Is it too late to start using the sneak playstyle?

Solution 1:

It is never too late to start playing the game the way you want to play it. Your sneaky assassin character has a background in magic. If the game seems too tough you can always respec your perk points but that will disable achievements as noted in the answer.

Solution 2:

I'm not a power gamer, and my guy's a stealthy, magically gifted wood elf who can also handle a sword ;), but I must say I'm pretty happy with him and I also have a bunch of perks in non-sneaky branches. I'd say just go with it; the most important thing is sneaking skill points (as opposed to perks), and then (at least for my playing style) as soon as I got 3x bonus on stealth archery, I was mostly done in the Stealth skill perks (the backstabbing perk is pretty spectacular when put to use though :). So I'd say just go with the flow. And there's always situations where you need brute force so destruction will come in handy anyhow.

Solution 3:

Adding some more to the answers already on here.

I suggest that you get the Shrouded Armor from the Dark Brotherhood sanctuary. These are very light and add very little weight to the inventory and some of them increase your sneaking abilities. You can switch back and forth between regular Armor and this clothing depending on what you are doing at the moment.

Also, enchanting some items with less weight(like a ring) with sneak helps. Get the Muffle spell(Illusion spell i think) helps when sneaking. I realized much later than you that I wanted some sneaking abilities and these helped a lot.

Learn how to brew Invisibility potions. This along with the Muffle spell above and I was able to sneak up on some enemies with higher level very easily even with heavy armor on.

Solution 4:

Not only is it not too late, but the perks you have already aren't even negatives. A little Destruction's nice for at least setting runes, some points in Restoration are almost a must, and Alchemy and Speech work fine for all builds. If you'd thrown everything into Heavy Armor and Block you wouldn't have many synergies, but the most effective characters all dabble at least a bit in magic, combat and stealth.

A good example for Destruction is that, when I'm using stealth and have several enemies descend on me, I can hold them off a bit with the Impact perk (most dualcast spells will stagger an opponent). This is especially true against large targets, like dragons.