Doesn't it feel like the speech skill is almost useless now? We got almost every skill being used in speeches. I think it would've been best to combine both the barter and speech skill together.. Anyway I am enjoying the game so far. Its 2x better then Fo3 from my perspective.

I'm around level 10 and have pretty good repair, guns and sneak skill, but have run into quite a few challenges (pretty much all the way to the NV strip) where only pure speech would take me over the top...

I'm considering re-rolling my character because of it.

Yea but we got soo many skills factoring for in for Speech. For example; Barter. Where barter allows you to both get this cheaper, and speech.

I dunno, speech has helped me out plenty of times. Much more than the few times I've used other skill checks.
At any rate, it's leaps and bounds above F3's rendition of the speech skill.

speech is extremely useful in this game, it can make quests easier or start them sooner

It can even get you bonus rewards to quests/random encounters.

Actually I'd say Speech is one of the, if not the most important skill. Obviously depending on what you want out of the game.

Speech can be one of the most important skills. I've noticed that in this game, the number of speech checks is exponentially larger than in Fallout 3. Since the character I'm using now has a Speech of 65, this can be very useful.

Not really there are alot of speech challenges out there and definitely feel like speech is more useful. Now if you are expecting some weird set of speech challenges that give some uber reward for every NPC that has a conversation list with a speech challenge then yes it will be useless. However I personally like the speech challenges because they give that extra bonus of xp and give more insight into things. First speech challenge kind of surprised me in Goodsprings which is why I went out to get another level so I could do the speech challenge. Would definitely say speech challenges are more rewarding in New Vegas Vs FO3 since they can have direct impacts on what happens during the course of your journey.

I'm finding constant speech checks, and my girlfriend found a Speech of 60 or so by level 6 early on to be quite powerful. She got into the strip within no time.