You can probably go with the steed stone as soon as you have orcish armor, perhaps go and do Deepest Fathoms to make up for the lost armor rating.

I didn't take any of the bash perks, I wanted to avoid becoming a smiter. I actually enjoy letting the enemy knock me around a bit!

You need to let your atronach or companion do the damage for you until you can cast flame cloak. You can also use runes and standard flames but your primary task is absorbing blows.

It is my honest opinion that augmented flames etc DO boost the strength of cloak spells, the numbers just aren't displayed correctly in your spell effects. I'm going to confirm this once and for all with this build. Need to do some more testing.

This is the result of a test someone did on the uesp...

"I did a test to see if the perks truly affected the cloak spells: I spawned a Wolf with no resistance, set its health to 1000 and cast Frost Cloak spells twice on Adept difficulty:

- The 1st time without Augmented Frost: after 60 seconds, the Wolf received 487.55 damage (8*60= 480=> the Frost Cloak does 8pts/s as in the description)

- The 2nd time with both Augmented Frost: after 60 seconds, the Wolf received 725.92 damage (8*1.5*60= 720)

In short, the Cloak spells do 8 pts/second and are affected by Augmented Flames/Frost/Lightning perks."

I'm having a tough time A) leveling Heavy Armor and B) figuring out when to use destruction early on.

Do not worry about heavy armor, ignore it completely! It will obviously level much slower than normal. I'd only just taken 3/5 juggernaut by level 25 but armor rating is the important factor and that was in the 400's thanks to orcish armor.

Buy training in destruction every chance you get, its pretty cheap below level 50. Drop your fire rune at the start of every battle. Once you have your flame cloak your golden.