Yes to more ways of befriending merchants. It's been way too time-consuming trying to figure out how much each merchant gets plus-relations for which amount of gold. Some merchants also have different ratios. Zaleskar for example, if you shower him with a gift worth ~100 gold, his attitude went up by 7. On the lizard water mage book merchant, attitude went up by 50+.
Yeah I pretty much test the water now with something like 12 gold to see if the attitude divider is 2 3 or 4. The water spell lizard was 1 which is really good and majority of the characters that sell decent stuffs are 3.
And right now, I actually find gold to no longer be an issue simply because the game has an exploitable craft-and-sell method that is helpful to do on the first 3-4 hours as you slowly make your way out of fort joy so everyone will have their skill learned before killing a few selected NPC (Quest) to regain all the crafted grenade/potion and trade to other NPCs Zaleskar later.
Combined with extra thievery+ gears (and you might as well teach everyone Walk-In-Shadow because The Pawn requires rank 1 scoundrel anyway to make it really really easy to steal without any preperation), it's really easy to recycle all the gold and leave Fort Joy with a few thousands like before this patch. Just gotta avoid being tempted to steal at level 1 to 4 and just start at level 5 with extra thievery gears because the gold limit is around Character level * 60 + (Thievery level - Thievery level required * 30).
