Aside from the occasional "Intimidate" or "Persuade" which doesn't come around often. I don't use exploits, glitches, or anything that's related to "Powerleveling" How long is this going to take? I'm not sure if I wanted to train....seems kind of cheap to be honest.

I always found that having low Speech gives the game more life (for my thief character, anyway); as I slowly get rich selling my stolen stuff to merchants. You will get there, just keep sell, sell and sell.

On the other hand; just entertaining the thought: You can always do the Restoration Loop, make a potion that worth a million gold, sell it to a merchant and immediately express to 100.

Well, personally, I don'r consider training in these games to be cheap at all. I see training as a valid roleplaying way to improve skills. After all, if we want to learn how to better speak in public, what do we do in real life? Most of would take a course in public speaking, wouldn't we? This is training in real life. If we want to learn how to use a sword or a bow or how to defend ourselves with our fists most of us would study with someone who knew how to do these things.

In fact I think blindly rushing out into the world and engaging in combat makes less roleplaying sense than training does. I believe that, for most characters and for most skills training is actually the most appropriate roleplaying way to simulate expanding a character's knowledge in these games.

Wait until you start to grind your armor skills. Repeatedly letting a Forsworn Briarheart smashing your unbreakable armor to shred does not, in anway, the most appropriate roleplaying way.

That's a good point. As I mentioned in my previous post I don't powerlevel. Instead of letting one enemy smash my armor over and over I just keep fighting and clearing places.

Then you should apply the same mentality to selling stuff and slowly improve your Speech skill! I had a blast with my thief character, stealing and selling stuff to fences; and once my Speech reach 100, I got the Golden Touch achievement.

How long did that take? I don't think I';ll raise speech for my battlemage, but I will for my assassin type character.

300 hours or so since I started the character (I really took my time though; I also level other skills in the meantime)

In the lkong run would you say it's worth leveling Speech? Is it THAT useful? Or more for a roleplaying reason?

More of a roleplaying reason (and also for the extra perks), otherwise Speech itself is completely and utterly useless. What do you have to lose? This isn't Fallout, where you misplaced a point you're screwed.

For me it was mere convenience. I had to intention of leveling up Speech that early on in my character; it just happens over time and adds up to 100. And when I reach 100 and got almost half a million gold, I was like "Hey look, my Speech is at 100... Cool!"

Thanks.

I guess I'm one of the rare ones that actually uses Speech often and finds it useful.

Talk to people more often. With my current character I actually raised speech via persuasion and bribes for about 4-5 levels before I even sold a single piece. Aside from intimidation and persuasion, even bribing will raise the skill.

Also why not train, as already said it's very realistic, makes sense if you roleplay, and it costs. Then again I use mods, so spending a thousand gold to level a skill by a single level is a luxury for me.

Maybe you'll consider this "powerleveling", maybe not. But I've found that a fairly efficient way to increase Speech is to join the Thieves Guild, and do all the improvement quests so that fences have 4000 gold and there are the extra merchants in the Ragged Flagon. Then just make expensive potions in Riften, and sell to Tonilla, to the alchemist merchant that joins the Thieves Guild, to the merchants above ground in Riften, and to the Khajiit caraven fence that regularly appears outside of Riften.

This is definitely worse than training.