Recently started a new character inspired by
DotA's Dragon Knight, since I realised I could really make that work in Skyrim (and I'd never yet been a straight-up fighter despite finding it the most fun playstyle in the game) so I may as well post here. The skills I'm perking are one-handed, block, heavy armour, enchanting, and smithing, with some low-priority investment into speech.
If you're not familiar, some of the Dragon Knight's most immediately noticeable traits are having high values of both armour and passive HP regeneration, making him extremely survivable; so I thought for a singleplayer game like Skyrim that building a character in the same way would probably pay off as one of my complaints has always been my apparent lack of durability, particularly versus multiple opponents and during sustained combat. I'm interested to see how strong I end up becoming, and how I will compensate for my weaknesses (such as to burst damage).
Race: Breton, for the magic resistance, since that's the most immediate problem a physical character faces. Casting wards would be out of character and I have no magicka to do that anyway.
Name: Davion, of course!
Armor: The best I can find; aiming for steel plate for a more noble appearance than the likes of Daedric would offer, and because it's easy to make and upgrade and barely any less effective, practically.
Weapons: The best one-hand sword I can find and nothing else. I would ultimately like to create a health-absorbing dragonbone sword, because it seems the maximum passive regeneration I can potentially achieve through enchanting still won't be enough for me.
Magic: Besides an assload of vitality-boosting enchantments, Fire Breath and more Fire Breath.
Level: I don't think it matters since this number is liable to change. I'm aiming for 60 though; most of the contribution toward my later levels will be through trainers, I imagine.
Leveling both sneak and heavy armor simultaneously isn't the best thing to do XD...
Btw, what difficulty do you guys play on? I find adept hard enough, tried playing on expert, but that was a bit too much for me.
It works out very well if you can use muffle (illusion spell or enchantment).
Adept. I've always found moderate difficulties to be adequate in all games, and I've been content to stay at that level since it feels normal instead of artificially skewed, as most games simply modify stats and the like rather than actually have better AI.