More attribute points, please?

[Achi]

I've been playing Wasteland 2 now for a bit and must say that my party feels woefully weak. The way the game is set up means that you are either below average at everything, or good in one or two areas, while being terrible at everything else.
Since I don't like min-maxing characters, but rather try to make "believeable" PC's, I tend to make sure that they are well rounded. Turns out that this was a mistake.

I know that you gain attribute points as you level up (4 in total if I remember correctly), but this takes a long time and four extra points don't seem like much to begin with.
Does the game give you more attribute points through books and such as you progress through the game, or am I better off starting from scratch?
I'm not even sure that I have the motivation to do so at this point.

It's not that I can't handle the combat, I just don't have much fun feeling like I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel all the time.
Enemies instanly close up distance right at the beginning of a battle, because they tend to win initiative in almost every instance, making tactical movements almost impossible or pointless, so I end up kiting them around while picking them off with my sniper. This really doesn't make things very fun for me.

Enough complaining. In short: how can I get more attribute points?

[Gregorovitch]

Originally posted by Achi:

Enemies instanly close up distance right at the beginning of a battle, because they tend to win initiative in almost every instance, making tactical movements almost impossible

This is likely your biggest problem - your guys lack Combat Initiative, which is the most important stat in the game, and as a result enemies are running rings round you. Note that Combat Initiative doesn't just control who goes first in battle, like it does in most RPGs, it also gives you extra turns. A character with 15 Combat Intiative gets three turns for every two a character with 10 CI gets roughly speaking. This why it is so important.

You get it primarily from Awareness, Strength and Speed. There are particulr steps for each of these that give you +1 CI. You need to examije how these steps work carefully on cghatcter creation to get this right. The game does not do a great job of helping you apart from it does display rthe derived stats (like CI) as you assign attributes so you can tune it up.

If you want to see how to create a good ranged character suitable for say an assault rifle look no further than Angela Deth's stats and see how she's built.

Generally speaking 9AP is enough (there are specialised weapon builds that do better with higher AP that enables them to shoot twice etc) and you really want to be looking at at least 14 and prefereably 15 CI for most of your characters, especailly as the recruitable NPC's (with a few notable exceptions such as Angie) are not built optimally and tend to have low CI.

With high CI you will find that you are now running rings round the enemies and that combat is much more fluid, tactical and fun since you can move around a lot more. Heavy tanking doesn't really work in this game, light armour, Ci and combat speed is king. Also you will kill stuff much more easily taking less damage yourself so I would recommend restarting and cranking the difficulty to compensate. Same challenge, much more fun.

I agree you should not have to min-max a stat like this, it's a valid critisism of the game, but it's the way ot works and for max enjoyment you got to roll with it really.

BTW a heavily min-maxed party will go for like 20 CI all round, so going for 14/15 is not really min-maxing.

[|$m0k!n|-Mr. 4HyDe-]

You can get five Attribute points in total - The game caps at lvl 50..

The Beta was more forgiving and flexible with early builds, correcting mistakes and such because Mysterious Shrines gave you Attribute points, but that's long gone, even though it kind of feels like the game never truly left that stage..

[Incunabulum]

And you're *expected* to only be strong in 1-2 areas and weak in the rest. That's why you have a party of seven. with seven you can afford someone to specialize in 2-3 skills while having enough left over to be marginally proficient (for emergencies where your specialist is killed/incapacitated).

[Achi]

Originally posted by Incunabulum:

And you're *expected* to only be strong in 1-2 areas and weak in the rest. That's why you have a party of seven. with seven you can afford someone to specialize in 2-3 skills while having enough left over to be marginally proficient (for emergencies where your specialist is killed/incapacitated).

I'm aware that this is a design decision, but it is not one I like. In a single player RPG, I like to be able to create the characters I want and be able to be successful with them, not so much the character that I'm expected to make. I certainly didn't expect to be "punished" for making "wrong" decisions in terms character creation. Since you are more or less stuck with your starting stats for the rest of the game, I now have to consider starting over, since I won't get enough points to "fix" my characters.
That really isn't for me. Challenge is one thing, but if it is achieved by such "straight jacket" methods, it just turns me off the game.

[nirth]

Originally posted by Achi:

I now have to consider starting over, since I won't get enough points to "fix" my characters.
That really isn't for me. Challenge is one thing, but if it is achieved by such "straight jacket" methods, it just turns me off the game.

I agree with you that you shouldn't have to restart the game because you made decisions in a vacuum of information that led you to this point. That's bad documentation and design on the part of the game and not a fault of your own.

Happily, there is an easier way to fix it other than starting over: using an advanced text editor on your save game file.

Use something like notepad+ and edit the xml file in your game's save directory.

You can find your saved games under documents/my games/wasteland2/save games/savedgamehere

Do a search for your character's name then skip ahead to availableAttributePoints and add however many you want. You can then allocate them to your character. You can, if you want, just modify each attribute directly as well.

For more information check out:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Wasteland/comments/2h94mw/how_to_edit_the_save_files_for_science_of_course/

Good luck!

Remember to back up your save game first.

[Sentient_Toaster]

The standard 'Seasoned' difficulty is perfectly doable w/o going anywhere near min-maxing.

With my initial run, I only decreased *one* stat by a single point among ALL four starting rangers (one Ranger had a starting speed of 2 but no less than 3 for every other stat, no other ranger had a single stat of 2 or lower -- even in stats perceived weaker like luck and cha).

It's more important that you don't create terrible impractical characters (a party full of int-1, awareness-1, max-cha/luck barter specialists w/o a single combat skill between them? Yeah, good luck with that.)

[Spocks Toupee]

My first playthrough was with an entire party with 10 INT, 3 everything else characters.
It was great getting 5 skill points each level and my characters had about 45 unspent skill points each, but the entire game was difficult, because they had a low Combat initiative.

This time through, everybody has 4, 1, 7, 3, 2, 8, 3 build
That gives me 4 skillpoints per level, and a combat initiative of 13, 8 AP.

I get to go 2x more than the enemy does, with this party I'm kind of bummed a wasted some point in Brawl, because nothing usually ever reaches my party.

With my old party with low Combat initiative I ended up meleeing a lot.

[Achi]

Originally posted by nirth:

Originally posted by Achi:

I now have to consider starting over, since I won't get enough points to "fix" my characters.
That really isn't for me. Challenge is one thing, but if it is achieved by such "straight jacket" methods, it just turns me off the game.

I agree with you that you shouldn't have to restart the game because you made decisions in a vacuum of information that led you to this point. That's bad documentation and design on the part of the game and not a fault of your own.

Happily, there is an easier way to fix it other than starting over: using an advanced text editor on your save game file.

Use something like notepad+ and edit the xml file in your game's save directory.

You can find your saved games under documents/my games/wasteland2/save games/savedgamehere

Do a search for your character's name then skip ahead to availableAttributePoints and add however many you want. You can then allocate them to your character. You can, if you want, just modify each attribute directly as well.

For more information check out:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Wasteland/comments/2h94mw/how_to_edit_the_save_files_for_science_of_course/

Good luck!

Remember to back up your save game first.

Hmm, this sounds helpful! I have no experience with editing save files, but it doesn't seem to be so difficult. Thanks for the tip. I appreciate it.

[Lozzle]

Originally posted by |$m0k!n|-4HUD-DUKA:

You can get five Attribute points in total - The game caps at lvl 50..

The Beta was more forgiving and flexible with early builds, correcting mistakes and such because Mysterious Shrines gave you Attribute points, but that's long gone, even though it kind of feels like the game never truly left that stage..

Good luck hitting 50 on a single play through, especially before patch 3. I did every quest I could, combat, farmed even a little early game and still barely hit 42 by the time I finished. 1 stat point every 10 levels isn't exactly realistic in the long scheme of things.

When I hit 40 that point for my party had maybe 2 hours of play to be used. Pointless. Obviously now you can bring characters over into another playthrough but you'd still end up going through half the game again before hitting 50 for one more stat point. Woohoo

Should be every 4 or 5 levels like in Divinity OS. Most characters finished the game past 20(no real cap) but even skipping content you could hit 20 and that was the expected end game level you should have hit, with plenty of attributes to shift around in between then.

[Gregorovitch]

@ Lozzie: I think one reason for this is that the recruitable NPCs are deliberately not built optimally and with so the few extra attribute points to allocate means you can't "fix" them that much through the game. again deliberately. The idea is you are not supposed to be super heroes, you are just a bunch of ordinary joe's (whatever that means in the wasteland context) or wierdos struggling to make it in an unforgiving world. This is also why the pre-built characters are so unoptimized I believe. It was the same in Fallout 1/2.

What is annoying is that when you first play if you make a hash of your party builds you can't fix them either, unlike DOS. This in itself would not matter so much except that as the OP points out combat is not really much fun if you haven't got the CI and CS to stop the enemies closing you down and dictating every fight with depressing repetition.

[Spocks Toupee]

If you set your Charisma to 10, you get +50% exp.
You could probably hit 50 then.
Yes? No?

[Gregorovitch]

I had a CHAR 10 leader in my first game. She made about level 46. I did most stuff. The CHAR XP bonus does not apply to combat XP of course. My take is that XP bonus is not a good reason to take CHAR - leadership and NPC recruitment is.

[Lozzle]

At least it's not Barter. Most ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ useless stat I've ever seen in an RPG. 10% my ass.

[gezzer]

Originally posted by Spocks Toupee:

My first playthrough was with an entire party with 10 INT, 3 everything else characters.
It was great getting 5 skill points each level and my characters had about 45 unspent skill points each, but the entire game was difficult, because they had a low Combat initiative.

This time through, everybody has 4, 1, 7, 3, 2, 8, 3 build
That gives me 4 skillpoints per level, and a combat initiative of 13, 8 AP.

I get to go 2x more than the enemy does, with this party I'm kind of bummed a wasted some point in Brawl, because nothing usually ever reaches my party.

With my old party with low Combat initiative I ended up meleeing a lot.

But that would be viable if you took melee skills. High str, then you have high con, then take brawler and bladed and/or blunt and your a monster. Comes down to how you want to play I guess. The problem I'm running into is too many shooters and I'm having problems finding all the bullets I need. It's the type of game it is, unforgiving no matter what you choose.

[Spocks Toupee]

Originally posted by gezzer:

But that would be viable if you took melee skills. High str, then you have high con, then take brawler and bladed and/or blunt and your a monster. Comes down to how you want to play I guess. The problem I'm running into is too many shooters and I'm having problems finding all the bullets I need. It's the type of game it is, unforgiving no matter what you choose.

All my party members use ARs I keep them equipped with ammo
Try going into the citadel, buying your ammo, then exiting the citadel, and reentering and see if he's restocked.

If not, buy your ammo in the citadel, exit go to the world map, walk a couple feet and come back to the citadel, and he should be restocked.

IIRC vendors restock just from leaving the area and reentering the area again