Hello Forums, well this is my first post so a quick intro. Ive been playing Skyrim since right around release. I bought it at the same time that i bought my 160gb PS3(OMG /GASP OMG) and so far its been relatively painless. Ive enjoyed a few different characters without any major hiccups. My first was a Dunmer ranger/spellsword/whatever(very unfocused character, perk and questwise), next was a Brenton Conjurer(he was fun but i powered thru the college quest and gave him up at lvl 19), after that a Nord Warrior(still plan on playing him, has completed the civil war ql and im holding onto him for dawnguard, lol). It should be noted that i still have not completed the main quest on any charater.

Onto my current toon, an imperial assasin(quite heartless i might add), i made her a few weeks ago and she is far and away my favorite. Currently she is lvl 32 and she has not started the main quest(no dragons souls or shouts yet) but she has completed the thieves guild quests and dark brotherhood quests, and now ive moved onto tracking down daedric quests and eventually i want to find all of the dragonpriest masks with her. So far she has been a standard build with perks focusing in light armor, archery and duel wieding one handed weapons. ive avoided using magic and tend rely on the powers ive aqquired through quests and items rather than magic or shouts. heres my dilema, last night i Aqquired the Ebony Mail from the call of boethiah quest and i realllllllllly want to use it, not only do i like the looks buts its powers are badass! the only problem, its heavy armor. so far it doesnt seem to affect my ability to sneak up on targets but i took a significant hit to my armor rating using it and have put a few perks into light armor assuming id be using that my whole career. Previously i was using a mix of Nightengale and Ancient Shrouded that i had upgraded a bit thru smithing(done somewhat organically i havent let it get to far ahead of the rest of my skills). heres a quick run down of her build where its relevant to this thread:

health: 320
stamina: 190
magica: 100
armor rating: 135

light armor 60, perks: Agile Defender 2, Custom Fit
heavy armor 22, perks: Juggernaught 1
smithing 73, perks: steel smith, arcane smith

i put that one perk into heavy armor last night because i wanted to see what the difference would make in my AR but i have a back up save in case that turns out to be a bad idea. so basically my question is:

Will the difference in AR vs. the impact of heavy armor be very noticeable to my sneaky assasin at higher lvls? and is it worth it to me to invest perks into heavy armor beyond just juggernaught? Custom fit seems like a waste now that im using both types of armor and i dont want to take anymore perks that will be useless down the line. I plan on playing this toon into higher lvls and eventually completing the main quest with her. Once i can fit it into her story that is, its kind of hard for a merciless killer to justify wanting to save the world, amirite??

Just get max enchanting/alchemy/smithing and you can mix and match virtually any armour and still reach the cap.

thanks for the reply, ive been working on smithing and alchemy but havent touched enchanting outside of using soul gems to charge my weapons, haha and i dont even fill my own soul gems. that being said, from an RP standpoint i might be able to work in a little enchanting but i by no means want to max it out on this character. im really just wondering about which, if any, perks i should put into heavy armor.

Craft lots of iron daggers and enchant them with an enchantment with very high value (Banish, if you get it is really worth). So you can level up your Smithing, Enchanting and Speech. In that case you don't need to use Heavy Armor and stick to Light (if you so wish) because you'll be able to enchant a light shield with stronger enchantments than the actual ones on the Ebony Mail.