Heavy armor vs Light armor

it burns to:

More protection, ,more noise, and less mobility vs Less protection, less noise and more mobility.

One difference that should be put in is that it should be harder to push over/ knock to the ground, someone in heavy armor. Unless they had a large warhammer of equal mass, which in turn take forever to get swinging unless your character is super strong.

Unfortunately it was hard to resist grabbing glass armor if your character was really a fur character type (like a hunter). So I want all kinds of armor and clothing to have different strengths and weaknesses that also makes you value the lower spectrum. Like buoyancy - harder to stay afloat in heavy armor than in light armor. Protection against elements - fur likely has a good bonus against cold, metals may have weakness to lighting even if their armor rating is higher. Noise levels. Ease of obtaining materials needed to repair armor (leather and fur and iron might be easier to obtain than elvish and ebony and daedric). Are you strong enough to walk around in the heaviest armors at all, or do you get a penalty?

I can see this time round having perks to separate them much more. Like say heavy armour having perks to reduce the chance of being staggered (more tank like) with light armour having perks to evade or move faster.

Shouldn't it be harder to knock down an agile person in light armor? At least in real life the heavy knights armor from late medieval times had a down side when fighting on foot as it was difficult to maintain balance with such a heavy outfit..

i hope they make the differences bigger this time around. seriously there was no reason to use light armor in oblivion outside of looks because at a certain point the heavy armor didnt encumber you anymore and i never noticed any big difference sneaking around in heavy or light armor in vanilla oblivion. i had to use mods to address that.

heavy armor should make you significantly slow i would say around 25% at least. it should incur a significant penalty to sneaking say at least 50% and neither one of those should disappear even with perks. possible be reduce slightly but they should always be there to make light armor viable.j heavy armor should be able to reduce damage to a max of 60% and no more.

in order for heavy armor to be viable light armor should have significanly less protections and durability and lower enchantment as well............since its less material that kind of makes sense. i would say that the very best light armor should only reduce damage by 30% max and no more.

i wish they had DT or some way of having different damage types so that armors could react differently to them but thats not going to happen apparently. id love to see fur and leather armors resist frost and metal armors resist shock (since it would travel through the suit to the ground) and glass could resisnt fire since glass is an insulator. i can dream at least.

There will be no more 'fire shield 18%' Sigil Stones to enchant with, so enchanting clothing should not be such a win win option anymore. The way it should be imho. My mage will move fast, but may have to rely on cast shield spells for protection.

@Kermit, been through the DT thing before, only problem I have with it, is it kind of forces you to take the best weapons and armour, rather than those you think suit your character, or you like the look and feel of. With DR, if you don't like Daedric, you can use lesser weapons, at a slight penalty. With DT, you are a fool not to use Daedric if you can.

I've always been into Heavy Armour.

Having said that when you master either Heavy or Light Armour Skill, a full set of Glass/Daedric have exactly the same armour rating and both are weightless.

So doesn't matter that much IMO.

i actually changed all the weapon stats in my game to be fairly even across the board and gave them different characteristics based on material with some being lighter faster more durable etc. it seemed silly that iron which is very heavy did very little damage compared to glass which at least in the TES universe is supposed to be lighter since its light armor. id rather have the pierce, blunt, slash stuff you see in other games like NWN or even mount and blade had a good system.

one thing that would be a positive with a DT system though is that you could have a minus DT effect like the AP ammo in new vegas for certian weapons. for example you could give a warhammer bonus DT reduction against heavy armor that could simulate crushing damage. daggers could also recieve bonus DT reduction against heavy damage because its easier to thrust a dagger into a neck or under arm joint instead of slashing with a sword which frankly slashing weapons svck against heavy armor.

LA since I usually go for stealth, oblivion was pretty bad about it the differences disappeared at hirgher levels everything besides protection and weight which were when you got the topped out LA had 50% more protection and HA weighed 50% less making them equal.

No Armour: Or just wearing clothes.

Full speed of character
Full mobility of character
Full stanima use
Full stealth capability
Full magick effectiveness

Light Armour: Hide, Fur, Leather, Bone, Mail, Glass, etc.
Full or near speed of character
Full or near mobility of character
Full or near stanima use
Full or near stealth capability
A moderate hampering on magick capability
Better protection against melee, and projectile attacks.
Low durability
weighs not to much

Heavy Armour: Iron, Steel, Ebony, Daedric, etc
Hamperance on speed of character
Hamperance of mobility on character
Hamperance on stanima use
Big Hamperance on stealth capability
A moderate to high hampering on magick capability
Best protection against melee and missile attacks
Cannot swim and will sink to the bottom of the water in heavy armour.
Take more damage from high falls in heavy armour.
Very durable
Weighs more

Mobility: Might effect the time to draw a weapon or the time it takes to jump or dodge.
Stanima use: The strenous actions controlled by stanima (sprinting, striking, jumping) cost more stanima.

If you don't want all the complication of different weapon v. armour types, a simpler way to do it is have a mix, with skill based DR and set by type and condition DT, which is only reduced at very low skill ( still learning to move in the stuff, easy target ), but after say apprentice level, doesn't change with skill.

If you're looking for differences regarding actual stats, you wont find it, not in Oblivion at least. In Oblivion, if you had 100 skill in Light Armor, and had the best suit of Light Armor on, your defense rating was 85. Same with Heavy Armor and the best suit of it. So what was the difference, stat wise? Absolutely nothing.
The difference, is immersion, RP, and imagination. Does your character use light or heavy armor? That's the difference. Roleplay. Immersion. Use your imaginations and things start to find purpose.

There was one difference, the health of the armour. Heavy armour takes a lot more damage before it is broken.

The difference you say? It's quite simple, really. Although it seems to be overlooked a lot in this thread. Anyhow, at the high-end of the scale, yes, a full set of Daedric armor and a full set of Glass armor provide the same armor resistance. However, Heavy Armor has more health. What does this mean? It means that it takes longer for it to break. What does that mean? It means that it takes longer for it to lose it's armor resistance effectiveness, as once armor deteriorates to 0 percent health, it provides no protection. (It slowly loses protection as it breaks is what I was getting at.)

Furthermore, Heavy Armor had the advantage that it could be mixed and matched while still retaining all of it's perk advantages. That's something which Light Armor does not do. If you mixed and matched Light Armor with Heavy Armor, then you would lose out on the 50 percent extra protection perk that Light Armor provides. To top it all off, there's one key item that comes to mind that's exclusively Heavy Armor (Escutcheon of Chorrol), which makes the factor of losing the 50 percent extra protection perk very important.

Stat wise, Heavy Armor is the clear winner at the higher end of the scale. I imagine that Skyrim will try to make the Heavy Armor and Light Armor skills different, from beginning to end, this time around.

Yep. LA didn't have near as much durability as Heavy Armor. Glass Armor required alot more repairing than Daedric Armor.