It is a bit like Oblivion again, coin wise. You basically take a majority of the loot you find/steal & sell it to a merchant or fence. Once again, being a thieve's guild member pays off greatly.

In the end you do not need any speech perks, there is more coin floating around than in past games it seems.

Seemed like a pointless thing to do for me to invest points in speech as money is never an issue.Would have taken the tree if you could talk a dragon out of attacking you.

what could you possibly need more money for-shops only rarely have useful items to buy and even then only at low levels-the only things you need money for are ingots, potions (if you dont want to steal them), possibly arrows, and houses (the only one that is al that expensive is proudspire manor)

It's not that I need more money its that I can offload everything much easier and quicker without spending nearly as much time on it as I did before.

Its good that you can use the tree to gain a Fence perk, as I did not like the Skyrim Thieves Guild and so never joined, but still wanted to sell or just remove the theft flag from an occasional stolen item. You sometimes "steal" items which aren't really thefts, like when you kill a villian in a town quest and take from his house.

I took the Bribe perk as well since I don't want to ever go to jail.

Investing in shops is useful if you are looking to save up for expensive magical items or aiming for the game's money Accomplishment.

I'd like to explore the Speech skill more, but it seems to level very slowly. Getting to 70 just for a 50% better intimidate chance seems like a huuge investment.

Anyway, the other day my wife suggested that taking ranks in haggling (the first 5-rank perk you can take in Speech) might help level my Speech faster, since I'd be trading more expensive items effectively. It *seems* like that would work, but I haven't played around with it yet.

The other thing is, my characters rarely get past the 20s in level. By that point, I just get tired of the same character and want to move on to other things. So that leaves me little space to work on Speech unless I'm *really* dedicated to it. But if I could level it faster, I'd be more inclined to try it out.

It's not that the speech perks are bad per say, it's just that other options in other trees are just so much more interesting and appealing. I can't really see speech perks being viable for anything other than RP purposes.

There's another dynamic here - something you could do in Morrowind and returned in Skyrim (but was absent in Oblivion):

In Oblivion, the "Invest" perk and "Master Trader" actually meant something, sort of, as vendors would only ever has as much money as they had. If they had 800 septims, you couldn't increase their money.

In Morrowind and Skyrim, if you know who you are going to buy from, and let's say you want to buy 3000 gold worth of good and/or training, well, you make your purchase (assuming you have 3000 gold), and now the shops cash is increased by 3000GP, to say, 3800 total. Now, you have 3500 or 3700GP worth of items to sell, you can sell them and get your money back. So, that's basically what I do. I took a couple levels of Speech's basic perk (which increase your sell price and decrease your buy price by like 10% each level), so that I didn't get ripped off so bad when buying and selling, and sometimes use fortify haggle potions, and I usually go find a beggar to get the 1gp Gift of Charity, so I get decent prices, then I just do what I outlined above.

I could see how investing might still be somewhat attractive, but as long as you have stuff to sell when you have stuff to buy, investing becomes less necessary.

EDIT:


Guess someone did mention it before, and I just missed it on my first read through.

In TES games, it's always seemed like you pretty much *have* to buy training for certain skills, and speech/mercantile has always been one of those skills, at least for me (unless you *really* enjoy selling arrows 1 at a time; for those that don't get the reference, in, I think it was Oblivion, might've been true in Morrowind too, the skill didn't increase by the amount of gold you got, so much as how many individual transactions you completed. So, if you had a stack of like 300 arrows or some other light weight low value item, and sold them one at a time, you'd get far more merc skill ups than if you sold the whole stack at once, which just seems silly).

I'm trying it with a mod that makes skyrim ....ehmmm more challenging even prices are affected so now it kinda neccessary

If a vendor is also a trainer, make sure you train before you sell. The money you spend training goes into the vendor's pool of money. Quite often I would whip up a batch of potions, train, and then sell the potions to get my money back.

it's so strange that the merchants get more gold when we decide to put some points in our speech skill. I'm glad mods fix this, because it really shouldn't be an issue.

I spend 0 time. I don't ever have to sell or buy anything. That is without any Perks in silly Speech. After level 10, Gold stopped mattering. I figured out I can sell Potions and Enchanted Iron Daggers or stuff I find to vendors, and within a couple of hours had more money than I would ever need. Now, I do not ever need to sell things to a vendor. I just don't bother picking up stuff, becaues the gear I am wearing is far better than anything I could hope to find.

You don't need a lot of money, just enough money to buy whatever useful crafting / enchanting items the merchant has. THEN you sell your loot to the merchant and get your money back and leave them broke. So you gain whatever money they had AND valuable crafting materials while lightening your load of useless loot. This is only a useful technique while building your crafting skills and into the mid game. After that point, money shouldn't reallyl be an issue but if you have spare perks, use them where you want.

This is the real problem, aside from select ones on the left-hand side the perks in Speech don't do enough to justify taking them in a lot of (some would say most or all) cases. it doesn't help that having a high enough Speech skill to get some of them often means you no longer need them; the right-hand ones get hit particularly hard by this, as there are only a few difficult Persuade or Intimidate checks to begin with and most of same can be passed on skill alone from about 80 or so on.