The soft level cap and light armor.

So what I understand so far is that the soft level cap is at 20 and to level up past that you need light armor, oddly what i have found is that some light armor isn't as strong as others but has more light. i.e I have a Knight 1 chest plate that has a defense
level of 223 and light +2, but I also have a Knight 6 chest plate with 158 defense and +9 light. If I put the Knight 6 armor on, my overall defense goes down but my rank levels up. I'm still trying to wrap my head around this...Ideas?

:)

 

Leveling past 50.

Soft Cap is 50. Hard(Max) Cap is 81. Yeah, every time you level up, it progressively gets harder.

 

Perk suggestions for BattleMage

[quote user="M3gaToxic"]

I just got the game for Christmas and i am now a LVL 7 Battle mage, I have perk points in One handed, Destruction, Restoration, and Heavy Armor (because i like heavy armor). I joined the Collage and learned Firebolt but i still like using Flame more. I like
smithing too and have like 24 enchanting. Will i be able to max out all of these through the game? My friends said you only get a set amount of perks and that the max lvl is 50. Is the Dragon Armor light armor and Daedric Heavy?

[/quote]

Dragon Armor is a perk not a specific set of armor. Once you have the perk from the smithing tree, requires skill lvl 100, you can craft either Dragonplate (heavy) or Dragonscale (light).

Daedric armor is heavy as always and requires a smithing skill of 90 to craft.

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As far as I know, as I have not reached lvl cap, the max attainable level is 81 and at this point you will have maxed out all skills. That is the hard cap however, the soft level cap is 50 because after that you no longer gain perks for leveling up. You
can still increase your skills to 100 and reach level 81 but you will no longer be able to expand your skill trees after 50.

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As a battlemage your perks are gonna get spread out, as I'm sure you have noticed seeing as you have destruction, heavy armor, enchanting, smithing, restoration, and one handed currently taking up perks. I would recommend looking into block if you are not
using alteration to increase your armor. Restro is a good way to go as a battle mage and since you already have gone one handed picking up block would be logical especially since you said you like using heavy armor so alteration is sort of redundant.

 

Is this low level defense including the upgrade that can be done to the armor?

 

223 chest is fully upgraded, 158 chest is not upgraded. I think I got it figured out though, I will have to sacrifice defense points to level my guy up to get better drops.

 

sacrifice defense? I wouldn't do that. just saying

 

Drops don't change by level. At least I'm pretty sure because I'm level 21 and still pick up low level drops from the easier levels (moon, venus, etc).

Mission/strike rewards are what you want to go after. Do stuff that rewards rare gear upgrades on completion. Ultimately you have to keep doing harder and harder stuff to get better gear. You can't just keep patrolling the moon and hope to get a high
level helmet. After that you're better off building up your vanguard rep/marks by playing the strike playlists and doing bounties to buy high level gear. Or if you're more into the crucible you need to work on crucible rep/marks and bounties for that gear.