Stupid things have got an Armor Rating of 240 in my game right now, and I don't know what's causing it.

probably due to some evil wizard casting a spell on your game.... as in I got not a clue - only guess would be scripted mods (and even then I don't know of any that change AR via script)... hmm I think I could code up a function (in WB) to (potentially) narrow it down to a specific mod/script... If it works for a different search I'll let you know ofc
Pacific Morrowind

It's gotta be something in the savegame, because placeatme'ing an Ancient Gargoyle in a different set of saves produces one with a nice normal AR of 80.

I should work backwards through my saves and see if I can figure out when it started. I really don't want to have to load an old save, because I just managed to kill two of them the other day (their still vulnerable to magic, but completely immune to weapons). Now, though, I've got three of them outside Bravil.

Maybe I'll have to set their DefendBonus to 80, then console kill them and see if it gets any better with the next batch of spawns.

what if it is a quest script with long interval (like say 5 or 10seconds) between runs... with a random apply function... seems unlikely I suppose but really all I can think of except for bizarre oblivion.exe error.
Pacific Morrowind

Managed to get past this bunch after about the twentieth death. In the middle I found something interesting. On one load, the Gargoyle's already had the correct AR, before I force adjusted it. This same load, my Super Hotkeys mod stopped working, which means OBSE had gotten bollixed somehow. Seems to suggest that whatever is causing it is an OBSE mod.

I used wingrep to look for changes to DefenseBonus, but only MMM's wounding was affecting that (and that both seems to be functioning correctly...DB went down as wounding went up, and is not an OBSE mod).

Anyone know of any settings besides DefenseBonus that would give an increase to armor rating without showing as an active spell effect? Something OBSE based?

I'm thinking on the lines of one of these OBSE commands:

(since they use the # reference for DefendBonus rather than the name seems the most likely to me)
Pacific Morrowind

Can't find anything for that either. Thank you for the suggestion, though.

This will drive me buggy. There's gotta be something going on. The Lesser Balrog had an AR of 200, exactly four times what he should have had. The Gargoyles got 240, exactly three times what they should have had.

In both cases I died frequently during my first encounter with them, so something might be going on there and getting saved in the save game.

The worst part is I play without the Enemy Health Bar, so the only indicator I have of damage to the opponent is the wounding effects from MMM. This means I can end up beating my head against a gargoyle a dozen times before I realize that there is a problem.

Looking into it see if I see anything in alpha version that could be doing it ..

are you importing actors spells at all?

I'm importing spells from OOO only, I think....rebuilding patch will confirm shortly. Yeah, just OOO.esm and OOO.esp are tagged at the moment.

But Refscope shows only a single instance of the ability that gives them their normal 80 AR, and removing that spell still leaves them with 160, but no active effects that can explain it.

And it's not consistent....with the Balrog I noticed earlier so I went back to a previous save and the next time I encountered them I was okay. In this case, I'd had my first encounter with a Gargoyle a long, long time ago, and had encountered several since, but mostly went around them. This time I got annoyed because I encountered five Ancient Gargoyles between Leyawiin and Bravil.

One upside to all this is that I found a major problem with the FCOM gargoyle setup that is preventing Dev_akm and bg2048's new Gargoyle loot from coming through. Posted about it in the alpha forum for you.

I noticed in my previous game the Ancient Gargoyles were Extremly tough, I could kill most creatures within three hits, but I could beat on them for a few minutes. (wasn't God mode but unlimited rings, and Meruhnes? Razor)

Tough I don't mind, but 240 AR means that I can't do any physical damage to them at all. Only magic damage, and there's only one variety of that worth bothering with.

It was beginning to confuse me because I can now go toe to toe with a Lesser Balrog and win, but Gargoyles were winged death every time, and I could barely make them bleed. I mean, I know there's a difference because I have high Fire Resistance and only medium resistance to anything else, but it was getting absurd.

Have you found a solution to this Showler? I'm getting the same issue, though it seems to happen with every Gargoyle but not every Balrog. Either way, they're common enough, especially in Oblivion gates, to piss me off. I've just resorting to using the kill command in the console, which isn't how I want to play.

Next time you encounter them, try clicking on one in the console and typing "set defendbonus to 0", then type "getarmorrating" (I think those are right).

If the Armor Rating comes up at 80, save your game and try fighting them. I think successfully saving my game with the altered rating was able to reset future ones I encountered.