i had one character that chose the speech perks. they are totally useless esp. later on in the game. i started again and made a new character

Sure it does. My thief spent a lot on arrows, my mage a lot on spell tomes and soul gems, and I don't like to have to penny pinch. Early on 10% on everything plus a 15% bonus from an amulet makes a big difference. Later on, not having to scrounge for a vendor or let a bunch of loot pile up just makes for a more hassle-free game.

You can't say "there are no shoulds" and then proceed to tell people there's only one way to play the game.

Speech is bad. It's a fact. If you like the bad perks, that's totally acceptable because that's how you want to play the game. Someone looking for advice shouldn't be led to believe that terrible perks are actually good, because they're not. I have never EVER had to "penny pinch" in this game, gold is a totally unlimited resource if you're even casually exploring dungeons.

Haggling is an extra 30% for buying and selling (FOR FIVE PERK POINTS). Let's say you sell that bow you're not going to use for 1,000 gold. You just made what? 300 gold? FOR FIVE PERK POINTS?! Yeah, that's beyond insane. Between the general goods vendors and the specialty vendors, you'll have enough people to buy your junk.

what do you buy with all this gold hmmm? if you could pay to have gear smithed and improved, items enchanted and recharged that gold may go somewhere so far i dont even take all the stuff i find yet still have thousands of gold, being able to buy and fill all the houses by lvl 30 without stealing anything i find the econamy a joke, as are the speech challenges, so please some one tell us why you need them? I didnt even go the route of smith-enchant-sell my loot i just sell yet i dont have a speech skill above 60, the fact is you find loads of gold just around, why they felt ever drauger needed to have gold on them i dont no, is just so in your face over the top. Beggar in skyrim lol give me a break. you can become rich chopping wood and picking veg.

@ riskybiz13: You're telling me how to play my game. Don't. Your opinions don't count as facts.

I'm telling you that I prefer to have the extra gold early on and less hassle selling later. That makes the speech perks (one in haggling early on and up to Fence later on in the game) totally worth it to me. The combat is easy enough that you don't have to spend every single perk on it.

All Perks are a Trade Off.

Some Perk Trees have more to trade than others do, but it all comes down to choice. There are some Perks in the Speech Tree that can help some players achieve the goal that they have for the game. However, of all the Trees, I would say that Speech has the least amount of helpful Perks. But, that does not mean all the Speech Perks are not useful.

Whether any of them are useful or not all depends on your character, the way you play and the role that you follow.

We're not talking about you, we're talking about OP. He's asking about Haggling, so your "less hassle" argument is invalid (even though I still believe that perk to be just as useless as haggling). You can play the game however you want. Perk out lock picking, speech, then run around naked and box mudcrabs for all I care. I'm just trying to give OP a good, honest answer to his question.

Speech could be useful if you're RP'ing or if your end goal is to be the richest man in Skyrim, but if that doesn't apply Speech is... bad.

Edit: And if you think combat is easy without perks, you might want to scale up the difficulty a little bit.

I would say lockpicking as being worthless is a fact, I do not need one perk point to pick a master lock with only five in that skill and no perks.

I do agree that haggling beyond the first one is redundant. I just chose them because you have to to get the merchants to boost their gold. Haggling should be done in game similar to Morrowind did it that was fun for me at least. Then there should be a separate perks branch for boosting the merchants good or better yet they do that automatically when you reach fifty in speech and layer at either seventy five or a hundred.

I think a lot of people miss the point about this game...and that is that eventually your character becomes a larger than life legendary hero, who can trash everything that he or she comes up against, all things being equal.

Following on from that, most of us have a tendency to concentrate on combative perks, which is understandable, but we really don't need to...and in all reality there's probably a few combat perks that we probably could siphon off into other areas, such as speech (granted though that the perk tree structure requires in some instances that we 'waste' some perks just to get better ones up the tree).

With Speech, the question is 'do you want greater availability of money?'...in my case, I'm not short of a septim, but I'm not swimming in it either, at level 60, but it would be nice to be able to actually dispose of all that booty from a dungeon in one hit, rather than having to do the rounds of two towns or sell half and jam half into a chest.

For my playstyle I prefer to go into that tree, I am a thief type character. I like to get gold, it also saves me from becoming overpowered, going into a non combat tree.

And I'm giving my honest opinion, which is that yes- at least one point in haggling is worth it if you take it early. I don't consider it a necessity, it's more of a matter of convenience. I like having a good bank balance and later on, I like being able to easily sell stuff off without having loot stack up in my inventory.

I adjust difficulty level if combat is too easy. That's not the issue. I'm not saying not to put points in combat skills, but that there are enough of them that you can have a combat concentration and a craft skill or two and still not miss a point or two in speech.

We're talking about playstyles, and once again- you don't get to tell other players their methods of play are "invalid."

I put seven in speech up the left side, I also can build ny characters combative style however I wish. It works fine for me, in the speech tree I mainly want the ones that up the merchants gold.

I think the biggest reason people aren't keen on the speech tree is primarily the lack of end-game gold sinks. Personally, on a couple of my characters, I've invested about 5 perks into speech - usually 2 or 3 levels of Haggling (so I get moderately reasonable prices when I sell things, instead of selling, e.g. 500gp items for 80 gold, I can sell them for maybe 200-250 gold), but since there's unlimited loot, and the higher level your character is, the more likely you are to find loot worth 1000gp+, speech isn't essential, just helpful in the early parts of the game.

If gamesas had actually put in some decent things to spend money on late game, speech would be a more highly-regarded skill. Personally, I think I would have tried to modify the smithing, enchanting, and alchemy system so that, the very best craft items in the game also required very expensive "consumable" items. Perhaps put in some quests in the game, such as the civil war quest line, and maybe some questlines to rebuild or improve some of the holds, where the player has to cough up like 20000 septims, or 50000 septims to progress the quest.

Okay, let's talk one point in Haggling. 10%, and you're saying "early on." Early on you'll be selling gear for what? 100 gold? 200 for a really good piece? So that perk gives you... 10 gold? 20 if you're lucky? I think you're just being stubborn at this point...

how about the persuasion and intimidation perks? do they make the game easier, as in let you talk your way through a few quests or something like that?

The easiest way would be to pay for Crafting. Enchanting and Smithing could be ignored as a skill if we could buy enchantments/recharges and pay for weapons to be improved/made. There are all kinds of ways to make this work. Like, we could get a discount if we brought the materials. Then we could chase the gold in the game for a reason and not just to count it.

And you're being obtuse, otherwise I wouldn't need to explain to you that the value is in its cumulative effect and not what you get for one or two pieces.

Yes speech perks are WAY worth it if you do it right. You don't need to put a bunch in the first stat that just makes prices better what you want to do is get up to where you can invest in vendors then go to riverwood and invest in the general trader after that he well have 10,000 gold every 2 days instead of like 1000

There are not too many opportunities to do those two things. It's not like in Morrowind where it was a choice in each conversation.

Spot on, CCNA.

I think it's obvious after Oblivion and Fallout 3 (and others) that Beth games attract players with a tendency to become 'gatherers and hoarders', or just to collect stuff. Disposing of money, or having something worthwhile to spend it on was always going to be an issue.

In F3, some folk had so many caps they could litterally swim in them, and although Skyrim is a lot more economically tighter, there just isn't much to waste your money on. In oblivion, I took up magic arrow collecting, and looted or bought up any new type of enchanted arrow I saw, which at least gave me something to buy. In Skyrim, it's rare that I seen anything that I can't make better, and well, what's the point of collecting every magic axe in the game? They only really come in five or six basic types (fire, frost, shock, scary or blessed...which makes me wonder why there isn't a 'hand-axe of irony' : Calms whatever it hits).

I don't take those. Most of the quests have work-arounds if you don't pass the check, most of which seem to be fairly easy.

Resorting to the "big words" to further the argument, I really love this. The "cumulative effect" of tacking on 10g to every 100 you earn is so minimal it's a joke. I'm not being "obtuse," I perfectly understand your argument. Later in the game, perhaps you could make some kind of an argument that you gain an extra 100 gold on selling an item that's 1,000 gold-- but we've already established that gold is infinite later in the game.

There's no argument. I and others say we use the perk tree, you insist that your opinion is fact, and now I ignore you.

Funnily enough though, in FO:NV caps could be an issue at times, especially if you didn't have repair skill very high and certain perks.

As to Skyrim and the speech tree, I've seen nothing that makes me think "It might be worth putting some perks in this".

I don't want to say too much as this thread is currently in General rather than the Spoilers section but I'd say be careful what you pick up/loot (think weight vs cost) and there's a certain city that has 5 vendors in a small space, 3 of which will buy any non-stolen items. Same city potentially offers more vendor opportunities if you do a certain quest line.

(Sorry to be so vague, just trying to consider the forum area this thread is in at the moment).

On that we can agree