Whilehttp://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1312501-the-way-of-the-artificer I decided to take the speechcraft path late in the day - around level 45, just because it seemed like a good "in-character" option and I had all the perks that really mattered by this stage. using the merchant skills to drive down prices and drive up sales value I found that it was really quite affordable to just buy all the alchemy reagents and soul gems from a shop as I needed, indeed I began to doubt if I really needed all my +fortify gear to lower my weapon charge costs given the abundance of soul gems I could buy.

When I was developing my artificer page responding people's questions I became aware that really you could do the artificer build without actually investing in either alchemy OR enchanting if you were diligent in your shopping/looting.

As my knowledge of buying and selling grew, i became aware that i might've stumbled onto a new style of play that I'd make my next character into...



The way of the merchant!




Overview
You might be thinking "Why the hell would I want to focus on acquiring large amounts of gold. Gold is practically useless in this game and it's so abundant it's a joke"; and you'd be right. And playing as a merchant makes it so much more abundant it's crazy. So why do it? - Well take a step back, the main reason gold has no value to most players is that they make alchemy, enchanting, or smithing a key focus of their character, once you have crafted your end-game set of enchanted gear which includes cost reductions so you never run out of charges; or maxed out alchemy and have a bag full of poisons that slay gods, or a potion that makes you chest hair grow into a bristling array of swords you're pretty much done with shops. Never need buy anything again; and thus your gold builds up.

Almost anything you can craft, can be bought. Whether that be daedric armour, enchanted items, or poisons. The shop bought versions arn't as strong mind you, but they're adequate for end-game play, even on master difficulty.

For the merchant, instead of spending 8-12 perks per crafting skill, he instead spends around 6-8 perks on speechcraft and has the financial leverage to buy whatever he damn well pleases. Those expensive spellcasting scrolls that are 1000 gold a pop? - let's use 'em... not an alchemist? - buy some potions then... how about staves? - Oh right they use charges per shot... no problem just buy a job lot of soul gems (aka, "magical ammo clips!", it only costs like 10 gold a shot that's NOTHING to you!



Thieves
The most obvious playstyle for a merchant is that of the rogue. Since you can fence your own stuff you can clean the town and pawn it off. Unlike Oblivion pickpocketting is actually really quite profittable, with NPCs routinely carrying jewellery that you can flog for 250+ gold a piece

Alchemists
Alchemy already produces insane amounts of gold if you want to abuse it, but having the perks to sell to more vendors and to sell more items to each vastly improves your market share, plus you can pretty much buy every alchemical reagent you see without giving it a second thought.

Artificers
It was this playstyle that I realised the synergistic nature of being a merchant. My original artificer designs focused on reducing the charge cost in order to make the use of staves efficient, and even then scrolls remained an expensive luxury. But if you max out your speech/merchant skills you can buy up just about every soul gem you see without your wallet even noticing and just use them as ammunition clips. Forget wasting time and effort soul capping anything

...basiclly
Instead of you focusing on a specifc pathway of play and mastering it - the merchant has such a wide array of tools at his disposal; scrolls, potions, poisons, enchanted items, staves - he can McgGuyver his way out of any situation



In summary
I guess the key point I'm trying to get over with this post, is the wide range of options available to you when creating a character that can make your character interesting. People focus heavily on the crafting skills, to create what they need from scratch, and shun the business side of things, when in fact it's possible to reverse the polarity as it were, and create a character who has little or no crafting skills, but has the business savvy to supply themselves with all the equipment they need without breaking a sweat. (Not to mention the roleplay aspect of travelling from town to town buying and selling, likely travelling with a companion who can help carry your wares too)

If raw power is your goal then crafting will always be the easiest path to it. But as I've come to find, even a humble merchant can survive the rigours of master difficulty and ultimately isn't that enough in a character design? - to be able to survive against whatever skyrim throws at you?



Incidentlly, if you still think having a merchant as the protagonist would be boring, might I suggest youhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spice_and_Wolf, you might be suprised

I'm always surprised when I see people saying Speechcraft is useless. It's actually very useful for thieves, at least.

Speechcraft is useless.

But for RPing purposes it's okey I guess.

With my latest character, I do not play a mage, warrior, thief etc I am just a normal Imperial who wants to save up as much money as he can, get married, pray to Stendarr and buy a nice house and fill it with all the books he finds. I started writing 'Valens Skyrim Journal' over in the Fan Fiction section if you want to read more about him.

The Speechcraft tree is, like you say, awesome. Did you know that perks not only do things like give lots of vendors +1000 gold or get a discount if trading with a character of the opposite six, but that you can invest 500 gold in stores?

If you talk to Lucan Valerius at the Riverwood Trader in Riverwood, and have his Golden Claw quest in your journal that you get through talking to him (you dont have to of completed it) then if you invest 500 gold in his store then his trading gold changes to 10,000+ gold coins. Good for selling stuff. I am going to play with my Merchant/Master Trader character until I have 1 million septims. Then I am goinb to create a new vampire character. Or maybe I will just make my Merchant/Master Trader character a vampire! lol His new objective, to sneak about and travel only by night, and to drink the blood of every npc in Skyrim!

I guess you ignored my entire post above. Pointing out that if you make speechcraft your focus, you have the capital to buy every trinket, artifact and potion under the sun and McGuyver your way out of any situation...

The thing is, you don't really need speechcraft for that. Money is plentiful already. And speechcraft doesn't give you any real bonus that the other skill trees do.

I like your idea to play though, from a RPing point of view. But lets just say that in an MMO setting no one would pick speechcraft the way the balance in this game is set up. (Ie: nothing you can buy is more powerful than what you make/find yourself, and there are no real money drains anyway lategame)

I noticed this with my Orc blacksmith that I was just wasting all my money to get supplies at mega prices, and then selling back awesome gear at tiny prices because I forgot to invest in at least the first Speechcraft perk that changes the prices.

speechcraft is worthless but i would still take one point in haggling early on to speed up gold generation.

With regards to optimizing gold gain, its not so much how much you can sell item A for but rather how much gold the merchant has on hand. this means increasing the amount of gold in hand merchants through master trader will increase the rate of gold generation more so than investing perks in haggling. however, this requires a serious investment of perks and raising speechcraft is ludicrously difficult even with efficient skill training and skill book usage.

See, this is the real beauty of TES games: they AREN'T MMOs. Half (or more) of the fun is finding new and unexpected ways to approach things. It says a lot about the game that you can effectively buy your way through tough spots that most people would just hack through.

In an MMO, you CAN'T do unique and endgame together. The developers have told you what you can do, and that's all you can do. In a game like TES, the developers only tell you what you CAN'T do, and then leave it up to you from there. The LAST thing the world of gaming needs is more handholding and railroading of the player.

Actually it's pretty quick to level up if you also craft stuff, especially if (like most of my characters) you're a master blacksmith and can make ridiculously valuable items. The trick to it is that the more valuable the item you buy or sell the more Speech XP you get, so converting a 7400-Septim Legendary++ Daedric Sword into more smithing supplies can give you an entire level in Speech, even if it's in the 70s. A master enchanter can also pump it up at that rate, provided you have access to the Banish enchantment (it'll read 'Daedra of level X are sent back to Oblivion'), since you'll more than cover the cost of the Soul Gems by selling such an item, even with a mid-strength enchantment.

It gets really silly if you can do both, since Daedric weapons with maxed Banish enchantments sell for ludicrous amounts of money, however it can be difficult to cash them in. Even without that it's still pretty nuts; one of my characters has a Legendary++ Daedric Bow with a dual enchantment (Absorb Health+Soul Trap), which is worth 14,450 septims and would sell for well over 4000 even with low speech and no perks.

I always run up and perk out Speech, and selling is, indeed, a hassle when you're at the point (roughly 50 or so Speech) where you can sell valuable items for a large percentage but do not yet have Investor or Master Trader; it's seldom a bad idea to buy upper-tier Ingots or Soul Gems when available, though, so you can usually absorb a large chunk of value that way. Getting the Merchant perk when you hit 50 Speech (or at the subsequent level-up) is critical; it allows you to sell anything to anyone, which makes selling some items a lot easier.

Having a vendor with 10K gold is golden. Plus speechcraft quickens dialogue options by bypasses some unneeded dialogue branches to get end results quicker.

Actually I would recommend only level 1 haggling, allure and merchant, merchant been the key to riches beyond your dreams.

You don't need to loot much at all, the key is stealing/buying every alchemy ingredient in existence and making potions to offset your purchases.

The slow potion has a listed price of around 1200 gold. Two potion will clear an alchemist of all his/her ingredient and spare cash. Four or five potions will clear all ingots from a smith or all soul gems from a mage. The reason for the slow potions is due to the ease of obtaining huge amounts of the their ingredients, namely salt pile and deathbell

Invisible potion has a listed price of 1500 and one of the ingredients, chaurus eggs is the most abundant ingredient in skyrim. If you can manage the second ingredient (vampire dust, nirnroot, ice wraith teeth or Luna moth wing), then you are set. It is also a very good item to have on your person for bad situtations.

Finally you want to visit the black reach for that special quest for it's very special perk reward.

Speech is useless, except for the merchant skills.

Alchemy and Speech are excellent to level together.

You can start a character at lvl 1, go to Whiterun, buy every alchemy ingredient below 100 gold and endlessly make potions and sell them, if you carriage ride (and then fast travel) between Solitude, Whiterun and Riften alchemy shops.

Once you have enough spare gold, you can buy alchemy/haggling gear. Once you get the Merchant skill, you can buy lots of training from NPCs who are also merchants, and sell lots of expensive potions to them.

My current character made it to the mid-40s and had hundreds of thousands in gold without ever killing a single monster or using a cheat.

Around lvl 30 you'll have like 90 dragon bones and scales to sell, and hundreds of gems and stuff, this makes speechcraft totally useless in terms of getting money advantages.
Plus, if you consider that when you take all the money a shops have you can just wait 24 hours and sell again at the same shop, also the perks that increase the money a shop have is useless as well.

A lot of Skyrim players seem to equate imbalanced/flawed game design with "freedom". I don't.
Some of the perks are a joke, plain and simple. Skyrim being a SP game is no excuse for it having sub-par RPG mechanics, especially when so many improvements can easily be found in other RPG's.