InThe Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, merchants have a limited pool of gold they can use to buy loot from players, and they rarely pay the full value of anything the Dragonborn sells. The best way for players to deal with both of these problems is to raise their Speech skill.
A high Speech also has other benefits. Sometimes players get chances to persuade, bribe, or intimidate characters into doing what they want, and if they succeed they can quickly complete quests or avoid dangerous combats. All of this makes Speech a valuable skill for anySkyrimbuild, and this guide will explain both how to raise the skill quickly and which perks are worth buying.
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The Best Speech Perks to Take
Hagglingimproves buying and selling prices by 10 percent the first time, but the extra Haggling perks only add 5 percent each. This means the perk maxes out at 30 percent. However, Haggling is a Fortify Barter effect rather than a Fortify Persuasion effect, so it still makes a difference once Speech reaches 100.
The right branch perks areBribery,Persuasion, andIntimidation. Bribery allows players to bribe guards to ignore their crimes, but joining the Thieves Guildalso provides access to this ability. Either way, bribing a guard only clears a bounty if it’s for a recently committed crime the guard saw or had reported to them.
Persuasion is more useful because it lowers the Speech needed to pass checks by 30 percent. This means players can pass an impossible 100 Speech persuasion check with just 70 Speech. Intimidation doubles the chance of an intimidation check working, but players need 70 Speech and the other perks just to buy it.
The first perk on the left branch isAllure. This adds another 10 percent boost to merchant prices, but only if the merchant is the opposite sex of the Dragonborn. It’s a decent bonus, but it’s situational.
After Allure isMerchant, which may bethe single most important perk in the Speech tree. Players with Merchant can sell and buy any kind of item from any kind of merchant, making all of them as useful as a general goods seller. Players with this perk can even buy items from a merchant’s personal inventory, but not keys and not the clothes off their backs.
Investorallows players to pay certain merchants 500 gold, and from then on the merchant will start each day with 500 more gold than normal. Investable merchants tend to be the ones who own shops rather than stalls. This perk only tends to be useful during the late game when players start finding and crafting items that would be too expensive for merchants to buy normally.
After Investor comesFence. With this perk, players can sell stolen goods to any merchant, not just fences. This perk is supposed to apply only to merchants players have invested in, but thanks to a bug it applies to every merchant.
The final Speech perk requires 100 Speech and all the other left-branch perks.Master Traderadds 1000 daily gold to almost every merchant in the game. This makes selling loot much faster and simpler, but it’s not asuseful or game-changing as other 100-skill perks.
The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrimis available now on PC, PS3, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
