I dunno if anyone has noticed. But under alteration dragonhide (The master-level damage reduction buff), is classed as being in the same catagory as oakflesh/stoneflesh/ebonyflesh - and for some mystifying reason, ebonyflesh (expert level armour buff) actually takes presidence over it.

This leads to a number of problems:

1) Perk redundancy. There's no point taking mage armour ranks if you're going to use dragonhide, because dragonhide doesn't benefit from mage armour, and provides far better protection - the two skills are mutually exclusive because if you cast any of the mage-armour using skills at the same time, dragonhide stops working

2) Dragonhide can't be used in a suprise situation: An alteration mage has to walk around essentially naked, if they walk around using ebony-flesh as a general safety measure, and then get into a fight they really want the 80% damage reduction for... they can't. because ebony flesh over-rules the dragonhide.

3) Armour elitism: Alteration is meant to be the caster defensive school, but non-magic armour rating combines with the dragonhide damage reduction, while alteration armour rating disables it entirely. This further reinforces that wearring physical armour is the only way to play.



I'm not sure how spells are set up in skyrim, but it appears to me that spells must have a list of proscribed spells that it dispels if they are in the same grouping. Dragonhide needs to be "seperated" from the oakflesh list so the two sets of spells can be maintained side by side. For those perhaps confused, oakflesh/stoneflesh/ebonyflesh add 60/80/100 to your armour rating for a long duration, dragonhide reduces incoming physical damage by 80% for a short duration. Despite the name similarity both sets of spells have very different effects