Oblivion:Armorer

Armorer governs the use of repair hammers to repair both armor and weapons. As your skill improves, you can repair items more efficiently and will break repair hammers less often.

In-game Description: Maintain weapons and armor at top efficiency. Worn weapons and armor are less effective.

Mastery
Mastery Perks
A Novice (armorer < 25) cannot repair magic items.
For an Apprentice (armorer 25-49), repair hammers last twice as long. An apprentice of Armorer still cannot repair magic items.
A Journeyman (armorer 50-74) can now repair magic items.
An Expert (armorer 75-99) can repair items beyond their highest condition (to 125%). Expert-improved weapons do extra damage, and Expert-improved armor protects more.
A Master (armorer 100) never breaks repair hammers; one hammer lasts a lifetime.
Using Fortify Armorer to boost your skill to 100 will provide the master-level perk.

Skill Benefits
Your armorer skill level controls how many health points of damage you fix each time you use the skill:
 Health_Repaired = Armorer_Skill + 3
This is the number of health points, not the percentage of damage, that is repaired. See Weapons and Armor for details on the total health of individual items, which allows conversion between health points and percentage.

Skill Increases
Your armorer skill increases by 1.5 experience points each time you use the skill, regardless of the amount of damage repaired or whether you break your repair hammer.

In general, to gain Armorer skill be sure to carry multiple repair hammers every time you go adventuring and repair everything you possibly can.
Repair your own armor and weapons after each fight (even if the health is at 99%).
Repair your fallen enemies' items even if you're not going to carry them with you afterwards.
When fighting a weak enemy, be sure to let them hit you a few times instead of immediately killing them.
You can hotkey your repair hammers for easier access to the repair menu.

Tricks to increase your armorer skill somewhat more artificially include:
Shoot your bow at the ground. Each shot will lower the bow's health, regardless of whether or not it hits a target. Fire one arrow, equip a hammer via hotkey, pick up the arrow, and repeat. This is the easiest way to artificially train Armorer without leveling any other skills and requires no extra tricks.
Create custom Disintegrate Weapon or Disintegrate Armor spells so that you can cast the spell on yourself, then repair the disintegrated items. (This technique will also increase your Destruction skill).
Fast version: low magicka cost Disintegrate Weapon. Have different weapons in quick slots 1-7 and repair hammer in 8. Cast spell, change weapon. Repeat for all weapons, then repair all of them. 7 repairs in ~21 seconds.
Enchant a wearable item with a Disintegrate Weapon or Disintegrate Armor enchantment. Each time you equip the item, the health of your weapon (or armor) will decrease (you may want to hotkey the item), then you can repair it. The Amulet of Disintegration added by the Shivering Isles expansion can be used the same way. This works particularly well with Shagrol gro-Uzug's sparring weapons from the Fighter's Stronghold download, as they have a large amount of health and can take a lot of repairing.
Create a Fortify Armorer on self spell to boost your armorer skill to 100. This does not actually make you train armorer any faster, but it does ensure that you do not run out of repair hammers.
Once your armorer skill reaches 75, there are several ways to take advantage of the ability to repair weapons to 125%:
You can repair Bound Weapons or Bound Armor to 125%. Repeatedly conjure new bound items and repair them. (This technique will also increase your Conjuration skill).
Acquire the ruined Ayleid Crown of Lindai (ID 000A933E) available at the end of the Secrets of the Ayleids quest. This crown has zero health and therefore can never be repaired to 125% health, but still shows up in the list of items that can be repaired when you are expert level. In other words, it can be continuously, infinitely repaired for easy armorer training - particularly useful when combined with Fortify Armorer so you only need 1 hammer.
Select "Repair All" from any NPC who repairs equipment and they perform the additional "service" of reducing all "super-repaired" items back to 100%, free of charge. In order for this to work, there must be at least one item in your inventory which has health less than 100% (i.e., one item that legitimately needs to be repaired). Also, you must use the "Repair All" option, instead of individually selecting items for repair. You can then repair all of the items back to 125% health; the more pieces of armor in your inventory, the more training you get out of this.
Sell weapons or armor with 125% health to a merchant then buy them back: the health will be reduced to 100%, allowing them to be repaired again.
If you have the Knights of the Nine official plug-in, you can place all of the Crusader's Relics on the stand in the basement of the Priory of the Nine. All of the relics will be returned to 100% health, and you can repair them back to 125%.
See also:
Increasing Skills: General tips on how to improve your skills semi-naturally.
Trainers: Pay for armorer lessons.
 
Skill Books: Books that provide lessons in armorer.
Increasing Attributes: Tips on training skills to improve the Endurance attribute.
Magic Items: There are multiple generic items with the fortify armorer enchantment.
Unique Items: A list of unique items, some of which increase the armorer skill. These do not include Leveled Items, such as those received from quests, or Artifacts.
Unique items include:
Rasheda's Special is a pair heavy gauntlets that can be bought from Rasheda at the Fire and Steel. The gauntlets fortify your armorer skill by 5 points and your strength by 5 points.
Apron of the Master Artisan is a unique shirt that, among other things, fortifies armorer by 7 points. It can be obtained from Norbert Lelles at Lelles' Quality Merchandise.

There are no Free Skill Boosts available for Armorer. The Fighter's Stronghold download adds a Dwemer Forge that gives you a temporary skill boost of 15.

Dialogue
When you reach 70 in armorer skill NPCs will start saying: "You've got the hands of a smith. Must have spent some time repairing your gear."

Character Creation
The following races provide initial skill bonuses in armorer:
+5 bonus: Nord
+10 bonus: Orc

The following standard classes include armorer as a major skill:
Archer, Barbarian, Pilgrim, Scout, Warrior

Messages
The following table provides the messages that are displayed when your Armorer skill levels up.



Notes
Repairing heavy armor appears to increase your armorer skill level more rapidly than light armor. This is because heavy armor has more total health (see Armor for armor health values). Since the health number you see in the game is a percentage of maximum health, repairing heavy armor from 90% to 100% might correspond to 100 health points, whereas for light armor it might only be 50 health points and require fewer repair sessions to fix.
Instead of repairing your own equipment, you can pay smiths to repair it. At low skill levels this is the only way to repair magical equipment.
If you visit the Tower birthsign doomstone (south of Imperial City Waterfront district, northern tip of the large island), you can receive the greater power ''The Master's Hand. This allows you to fortify your armorer skill 20 points once a day for 120 seconds.
Once your combined Fame and Infamy reaches 60, you can also visit the Shezarr heaven doomstone to receive the greater power Shield of Shezarr''. One of several benefits of this power is that it fortifies your armorer skill 20 points once a day for 120 seconds.
Repair hammers break randomly, so the player might want to save before repairing.