how to get speech to 100 in skyrim

Skyrim: How To Increase Speech

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In The 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 any Skyrim build, and this guide will explain both how to raise the skill quickly and which perks are worth buying.

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Best Speech Boosting Tips

• Speech is part of the Stealth skill group , so choosing the Thief Stone blessing will boost Speech gains by 20 percent.
• Players get Speech experience for every transaction they perform with a merchant, and the amount of experience is based on the real value of the item bought or sold. Skyrim counts a group of items ( like a stack of potions or ingredients ) as a single transaction with the value of a single item, so players who want to boost Speech should sell stacks one item at a time.
• Crafted items like potions, armor, and enchanted items are more valuable than their raw ingredients. Since Speech improves faster when selling more valuable items, players can make a lot of money while boosting Speech by buying ingredients from merchants, crafting items from them, and then selling the results back to the merchants.
• With the previous point in mind, players can use the Enchanting exploit to create vastly powerful items worth incredible amounts of gold, and then earn huge amounts of Speech experience by selling them.
• Once players have money to spare, a fast way to boost Speech is to buy and sell the same item or group of items from a merchant over and over again.
• Players can minimize the money lost from repeated transactions by using items and potions with Fortify Persuasion and Fortify Barter. Fortify Persuasion boosts Speech directly, while Fortify Barter is more effective but only improves merchant prices. Speech stops improving prices once it reaches 100, but Fortify Barter can keep boosting the numbers until merchants buy items at 100 percent value and sell items at 105 percent value. Skyrim makes it impossible to get prices better than these.
• Merchants only have so much gold to spend , but they refresh this gold when they open for business each day.
• Passing persuasion, intimidation, and bribe checks is another way to improve Speech. If players commit a small crime like picking a lock on a forbidden door in front of a guard or stealing an item worth less than 10 gold, they can run up to every guard in the area and convince them to look the other way. However, players must have 75 Speech to pass the persuasion check (or 53 with the Persuasion perk), or pay a bribe each time. Paying the bribe requires 30 Speech and the Bribery perk.
• The Master skill trainer for Speech is Giraud Gemane, the Dean of History in the Bards College of Solitude.

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The Best Speech Perks to Take

Haggling improves 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 are Bribery , Persuasion , and Intimidation . Bribery allows players to bribe guards to ignore their crimes, but joining the Thieves Guild also 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 is Allure . 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 is Merchant , which may be the 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.

Investor allows 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 comes Fence . 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 Trader adds 1000 daily gold to almost every merchant in the game. This makes selling loot much faster and simpler, but it's not as useful or game-changing as other 100-skill perks .

The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim is available now on PC, PS3, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.

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