I've yet to hear anything definitive on this. If I use the Steed Stone, do I need to worry about Armor making noise? Last I checked, Muffle perks and Muffle enchants reduce the noise made by armor... but if the Steed Stone makes the armor weightless, it's reducing 0, which means Muffle is a waste for a Steed Stone character.

Anyone have anything definitive on this?

Muffle=Silent movement
Steed stone=Fast movement because of weightless armor

I'm not so sure though.

One would think weight and noise would have some correlation, but I can't even imagine how to go about testing this one... Maybe turn the volume up really loud and test heavy armor with/without Steed Stone and Muffle, see what the differences in noise are? That seems horribly subjective to me, but I can't think of any objective way to test it.

I use the Steed Stone and always wear Heavy Armor.

Sneaking problems are rare for me. I just stay out of an NPC's line of sight and move slowly.

I really don't think muffle is just reducing armor weight. Tests could be done with no armor vs armor vs armor w/steed. But in the unlikely event that it does duplicate muffle (bet 10,000 it won't) you are still using a birthsign for something that a sneak perk and shoes can cover.

With muffle (And none of the left-hand sneak perks) you can pretty much stand behind a guy jumping up and down behind his head making silly gestures and he won't notice you. So that would indicate that no, steed doesn't make up for muffle if you're having to actually worry about your movement speed/sound generation

Here's the situation. My character is high level, and has Mastered Alteration and Enchanting. Dragonhide gives me 80% Damage Reduction, so i'm not concerned about armor, but... Ebony Mail looks damn good on a female breton. I'm using a Mod to allow me to make an unenchanted Ebony Mail, but it's still Heavy Armor.

The Steed Stone says, "Those under the sign of The Steed can carry more and do not suffer a movement penalty from armor." This is ridiculously ambiguous. We have confirmed that you do not take encumbrance or increased stamina drain from Heavy Armor while using the Steed Stone.

The Sneak perk Muffled Movement says, "Noise from Armor reduced by 50%". This implies there is a specific amount of noise generated by your armor. Some rough tests seem to indicate that the heavier the armor you are wearing, the more noise you make, all things being equal.

The Muffle enchantment is similarly ambiguous.

If I use the Steed Stone, my armor weight is zero for encumbrance and stamina drain calculations. Is it also zero for noise calculations? If it is, then that is a perk and an enchanting slot I don't have to spend if I want to attempt stealth.

edited for punctuation, grammar, spelling.

I think weight is weight, and noise is noise, time for more testing on the matter. I do know that wearing the muffled boots with a full set of daedric using the steed stone and only 1 point in the tree is more than enough and I'm only around 55ish skill.

Have had things staring directly at me not 20 feet away and I'm still not detected. No perks needed unless I were to be a dagger assassin which I'm not, I peck with arrows then melee or summon dremora lords if necessary.

My testing shows the opposite, that the Steed Stone DOES effect Sneaking. Remember in Oblivion, the weight of your boots was factored into your detection chance when moving. In Skyrim it's suppose to be the combined weight of your armor. UESP.net agrees with this.

However, this doesn't mean you'll be completely silent on movement if your armor weighs nothing -- that's not how it worked in Oblivion either if you took off your boots.

So BOTH are useful. And the "Silence" perk in Sneak eliminates it regardless.

This is especially important if you use Invisibility as that just makes you impossible to be SEEN, not impossible to be HEARD.

my sneak is at 60 and i use the steed stone with light armor and i have to move really freaking slowly to sneak up behind someone without them noticing.. the reason is all the noise im making because i dont have muffle.

I'm 50/50 on this.

Muffle enchant, Muffle spell, and Muffled Movement perk all claim to reduce noise made by armor. This leads me to believe there is alternate noise being made by movement speed. In the past, noise made by armor was calculated using the weight of the boots, as you mentioned.

I'm going to pull some numbers out of thin air, to create an example of how I think this may work. I have little to no foundation for this at the moment. I'm going to ignore the effect of movement speed for now, and assume you're moving slowest.

You opponent has 100% chance to detect you. For every skill point you have in sneak, that chance is reduced by 1%. You have 40 skill? They have a 60% chance to detect you... assuming you're naked. I believe Sneak perks are multiplicative on the skill value, so +20% Sneak perk would be 40% * 1.2 or 48%. If I allow for movement speed for a second, I'd think fast movement would also be a scalar like 0.5 or something... and the Silence perk actually removes that penalty.

You armor weight translates to a 1% per lb modifier multiplicative penalty to your sneak skill. If you're wearing 20 lbs of armor, that's a 20% penalty. 40% * 0.8 = 32%... which means my opponent now has a 68% chance to detect me. Muffle effects directly impact that 20lbs. Noise produced by Armor reduced by 50%. That 20 lbs now becomes 10 lbs, or 10%... making your detection chances 64%.

Taking all this to it's logical conclusion... if a character with 100 sneak skill is naked, they're undetectable when moving slowly. If they put on armor, they're more likely to be detected if it's heavier armor. If they have the Steed Stone, it wont matter how much armor they're wearing... they'll still be just as (un)detectable as if they're naked. This same effect can be accomplished by using a combination of the Muffle Enchant, Muffle Perk, and Muffle Spell... or just using the legit Ebony Mail, which has a Muffle enchant of strength of 1.0.

What I don't want to do is spend a perk and an enchant slot, when I'm going to be using Steed Stone, which may or may not give the exact same effect. I don;t have the muffle enchant yet on this character, so if someone wants to do some controlled tests, it'd be appreciated. Otherwise, I'll just do the test myself in the next day or two. The purpose of this thread was to see if someone already had concrete evidence of a correct answer.

I think you're basically correct Cheshyr. And according to UESP, the Muffle Spell is set at "1.0" for magnitude which makes me think it's 100% effective. See:
"It is unclear whether or not the magnitude of the Muffle effect is significant. Based on the description of the Muffled Movement perk (Noise from armor is reduced 50%), a magnitude of 0.5 is equivalent to a 50% reduction. However, the magnitude of enchantments and spells is never displayed in-game, suggesting that the magnitude does not matter. If the magnitude is significant, most enchanted items have a magnitude of 0.5, implying they are only 50% effective"

However, the "Silence" perk in Sneak is different because it doesn't mention armor weight at all, and specifically mentions "both walking and running". Which makes me think there's a penalty for running/moving quickly that has nothing to do with armor weight that "Silence" further eliminates. I mean even if you have 0 armor weight you still have the weight of your body, right?

I have two sets of boots I use when sneaking:

• Tip Toes
  
  • Fortify Sneak
    
  • Muffle
• Thieving Boots of Stealth
  
  • Fortify Sneak
    
  • Fortify Pickpocket

I'll switch from the Tips Toes to the Thieving Boots when I'm in position to pickpocket. It's difficult to be definitive, but after running tests last night it seems that Muffle does assist sneaking on my mage who does not wear armor. Now that I have 100 sneak, I'm wondering if I should just drop the Fortify Sneak in favor of a single pair of boots with Muffle/Fortify Pickpocket