Oh the title should read Since they did NOT cut out the speech skill

Sorry


Simple question


Do you think that with the fact that they were consolidating, eliminating and scaling back skills and that they left in the speech/mercantile combo means it will be a useful skill to take perks?


I mean why cut out Mysticism, Altheticism, and Acrobatics , combine multiple other skills into one and then leave in a useless skill ilke speech/mercantile?

Speech isn't useless in this game. And the others were cut because everyone automatically did them and had leveling issues with them.

speech is useless?

I know friends who have REALLY crackhead like characters in Oblivion on console. From athletics/acrobatics alone.

I was dissappointed to hear it wasn't in the game, but I'm GLAD it's gone actually.

Whenever I made a character it would be one or the other, Athletics or Acrobatics (sometimes both). As a major skill.

I think it's very useful, especially for thieves/assassins. Bribing guards and turning every shop you invest in into a fence, sounds pretty useful to me.

I think it will be even more useful in Sky because it will probably do more than just get you price discounts/better rates for selling stuff, and a bit more information from making NPCs like you. They say it is like Fallout 3's speech system so I'm expecting speech challenges that will offer alternatives to actually fighting if you want to play a smooth talking rogue type.

Mysticism probably cut out because magic are too spread out, and it is better to put it into other schools. Much like how medium armor was redundant and orc armor was put into heavy armor instead.

Speech is one of a kind. Though I would say mixing it with mercantile would make sense too. The reason why you can buy lower and sell higher is due to better negotiating and bargaining skill, which involves talking (speech).

Speech could be handy and I always worked on Mercantile so I could invest it shops and make more money. I rarely even bothered with Athleticism and Acrobatics as movement speed was never really an issue and I rarely went jumping around. I guess it just comes down to play style. You probably still need speech to convince NPCs to your view but they can just have fixed values for movement and jump heights. Although acrobatics reduced fall damage too didn't it?

Not in Skyrim, no. In Oblivion, leveling Speechcraft was entirely worthless. In Oblivion, you could just mini-game everyone's dispositions up or use a charm spell. In Skyrim, you'll just totally fail checks if your speech is low.

isn't it more like fallout where u can get other speech options normally locked out to u ? and I think u can invest in shops so u can sell to anyone and at a higher rate ?

Speech tree very very general spoilers

Most of the perks in the tree are just there to make more money and money was never a problem in any other TES game.

I hope its more useful not because thieves can use the few that arent just for making more money

I hope its more useful not for the few that improve your conversations


9 of the 13 are about making more gold and so far the arguments for speech have been for those few 4 perks that have nothing to do with gold

There are two branches in the tree. One for mercantile benefits, one for persuasion/intimidation benefits.

There's a reason arguments has so far only covered the useful side of the speech perk tree. As you said, making money has never been an issue before. Go ahead and ignore the "barter" side of the perk tree.

Oh yeah, there's "intimidation", wonder how thats gonna pan out

Persuasion is based on your Speech skill. Intimidation is based on Speech and your level.

Not sure about Mysticism but Athleticism and Acrobatics are just as useless because they can just have fixed values. Athletics only affected movement speed on ground and in water and acrobatics affected jump height and reduced falling damage. All of which can be fixed to a particular value like any other game.

I'm with you on the part about speech being more useful and as you get better at speech you are given more speech options. Even something along the lines of Fallout 3 would be better where you need a certain level of speech to convince NPCs to do things or reveal information.

They probably just merged Mysticism with the other schools to make things fit evenly.

How would you level up speech in Skyrim?

Sellin loads of crap

Thats the problem, the very point of the thread


Why would they cut out so many other skills and pare down the game and not pare down the "barter side" which most people find useless

It makes no sense UNLESS gold will actually mean something and its not so easy to obtain *hope hope*

Heh, maybe they should have made the speech skill an integral part of Dragon Shouts. The higher the skill the more potent the Dragon Shout.

it is supposedly much harder to get money in skyrim

You..I'v seen you before.
Let me see your face...
YOU are the one from.....


the other semi pessimistic threads lol.

I believe I've seen you around multiple times talking about relatively similar topics dealing with how they've cut out some skills.

The main point for cutting out said skills is they were useless, and they screwed up leveling. Everyone jumps and everyone runs so to have a skill increase for that..well..it kind of skews leveling patterns. Also this time around speech craft is MUCH more useful. It is combined with mercantile but also there are plenty of speech craft checks that play a fair part in the game. For more info on it look in the wiki.

ALSO mysticism was NOT removed. It was combined with another school of magic. There were too few spells in mysticism to clarify it as a full school and anyone who played oblivion definitely knows what I'm talking about. It was almost impossible to level it naturally since none of the early spells were practical at all (there were many useless things like telekenisis which did absolutely nothing for you really except for help you reach some stones in aylied ruins). There was really only one reason to ever level mysticism and that was for the reflect damage stuff. Even then that stuff usually took a master of mysticism to cast.

Which meant out of the three spells worth note in the school 2 of them were locked until you grinded hours using useless ones that you normally wouldn't touch.

I believe it is now combined with alteration? point being, mysticism is not gone. The spells were just combined with another school since it wasn't fleshed out enough to merit its own.

Hand to hand was equally useless. I'm glad they realized this and its gone. If you want to walk around punching things go for it. It doesn't deserve to be a full skill though. There is no way you would survive in this type of world beating things with your fist.

I thought speechcraft was extremely useful in fallout 3. The fact that it is now essentially combined with the barter skill from there as well makes it indespensible for me.

That and i'm so glad that pick pocket got its own skill. I look forward to making a master theif. there are some amazing perks for it as well such as the option to silently kill foes by placing poison on them silently while pick pocketing.

My first play through will be a dark brotherhood member and he has no intent on doing petty theft but I may have to practice it somewhat or recieve training just so I can be skilled enough to do that. I see huge applications of this when required to kill a target in a crowded city or trying to kill someone in a home without being cought.

I was rolling my sleeves up when I read the title, then I read the OP and I was like, "that's better." Anyways, I feel the consolidation of speech/mercantile was a good idea, because you don't need to get all the perks and the speech perks all tend to go up one alley while the mercantile/barter related skills go up another alley. This is good consolidation. Other than that, no excuse to cut out Mysticism, Acrobatics, or Athletics. They should have consolidated Acrobatics/Athletics into the same tree but instead, they completely remove them. I just can't agree with Beth's decision on that one.

I don't think the barter side of the speech tree is useless. They aren't the most sixy perks to be sure, but there are some in there that could certainly be a useful convenience and time saver for characters who sell a lot of varied loot.

I'm a touch disapointed by the removal of hand to hand, to be honest. What if I wanted to make a Monk class? But I'm not too worried about it...

Does the Light Armor skill have perks that supplant Athletics/Acrobatics, by the way? I should probably look myself, but I'm wondering if I'll be able to make my Dunmer Nightblade run really fast and jump across rooftops...