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Just like the title explains. Im wondering if theres any hidden bonuses to wearing unarmored aswell.

Yeah it is kind of for roleplaying, warlocks and witches dont seem right wearing armor.

I tried using heavy with a magic character and I ended up with no space to pick up ingredients for my alchemy so it was my best choice at the end of the day. Light and medium I use to much so Know I cant even look at them without feeling a bit queasy for some reason.

All that dust could be a bit off-putting in my eyes, but whatever floats your boat

Anyone know if theres a penalty for wearing armor if you use spells?

Silly, silly Bethesda. They should of thought it through a little better, its good but not much wow factor. Looking forward to relying on enchantments and magical jewellery when the difficulty is set full. I got killed by a Nix-hound in two hits, the first one nearly killed me.

Too often does that happen.... but this time it was more 'get pawed', 'stumble' , 'headbutt', 'dead'. Glamarous death I must say.

Meh Cliffracers make good target practice for any uprising Warlock .I accidentally run into a scamp earlier, bad times.

I think unarmored is good for me, I take more time planning my attacks because my defence is so weak at the moment. Means I have a use for illusion, conjuration etc. and not just blasting everything with a some giant ball of poison. I always found in the past that I just wont use the other spells schools that much as I can take the easy route out, I like a challenge.

My main character uses unarmored, but he also carries a shield and has block as a major skill. I came up with this combo in response to the bug that made your armor rating zero unless you were wearing at least one piece of armor. Of course, as well as negating the bug, it also allows you to stay fairly well protected while where practically no armor. I've since installed the Morrowind Code Patch, so the bug's gone, but I liked the combo so much that I've stuck with it.

As for advantages of being unarmored, I'm not sure whether this counts but, if you do choose to carry a shield then you potentially have far more enchantment points available to you when umarmored than you do wearing light armor (admittedly you'll still be slightly behind medium and far behind heavy armor). The best light armor for enchanting is glass, offering a total of 115 enchant points. However, wearing a full set of glass armor prevents you from wearing the best shoes and gloves for enchanting, which offer a total of 80 enchantment points. The 35 point difference can easily be made up for by a number of different shields. I think these are the best three:

Chitin Tower Shield - 37.5 enchant points, 6 lbs
Glass Tower Shield - 45 enchant points, 9 lbs
Orcish Tower shield - 90 enchant points, 13.4 lbs


Edit: Just noticed that the highest enchant value for a full set of light armor is actually 200. This is achieved by substituting the glass helm for the Telvanni Cephalopod Helm. Some shields do have enchant values high enough to overcome this, but they're all so heavy that I don't see any of them as an attractive solution. Of course, the Telvanni Cephalopod Helm does offer fairly poor protection compared to glass armor so... Well, you decide what's important.

At level 100 for your unarmoured, what is the armour rating of your character? I have never done unarmoured and am just curious.

65. However, the interesting about unarmored is that it gets better more rapidly at higher levels. The calculation is skill^2 * 0.0065. Here are some values at different levels as well as the equivalent base armor rating at the same skill level.

Level - armor rating when unarmored - equivalent base armor rating
20 - 3 - 4
40 - 10 - 8
60 - 23 - 12
80 - 41 - 16
100 - 65 - 20

What this means is that if light armor and unarmored were both at level 60, light armor with a base armor rating of 12 would provide about the same protection as not wearing the armor.

Yeah you get some a lot of enchantment point for shields but wearing one dosent seem right when I'm equipped with a double-handed staff. I could wear it for the armor bonus it seems to give you even when its not out but that just seems a bit silly for my particular character you know?

I think its fun levitating in the air away from some nutter with an axe and then pelting them with poison bombs.



I see what you mean about the rapid increase in armor rating later on. I thought all the armor ratings went up by the same much continously. Where did you find this may I ask?

I did the calculations myself based on formulas I probably found on the UESP somewhere.

*looks*... Ok, the formulas are on the "combat" page, which is here:http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Combat.

i went unarmoured for my first playthrough

it's handy cos your overall armour bonus is a little bit higher even when you decide not to wear a helmet, for example, or want to put on some gloves instead of gauntlets

Is the unarmoured rating any where near the the rating of a decent set of heavy or medium or light armour?

Sort of but its still low, lower then that of medium unless you have the artifact of course. Its seems unarmored is more to do with speed, wearing more clothes and general item carrying.

Unarmored is best used with enchanted clothing.

Yeah I have never bothered enchanting clothing before, this give me a chance to experiment and rely more on magical stuff. Im guessing that the more expensive the clothes the higher the possible enchantment?

there's no comparison,

i think my best rating with 100 unarmoured skill and high speed score(?) was in the region of 120 which at high level is pwnage city

but at least its an option

More or less. But they all have pretty low enchantment point costs.

That's not true at all. Exquisite clothes have very high enchant values. In fact exquisite shoes have the highest enchant value of anything that you can put on your feet.

Edit: Here's a link to the base clothing page if you want to see the enchant values http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Base_Clothing. Also, here's a link to the base armor page so you can see how unarmored measures up (use that table I posted before to compare) http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Base_Armor.

Yeah I thought thats the reason that you cant wear gloves and shoes when armored, because have such high enchantment values. Some of the gloves Master Aryon gives you in the Telvanni quests are just ridiculously powerfull.

Also thanks for the link.

And what gloves are those?

Never heard of them. Can you provide me with a name so I can look them up on the wiki?

Heres alink to the page they are on. There called Aryon's Dominator/Helper :

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Aryon%27s_Dominator#Aryon.27s_Dominator

Helpful. thanks.