Skyrim V: Skyrim

[Calemyr]

hmm.... and now I have an interest in making the unarmed vampire hunter (Movarth Piquine) from immortal blood ( http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Immortal_Blood ) as a character.... gotta think this through....

If so, I strongly suggest you consider "Combat Fists" from Steam or "Enchantable Unarmed Strike" from Nexus. They provide weapons that use unarmed animations without models. This means they can be improved and enchanted like normal weapons.

Combat Fists allows you to create 1h fist weapons that count as daggers for all intents and purposes (damage, weight, perks). Using them allows you to gain skill in 1h, benefit from 1h perks, and (I think) benefit from the insane backstab multiplier daggers get. Their damage is fairly mediocre (being daggers), but they're still better than unarmed and you can mix and match with magic. I don't know if you get all the animations this way, however.

Enchantable Unarmed Strike allows you to create 2h fist weapons, but doesn't treat them as actual 2h weapons (no skill gain, no perks). I usually edit the mod to behave as warhammers when I use this one. This one makes both of your hands use the same damage and enchantment, and it's all or nothing (unarmed or not), so you don't have to worry about animations. Additionally, there's a second set of weapons called claws, which use the Khajiit unarmed animation, and an additional dragon-tier weapon for each, which is nice.

The downside of both of them is that they don't use a model, so if you are disarmed you won't be able to find your weapons again. That said, they do benefit from the Heavy Armor Iron Fist perk and the Fortify Unarmed enchantment, and unarmed attacks just have so much more style than the rest of these.

The other mod I like (if you are willing to use ScriptDragon), improves your unarmed damage by 1 each level. Combined with the rest of it, however, it may well be overkill.

If you're playing on console, however, your only real answer is to use the Fortify Recovery alchemy bug to create gloves and rings with high Fortify Unarmed enchantments. There's really nothing quite like punching a dragon to death, is there?

On the whole, how useful is Light Armour for a warrior who doesn't sneak around too much? Does it have any advantage or should I just stick to Heavy Armour?

Both are effective in different ways: You get more defense earlier with heavy, you are more mobile with light, though both of these can be negated by the endgame (reducing effective weight to 0 and capping your defense). You get a reduction in fall damage with heavy, you get an increase to stamina regen with light. You move very slowly in heavy armor, but the best weapons (pre-Dawnguard) are down the Heavy path.

It's a zero sum game, really, it's just a question of which sum suits you better.

I personally favor light armor because Dragonscale looks badass while Dragonbone looks dumbass and Glass weapons and armor have a suitable style for the knight-in-shining-armor look, or simply look awesome if you use a texture replacer that restores the Morrowind coloring for glass.