Please someone tell me if it's even worth upgrading or not, I know that you might get better price from people when buying stuff, but I doubt any of us here actually buy stuff that much from A.I that we need to barter with them. So any ideas people?

it really has no impact. There are no persuasion checks in this game, just a few random incidents that mean nothing. Also, I find that some apparel actually gets decent prices.

It's Mercantile, basically. It can get you cheaper prices, the merchants have more gold, and you can sweet talk your way out of crimes.

It does have impact beside obtaining better prices at vendors (which is not that bad. At the beginning of the game, I had to buy lockpicks at 6 gold; now that I've improved at speech, I can get them at 4.). In some conversations, you'll have to persuade people to do something, or threaten them if they don't, etc. I think you can obtain extra things from people too if you have the proper level.

It's worth specing into very early on when you have lots of things to sell and you need to buy for less. However, later on (for ex., I'm lv40 at the moment), I am doing fine without it. Merchants can have up to (I think) 1500 more gold, and you can sell anything to anyone. That is helpful, but IMO not worth specing into.

definitely not. Your lucky to get enough merchants to buy all your crap as it is.

That's why the skill perk is so great. However, there's definitely no problem finding money in Skyrim so it's quite a useless skill overall.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Speech

Full description @ the UESP Wiki

Despite what some people are going to tell you, it is involved in quests. I've managed to avoid battles or problems- even the 'end fight' of quests- just by using Persuade/Intimidate/Bribe. So it's a pretty cool perk, if you want to play someone that isn't completely combat-oriented.

i would recommend not wasting perks in it. vendor runs out of money? wait 48 hours. after an unhealthy amount of hours playing this game, i've run into one quest where there was a speech check to avoid confrontation. i might have run into one or two fetch quests that could be avoided with speech, but those were hardly difficult so the benefit was negligible. speech is massively neglected in skyrim and not used any where near it's potential.

there are items that boost your speech skill. i have passed speech checks with proper level in speech, no perks needed. just raising speech to a decent level is enough.

i agree that speech should really be called mercantile only because speech checks are not used enough and not used in the more 'high profile' quests.

Speech makes the horrible trading system of Skyrim worse as you keep playing.

Basically.

since gold is easy to come across you can just bribe everyone even with a low speech skill. its a completely worthless skill tree. at least in fallout 3 and fallout NV you actually had real speech checks that made a difference in how the game played out. since i have so much gold on me i just bribe everyone and it does the same thing as persuade........sigh. yet another thing they did right in fallout 3 and forgot to do in skyrim.

My character wouldn't be who she is without the 'persuade' perk. The 'merchant' perk is quite useful, especially for selling crap potions to Stormcloak smiths and the likes in the wilderness, but I don't fast travel, so every little helps.

Everybody else seems to hate it. I liked it. Only two of the characters I've played so far (long story ... had a lot of save game issues which necessitated a lot of resets) haven't had it.

If you want to not be a meat/magichead, I'd suggest using it. You'll automatically be a bit weaker in the other aspects of the game, but you will get a boost with Speech checks, and there are some cool little events that involve it. But if you expect it to have a huge impact on the game, you'll be disappointed.

It depends a lot on how you play. Speech could have been used much more robustly than it is, but I passed four Speech tests in a two hour session last night in Riften, so it's not like it's never used.

And I do buy a lot of my stuff from merchants because my character is learning enchantment and it's easier to buy stuff than go digging for it in dungeons. I also have a 'no borrowed armor' rule, so I have to buy or craft all of my own armor for myself and my companion to make sure it fits. I buy a lot of those materials from smiths because it takes my character a long time to mine ores (4 hour wait/vein). I also buy a lot of soul gems and ingredients. I also buy food and drink because I RP. So, yeah, I use the merchants all the time, so for me it's not useless. I'm sure tens of thousands of gold have passed hands with this character. I'm level 27 right now and I've only got 1,000 gold.

By contrast, because I only have 100 Health, I avoid going toe-to-toe with tough opponents. Consequently, I rarely use my armor, block, one-hand or two-hand skills. All of these get used less often than my Speech, Lockpicking, and Pickpocketing. What's important depends largely on how you choose to play the game.

Completely worthless for most characters I'd assume.

I haven't failed a speech check yet I don't think, with no perks in it. Gold stops being an issue pretty early on as well. There are also better ways to boost speech in skills that have other more useful applications - both alchemy and enchant can boost speech well enough on their own - and they can do the same for lockpicking and pickpocketing. There are a few perks like the increased carry weight or ability to bribe guards that you obviously can't replace with enchants/potions, but they're pretty minor.

I dont think it is as well implimented as Fallout New Vegas and the like, but it can serve a purpose. Quite a few of the Skills that people say arent worth it, actually have some nice Perks in them. Like the +100 carry weight in pickpocking or the +50% chance for special itmes in chests, in lockpicking. On the other side of things, in the so called more relevent skills, i dislike the Shadow Warrior perk in Sneak, and in Alchemy i prefer to follow the Poisoner route & avoid the positive potions. Basically all i am saying is, that you dont have to take ALL the perks in a tree, so just grab the ones you like the look of & feel are more usefull to your character.

Pretty much to get better prices, thats it.
The speech challenge does not seem to matter, much.

Perking into Speechcraft is totally useless in Skyrim because:

1. Bartering happens automatically now - there is no setting your own prices, so you can't actually try and get more/less out of something if you wanted to.

2. The majority of shopkeepers never have anything worth buying anyways other than potions

3. Every single time you could do a (rare) speech check, you always have other options to still complete the quest in the way you want - i.e. even if you fail the pursuation check to get someone to leave the mine, you can still bribe them for 300 gold (WITHOUT any perks)... which makes the whole point of speechcraft useless. Hell, the guy who gives you the reward even gives you 300 extra gold because of the fact - totally invalidating the "negative" aspect to bribery!

4. Gold is incredibly easy to come by after level 5-10, therefore it has no *real* value (helped by the fact there is almost never anything worth buying except for a home and potions). Bethesda was too afraid to let players fail, so as such gold is the easiest thing to find in the game.


Here's what would make Speechcraft work:

1. Make it so there are actually items of value and things worth saving up for. The most expensive thing you can really get in the game item wise will only set you back about 3k-4k gold - absolutely nothing when you have 30k by level 25 (and that is without doing any serious looting). Especially hurts when the most expensive thing you could ever possibly find or craft is only worth about that much too. Bethesda really killed the value system in this game. I remember when finding a Grand soul gem with a Grand soul in it was a very high prize for early level players, even if you didn't do enchanting - because the damn thing was worth about 6k gold. Everything was put at excessively neutral levels in skyrim however.

2. Make it so you can use speechchecks for situations far beyond the pre-scripted ones, and make the speechchecks actually have real conciquence. I.E. don't let me just bribe someone away for a paltry amount after I failed a speechcheck with them. Make it so if I do resort to bribery, it's a real cost against me, not a "fake" one that I make up later with a bonus to my quest reward. Let me use persuation in lots of situations - run into bandits on the road? Why not try to convince them to leave you alone? Want to do steal something or sleep in someone's bed, why not try and convince the guy that you are his friend? Want to just be nice to someone because you want to have them be a potentual follower, why not be able to do a speechcraft-style thing to them that boosts their opinon of you? There's so many situations this could have been used in, but instead they just left it for a couple of very minor quests, made it so even if you DID fail you never truely lost (you could always still bribe or intimidate without perks, and both of those options essentually have zero conciquences for doing them).

3. Cut the [censored] loot! I like the fact that a group of guys in a fort might leave something mostly useless but still have a sliver of value (steel armor), but why must EVERY single dungeon I enter, EVERY single fort I find, EVERY single ANYTHING in the wilderness always have a predictable big chest with predictably leveled loot inside, not counting the 10 chests I found when I was going through the dungeon. Just by doing that, they completely kill the value of loot and make the game feel extremely video-gamey. There's no hand-placed uber items to find, there's nothing cool you can just find sitting out, and it makes every dungeon feel the same, because a fort will play almost exactly like a dwemer ruin which plays exactly like a drauger den, etc.

You gotta hand it to bethesda, their world and dungeon design is among their best in Skyrim. It looks great, and most dungions feel very unique. However the level design in them is absoutely terrible, and they all play exactly the same despite looking and "feeling" very different. They have all personality on the outside, but no personality on the core things that matter. There's no connection, its just a bunch of halls with predictably leveled loot for every single dungeon type. It's like they didn't even bother to make it feel like they belonged in the world, they just wanted random spaces for a player to dungeon romp in, as if this is everquest from 1999. And it's directly related to how they handled the loot, why you have too much of it, and why - ultimately, speechcraft/mercantilism is a completely worthless skill.

On my next runaround, I'm bypassing speech completely. There is an easy way to get 100 at the beginning of the game, so the only thing it might get you is some gold... I say forget it. It was better implemented in FO3.