been "suitable" for the character. DB had an extremely high armor value, which by itself wasn't an issue, but the durability should have been terrible, making it ideal for an assassin who isn't SUPPOSED to get hit a lot; the high value would have made the repair costs astronomical for a non-armorer character, and the low durability would have made it all but useless after a few hits in "normal" combat.
(Note that chainmail can be a light or a heavy armor, depending on a number of factors such as the thickness of the links, whether it's single or double linked, etc. I've seen iron chainmail hauberks that weigh somewhere around 80 lbs., and a chainmail shirt made for a young prince which was amazingly light (probably under 10 lbs.), which was closer to jewelry than armor, yet still highly protective. If the unit of weight in TES is somewhere around 1/4 lb. (half a kilogram), a lot of the weapon and armor weights would make sense (there are still a few which are absurd, no matter how you figure it). At any rate, naming the armor for the material is only half of the picture; you could conceivably make various forms of light, medium, and heavy armor from almost any material.