About speech leveling.

[freddebw2]

Speech is HORRIBLE to level.

I feel like you basically have to abuse and exhaust all dialogue options for every npc. Visit and revisit npcs even when not prompted during quests, because, they might have something new to say about what their neibour just told you. Reloading to make sure you pick the right chain of dialogue to get most speech points out of it if you get locked out of dialogue. Speak to them again when possible, and chose a different approach or persuasion resulting in them telling you the exact same thing over again, even though they just told you.

Start a subchain of dialogue, pick some options and then restart it if its still "white" and pick different options for more points in speech. Often one response should exclude the other options but it doesn't. On the other hand its often the other way around aswell. You pick something that really shouldn't matter and your locked out of alot of dialogue. I wonder if this effects the game though, like does saying somethinbg completely different after first saying one thing change anything in the game, and does it matter what you say first or last?

And then there is haggling. I always haggled during my first playthrough. Basically I just put the bar a little lower than asking price, to save time, and I thought I would get exp. However after noticing how slow it was to lvl speech I investigated and noticed I didnt get exp at all from this haggling, even though everyone says: "you want to level speech? Haggle alot". So I experimented and it seems as followed:

You only get exp for each different reaction during haggling dialogue once, and not even per character, it seems characters are grouped together in some way, so it seems to be once per different reaction per group of traders or area. It would be really nice if people stop spreading misinformation about this.

[McCloud]

I think haggling will just get you 'personal' rep with that specific merchant and only if you give them more (so basically not haggling). Yeah, but as for your subject I've not seen any Speech increases while haggling. +rep is good though for... for... not sure. Do they lower prices once rep is up? heh

[freddebw2]

As I noticed when you haggle you get rep once for every diffrent response/reaction.
Like, you set the bar and they say something like:
piss off or something like that. +exp
afterwars you haggle again, but you change the position of the bar they say mabye:
tough luck, no deal, your a pinchpurse, "interesting offer lower it abit" , "come now just a little bit lower or even "thanks a thousand times" or whatever when you tip them.

For each response or reaction you will get extra experience in speech, until you have exhausted all reactions. The merchants however seem like I said grouped together somehow, because some npc in the town would give exp (once per reaction), and some wouldn't. Probably how villagers can be during quests, when some have white, while others have grayed dialogue.

[Hammer]

I've vowed to change this speech XP system the moment a proper modding kit comes out. I've already tried with what tools are available, and I just can't find anything that seems to be related to Speech XP from my side of things, except those persuasion checks.

Originally posted by McCloud:

I think haggling will just get you 'personal' rep with that specific merchant and only if you give them more (so basically not haggling). Yeah, but as for your subject I've not seen any Speech increases while haggling. +rep is good though for... for... not sure. Do they lower prices once rep is up? heh

Speech increases while haggling ONLY happen if the dialogue associated with the haggle is considered "new". Since I tried a Speech playthrough and I'm a huge grinder, I was paying a lot of attention to how Speech works. It only seems like haggling increases your speech, but truth be told, it doesn't. It only looks like it increases it because of the voices attached to the haggling attempts. Once you've exhausted your voice options and responses (some of them are the same from trader to trader, so it means other traders you haggle with won't give speech XP because the option is counted as "greyed out" for them), no more Speech XP.


It's such a terrible system of XP gain, when every other stat and skill is so easily grindable, the one you need the MOST for a good playthrough is very difficult to grind.

[freddebw2]

Originally posted by Hammer:

I've vowed to change this speech XP system the moment a proper modding kit comes out. I've already tried with what tools are available, and I just can't find anything that seems to be related to Speech XP from my side of things, except those persuasion checks.

Originally posted by McCloud:

I think haggling will just get you 'personal' rep with that specific merchant and only if you give them more (so basically not haggling). Yeah, but as for your subject I've not seen any Speech increases while haggling. +rep is good though for... for... not sure. Do they lower prices once rep is up? heh

Speech increases while haggling ONLY happen if the dialogue associated with the haggle is considered "new". Since I tried a Speech playthrough and I'm a huge grinder, I was paying a lot of attention to how Speech works. It only seems like haggling increases your speech, but truth be told, it doesn't. It only looks like it increases it because of the voices attached to the haggling attempts. Once you've exhausted your voice options and responses (some of them are the same from trader to trader, so it means other traders you haggle with won't give speech XP because the option is counted as "greyed out" for them), no more Speech XP.


It's such a terrible system of XP gain, when every other stat and skill is so easily grindable, the one you need the MOST for a good playthrough is very difficult to grind.

Pretty much my observation. And to be honest, I don't think the total amount gained from haggling is that much. So unsure if its actually worth going through with it, because it's such a hasstle and time consumer, going through all the reactions with every npc, because you dont know who will say something different, even if its only once.

I set out to have 20 speech before the monastery quest, and I barely did it, but I have done every side quest in the game, haggled with everyone, and exhausted I believe every single dialogue option available, even options that doesn't make sense or shouldn't be available because of previous dialogue. I have reloaded dialogues to get the optimal amount of experience , and made sure no new dialogue were available to any npcs after learning something "new" from someone, because often there are even if the game doesn't prompt you about it.

Playing "naturally" it feels impossible to get that 20 even though you talk to everyone, and go through their chains of conversation in a "natural" way.