I'm playing a pure warrior and I'm focusing on heavy armour skills, my issue is I hate the look of the higher tier armours and absolutely love the dwarven armour. Is it possible to go successfully into the end game sticking to upgraded Dwarven armour? I've been holding off on some skill points and could easily open up orc, ebony, and dragon armours if I needed... but I've been holding off on that until I found out about the dwarven... it would save 3 skill points and make me a lot happier...

So is it viable to play through on the normal difficulty without many armour woes using the dwarven?

I'm sure there are people who do it with iron armor on master difficulty, so I wouldn't sweat it. I WOULD upgrade it as high as possible, and enchant it as well. Beyond that, those high numbers in the "end game" don't mean a whole lot. Elemental protection means more than armor.

you'll be fine.

Enchanting will be coming up very soon, I realized with my build I'll have many many points left over so I can easily work on the enchanting aspect and make the upgraded dwarven armour beastly.


Cheers folks

Yeah from what I understand armor type doesnt mean a whole lot(in the end). Assuming you have the required perks and enchantments or spells.

Personally, I am still debating the light/heavy armor. Going for a spellsword, so my hp isnt the greatest nor my stamina. *shrugs* Also the whole needing a full set of heavy or light armor to make use of those skill tree perks is highly annoying. I find a nice mask and its light armor, and I am heavy, I am totally screwed out of those perk choices. Partial to the gloves for heavy armor types, pretty much everything from iron and up look nice, compared to light armor(imo). However, light armor has some sweet looking helmets and chest pieces..

So in the end I think I will avoid perking either of the armor trees and just go alteration buffs. It pretty much gives me equivalent armor, and I gain the use of paralyze spells and etc. Sorry if I was rambling abit, debating perk choices as I write this

You certainly can! like yourself i`m not fussed for the look of the higher armors and wear only iron armor and iron helmet, also using only dwarven swords. Completed main quest and most faction quests and now at lvl 41 after 105 hours.
On Adept difficulty you should have no problems with dwarven

If you get your smithing skill up to a hundred and upgrade it to legendary you shouldn't have a problem kickin some ass

I personally prefer ebony armor(Black Knight FTW) But just get massive amounts of Elemental Resistance, and upgrade it as well.

I can happily say you'll be fine with dwemer.
It might be easier with other armour sets, but you'll be fine.

You'll be absolutely fine. I'm playing through on Expert with nothing but Nordic Steel weapons and armor. Blacksmithing helps as well, but IIRC, UESP has the armor rating cap at 567 points. With a full set of Steel Plate and all heavy armor talents (Don't quote me on this part, I could be wrong), you'll be past the cap. With a lil' bit of Blacksmithing you'll be way past it.

Oh, but more importantly, don't worry about armor caps and all the technicalities. Just wear whatever you think looks cool. Seriously.

I'm sure keeping it is viable.

It might break the game for you, but with Enchanting, you can use pretty much any equipment you want and still be effective. There's an alternative if you don't want to feel cheap, though:

My Khajiit is lightly armored and has 100 in Smithing, but I sincerely do not like the look of dragon scale armor, at least on him. Both my glass and my dragon armors were legendary, but the dragon was obviously the dragon armor was better. I simply purchased a blacksmith's drought (+30% to your armor and weapon upgrading for 30 seconds) and upgraded my glass equipment again. It is now stronger than my legendary dragon armor, but not so much so that it's gamebreaking; I'm not invulnerable.

My plan is to stick with steel plated, I also detest the look of dragon and daedric. I just can't see my main heavy armour character wanting to wear flashy ostentatious armour.. and both Daedric and Dragon makes you stand out a mile.

The armor rating is capped, if I'm not mistaken, at 600 (80% damage reduction). I think that's fairly easy to achieve with Dwarven armor, because I've heard people reach it with Iron.

You might wish to do the quest Unfathomable Depths: http://uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Unfathomable_Depths due to the reward permanently increasing the effectiveness of Dwarven armor by a lot.

Thanks for directing me to the quest, I'm on my way to clearing Riften quests out at the moment anyway so I'll just do that one now.

Not only is it possible I recommend it because it looks sweet! I can't take off my Orcish armor because of this exact reason.