About speech and one/two handed weapons

How to level up Speech without Riften bug? Only selling items, persuading etc? And about one/two handed weapons, speed matters a lot in combat or what matters are the perks of their weapons? For I am not sure what to use, sword, axe or mace (same in the two-handed weapons, greatswords, battle axes or warhammers).
What do you prefer and why?

If you have a small bounty, you can use the Persuade option on all of a town's guards. It gives you a small bump with each interaction.

"Hey I know you"
-- "No, you're making a mistake!"
"No, you're a wanted man"
-- (Persuade)

speech is just doing a lot of trading and using the 'persuade' 'bribe' and 'intimidate' options.

and well weapon preferences really depends on how you want to play.

Sword - 10% critical
Axe - bleed damage
Mace - ignores armour rating

sword hits faster than the axe, and axe faster than the mace


same goes for great swords, battle axe and, war hammer.


really depends on wether you like dealing high damage or low damage but fast hits...just try and you'll find out

The weapon specialty perks for melee weapons are all pretty poor IMO. Critical damage only multiplies off of the weapon's base damage which is small in and of itself. Bleeding damage is a small DOT bonus based on weapon material with Daedric axes capping at 18 damage for 3 perks. Ignoring a percentage of armor rating sounds good until you realize almost nothing in the game has an armor rating and those few that do have an extremely low armor rating making the damage bonus small to non-existent. My advice is to save the perk points and invest them elsewhere.

You know Dagmar I never knew the armour rating was not really there. I thought it was similar to our unimproved items. That is helpful. I guess just the extra % damage perks from the first perk in the tree for melee is all that is really a good idea then, huh. Well maybe dual flurry and a couple others help, too. LOL

Like Dagmar said, the hack & slash, bladesmen, and bone breaker perks are truly inconsequential in the overall scope of things. Much better off putting those points somewhere else, like smithing, if you want to increase your damage output. As far as which to use, one or two-handed slicing, chopping, or bashing...it's all a matter of preference. Personally I've only dual-wielded swords and axes. I haven't used a two-handed yet.