I agree there, there should be more disparity. The fact that both have perks to make armor wear nothing irks me. Light should be nothing. Heavy should be half weight.

I have no real issues with the perks as each of them reflect a dedication to that particular art, Heavy or Light. Effectiveness of the armor still reflected by skill level as well as the entry level perk??? If so, using perk points gained in other skills of focus would be the expedient thing to do. It reflects the limitations of some lines of perks like 'Axe' perks that are useless when using a mace or fire spell boosting when you use frost spells. Take perks that make sense to your character.

Maybe I should clarify that the reason i'm not concerned about the armor perks being "boring" is that I'm sure there will be mods to make them much more interesting very quickly.

I seem to take that for granted.

That would be much more sensible, but I think the description is quite clear. I wouldn't really mind in the case of heavy armor and defense increasing perks, but to only be able to dodge or regenerate stamina when you put on a helmet is ridiculous.

What I was expecting were more perks that benefit an agile fighting style. While the dodge perk and stamina regeneration are theoretically nice (ignoring the requirements for a moment), the defense increasing perks don't help at all to distinguish between heavy and light armor. Light armor will have less defense by default, no matter how much you increase it with perks, which is why it needs other advantages.
That the only hand-to-hand and acrobatic perks are under heavy armor puts me off as well. I would have expected at least something similar for light armor. If you want to play an effective monk, you have to use heavy armor gloves, which means you can't make use of the light armor perks because you can't wear a full light armor set. As a fistfighting monk, you can't dodge. What were they thinking?

Overall, except for dodging and stamina regeneration, the perks not only totally missed the target group of agile characters. The perks that would benefit them are also under heavy armor. I just can't get my head around that.

Going back to Oblivion, wasn't the Weightless armor bonus only dependent on NOT wearing any heavy armor rather than wearing light armor everywhere?

Yes, actually, it did! So there you go, complainers: you can walk around without a helmet on and get all the glorious benefits of the perks. Enjoy seeing your beautiful face that won't be so pretty once it gets smashed in by a giant's fist because you weren't wearing a helmet you idiot!

The weightless perk in Skyrim doesn't require you to wear a full set either. However, the other perks do.

My ass is going to be fully armored at all times, and in style too. I love those guard uniforms.

No, it doesn't say that. What it actually says is unclear at the moment since no one has those perks. I think it excludes heavy armor. Only Matched Set requires you to be fully armored.

The description is pretty clear to me.
If it would simply exclude heavy or light armor, you would get the benefits without any armor at all.

What I think it means is that you must be wearing some light armor and no heavy armor for it to work.

Well remember that the stamina regeneration perk means 50% less penalty than it was before. You don't magically regenerate it faster because you put on something heavier than clothes.

I guess we'll all know in a week.

Perks are also experience..
So someone who wears light armor and sprints a lot will probably get into better shape than someone who wears only clothing while doing so.
It would make sense that stamina regen is actually increased over the normal..


I think Bethesda has made some great role playing perks..
Its just seems like they lost sight of the gameplay mechanics a bit and didn't think them all through..

Ex. why would I get another 30% off my barter price when I can get 30% spell absorption?!

Role playing I suppose. Some people may play a merchant so the barter perks are very important to them while the spell absorption isn't since they try to avoid fights altogether?

So when does it stop for you or anyone who says, "mods will fix this"? You will spend more time looking for mods and more time trying to fix stuff that isn't broken that you will end up with a different game that you won't be satisfied with because you are looking for more mods to fix the stuff you are not satisfied with...overall your game will crash eventually. That's why the consoles are better IMO. I play what I get and I am quite happier and enjoy the game more.

Really?

Really.

I play what I get for a couple months before modding anything. I'll at least give what Bethesda designed a go before deciding what I think would be better for me personally. How can consoles be better when you get exactly the same with the PC but don't have the option to mod things if you so wish.

I agree with you that some people right now are already talking about drastically overhauling the game or big aspects of it without even playing yet but at the end of the day it's their game they can do what they want with it, Bethesda release the modding kit willingly so people can tinker it and add things they want because it gives them great ideas for the next games. Quite a few of the changes in Skyrim are based off of mods that people created for Oblivion, so the 'better' console version is actually benefiting from the modding that PC users do...

Copying myself from another thread. See how this strikes you:

Yeah, I spent a few minutes just now with the Heavy and Light armor perk trees in a side-by-side comparison and I would say they're just about equal. Here's my take:

The perk that makes Heavy Armor weigh nothing is powerful indeed but look what you have to do to get it. You need to ge the skill to 30 and take Fists of Steel, which is great if you plan to do some 10 finger beat downs, but completely useless if you're going to be using weapons/magic all game, like myself and most others. Then you have to get the skill to 50 and take Cushioned, which is pretty whatever. Nice to have, but between the Etheral dragonshout and the auto-save feature, dying cause you falled is just not going to be much of an issue. Then you have to ge the skill all the way up to 70 (you'll almost certainly be very high level at this point) and take the perk. On top of all this, that whole string of perks take you on a branch away from the rest of the perks, that you'd then have to come back to. Maxing out your skill and perks in heavy armor is a HUGE investment and in the end may be only slightly better than light armor, if at all.

With light, you get the same Weightless perk at level 50 and because of the layout of the tree, you can still very easily arrive at the final perk, which IMHO is better than the final perk for heavy armor. Dealing extra damage to an enemy (heavy's reflection) is nice, but you're in heavy armor. You're designed to take lots of hits so that you can stay in your opponent's face much longer and therefore get in more hits in a shorter amount of time. With light armor, being able to skip on on ALL the damage from a hit every 10 hits means YOU last longer in battle, so it's almost like getting a nice solid boost to your armor rating. Couple that with the extra stamina recovery perk, and then compare that you heavy's lower stagger perk. The two trees are basically equal IMHO.

Heavy requires a moderately larger investment for MAYBE a slightly larger return, and light armor has an easier tree where you can get the top perk by using less perk points.