A Player's Guide to Skills and SPECIAL

A short optimisation guide to the SPECIAL stats and Skills of Fallout: New Vegas. YMMV depending on your playstyle, or your own experience with the game.

Introduction

So, here we are. This guide is intended to provide some pointers as to the basics of the skill and stat systems of FNV. Whether you're a new player, or a veteran of the game, I hope this guide will provide some tips and recommendations based on my 100+ hours spent in the game. I'll be dividing this guide up into two sections.

The first will cover the seven SPECIAL stats in order. This section will cover which of them is most useful in this game, which of them you can dump in favour of others, and whether you should invest additonal points into the stat later in the game via the Intensive Training Perk.

The second section will discuss the various skills of New Vegas, and their various uses. I won't be going into dialogue checks with this, as I have neither memorised how frequently specific skills are used for checks, or the average difficulty of such checks across the game and the DLCs. I will discuss which skills are the most useful, just not in the context of dialogue.

Remember that this is my opinion garnered through many hours of play. I don't profess to be some kind of expert on this, nor do I want to pretend that this guide is in any way unique. I'm positive that someone out there has probably written a far more eloquent and detailed guide than this. All I want and can do is share my experiences with the community in the hope that one of you felgercarbs finds it useful ;)

Section 1: What Makes You S.P.E.C.I.A.L.?

For the few here who are completely new to this, SPECIAL is the stat system used by Fallout (as well as some miscellaneous TTRPGs) to determine your characters core abilities.

Strength determines your character's raw physical strength, and affects a good deal of derived attributes. The only skill affected by your strength stat is your Melee Weapons skill. However, strength also affects how much weight your character can carry in items, the ability to handle certain weapons (which affects your accuracy and scope sway), and also affects your melee damage output. Strength isn't a dump stat for most builds, as it is useful for both melee and ranged builds. Melee fighters will appreciate it for the boost to damage; snipers or other gun users will appreciate being able to hit the broad side of a barn with a .50 Anti-material Rifle, and everyone likes being able to haul more loot back to the nearest vendor. However, the lack of skills affected by strength can decrease the priority of the skill for those who want a character who has as many skills maxed out as possible. I would recommend leaving Strength as it's default value at character creation, and putting points into it via the Intensive Training perk after you start the game proper.

Perception is a rather misleading skill, in that it is far less important than it would otherwise appear. You accuracy is affected far more by your Guns skill and your Strength stat than your Perception, and like all other stats, the skills affected by it can be increased later by assigning points to them. I think the highest check I encountered for it was in the Old World Blues DLC, and it wasn't nearly as high as some of the other stat-based dialogue checks in the game. The only gameplay element affected by perception that can't be increased some other way is how far away you can see the red target markers on your compass from. That's it. You can essentially just dump this stat, and nothing really comes of it. Lockpicking is a great tool, fine; Energy Weapons are cool, yes, and so are Explosives; but you can increase those skills every time you level. Perception is a dump stat for every character. Be a blind-ass mailman, don't worry about Perception.

Endurance is how durable your character is. This is essential if you want to tank pretty much anything the wasteland throws at you. A high Endurance can make your character near invulnerable to damage when paired with a good DT from armour, and can make your HP pool large enough that you might as well sexually identify as a M1A2 Abrams Main Battle Tank. It also affects health regen rate and your resistance to radiation and poison damage. Endurance also affects your Survival and Unarmed skills, which are neat, but not essential for all characters. Like strength, I'd recommend leaving this at rank five at character creation UNLESS you want to roleplay as Wolverine. Increase after character creation otherwise. Still, very essential for all characters.

Charisma is another skill that is fairly misleading, albeit more useful than Perception is. Charisma mainly modifies the values of your Speech and Barter skills, but also affects a hidden stat called 'Companion Nerve'. Companion Nerve gives a passive buff to your followers' armour and damage, and caps at a +50% bonus at CHA-10. Other than that, Charisma plays a very small role in dialogue, with the Speech skill being your primary means of convincing others to take your side of a conversation/argument/disagreement/insert-conversation-type-here. It's a dump stat, sure, but if you want to charm the pants off people at lower levels, you probably shouldn't dump this stat. If you do dump it, don't bother investing points in it after character creation.

Intelligence determines how smart your character is from the perspective of problem solving and general knowledge. Intelligence is another stat which you should definitely keep at default unless you wish to specialise in it. For one, it affects the medicine, science, and repair skills; all of which are really, really good skills. Secondly, and most importantly, it modifies the number of points you are able to spend on skills per level up. A high intelligence stat can get at least one or two of your tag skills maxed out by fifth or sixth level, if not more or sooner. Do not dump this skill, unless you want to see the comedy genius of a brain-damaged courier talking to people. If you leave it at default, consider investing points into it via the Intensive Training perk.

Agility is one of the more important skills in the game, mainly because it is the go-to stat for VATS usage. Agility affects the Guns and Sneak skills- both very good in their own right- as well as modifying your character's weapon draw/holster speed, movement speed, action point regeneration, and your reload speed. While the movement speed increase is minor at best, the bonus to action points is vital for late-game encounters against multiple targets. Being able to fire more using VATS more frequently is very nice, unless you're one of those VATS-Luddites who think aiming down the sights is the pro-gamer way. Either way, being able to reload faster and quickly draw your big iron from your hip can save your bacon in the early game where you have little armour, few bullets, and not enough HP.

Finally, we have Luck, which is probably the most valuable skill in the game. Luck may seem unassuming at first, as it does not directly modify any particular skills. Instead, it gives a small number of additional points to every skill. Luck also increases the frequency of critical hits, which is amazing when going up against enemies who shrug off most damage like a dog shaking off water. It also modifies how much loot you find in containers, which includes ammo, caps, and food. Oh, and it makes you better at casino games, meaning a courier who gets to Vegas with a measly 1000 caps and 10 in Luck can easily clear out all four of the base game casinos within a hour of play. That's a lot of moolah you can get very easily. If you're going to spec a stat to ten off the bat, pick luck. If not, keep it at five and invest five of your ranks of Intensive Training into it later on. You will (not) regret this.

Section 2: You Got Skills

So, you've specced out your character with the right SPECIAL stats, and now you want to think about what to put your skill points into? You don't do this right after character creation (well, not counting tag skills- which we will cover), but you will want to be thinking about which skills to prioritise when it comes to your first level-up.

Barter affects how much it costs to buy something, and how much you get when you sell something. New Vegas is mostly OK with the pricing on items, so this isn't that important; but you often get this skill tested when dealing with negotiation-style dialogue encounters. Still, it's pretty unnecessary for a good deal of the game, so treat it as a low-priority skill for investment. Don't bother wasting a tag skill assignment on it at the start of the game, or if/when you get the Tag! Perk.

Energy Weapons is how skilled your character is at using weapons that go 'pew pew' rather than 'bang bang'. Like Guns, Melee Weapons, and Unarmed, this skill's priority can vary on your preference for how you measure out damage. Unlike Guns and Melee Weapons, but like Unarmed this skill applies to only a comparatively small selection of weapons in the base game. Old World Blues is pretty much the only DLC where this skill kicks ass, and is pretty much essential if you're playing through that. Otherwise, the lack of robot enemies or other energy-vulnerable foes in the Mojave makes this skill a matter of preference.

Explosives, meanwhile, is a fair bit more useful than Energy Weapons. Grenades can be one of the most powerful weapons in your arsenal, and you can use plasma grenades effectively without a need to invest in Energy Weapons. Explosives also allows access to the Mad Bomber perk with the Gun Runner's Arsenal DLC, which is one of the most valuable crafting perks in the game. Even if you're doing a melee oriented build, at least put some of your points into maxing out this skill.

Guns, like the other weapon skills, is another bread-and-butter choice. Depending on your preference, the Guns skill can be either a dump skill or a valuable first pick. However, the overwhelming majority of the base game ranged weapons are ballistic weapons, which makes this perk far more valuable, especially in the early game (where energy weapons and ammo for them are far less common). Again, invest if you want to be able to use some of the best weapons in the game.

Lockpick is a essential skill, no matter the character. Unlike how the analogues to the skill have been treated in other Bethesda-published titles such as Skyrim, not all locks can be picked without investment in this skill. Some of the best options for resolving quests or situations are behind doors that require 100 in lockpicking to access. Even if you think you don't need this perk, you really do if you want to open all of the options up for the choosing.

Medicine isn't as useful as other perks for normal gameplay, but there are a fair number of skill checks based off of it in many, many quests. Medicine also affects how much you heal from using Stimpacks and Doctor's bags, which can be a lifesaver in the resource-starved hellscape of the Sierra Madre from Dead Money. It's useful, but not essential. Invest if you have nothing else you want to invest in first.

Melee Weapons is another core skill that affects what sort of blunt, sharp, or spikey implements you are effective at using. While you can equip anything regardless of skills, you will probably appreciate being able to use that chainsaw more effectively. Still, this skill is less necessary due to the lack of required accuracy during melee combat, as opposed to Guns or Energy Weapons. Invest if you want, but remember that it's not nearly as useful as other perks.

Repair is possibly one of the most important skills in the game, for one reason: the Jury Rigging Perk. Weapons and apparel fall apart over time, and armour doesn't come with a repair kit. You can always try finding another identical piece of equipment...but a lot of the best armour is unique. So, with that in mind, jury rigging is the most useful perk in the book. Keep your gear in tip-top condition, using nothing more than a armour piece of the same slot type and class, or a weapon of the same category or ammo type. Invest in this skill, period.

Science is slightly less useful than repair, but still great when it comes to skill checks and crafting. With a good Science skill, many doors will be opened for you when it comes to skill checks of the technical variety, or encounters that require you to have an ample supply of energy weapon ammunition. Old World Blues is the DLC that you will probably get the most use out of this skill from. Also, Science is just as useful as Lockpicking for opening doors, albeit for unlocking terminals that may unlock a door (or a safe, or a specific environmental element; you get the picture). Invest in this skill if you want to get into every room in the game.

Speech is another highly useful skill, and will be responsible for the majority of your dialogue check successes. I don't think I need to elaborate, invest in this skill.

Sneak is so sneaky that I overlooked it when writing this guide initially (thanks to BadMoskaw for catching that). It's a very important skill in the game, and can be used very effectively to avoid difficult encounters, or change the odds by silently taking out enemies before their buddies detect you. Sneak attacks are automatic criticals, and can one-shot even the toughest of mooks. In addition, investing points in this skill allows you to sneak holdout weapons into areas where you generally have no access to your weapons. These areas are mainly just the casinos on the Strip; but also include a couple of other locations, such as Caeser's Legion's main encampment. Sneak is useful, but it almost never shows up as a dialogue check.

Survival is a 'meh' sort of skill. It's highly useful for crafting medical items and food, and it has a fair bit of use in dialogue checks, but it's not really all that essential. If you want to get on Wasteland Masterchef, invest in this skill. If not, prepare to eat two hundred year old tinned food out of a dumpster.

Finally, Unarmed is the weapon skill relating to your prowess as a hand-to-hand fighter. This also includes how good you are at using melee weapons that use punches to convey damage (i.e. power fists, knuckledusters, and other weapons). Like energy weapons, it's a skill that covers a small number of items, but it can be effective if you prefer to use these weapons. Invest as a preference, dump otherwise.

Section 3: Tag! You're it!

(Thank you to Saphira Faefyre for pointing out I had forgotten to write this section of the guide! Also thanks to everyone who's rated and awarded this; it's always nice to know that your knowledge is valued by the community.)

So, now that you know what makes you SPECIAL, and what your skills are, it's time to pick out what skills you should make your Tag! Skills. Three Tag! skills are picked at character creation, with a optional fourth skill selection available via the Tag! perk, which becomes available at Level 16. Selecting a skill to be tagged adds fifteen points to it, which makes a huge difference at the start of the game. The ideal way to use them is to make your tagged skills the three skills you feel your build will need the most (i.e. speech/two other skills of your choosing for a persuasive talker, or guns/energy weapons/explosives for a ranged build), but they can also be used to make up for deficiencies in otherwise vital skills that are useful with every build (i.e. improving your Lockpicking or Science skills if you dumped Perception or Intelligence at character creation and want to still be able to open up safes and doors).

However, some skills are definitely not worth prioritising or improving at character creation, as they either can be used to dump unused skill points into during level ups (i.e. if you max out all your major skills, and have points left over, you can improve one of the skills that are significantly less useful, which is essentially just Barter and the melee skills).

Therefore, realistically, your Tag! skills can be pretty much anything, so long as they gel well with what build your going for. If you're building a gunslinger with a silver tongue, putting your Tag! assignments into Guns, Sneak (for crits), and Speech isn't a bad idea, but putting them into, say, Melee Weapons, Unarmed and Medicine might either be detrimental or beneficial depending on what your character develops into. Sure, Melee Weapons, Unarmed and Medicine might not be immediately useful, but you might run into a situation where the optimal outcome can be solved via a Unarmed dialogue check. Or Medicine, Barter, Science, Repair...you get the picture.

In my experience, the skills you can never really go wrong with investing your Tag! choices into are Guns, Lockpicking, Repair, Science, Speech, and Sneak. Survival can be good if you want to craft more complicated food and medicine to give you temporary buffs, but is otherwise redundant due to the wealth of food and medicine you can loot throughout the Mojave and surrounding areas.

Other combat skills like Melee Weapons, Energy Weapons, Explosives, and Unarmed are good for specific builds (and in the case of explosives, great in general), but are generally secondary due to the weapon selection being skewed in favour of traditional ballistic weapons, and the ammo for explosive and energy weapons being generally more expensive and harder to find early on in the game.

Other support skills like Medicine and Barter are useful in dialogue, but- especially with Barter- don't have much of a noticeable effect on gameplay when invested in. Medicine does increase the amount of health you get from medical items, but you already get a lot out of Stimpacks with little to no investment in it. Barter's effect on the pricing at stores is nice, but is easily ignored due to the relatively lenient item economy. Dialogue check wise, they get far more usage, and even then, Barter checks are pretty much the only one you're get semi-regularly, with Medicine's best being employed at Camp Forlorn Hope and Nellis Air Force Base to heal wounded soldiers.

Overall, it ultimately lies with you to decide what you want to prioritise. Hopefully this guide will help with that.

Appendix 1: Traits and must-have perks - Introduction

Since this guide has (to my utter disbelief) exploded somewhat in popularity since I wrote it, I've been considering expanding it to briefly share some additional wisdom on other parts of character building. As is evident from the title, this is the first of such additions. I also plan to write another appendix discussing character improvements earned through gameplay (achievement perks, learnable perks, cybernetic implants, etc.).

I'll also possibly write two more; one to discuss a few sample character builds, and another to suggest some mods that can really enhance the vanilla character creation as well as gameplay in general (without breaking the balance too much, like with 'Perk Every Level' or 'Infinite Weapon/Armour Condition' mods). But that's for the future.

Anyway, this time I'm going to discuss the traits of New Vegas, as well as some of the perks I consider essential, some of which I've already mentioned. I won't be going into too much detail, but I do want to highlight the other parts of the character building mechanics from this game. New Vegas is probably my favourite game due to how in-depth the character creation and progression systems are. There are games with much more complex or varied systems, but outside of TTRPGs like Dungeons and Dragons or Shadowrun, FNV is the best I've played when it comes to creating a character and growing them into something truly unique.

Appendix 1: Traits and must-have perks - The Traits That Define You Pt 1

So, what are Traits?

Traits are a system that dates back to the first two Fallout games, which have (for whatever reason) failed to be integrated into all of the Bethesda-developed titles. Out of all the post-Bethesda Fallouts, New Vegas is the only one to have retained this system.

Traits are optional semi-perks that can be picked at character creation. They offer some major or minor benefits to your character, in return for a disadvantage of some sort that is commensurate to the advantage. For example, in the original Fallout (as well as Fallout 2 & Fallout Tactics, there was a trait called "Jinxed", which increased the number and intensity of critical failures for your enemies, as well as for the player and companions. This meant that while your enemies would often end up shooting themselves in the foot during combat (amongst other hilarious critical failures), you and your companions would just as frequently end up hurting yourselves trying to do tasks that would otherwise be perfectly achievable for you.

In Fallout: New Vegas, there are ten base game perks, plus six others added with the Old World Blues expansion. I will now endeavour to lay out their usefulness, in a way that makes as much sense as possible.

Built to Destroy: This one didn't appear in any game prior to (or since, Todd) FNV. It increases crit chance with all weapons, but also causes weapons to decay faster. This one is actually a really unbalanced trade-off in my experience, at least once you get past the early game. Since you can essentially repair any given weapon with pretty much any other weapon once you hit level 14 and have 90 in Repair, you essentially don't have to worry about weapon decay any longer. Even before level 14, repair kits can be crafted from junk that- while not often found all in the same place- is pretty commonplace. Even the few vendors in the early-game regions that sell the damn things will sell enough to tide you over so long as you craft a handful of your own kits. This is pretty much a god-tier perk, especially for stealth builds.

Claustrophobia: Another newcomer to the series, and one of the six added from OWB, Claustrophobia is kinda mediocre. It's not bad, but it's not overly exceptional either. Claustrophobia essentially adds +1 to all SPECIAL stats while outdoors (which includes some indoor environments as well, due to how the "isPlayerCharacterIndoors" check is pretty basic) while simultaneously deducting one from your base SPECIAL values while you are within a indoor cell (i.e. any building where the interior is seperated from the exterior via a loading screen). Pick it if you feel its good for your character, don't bother if it isn't.

Early Bird: Another OWB perk. This one functions similarly to Claustrophobia, giving +2 to all SPECIAL stats between 6AM and 12PM, but reducing them by -1 between 6PM to 6AM. This one is good for survival playthroughs (where the player is expected to get regular sleep during the night to avoid dying), but the only times I have ever slept outside of survival were when I couldn't be bothered to skip time, and when I had a bed available. This one is very situational, skip if you don't think it adds to your character.

Fast Shot: A series classic. I know at least one Steam user already disagrees with me on this- and, just to be clear mate, I honestly respect your opinion (you have way more recorded time in this game than me, and unless you spent most or all of that AFK, you definitely have the greater experience), but have to disagree regardless- but I honestly don't think Fast Shot is any good. Fast Shot reduces your overall accuracy, but grants a respective increase to fire rate in return. Without going into depth on the damage system in FNV, I honestly feel DPS is a poor way to measure the effectiveness of any given weapon. A good number of the high damage weapons are slow firing already, and the ones that fire faster already do comparatively worse damage per shot. This means that, for weapons like the Survivalist's Rifle or the AMR, you are trading potential accuracy with these high damage weapons for a slightly faster firing speed, but are just firing more of the same bullets with automatic weapons like the 10mm SMG. You also chew through ammo faster, which is worse on survival difficulty for obvious reasons. Ultimately though, this one's up in the air.

Four Eyes: Another newcomer to the series, this trait can only be chosen with a Perception less than 10, but higher that 1. When you are not wearing glasses, you have -1 to Perception. When you are wearing glasses, your perception is increased by +1. This essentially means you can't wear certain helmets (like Power Armour helmets) if you want to have greater-than-normal perception. This one is a really well thought-out trait in concept, but due to Perception being less than stellar in FNV, it's ultimately wasteful. The idea of being forced to take a stat penalty in order to wear a complete suit of power armour or NCR ranger gear is nice on paper, but I feel it falls flat in execution.

Good Natured: Another returnee. Gives a bonus to a number of non-combat skills in return for a proportional deduction to all of your weapon skills. This can be great if you dump one of your Tag! assignments into a single weapon skill that you want to focus on, and can really help in the early and mid games as far as skill checks go. Definitely a keeper.

Heavy Handed: Another returning trait from previous games, this one gives a deduction to your melee and unarmed critical damage in return for more overall damage. This one is another example of really weird balancing from Obsidian. Like Built to Destroy, the debuff is really weak in comparison to the utility of the perk. Even with a 60% decrease in crit damage, you deal normal hits far more often, and the 20% increase to standard melee damage is more than enough to make this overpowered. If you're going for a melee character, do not think twice about getting this.

Hoarder: Another OWB one. I don't really have much to say about this one, to be honest. It's one of the things I always look at and go "Huh. I wonder how useful this would be if I picked it?", and then I look at the rules as written and go "yeah, no, not really worth it". On paper, this one is meant to increase carry weight by 25 pounds, while also decreasing all SPECIAL stats by one if you drop below 160lb. This is kinda awful, because it puts you at a major disadvantage when playing through Honest Hearts and Dead Money, as HH has a very strict weight limit for starting the DLC, and DM strips your character of all items at the start of the adventure. Still, YMMV.

Hot Blooded: Another OWB one. Increases damage when your health drops below half, but also decreases Agility and Perception. Note that while it says you get only 10% extra damage, it's actually 15%. Kinda meh, but it can be useful in difficult fights.

Kamikaze: Another returning trait. Increases AP reserves while also giving a -2 debuff to DT and -15% Damage Resistance. Really not worth it, as you only get 10 Action Points in return for a pretty large debuff to your durability. Hard pass.

(Continued in Part 2)

Appendix 1: Traits and must-have perks - The Traits that Define You Pt. 2

Logan's Loophole: From OWB. You can't be addicted to chems (which is nice? I guess?) and they get twice the duration, but you also can't level past thirty. Even though this can also be removed via the OWB Auto-Doc...why would you even pick this in the first place? No chem addiction and twice the chem duration in return for fifteen perks maximum and a level cap of thirty is really not worth it, and is also really bizarre as far as tradeoffs go. I'd understand something like increased XP gain and/or additional skill points in return for this. But such a massive debuff all for a Logan's Run reference? I'm all for classic sci-fi cinema, but this is kind of an awful trade off in any context. Hard pass.

Loose Cannon: Unique to FNV. 30% additional attack speed, and 30% reduced AP usage with throwing weapons in return for 25% reduced velocity. Alright if you're using throwing weapons, but a waste of a trait choice otherwise.

Skilled: Another OWB one, but (weirdly enough) imported from the classic games. Adds +5 to all skills, but reduces experience gain by 10%. Despite all appearances, a very good perk. -10% experience isn't that bad, especially since it gives you a really nice head start with your skill increases. Definitely consider getting this one.

Small Frame The last of the returning traits. So long as you have less than 10 Agility, you can gain +1 to agility at the cost of increased limb damage. Like Hot Blooded and Built to Destroy, this one is incredible unbalanced and overpowered. Limb damage is easily healed with Stimpacks, sleeping, and Doctor's Bags, and +1 Agility can give you a spare point at character creation to put into something else if you want 10 Agility when you leave Doc Mitchell's house. Definitely consider getting this one.

Trigger Discipline: Inverse of Fast Shot, and a unique trait to FNV. Reduces fire rate, but boosts accuracy. My spin on this is that the better accuracy is worth the reduction in fire rate, but only because I prefer the slower firing weapons to the automatic ones. While I'd definitely pick this over fast shot, it honestly isn't much better. YMMV.

Wild Wasteland: The Silly Perk. Adds in dozens of references to everything from Indiana Jones to Monty Python. It's not exactly gameplay-affecting, but it certainly does make things so much funnier. Best damn trait in the game, just for the Monty Python references.

Appendix 1: Traits and must-have Perks - The Perks of the Job

So now that we've covered traits, here's the section where I'll briefly discuss perks. I'm only going to cover a handful, as there are a very large number of perks in the game. So, here's the five I think are the best, and the ones I think aren't worth the investment.

Hand Loader and it's energy-weapon equivalent Vigilant Recycler: With Hand Loader, you get back more casings from used rounds, and can craft pretty much all of the types of ammo in the game at a reloading bench, including some varieties you can't get at vendors or as normal loot. Vigilant Recycler does the same for Energy Weapon ammo, albiet with no unique ammo types IIRC. The utility of these perks is incredible.

Intense Training: Allows you to assign up to 10 SPECIAL points, one for each rank of the perk. This means that, if you leave the majority of your stats at default at character generation, you can have three rank 10 stats by Level 20, assuming you don't take anything else.

Tag!: A fourth Tag! skill assignment. I don't think I need to specify why this is great.

Jury Rigger: So, in the comments, the Dead Money repair kit exploit and the usage of repair kits was bought up. I think this isn't really an argument against the use of Jury Rigger. First off, repair kits can't repair armour, and a lot of armour is prohibitively heavy to carry around in bulk. Power Armour especially is very heavy, and without Jury Rigger, you need to carry around rare and expensive suits of it to repair your equipped set with. This is very inefficient. Why not fix that power armour with lighter armour? Or, fix the high tech armoured helmet with a fancy hat? Jury Rigger makes your logistics a total breeze. It is by far the most useful support perk in the game, and I barely use repair kits once I have it.

Grunt: This one requires Honest Hearts, but it's incredibly useful to have. It gives a 25% increase in damage to pretty much all of the military-grade small arms in the game. This is amazing, especially if you use the Survivalist's Rifle and A Light Shining in the Darkness as your primary weapons like I do.

As for the perks which I don't recommend, this is a much shorter list.

In Shining Armour This perk is broken. I don't mean it's a bad perk, I mean that whichever Peta'Q at Oblivion coded this into Dead Money didn't implement it right, and it does not function at all without community patches. I mean, for frak's sake, how the hell do you manage to do this and not have it picked up by QA testing? How do you get to call yourself a professional coder, and not bugfix your code right?

This is basically the only one I would not recommend, as the rest of the perks are either situationally useful, or downright amazing. There are some minor exceptions, but they're heavily YMMV, so I'm not going to risk starting a flame war over somebody's darling perk. Anyway. that's this appendix, should have written up the next part in a while or so. Or maybe not, this could be the only appendix.

Closing notes

So that's my take on the Stats and Skills of FNV. I hope what I said makes sense to you, and that I wasn't talking out of my anal passageway. If you liked what I had to say, consider giving me an award! Thanks for reading this far, and have a great day!

[ThylacineX]

Nice guide, but I do have to disagree with you on the Hoarder trait. It is actually quite useful, especially on hardcore mode, as it gives yo more carry space that would otherwise be taken up by ammunition. Sure to initial debuff can be problematic early game, but getting past to 160 threshold is very easy. Also I've played through Honest Hearts and Dead Money with this trait with no problems.

[Kasa]

Old guide but I wanted to put in my two cents, traits that give you skill points are good early game but you will eventually reach a point you no longer need those skills points because of how much you leveled up and so they become obsolete.

Meanwhile traits like Built to destroy, Kamikaze and other traits act like perks and will be of use for your entire play-through.

[Alexandra#!/bin/sh]

Traits wise, I feel that Fast Shot can easily be substituted for the Trigger Discipline trait.

Since I generally end uo using the Survivalist Rifle from Honest Hearts at the start of the second act (which is generally when I play that DLC), Trigger Discipline is great for improving accuracy with the expensive- but hard-hitting- 12.7mm rounds that the gun fires.

Fire rate isn’t really an issue in FNV; you deal enough raw damage with the right perks, weapon choices, and skill allocations that, in most cases, DPS is meaningless. Trigger Discipline makes you more accurate, Fast Shot has a limited return by comparison.

[Prodigy Pyke]

For traits Fast Shot is a no brainer its legit a flat dmg increase and the accuracy debuff aint even anything major and it can be negated by using Steady. Best traits in the game by far tho are Fast Shot, Built to Destroy. Logan's Loop hole is fine if you remove it in owb by level 30, good natured is meh but it helps with early game as you only need to tag one combat skill to make up for it. Wild Wasteland is there for the funny references. Other then those most of the other traits are kinda bad.

[Saphira Faefyre]

I would love to know what you choose for the secondary starter options if any. IE: Good Natured, Four Eyes, Small Frame, Wild Wasteland, ect. I almost always take Small Frame for the extra Agility point.

[Saphira Faefyre]

Yeah that makes sense! I would like to point out that you get 3 tag skills at character creation though. Its always interesting to me to see how other people think when choosing character stats and such. I know as a stealth/sniper build I get kinda munchkin-y when I start a game so I really enjoy seeing others perspectives and takes on it. I think I normally do speech, stealth, and guns as my three starter tags.

[Alexandra#!/bin/sh]

This what you were looking for, mate?

[Saphira Faefyre]

This is a cool guide, I didn't see anything about tag skills though you mentioned discussing it in your section 2 preface? what would you say would be the best Tag skills at character creation?

[Alexandra#!/bin/sh]

So, uh, as I pointed out in the guide, repair gives you Jury Rigger, which is practically the best perk in the game due to how useful it is for equipment maintenance and inventory management. It also functions as one of the best skill checks for completing quests, and allows you to disarm traps with a small investment into it. Repair also is useful for the Mad Bomber perk from GRA, which allows crafting explosives. Hand Loader is useful, but its one of three perks that repair affects that are vital for keeping your character armed and ready.

Furthermore, I never put any real emphasis on Barter as a skill that should be invested into, so I'm unsure why you're bringing it up. There are two perks that barter is a prereq for, and while one is Pack Rat, the other is Long Haul, which is incredibly useful. Also, the way you describe Pack Rat assumes that you're playing survival, because ammo doesn't normally weigh anything.

[Prodigy Pyke]

I mean realistically speaking out of all the other skills in the game other then damage and support skills there is really nothing else to spec into. Barter is only good for one perk and that's packrat because it is busted and allows you to carry way to much healing items and ammo. repair is only good for hand loader to make the good ammo types and that's it. if you gamble in dead money every 3 days in the base game you get chips in the drop box in the bos bunker and if you got all the holotapes to use the vending machines u can just buy weapon repair kits to repair weapons. but with the survival skill its not about how much healing you get with the items its what the items give you. As with quartz its not about the night vision its about the straight DT it gives same with the other items i mentioned. With all the items i mentioned 18 DT from 3 items is enough to face tank anything in the game.