Optimal starting SPECIAL and Skills?

[@theweedfather]

Not asking for a quick answer but I want to beat F:NV before Fallout 4 comes out so I'm trying to find the best setup for my playstyle.

I prefer small arms over impractical heavy weapons or lasers, I am very ranged combat oriented and I don't use melee, but I do hoard a lot of crap for bottlecaps.

I repair sometimes when I find the right parts, I use a lot of stimpacks and rad x, but no drugs as I don't see the point. I generally try to talk things out before combat but I don't hesitate to kill when pushed.

I've never used implants but I'd like to in the future I've never gotten that far. I'm awful at hacking computer terminals so I don't mess with them. I pick locks, I don't really stealth or pickpocket/steal from people as I don't care much for it. I'm not always GOOD, but I'm not evil.

I generally gravitate towards medium armor as I've never really found any Power armor myself, I don't use VAT's all that much either.

[Vassago Rain]

There's no 'optimal' stat distribution, but unless you go for like 10 P, 10 C, it doesn't really matter.

The most important stats are strength and agility.

[talgaby]

As for skills, you need one offensive one (doesn't really matter which, but Guns is a decent newbie-friendly one), speech, and repair. Optionally lockpick, barter, medicine, science.
Since you shouldn't do much fighting throughout the game (there are no real rewards as the good loot is in fixed containers or at vendors, and the kill XP is next to nothing to the lockpick/exploration/quest XP), social skills can come in handy.

[Discreet_Pigeon]

Originally posted by Vassago Rain:

There's no 'optimal' stat distribution, but unless you go for like 10 P, 10 C, it doesn't really matter.

The most important stats are strength and agility.

I would like to add to that endurance for health and poison resistance would be great to have so that a cazador's sting won't just drop you especially if you don't have torniquets, antivenoms, or fiery purgatives.

[Straybow]

Since the above posters have all given you good advice in regards to combat, I'll simply make the suggestion that you ought to be nice to the cosplayers.

[Whargoul]

New Vegas is so easy you could put points anywhere and beat the game without much difficulty. Making stat food and taking chems will cap your stats out easy.

[Whargoul]

The most agility you'll need is 7 which gets you all the good perks. You only need 7 in any stat to get the most worthwhile perks. Strength is by far the easiest to raise. 10 int seems overkill... you could do 6 int and get educated which gives you 15 skills points per level - thats more than enough. Endurance doesn't really give you that much more HP. Charisma is useless unless you want a companion to do all the fighting. Perception is worthless but you should get it to 6 for better criticals along with 6 luck.

[Rick]

I usually have pretty general SPECIAL stats, but I can help you a bit with hacking on FO3/FNV. There's a little trick I do where I'll select three potential passwords trying to root out the correct one, and if I can't seem to do that then I'll slowly go over all the random characters inbetween the letters looking for the dud removal/allowance replenishers. What those are is if you mouse over a character chain like (#%%^##$^&*# and your mouse is on the first character of the chain, they'll all be highlighted and you can click on it, generally it'll remove a dud password or replenish your guesses.

[Rick]

http://www.wikihow.com/Hack-a-Computer-Terminal-in-Fallout-3

Number six shows a better explanation of the bracket tricks than I can give.

[@theweedfather]

I decided on these stats:
6 S
5 P
6 E
4 C
7 I
6 A
6 L

I heard intelligence is important and I horde somewhat, not big on heavy weapons or energy weapons but I wanted the extra skill points, medicine and repair.

Thank you all for your input and I think I will be happy with my character and hopefully do a complete playthrough in time for Fallout 4 in 3 days.