I'm undecided how to dress my Rogue. Because I can't see him, only the stats matter. So there is light armor or evasion-stuff. Naturally the stuff is much lighter than the armor but the armor is ARMOR.
At level 12 he has Protection 1 and Evasion 37 without modifier. I assume more Evasion is still useful. Will this ever change or does it make sense to discard the light armor to save loading capacity?
BTW: It's strange to play a game without collection mania again after TES.
Additional Evasion (and Protection) will always be useful. It's perfectly viable to stick to just the non-armor gear, although having access to light armor will generally give the rogue better defenses. If the rogue is a front-rank character and not specializing in unarmed then the extra defense might be useful. If the rogue is back rank then it really depends on how often you find the back rank characters under attack.
Unarmed specialists are liable to want to stick to pushing the Unarmed skill as high as possible before branching out into anything else, so unless that character gets the skill tomes in the dungeon, they probably won't have enough skill points for light armor. (Unarmed gives an innate boost to Evasion as well as to unarmed attacks.)
While Protection does reduce the amount of physical damage taken, Evasion prevents taking physical damage at all. The higher the better and recall: both values are not percentage based like resistances.
Rogues are build for Evasion. One could also say what the Protection of heavy armor is for a fighter is Evasion for a Rogue. The top end Protection a Rogue can acquire is 41 combining full chitin set with pit fighter gauntlets and serpent bracer. Now when a Rogue can equip light armor at Dodge 17 he also has +10 Evasion from Dodge plus the Evasion value of his shield plus twice(!) the Evasion of his cloak and once he reaches Dodge 24 together with some lurker parts his Evasion skyrockets. It's not uncommon for a mid- to higher-lvl Rogue to have Evasion values of 60, 80 or even more. So when your Rogue can replace any light armor part for an evasion gear part it's a save bet going for it.
