so just a quick question: can you upgrade your weapons and armor (light armor) to Legendary or whatever is the highest upgrade without investing perks into enchanting and alchemy?

i've read of the Alchemy, Enchanting, Smithing Loop where you can make and upgrade your gear into insane status but is it still possible to reach the highest gear status with just smithing?

You could probably wear a lot of smithing enchanted gear and use potions you buy or find to further enhance it, don't know if the max can be reached though and I certainly haven't hit it with my Ancient Armour upgrading.
I personally have just went for smithing and enchanting perks, don't want to use the loop of OP gear method but I still wanted decent enchantments on my gear.
So far the max potion I have found was a 50% increase on the smithing, I hope to find more of those soon.

as far as I know , you need to invest Alchemy perks as well , as i have a pretty high alchemy rating but my perks are low in alchemy so i am able to only increase my armor and weapons enchanting to like 10% regardless of what soul gem I use

Without perks in smithing but maxing it out you'd probally reach flawless, maybe exsquite on higher level gear.
Page http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Smithing shows that increase the different ranks provide and the skill required to get it, with the "natural" limits so to speak.

You can make legendary gear with the materials that you've put perks in, eg. glass, orcish, from skill lvl 91+.
Raising your smithing beyond 100 will naturally make you able to make your legendary items even better.

Ha, a couple of us here spent this very morning crunching the numbers that you are asking about by testing in-game.
The short version is that in order to reach "Legendary" upgrades without +Smithing enchanted gear and potions, you will need a weapon/armor that is affected by a smithing perk (that you have spent points in), i.e., steel, elven, dwarven, glass, ebony, daedric. The minimum required Smithing skill to do this is 91 for any type of weapon/armor. If you are trying to reach Legendary status with any other type of upgradeable material, you will need a Smithing skill of 168 or higher, which is obviously going to require some enchants/potions to get to.

Notes:
Once you reach a point where you are crafting legendary gear, it takes about 17 skillpoints more to reach the next "level" of legendary where you will see a boost in damage or protection. Although there is an armor cap of 80% that is reached by having an AR of 567 or higher, there is no realistic limit on weapon upgrades... in other words, there's basically hundreds of higher levels of "Legendary" that you can craft by using game exploits like the restoration potion glitch. I saw a youtube vid some guy made after abusing the resto loop where he was walking around with a sword that did IIRC over 25,000 damage per hit -- I guess that was a TES version of the lightsaber or something.

thanks guys! i think i'm starting to get an understanding of it. altho i need to experiment on that myself for me to fully understand.

appreciate all the replies tho.

i rerolled my character and made a spanking new assassin and wasnt planning to invest any perks on smithing. how important is it really to be able to upgrade your gear? i mean, since i'm wearing light armor, the armor upgrades might be really helpful but is it really necessary? the only reason i'd also want to put perks into smithing is because i want to craft daedric daggers and daedric swords for my assassin.. (so that would be on the h. armor side of smithing)

what do u guys think?

I can tell you this: the more you improve your gear, the less effect the material type has on damage. At high levels, you will do LOTS of damage with sneak attacks with any improved dagger type. As far as being necessary, I can say that there have been many posters on this forum who have said that the stealth archer/assassin build is invincible in Skyrim, so I have done my best, personally, to not be one. But seriously, if you want to excel at assassinations, you might want to concern yourself with poisons and such, as they help a lot... supposedly. I guess they put the alchemy skill in the stealth section for a reason.

-Loth

Umm if your going for daedric Crafting why not put 1 point in Dragon Armour? Then you got the best of both.
PS Smithing is not needed to cap but it will require you to max out the Light armour tree, or maybe cheese the game (Hence I recommend the Dragon Smithing, it will save you 3 perks points).

It depends a lot on how powerful you want to make your character.
With alchemy/enchanting/smithing at 100 and all your gear maxed, you can kill the final boss of the game in one hit, wearing leather armor that protects as much as daedric plate.

On the other hand, it's entirely possible to complete the game without any crafting done at all. Isn't all that freedom wonderful?

Fleapants has the right of it. Try to have some fun, okay?

-Loth

LoL i am! i'm loving the game and it's just the obssessive-compulsiveness in me that's curious - trying to envision the build and playstyle that i like without regretting if i did something wrong or if i missed out on anything. And i dont want to break the balance of the game or become too overpowered - just wana make sure i dont make a severly underpowered one. XP i dont even like 1-shoting enemies with my bow all the time - takes the challenge out of the game but of course, i dont wana get beaten up all the time heheheh

Like i said, my assassin is brand spanking new (kinda-still at level 16) and this is my first time with the elder scrolls so a few things i'm still unsure of. and yeah, just didnt want to waste any perks on anything that's really not necessary for my style of play just because i misunderstood something.

i really appreciate all the responses, really.