Sometimes I hear people complain about perks when they do nothing but add potency, or give passive benefits like magic resistance. Other people complain when perks add functions that can't be performed by default(like critical charging for one handed/two handed).

What are your thoughts?

I think most perks are valid. Things like necromage, quiet casting, atronach and recovery are very interesting cause they also boost the other magic schools and reward mages for using multiple schools. Respite and avoid death are also great restoration perks that are great for warrior characters. Snakeblood and extra pockets are... not so cool IMO.

Perks that simply add power are alright, cause sometimes they are just necessary, or else people could become really powerful in a skill without investing perks in it. They are often boring though, like the illusion perks where they affect higher level enemies. Kinda wish that happened by default by leveling the skill. Otherwise they are cool when they are unique, like seperate boosts for swords/greatswords, axes/waraxes and maces/warhammers.

Smithing perks are really neat IMO, cause you can always improve something, even without the perk. Enchanting is well done too, cause there are no limits without perks, only reduced potency.

My favourite perks are those that really add something. (sounds vague, I know)

Examples:

Dual casting

Sweep (suddenly sideways power attacks become interesting)

Poisoner

I wish I could name more perks like these, but there aren't as many as I'd like :/

I often wish there was an alteration perk that allowed me to apply flesh spells to NPCs, or an enchanting perk allowing for scroll crafting.

Anyways, what are your thoughts on this? What perks in Skyrim do you think are good? Which ones are bad?

I also like the perks that add someting or the chance of something. Devastating blow is one that I like, having a greater chance of decapitaitng an enemy. I also like the fact that their are "specialty" perks cause it makes more sense ( to me ) for someone to use just one type of 2h weapon ( or 1h weapon). I pretty much get all the perks up the center of the tree, then go back and get te specialty ones. The % to do more damge I look at as my character getting more skilled, the more skilled they are, the more damage they inflict, the less effort it takes to do the same things.

Because I mostly play warrior or spellsword/battle mage type characters, I chose to use 2h as an example, I never get a "pure" mage high enough to say if the perk's do alot of good at higher lvl's, so don't have a good enough grasp on them to make a really informed opinion.

The tree that I think is the most usless is Speech and that is mostly because the economy is flat. Being able to sell stolen items to an invested in merchant is a good idea, but still after a certain point, you have more stuff than the merchants have money for. I think while the idea's in the specch tree are good, it mostly falls flat because their isn't really much area to use them.

I agree. It's neat when the merchant perks turns everyone into a general goods buyer, but better prices or slightly higher persuasion success? I'll pass.

I wish there was a speech perk that allowed for brawling instead of persuading or intimidating, in almost every conversation

That would have been a nice addition to a warrior class people.. If the economy made sense ( vanilla) then the speech tree would have been much more important.

I would have like to have seen something like, Deathbells, Swamp Fungus and maybe Gaint Lichen only grow in the Morthal area, so if you sell their it would be at a lower price, where if you took it to a vendor in Solitude or Riften, you would get a better price for it, as an example. Ceratin vendors have "exclusive" items, smiths have different skills, those kinda things... then the economy would be such that you might really need some perk points put into the Speech tree. I know their are mods, I've seen a couple, but having played on 360 for so long, it would have been nice vanilla.

I would have liked to see Speech become more useful by enabling you to recruit more than one follower with perks in that tree.

As for the OP, in my view potency perks don't really add a lot, spells and attacks should just become stronger as you level. A bit disappointing. Perks which add actual capabilities you didn't have before (like in Fallout) are more interesting.

The Investor perk allows you to add 500 gold to a merchant, and it's something you can do more than once-I think. The last Speech perk allows you to 1000 gold for each merchant in the world. The Speech perks give you the ability to increase the amount of gold a merchant can accept.