Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord - 9 Best Charm Perks (2024)

Charm is one of the most important skills in if you want to rule a kingdom. As expected, this skill can help you increase your relationship with other lords and ladies, and increase the amount of renown and influence that you can passively gain.

A high charm skill won't have a direct effect on your combat performance, but with the right perk choices, it will have a crucial effect on kingdom management and expansion. High influence means you'll pass more favorable votes and high relationships will lead to more clans joining your kingdom.

Before patch 1.2, Self Promoter was one of the best perks in the game. While it was nerfed in the most recent patch and tournaments have become much harder to win with the improvements to AI combat, it is still a great perk in the early game, so you can reach higher clan tiers quicker.

Once you reach the middle stages of the campaign, it might be a good idea to change your first charm perk to Virile, especially if you plan on playing a long campaign that can span over multiple generations.

8 Warlord

If you're not going to invest in the charm skill completely, a couple of focus points to get to level 50 and picking either Warlord or Oratory perks is an efficient and effective investment. Oratory is a fantastic perk in the early game where you spend most of your time doing quests in various settlements, but it drops in value as your clan grows.

You should swap to the Warlord perk in the late game if you are not already using it. This perk significantly increases both the renown and influence you gain from battles, as well as giving you a boost in your relationship with lords in your kingdom.

7 Forgivable Grievances

The level 75 perk choice between Forgivable Grievances and Meaningful Favors is both very situational and niche. Meaningful Favors is most useful when you don't mind save-scumming and trying important dialogue checks multiple times until you get the double success, specifically for convincing other clans to join your kingdom.

Forgivable Grievances is more generally useful throughout all stages of the game. Critical failures in dialogues are very punishing and end the dialogue check, so the perk can be extremely useful in Iron Man runs, but the secondary effect is also a great bonus that will help you recover negative relations over time.

6 Young and Respectful

The choice between perks at this level ultimately comes down to your character's gender and your preference. In Bloom increases your relationship gain with the opposite gender, and Young and Respectful does the same for the same gender.

If you want to min-max every perk choice, you can choose the option that increases your relationship with male characters, as most of the clan leaders and powerful notables are male. This can change after a couple of decades as older characters pass away, so take a look at your encyclopedia if you achieve this perk in the late game.

5 Firebrand

The level 125 perks in the charm skill tree are two of the best perks that can justify a heavier investment in leveling up the skill. Both Firebrand and Flexible Ethics help the influence cost of managing a kingdom, and they also increase the recruitment you can get from cities and villages.

While Flexible Ethics is a great perk for voting against proposals that you don't agree with, initiating a vote costs much more influence, making Firebrand a better choice in the long run. In addition, extra recruitment slots are much more valuable in villages, since you can't recruit noble soldiers from cities.

4 Effort For The People

Any perk that can help you raise the loyalty of your towns is a great perk. Effort for the People offers an easy way to do that by defeating bandit hideouts, giving you a small boost either to your relationship with the owner of nearby settlements, or loyalty if you are the owner.

This perk also reduces barter penalties for clans in your culture, making kingdom expansion slightly cheaper in the long run. Both these effects are more valuable than Slick Negotiator perk, which only comes in handy if you exclusively use mercenary troops in your party.

3 Good Natured

Good Natured is the ultimate perk for preserving your influence. This perk completely refunds your influence if your vote fails, making kingdom management in the late game much easier whether you are the ruler or a vassal.

Tribute is a decent perk if you rely on barters to increase relations and recruit clans into your kingdom. But once you are past the early stages of your kingdom's expansion, its effectiveness will fall off. Both secondary effects are similar and not impactful enough to be a deciding factor.

2 Natural Leader

While the first bonus of Moral Leader is great to have if you create your own kingdom and need to recruit other clans to it, Natural Leader comes out on top in the later stages of kingdom expansion, especially with its secondary effect.

If your ultimate goal is world conquest, Natural Leader makes it easier to recruit clans of other cultures into your kingdom. In addition, the bonus experience for companions is extremely valuable as leveling up your hired companions is much slower than leveling up your own character.

1 Parade

Lastly, Parade is hands down the best perk for increasing loyalty in the game. Low loyalty makes managing and upgrading recently conquered settlements extremely slow, but if you have this perk, just by waiting in the settlement for a few days, you will stabilize its loyalty and can begin making necessary upgrades.

Public Speaker is a decent perk if you manage to level up your charm skill extremely quickly, but usually, by the time you reach level 275, your clan tier is high enough to make the bonus renown gain pointless.