Is there any way to fully silence my heavy armor?

Question

As discussed here, if you have a 1.0 magnitude of the muffle effect your armor will make no noise at all. Does this also apply to heavy armor?

Has anyone tried to sneak with heavy armor and muffle (from a spell or armor effect) successfully? I´ve been wanting to make a heavy armor stealth assassin for a while, but not if it will fail hard. On my light armor assassin I already have 85 Sneaking, Nightingale boots and muffle spell, I guess I will give it a try.

Anyone know if there is any way to remove or reduce significantly the noise from heavy armor so I can kill stealthily with a full set of heavy armor?

I know there are perks to reduce the weight of heavy armor but this is not what I am after.

Answer 1

Answering my own question:

Yes, we can fully silence our own armor noise, even if it is heavy armor.

Skills At The Testing Period:

Sneaking 80 - Perks

• Stealth Rank 3
• Backstab
• Muffled Movement
• Assassins Blade
• Light Foot
• Silence
• Silent Roll

Light Armor 44 - No Perks

Heavy Armor 27 - No Perks

Methodology Used On Testing Process:

It took 5 to 6 hours of testing, since I begun even before posting this thread here.

My methodology was based in the "concept of states", each state being a "armor configuration".

• State 1: Full Light Armor with Nightingale Boots
• State 2: Three Pieces of Heavy Armor (Steel) and Nightingale Boots
• State 3: Full Heavy Armor with Steel Boots of Muffling
• State 4: Full Heavy Armor with Muffle Spell

I tried to sneak over 5 different spots. I tried each state (configuration) five times in a sequence to make sure the result would be more "consistent". Most of the time, the results were the same in every try.

Test that I Missed:

Even though I have tested it out, I missed one test.

Comparing two muffle effects that have different magnitudes, in the same situation.

E.G : Trying to sneak with Muffled Movement as the only source of muffle effect

Since every magnitude higher or equal to 1.0 would lead me to the same result, maybe that 0.5 difference might be enough to make sneaking with heavy armor, a fail.

Results:

In every different state I tried, all the results were the same between then.

Every situation I could manage to sneak through using one state, I could do the same with all the other states.

BUT ONCE I REMOVED THE MUFFLE EFFECT FROM SPELL AND GEAR, I GOT CAUGHT MORE FREQUENTLY.

After testing it out, i've reached some conclusions :

• Even though UESP Says that there are magnitudes of Muffle effects, I could not notice it. This happened probably because every source of muffle I used (Steel boots, Spell and Nightingale Boots) have a 1.0 or greater magnitude, leading it to a full muffle effect
• The Number of Heavy Armor Pieces does not matter when Sneaking. You will not make more noise when using more pieces. The noise produces does not scales with the number of heavy armor pieces equiped.
• There are different ways to reach full silence from armor.

TL:DR:

Yes, it is possible and doable of Sneaking with Heavy Armors and it does not needs more perks or whatever than it would with Light Armor.

Also please, understand that Muffle effect have a spread of magnitudes in which it can be found in game.

Refer Here for the complete explanation

Answer 2

I have a level 40 heavy armor thief/assassin (Wood Elf) and I do fine. The extra silence effect from Boethiahs ebony mail does in fact seem to produce an extra positive effect in addition to my muffled ebony boots.