Not my OC though it would have been had I not found this one when I was scouring for source images. But hey, using someone else's is totally on theme here ๐คทโโ๏ธ
Focusing on stealth, pickpocket, and speech this time around.
Edit: Dayum. Arcadia don't fuck around. Pickpocketed her shop key, came back and robbed the place, made a bunch of potions, and sold them back to her. No bounty (so I didn't get caught) but she sent an assassin after me the first time and now the Dark Brotherhood.
Speech has some handy perks. You can bribe guards to ignore crimes, sell any kind of item to any merchant, increase the amount of gold specific merchants have on hand, sell stolen goods to specific merchants and pass speech checks more easily.
I've never really found all those worth the perk points to get honestly. Ignoring crimes becomes pointless when you have the money to just pay the fines which is basically always after level 15. The merchant situation is kind of neat, but price per pound, the only things worth selling are scrolls, jewelery, and weapons, that gets covered by everything but bars and alchemists. On top of that the 500 gold donation is literally pointless because the same skill tree gives you 30% better prices (40% for opposite sex) which actually spells out to 50 gold more in buying power or -100 gold for opposite sex. If you could invest multiple times or of the perk that gives everyone more money was for 5k instead of 1k it would actually be worth the investment of perk points, but really it offers nothing substantial mechanically compared to all the other things you could do.
I said I thought the perks are handy, not game changing. I usually don't go deep enough in speech to unlock investment, etc. Still, they're more useful than the lock picking perks. Depending on my role play, build and where else talents are needed, I might go as far as "Persuasion" but there are usually other priorities.