You can get the Vampire Gauntlets from a random encounter with a vampiric NPC (I think his name is "Traveler"). He wears vampire robes, armored vampire boots, and vampire gauntlets. You need to join the Dawnguard for him to appear.
Killing a mammoth will be fairly easy once you've got a bit of experience under your belt. With Elemental Fury + a fortify one-handed potion, you should be able to make short work of a mammoth. Use your light weight to your advantage; try to avoid facing him head-on. Also helps if you can find a mammoth that's relatively separated from the giants and other mammoths at the camp. I think Keepers are also grand souls. Not sure if you can abuse the "summon Keeper" spell to farm grand souls that way, but if not, you could probably just enter Apocrypha through any black books. Though tbh, petty souls are nearly as good as grand when it comes to leveling Enchanting, so you'll only need a handful of grand souls over the course of the playthrough, and you'll probably be able to come across them naturally on your walkabout.
Pick up Azura's Star, so that you can experiment on different creatures without "wasting" a strong soul gem.
As for shields — I didn't mention them in the build because it was already bloated, and stylistically they serve a similar function to sword-blocking, which I find to be a nicer aesthetic. But yes, the Sword-singers were known to use shields, and I actually had planned on using them in earlier drafts of this build. Plus, since we already pick up several Block perks, you won't even have to go out of your way to incorporate shields. I definitely used them a few times at lower levels, to compensate for the relatively low AR.
You can get the Vampire Gauntlets from a random encounter with a vampiric NPC (I think his name is "Traveler"). He wears vampire robes, armored vampire boots, and vampire gauntlets. You need to join the Dawnguard for him to appear.
Killing a mammoth will be fairly easy once you've got a bit of experience under your belt. With Elemental Fury + a fortify one-handed potion, you should be able to make short work of a mammoth. Use your light weight to your advantage; try to avoid facing him head-on. Also helps if you can find a mammoth that's relatively separated from the giants and other mammoths at the camp. I think Keepers are also grand souls. Not sure if you can abuse the "summon Keeper" spell to farm grand souls that way, but if not, you could probably just enter Apocrypha through any black books. Though tbh, petty souls are nearly as good as grand when it comes to leveling Enchanting, so you'll only need a handful of grand souls over the course of the playthrough, and you'll probably be able to come across them naturally on your walkabout.
Pick up Azura's Star, so that you can experiment on different creatures without "wasting" a strong soul gem.
As for shields — I didn't mention them in the build because it was already bloated, and stylistically they serve a similar function to sword-blocking, which I find to be a nicer aesthetic. But yes, the Sword-singers were known to use shields, and I actually had planned on using them in earlier drafts of this build. Plus, since we already pick up several Block perks, you won't even have to go out of your way to incorporate shields. I definitely used them a few times at lower levels, to compensate for the relatively low AR.