I need to finish my first play though. I quit after some frustration with the way the perks work and armor balance issues. I was going for a stealthy character, so I took light armor perks. I pretty much ended up not doing much stealth, I get a sneak attack in with my bow then rush in and chop heads off with my sword.

Anyway, the smithing perk tree is way out of whack, and the armor ratings need a total overhaul. If you're going for light armor like I did and want the best weapons, you have to take the heavy armor perks that you wont use just to get access to the other weapons. I had/have a nice set of glass armor with some pieces enchanted, and when I finally got smithing up to 100, I took the dragon armor perk, and rushed to my home to build a set only to realize I was a few scales short of being able to make a complete set. I had some stashed in other places, but was still short. I continued to play and when I killed another dragon and had enough, I ran back to my house to make my nice new shiny armor, only to find out it only has something like 20 points higher rating. To make things worse, I decided to look it up on the wiki to see wtf was going on, and it seems that no matter how high your armor rating is, the game has a maximum damage resistance of 80% or 85% which equals an armor rating of 760 or something, which my glass armor already exceeded. Hell with my smithing at 100 I could create an improved set of leather armor that was over the 760 rating giving me the maximum protection any armor can provide. That's seriously fucked up when leather armor provides the same protection as Daedric armor.

Being faced with having wasted a perk on dragon smithing, I was faced with a decision; either load an earlier save before I took the perk, or "cheat" and use console commands to remove the perk and give myself a perk I would have taken instead. I couldn't decide, and was a bit frustrated so I decided to play other games for a while and haven't gone back.

I'm not going to pick up any of the DLC until it's all out and goes on sale (like I did for FNV). Eventually I'll finish my game, and by then I'll start a new game with the DLC enabled.