Respeccing

[Bullett00th]

Started a coop playthrough recently and obviously we're going hit or miss with proper stats.

We're spread a bit thin between the main characters and have duplicate skills with our party members.

We're planning to eventually respect a bit but I'm wondering how soon we should do it and how much of a waste is it to spend money on respeccing?

[Kyle Reese]

the first few start at only a few hundred so as long as you pr-plan what you want to respec, if you're only doing two characters it shouldn't set you back much at all. Whether it's worth it depends on how much you want to change.

[Radiac]

Depending on how deep into the game you are, you might just want to restart a fresh campaign instead. Not that the money is all that rough, but I personally like a fresh crack at the badguys with a better team comp.

[Bullett00th]

Originally posted by Radiac:

Depending on how deep into the game you are, you might just want to restart a fresh campaign instead. Not that the money is all that rough, but I personally like a fresh crack at the badguys with a better team comp.

Thanks, any advice on how to level up early? We've spread our stats too thin without knowing higher stats will be necessary soon

[Radiac]

If by "Stats" you mean "Skills" , e.g. Lockpicking, Sniper Rifle, Nerd Stuff, etc, then I'd definitely start over. There are ~4 skills you can basically skip, as far as the main active team is concerned, and the rest should be given to exactly one guy. That is, you want everyone on the team to specialize in a few skills and have virtually no overlap at all. I generally give each guy on my team responsibility for 1 gun skill and 2 other skills. With that plan, by level 23-24, you're looking for places to put unneeded skill points, in some cases. There are some exceptions to this general rule, based on gear etc, but that's how I generally start thinking about skills.

If by "stats" you mean "Attribute points", that's really not the end of the world, actually. You get to increase one Attribute by one point at every level in Wasteland 3, and you can save up those Attribute Points over time if you want to, not that doing so really gains you anything except some flexibility. You'll eventually max out 4 Attributes and have the other 3 totally dumped to 1, in most cases, but NOT having it that way doesn't really hurt in the short term, and you can wait until you get the money to do the respecs if you want to.

That said, respeccing 4 guys is going to cost a lot of Colorado bucks, and I'd just restart anyway, once you have some idea what you're doing.

[Radiac]

As far as what I personally do with the Attributes and skills, well, you asked for it...

For all of our custom guys, (guy 1 through guy 4) by level 25, we will eventually get Coordination, Awareness, Charisma, and Intelligence to 10, leaving Luck, Strength and Speed at 1-ish for most of the game. We also give everyone a single rank in First Aid at creation and maybe spend a few unneeded points in it later, just to pass First Aid checks, when we need to. Giving everyone a rank or three in First aid allows everyone to be able to apply First Aid Kits to everyone during combat, including themselves.

Guy 1: Starts with C.L.A.S.S.I.C. = 4.1.1.1.1.3.10. That's right, we start with a 10 in Charisma. This gives this guy a faster Strike Charge Rate and a ton of bonus XP as he levels up, which will cause him to level up faster, which will help level the whole team a little faster as well. Guy 1 is eventually going to have max ranks in Automatic Weapons, Leadership, and Lockpicking, and will have 7 ranks in Mechanics, mostly for deploying deployable robots in combat. He'll also end up with more than 1 rank in Fisrt Aid, probably, so if you have to level somebody up in First Aid for a scripted check, you might make it this guy, in the early game. Guy 4 can also do that though.

Guy 2: Starts with C.L.A.S.S.I.C. = 4.1.2.1.1.2.10. Similar to the first guy, this guy starts with 10 in Charisma so as to get more XP faster, which will allows us to level the whole team faster. He specializes in Sniper Rifles, Sneaky ♥♥♥♥, and Hard Ass. We're going to give him the secret hidden skill, Combat Shooting as well, so he only gets ONE rank in First Iad because he'll need to conserve all of his skill points for his 4 main skills.

Guy 3: We talk to Greatski and make this guy with C.L.A.S.S.I.C. = 6.1.2.1.1.4.6. This guy specializes in Big Guns, Weird Science, and Nerd Stuff. Interestingly, neither Weird Science nor Nerd Stuff require high Intelligence, but we're going to max it anyway. This guy will have spare skill points by level 22-ish, and I spent them on Leadership and added First aid, but that's not terribly important.

Guy 4: Another Greatski guy, starting C.L.A.S.S.I.C. = 8.1.4.1.1.3.3. Specializes in Automatic Weapons, Explosives, and Kiss Ass. Eventually has some spare points to throw around, I put them in extra First aid, so you probably want to use this guy for early First Aid checks, before you get Jodie Bell up and running.

NPC#1 Lucia Wesson: Level her attributes any way you want, she's there to do "support" stuff like Barter, Survival, First Aid, etc. For Skills I level up her Barter first so that I can get Antiques Appraiser Perk, which is key, and I give her 1 rank in Brawling so that she can wield the Foam Finger when we find the recipe for it and make it. She eventually levels up Survival and small Arms to the max, plus she levels up Weapon Modding to like 5-6 and then uses the Modder's Kit to raise it to 7 as needed for crafting or applying mods in the field. Her First Aid skill eventually get's to like 7.

NPC#2 Jodie Bell: You don't get her right away, so I use Kwon until she becomes available. He just shoots and heals while he's there. When Jodie does come online, I generally rank her up in Coordination, Awareness, and Intelligence then Charisma later, leaving Luck, Strength, and Speed mostly alone, as is the general plan. She specializes in Sniper Rifles, Mechanics, First Aid, and she comes with 3 ranks in Animal Whisperer, which I generally ignore. Late in the game you may have enough spare skill points to level her up in Animal Whisperer and go get the Honey Badger in the Massacre Site, but I never bother, usually. She maxxes First Aid so we can pass any First Aid scripted skill check we need to, and they do come up.

Bench Player: I make a new guy with Greatski and pay the money for it in order to make a guy that has Weapon Modding, Armor Modding, and Toaster Repair. I then leave him in the HQ and only activate him when I need to craft something, or apply a weapon mod, or armor mod. I might also take him with me to go open a toaster, but that's totally optional. Some toasters have some decent gear in them, but none of it is mission-critical.

You might also want to give like one or two people higher strength for the purposes of wearing some of the unique heavy armors that you find. You can siphon Attribute points off of Charisma and Intelligence for that off of some characters, if you want to. The Chemtek Armor is nice, but not overpowered or totally necessary.

Which Quirk you take is a topic we could get into. I like to take some combination of Prospector, Serial Killer, Sadomasochist on my non-snipers, and I give the custom Guy#2, who is my sniper, the Two-Pump Chump Quirk, so as to be able to shoot a sniper rifle twice in the first round or two of combat, eventually. Doing this requires maxxing Coordination (which I do anyway) plus also getting a Utility Item that gives +1 Action Points, like the Anabolic Injector or the Star of Bravery, plus the assumption that the Leadership guy is going to use the Rally action on turn 1 every time in combat.

I give Guy #2 the Hard Ass skill specifically because it requires fewer skill points to max than the other skills. For each skill, there is a book that gives +1 rank in that skill when you read (and thus consume) the book. Some skills also have Utility items that give a +1 buff when worn, and there are a few armor pieces that give a +1 to a skill when the armor is worn. Hard Ass has all three, and thus you only have to buy it up to level 7 the regular way with skill points, and can get the last 3, which are the most expensive, using the items I just described (the book is called "Drill Sergeant's Phrase Book", the Utility Item is either the Star of Bravery or the Veteran Ranger's Star, or the Aviator Sunglasses, and the armor piece is the Scrap Helmet).

I don't recommend letting an NPC like Kwon handle Kiss Ass in the long term. It sounds like a useless non-combat skill, and it is, but Fargo loves to punish min-maxing behavior. No spoilers, just a warning.

[Radiac]

One last note about the Speed Attribute. Your characters start with a movement rate of 1.4, which means you can use 10 Action Points to move 14 squares. But if you only want to move a few squares, it will generally cost more due to rounding losses. If you have a movement rate of 1.5, you can move 15 squares for 10 AP, or 3 squares for 2 AP, but moving 1 square still costs 1 AP. With a movement rate of 2.0, you get to move 2 squares for 1 AP. There are leg armor pieces, and leg armor Mods that give movement rate bonuses. Also, when you increase your Speed Attribute, you get +0.1 squares per AP in movement rate. This means that you might want to occasionally spend a point on Speed just to get your movement rate from 1.9 to 2.0, because you get a marked and noticeable increase in short-range movement AP costs that way. Move rate of 2.5 is also better than 2.4, again because of rounding. Having said that, you may eventually find better leg armor or mods that make that Speed Attribute point a bit of a waste later.

In my opinion, the best leg armor and leg armor mod combo for this is the Spectrum Assault armor legs, which show up fairly late in the game, and the Personnel Drive mod. Spectrum Assault legs gives +0.3 move rate and Personnel Drive applied gives +0.4, for a total of +0.7. Commando Legs give +0.2, and show up earlier and in greater numbers out of random armor containers, so if you're not going to savescum for Spectrum Assault, you might as well settle for Commando and live with the +0.6 you get from that and the Personnel Drive. That might leave you at an overall move rate of like 2.1 though, which is a bit inefficient, but not the end of the world. I definitely wouldn't give my sniper FOUR more points in Speed to make up for that. That said you generally want 2.5 or 3.0 move rate if you can get it. Melee characters get to like 3.5 or 4.0 probably, with the buffs they get and the fact that they really do need to max Speed as an attribute.

[Radiac]

To explain about high Charisma and leveling the team faster. When you promote a new character from the "applicant pool" to the "Active Roster" the new guy get's automatically leveled up to the average level of the team (or maybe it's the lowest level among the rest of the team, I can't tell). So if you have two high-Charisma guys that are your first two guys, they get a bunch of bonus XP just from doing the early missions, and as such when you make new guys, those new guys might be level 3-4 when they would have been level 2-3 otherwise.

Eventually, the high-Charisma Lock Picker will get a LOT more XP due to all the locks that need to be picked and the XP generated from such (never use a found key to open a lock if you can pick it open instead, you get XP for picking locks). This guy will therefore outlevel the rest of the team, and the other High charisma guy, who has Sneaky ♥♥♥♥, will not lag too far behind him. When these two guys have gained a level on the rest of the team, you just send everyone else to the bench, then bring them back one at a time, and they get auto-leveled to the level of the lowest of the two main guys, So if your Guy 1 and Guy2 are both level 10 and everyone else is level 9, you can bench everyone except the first 2 guys, then bring everyone back, one at a time, and they get a free level that way, basically.

This also works with the bench guy who does crafting and modding. You can pull him out of cold storage once in a while when you need crafting and modding done and he'll get auto leveled every time.

[Radiac]

If you do want to experiment with giving one person high Luck, I'd make it an NPC that's mainly there for support, like Lucia or Jodie.

Speed is an attribute I would not bother increasing unless you have Coordination, Intelligence, Charisma, and Awareness maxxed already and you're looking to eke out a little more movement rate to raise it from like 1.9 to 2.0 or something like that. Strength is only necessary for wearing some of the better heavy armors, and even then they aren't really worth it. Fire, Cold, Explosive and Energy weapons ignore armor completely, making it a lost cause in many fights to try to out-armor the other team and win a slugfest.

On the other hand, if you are doing Melee or Brawling, that guy needs Strength and Speed and can generally dump Awareness. I hesitate to tell you that a melee or brawling guy probably has to abandon Charisma for Speed, but Speed gives evasion which might keep you alive in combat well enough that you need it more than you need Charisma. Strike rate, which you get from charisma, is really good, but so is movement rate and evasion for a close combat guy. I can't tell you how to best build a Melee or Brawling guy, because I never tried, and this is why. That trade-offs you have to make for doing Brawling or Melee well make me wince. Also, there are Area of Effect weapons, like flamethrowers, shotguns, and the Strike ability on the heavy machine guns and SMGs to consider. You don't want your rangers to be in the line of friendly fire, and you generally don't want to get closer to the enemies in any fight if you don't have to.

EVERYONE needs maxxed Coordination, and it's not easy to dump Intelligence, because of the bonus skill points it gives you, in addition to the added combat bonuses, which are nice.