» Mon May 02, 2011 3:44 am
The merchant with the lowest mercantile skill and highest disposition, and thus the one who'll pay the best rates, is Sinderion-- the alchemist in Skingrad who takes your Nirnroots. There are a few problems with him though-- first, he only has 400 gold, so you're sort of limited on what you can sell to him. Second, his inventory never resets, so he'll always have everything you sold to him. That's sort of nice if you want to buy something back, but means that if you sell him a lot of stuff, it can take a while to load his inventory, and can even make the game freeze. And finally, he's an alchemist, so he only buys and sells potions, ingredients and alchemy apparatus until you get your mercantile skill to 50, at which point you can buy or sell anything to anyone.
As a general rule, the mages guild alchemists have low mercantile skills, and if you're in the guild, they have a naturally high disposition to you, so they're pretty good too. Like Sinderion though, they're limited in what they'll buy and sell until you get to journeyman mercantile.
My personal favorite is Rindir in the IC market district. I can generally get him to 70% or more right from the start of the game, and can get him to about 85% later in the game. And he buys weapons and armor from the very beginning.
When you're out that way, Varel Morvayn in Anvil is arguably the best all around. He's only an apprentice in mercantile but he has 1200 gold. He won't pay as high a rate as Sinderion or Rindir, but he pays a pretty decent rate, and 1200 gold is the most you'll get from any regular merchant.