My rating of Perks in game

[ErlKing]

I have tested lot of perks at various levels and here is rating from best to worst, ranking is mostly "efficiency" based in terms of giving you advantage, but it does not mean these are most "fun" for everyone or fit every playstyle.

A grade - ones that would be useful to most play styles:

1) Locksmith - yeah, you don't want to walk away from locked safe with niggling feeling of "incomplete" run, so pick this perk as soon as possible, unless it does not fit you roleplay-wise or you will travel with lock picking companion.

2) Rifleman - extra damage, armor penetration, crippling - everything is obvious advantage, so unless you playing on easy or want extra challenge it is one of best perks.
Non-auto rifles are most common weapon type, have best ammo/damage ratio and most versatile (from shotguns to sniper rifles), so unless you prefer melee, pistols, full-auto or heavy weapons role-wise I would recommend getting rifleman.

Alternatives are:

Heavy Gunner - low ammo efficiency, expensive, cumbersome and situational, but looks cool and have potentially biggest damage output. You may consider secondary weapon skill though.

Gunslinger - pistols have low AP cost in VATS, light, hip fire friendly, stylish, but inferior to rifles in versatility and damage in most cases.

Commando - high fire rate, low ammo efficiency, not that good vs armor, but overall kill enemies faster than non-auto counterparts if you can manage recoil and ammo consumption (which is not that easy).

3) Toughness - at least 1-2 lvls, it is great perk at start and not so bad later in game. It does not help versus molotovs and energy weapons, but when you ll be facing those you would probably wear power armor or have decent gear / tactic to deal with it.

4) Gun Nut - crafting skill that allow to tweak your weapons, you don't have o pick it to be able to mod your weapons as you can eventually strip various mods from found weapons and put it on yours, but scavenging and crafting is rather interesting on its own and beneficial, so I would recommend to take this and level early.

5) Lone Wanderer or Inspirational - these are mutually exclusive, but rather beneficial perks, depending on your playstyle.

If you want to play solo or with Dogmeat - pick Lone Wanderer (yes, Dogmeat does not counts as companion for this perk). You can also improve Dogmeat performance by taking Attack Dog if you like puppy much.

If you like to travel with companions - take inspirational, it may not change much, but will keep you safe from companion nade throwing and let you shoot more freely around them.

6) Hacker - surprisingly less useful than Locksmith (at least early in game), but still good to have.

7) Local Leader - very helpful if you are into settlement building, but it also give you shared item storage for your settlement, so useful for everyone really. Pocket vendors that you can set up at lvl 2 perk could be handy to sell loot from raids, but do not expect big income on its own.

8) Medic - rank 1-2 is enough, that will double efficiency of stimpacks and radaway. Healing 60% of max health is sweet spot as you most likely will heal at 10-30% of health anyway and when you will find medic bobblehead it will rise to 70%.

9-10-11-12) Four leaf Clever / Grim Reaper Sprint / Critical Banker / Better Criticals - Luck as speciaL stat and these perks are surprisingly good and have great synergy if you could find spare points for these. Keep in mind that usefulness of Luck and these perks depends on how much you are using VATS.

Few points why crits are good:
- Criticals are 100% accuracy shot if not blocked by cover, so feel free to headshot with any gun even at sniper range.
- Resistance have less effect bigger damage is.
- 4-6 cranks laser musket critical head shot is unrivaled for dealing with tough legendary enemies.

13) Action boy(girl) - also VATS featuring perk, you would like to have faster AP regen in big fights. You may skip it if you are going to take Grim Reaper Sprint perk.

14) Science! - you would want that perk for later game crafting, you may also pick this early if you really into energy weapons (though you will lack ammo there).

15) Nuclear Physicist - take this if you have high Int and going to use power armor much. Radiation weapon is rather interesting as sidearm, especially if you planning to specialize at heavy weaponry or automatic. Most likely you will not get rad guns until 20+ level, so do not plan to use it early.

16) Nerd Rage! - surprisingly good perk, that can improve your survivability a lot, good choice if you do not like VATS and prefer to play more fps style. Either way its a great combat perk if you took high intelligence for Science! and Nuclear Physicist, but not worth it to pump Int just for this perk alone. Keep in mind that slow-time effect at low health could be achieved by legendary armor Martyr perk, but without resistance/damage buffs though.

17) Armorer - this is actually good perk, but first levels of it are rather underwhelming, so you can wait till you could take 2-3 lvls of armorer. Also keep in mind that you can strip good armor mods from found armor and that upgrading armor could increase its weight a lot so you may consider taking toughness instead, if you are not aiming for particular specialized armor mods in future.

B grade - perks that are situational, not that beneficial or just for fun:

1-2-3) Big Leagues / Iron Fist / Blacksmith - unarmed/melee damage perks and melee crafting are not as good and useful as firearm ones, but still viable if you want to smash things.
Just so you know, point blank VATS shotgun have 95% accuracy for headshot, that deal tremendous damage, so melee is not only choice for close'n'personal approach.

4) Chemist - chems are iconic buffs of fallout universe, so rolling with combat-junkie-psycho-killer is actually interesting. Psycho can turn hopeless fight into park walk, Jet is your own bullet time, Rad-X is RadSuit for poor and so on.
Only reason this perk is not in A grade is that chems pretty viable even without this perk and are not for everyone's playstyle.

5-6) Sneak-Ninja - these are for stealth playstyle, which is actually hard to pull off, unless you are dedicated to that path and going to build your character around that concept (muffled shadowed light armor, slow pacing exploring, companion managing, etc).

Few points about stealth play:
- sniping from sneak is viable, but suppressors for decent weapons are most rare / hard to craft mods in game.
- close quarters / indoors encounters are tough to sneak through, most of time you will face opponents face-to-face with no room for maneuver, which is limit usefulness of sneak.
- melee stealth is incredibly hard to pull off, though blitz perk could help, but still you will be exposed in case of groups of enemies.

7) Blitz - interesting melee perk, but I see it as bonus for stealth-agility build, rather than strength-melee. It can help you get sneak-attack with melee and give you ability to set up cool looking VATS chain-attacks, where you jump-teleport from one enemy to another.
One thing worth noting - you can't chain sneak attacks vs group of enemies (tested and failed with maxed sneak + stealthboy), no batman multi-takedowns for you.

8) Scrounger - I personally don't like this perk, but people find it useful when struggling with ammo management.

9) Intimidation - pretty interesting perk, though

Few things about Intimidation and pacifying in general:

- pacified targets become hostile again as you lower your weapon
- pacified target could be one-hit killed/KO by bashing with weapon (left Alt) and it looks kinda awesome
- killing pacified target doesn't make other pacified hostile
- enemies under your level are not that threating to begin with
- chances of pacifying are not that high even with high Charisma and max Black Widow/Lady Killer perk, so do not expect o subdue just everyone.
- chances are that in future it will lead to some kinky stuff from modders.

10) Wasteland Whisperer - same as Intimidation, but does not benefit from Black Widow/Lady Killer, and there is no finishers vs monsters, still its kinda awesome to be able to tame Deathclaw and your character screaming order "Stop cockroach" is just hilarious.

11) Steady Aim - most times you are shooting from hip, accuracy is not thing you worry about, but perk still somewhat useful for spraying and auto weapons. Worth picking only if you hate VATS and play fps style.

12) Moving Target - I wanted to put it in C grade, as this perk is way too situational, so unless you playing melee, hate VATS and sprint a lot during combat it does next to nothing for you. But then there is one thing that this perk may actually help you with - grenades, if you are used to run away from being bombed, but still get damaged then Moving Target can mitigate some of damage ( though picking Armorer and applying anti-explosion mods could be as useful).

13) Fortune Finder - plain and simple, not my type of perk, but could be useful for people who do not like to hoard loot and sell it to vendors.

14) Cap Collector - better prices, it is pretty simple perk and second level allows you to build better vendor stores via Local Leader, but I would suggest to just increase Charisma stat instead.

15) Lifegiver - one of few somewhat useful perks from Endurance tree, more HP makes you more durable, but resistance from toughness usually helps better.

16) Chem Resistant - good on paper, but if you are using lot of chems, bit of addictions is not that bad, plus there are plenty of addictol to cure all addictions.

17) Scrapper - people rate this perk highly, but I say that its better to sell armor/guns than scrap it.

18) Black Widow / Lady Killer - funny perk, damage wise its mostly useful for female hero, but as male you can pick it for romances if you low on Charisma. High charisma female with Black Widow and Intimidation could be interesting to play.

19) Rooted - useful, but situational.

20) Pain train - funny, but not that useful.


C grade - these are just bad, either poorly designed or just placeholders:

1) Basher - I wish weapon bashing have been tied to melee perk (Big Leagues), but as separate perk it does not make sense, unless you are into weird stuff.

2) Cannibal - I personally do not see how it fit Sole Survivor role, but this perk could be neat for some people. There are better ways to heal anyway.

3) Solar Powered - for superman wannabe, this perk is not that bad actually, but it does require 10 Endurance, least useful SPECIAL stat in game.

4) Rad Resistant - not that great, 10 rad resistance not much to begin with, power armor give you a lot of it, there is also rad suit with 1000+ Rad resist. Definitely it is not worth taking.

5) Lead Belly - this is just useless as most default food give you just 5-10 HP heal. Cooked food that give good heals is radiation free.

6) Adamantium Skeleton - useless, if you got crippled limbs you would want to use stimpack anyway.

7) Ghoulish - useless, it is not health regeneration if you have radiation, it heal you when you got radiation and lets face it - you either leave that place asap or use rad suit, negating radiation completely.

8) Aquaboy - useless, there is nothing interesting in water.

9) Party boy (girl) - booze effects are weak in comparison to chems and does not worth dedicated perk.

10) Animal Friend - shadowed by Wasteland Whisperer and not so useful to begin with.

11) Quick reload - pretty bad perk as it does not decrease reload time much and VATS cost for reloading is really small to begin with.

12) Gun Fu - one of most useless perks in game, damage boost is negligible and number of targets requirement makes it very very situational and unreliable. Very disappointing perk, despite cool name.

13) Sandman - pretty useless in comparison to Ninja, so I would not recommend it to anyone, unless you looking for every way to boost sneak attack damage.

14) VANS - perfect perk for players with 1 in Intelligence and I am talking not about character SPECIAL.

[Old Cat 🐱]

- pacified targets become hostile again as you lower your weapon

Damn, it kinda ruins the perk. I was hoping to have moar companions with it. Not gonna happen without mods, I guess.

[ErlKing]

Yep, no permanent hoard of slaves via Intimidation perk. They also do not follow you through change of locations and fast travel.

[SaltyOneOne]

You're wrong about Gun Fu......so very very wrong.

[paugus]

Locksmith as the top perk? No way. I think people assign a huge emotional value to a safe they have to leave behind, when 9/10 times, it's just a pipe pistol and some ammo and a chem or two. Lockpicking is pretty underwhelming, other than providing a few workarounds to a couple situations, a little extra loot, or a set of power armor or two (I have 15 parked in Sanctuary)

[Kommissar K]

In terms of sheer XP efficiency, Idiot Savant needs to be on that list. Its flat just better to have, even with high int (although one should avoid in 6-8 if you take it; either stay low int or go to int 9-10)

https://www.reddit.com/r/fo4/comments/3siw35/i_tested_intelligence_idiot_savant_and_experience/

Int 1, Idiot Savant 2 = 151.2% of xp
Int 10, no idiot savant = 130% of xp
Int 10, Idiot Savant 2 = 142.1% of xp

And this isn't counting the perks of Idiot Savant 3, which gets pretty insane against large groups of enemies (even more so with high int, as the Int bonus xp stacks with the Idiot Savant multiplier). And if you like to save scum, it does work on quest reward XP too, so you can save/load until it triggers.

Simply put, it will earn its XP back many times over to justify taking it as early as possible, over other perks (all of which, can wait).

[Wildly Mild]

Originally posted by paugus:

Locksmith as the top perk? No way. I think people assign a huge emotional value to a safe they have to leave behind, when 9/10 times, it's just a pipe pistol and some ammo and a chem or two. Lockpicking is pretty underwhelming, other than providing a few workarounds to a couple situations, a little extra loot, or a set of power armor or two (I have 15 parked in Sanctuary)

I agree with this. I expected there to be some really sweet loot in those master safes, but its just the same old junk

[ErlKing]

Originally posted by Paradox:

You're wrong about Gun Fu......so very very wrong.

Have you actually played with it? Its crap until lvl 50 and even then its way too situational.

Originally posted by paugus:

Locksmith as the top perk? No way.

You could be right, I am pretty biased in my opinion on Locksmith. You could be mostly dissapointed by contents of safes and lockers, but on other hand it would bug you that there could have been something good and you missed it if you dont have perk.

Originally posted by Kommissar Klose:

In terms of sheer XP efficiency, Idiot Savant needs to be on that list.

Forgot about that Perk, but I dont rate it high as XP efficiency itself. With current lvl scalling you dont have to pump lvl as fast as you can, just play the game.

[SaltyOneOne]

Originally posted by ErlKing:

Originally posted by Paradox:

You're wrong about Gun Fu......so very very wrong.

Have you actually played with it? Its crap until lvl 50 and even then its way too situational.

I'm 100% sure you never even tried it.

[Intra]

Gun Fu allows critical builds to slaughter rooms of enemies.

Especially with that .45 that refills AP from landing a critical.

AKA infinite AP. And you can get crits refilled from Sprint and Four Leaf Clover.

I can get 9 shots with 10MM off with my current build and I could easily min/max it to be like 15 in VATS without tons of AP cost reduction armor.

Also Mister Sandman is not useless. Sneak Attacks are amazing.

Gun Fu is better than Bloody Mess or Black Widow for the most part early game.

[Rogue]

I agree Gun Fu is a really good perk but like sneaking it requires you alter your strategy to make use out of it.

Sandman is pretty great in a sneak oriented build, it's not an A-grade perk but certainly not C. Speaking of sneaking, sneak and ninja should probably be A-grade, not because they are good for every build but just based on sheer power level.

Lone Wanderer is great if you play the game that way, Inspirational on the other hand is not at all worth the very heavy Charisma investment because the bonus is pretty mediocre, it's a B at best, probably a C.

Toughness is pretty meh, probably a B. It's only really good before you find good armor and it quickly becomes kind of... overshadowed. Energy weapons are used so frequently and that gives Toughness a huge drawback.

Medic is probably a B too, the effect is great but the truth is you find such a staggering amount of both Stimpaks and RadAways that Medic isn't an A.

[AnemoneMeer]

You're woefully incorrect about heavy weapons being poor for ammo economy. Gatling laser + barter perks is the ONLY gun in the game where buying the ammo from the store works out to less than 1 cap per shot. Then there's selling cores right before they expire. In other words, heavy weapons are actually able to be the defacto -most- cost effective weapons in the game due to just how effective the gatling laser is.

I spend 7 caps per 240 damage shot of my plasma rifle, and 250 caps per fusion core, at 50 damage/shot of my gatling laser, and 500 shots, or 100 damage per cap. To get to 240 damage, I need 2.5 caps, Less than half the price of a single plasma shot. This isn't even factoring the charging barrel, which completely breaks all cap economy wide open.

Basher is ludicriously good too and the fact you rate it low suggests you've not played around with it enough. First off, Bashing enemies with your gun knocks them back, which means you get free shots on them. There are -alot- of enemies you can push back. Second, all rifles by default have boosted melee damage simply because stocks add melee damage. The actual damage is on par with melee weapons that aren't fully upgraded, but with the side effect of easy free headshots. Bosting Basher makes Smash and Shoot tactics more and more effective. There's also the fact that melee damage is notably buffed in power armor for gun strikes too, which makes knocking VERY strong enemies back repeatedly and shooting them very very good. It's possible to stunlock some very strong enemies by striking them and moving back as you shoot, then repeating the process. Finally, gunbashing can perform executes from a deceptively high HP pool, killing enemies instantly.

[The peasant]

u puts lock pick in sight.. but leaves hacking the best perk because you can do everything with hacking....

[ErlKing]

My rating is not for optimal endgame killing machine. Iam judging perks based on early/middle game expirience.

Originally posted by Crimefridge:

Gun Fu allows critical builds to slaughter rooms of enemies.

But useful only vs rooms of enemies, useful only with low-AP cost weapons, useful only past 50 lvl and lets be honest - if you are 50+ level then you probably almost done with game. Yes, its "WOW, COOL" when you sweep room of enemies in one combo, but you can take it on 48-49-50 lvls and instead choose something better early on.

Originally posted by AnemoneMeer:

You're woefully incorrect about heavy weapons being poor for ammo economy.

Haven't got my hands on gatling laser yet.

Originally posted by AnemoneMeer:

Basher is ludicriously good too and the fact you rate it low suggests you've not played around with it enough.

Hm, you could be right, but bashing damage felt way too small when I tested it and point blank I usually use VATS-headshot.

Originally posted by Seeri:

Sandman is pretty great in a sneak oriented build, it's not an A-grade perk but certainly not C. Speaking of sneaking, sneak and ninja should probably be A-grade, not because they are good for every build but just based on sheer power level.

Sneak damage boost not that high and not all weapons have silencer option and if they have its very lvl demanding. I may underestemate stealth and sneak damage, but this perk is not that good.

[Rogue]

Originally posted by ErlKing:

Sneak damage boost not that high and not all weapons have silencer option and if they have its very lvl demanding. I may underestemate stealth and sneak damage, but this perk is not that good.

I'm confused, sneak damage multiplier starts out at +100% and caps out at +250% for ranged weapons, +430% for silenced ranged weapons and +900% for melee/unarmed, at what point do you start thinking it's a high boost?

[SaltyOneOne]

I'm convinced OP is high and don't know what the hell he's talking about.