I'm currently on my first play through, (currently 60 smithing) and I've been crafting my own heavy amor, on my 2nd play through, I don't want to go down the smithing tree... will I be able to get all the armor via random drops? Or do I lose some of the armor options if not a smith (other than the abilty ot make them stronger armor)?

You can pick up a full set of proper armour.

You can't make the armor without the perks, but you can improve any armor you find, based off your smithing skill level and whatever perks you have taken.

If you want to improve things further, any potions or gear with enchantments that boost smithing will be a big help.

Everything but daedric and dragon armor you can find, I believe.

I was happy with the answers up until this point If this is true, I guess i will have to go smithing just about every play through, as I usually like to obtain the best armor eventually in these types of games.

I've found Daedric gear.

I just haven't found anything Dragonbone or Dragonscale, which would kind of make sense, given that dragons have only just begun to appear and they don't have any options for giving the materials to any blacksmith for them to use in making the armor for you.

I'm currently holding onto a Daedric armor until I get the rest of the set so that I can chug a smithing potion and then improve it as high as I can, since I went the light armor side of the smithing perk tree.

It's not true. You can find both daedric and dragon armour. The latter is more rare, but i.e. Ancient Dragons have a chance to drop it.

There's an alternate way to make daedric gear.

Yea I think I read you can find daedric and dragon but they dont start to show up untill like level 45+ or something, which makes sense. I dident take smithing my second time though because its way over powered and far to easy to level up. Being able to double the armor though upgrading to legendary is just OP and then they even added % smithing and enchanting potions which makes stuff even more OP.

Armor is capped anyway, so it's only the weapons that become OP.

im still trying to find all the parts to the dragon armor

I'm at level 27, and I've seen armor and weapons up to Ebony, and full sets up to Scale on the Light Side and Orcish on the Heavy.

Edit: And by the way, I've adopted this strategy, and it is a good idea to also get Arcane Smithing so that you can also improve any Enchanted armor that you should find.

This is the part I enjoy most, random awesome loot drops and never knowing when you'll get it:)

Thanks all for the replies, I think I'm just going to reroll now w/o smithing