Seems Charisma is worthless? In Fallout 1 and 2 it was always my lowest stat, but I would at least do 4 so I could get 2 followers. In Tactics, it was pretty worthless, it got you promoted a little faster but again, at least imo a strong main char was most important so I would do 2 cha so I could have high agil/int.

In FNV, it seems 100% worthless. With 2 cha, I still have 80 speech (100 with magazine) and it says cha effects nerve, which improves NPC's, yet with 2 cha I see Boone popping heads off left and right... If he was any stronger there would be no reason for my character to be there. So, what exactly is the point of having cha even go above 1? Anyone found anything special about it? If I do go for another play through, my build is going to be 1 cha for sure at this point. For that matter, even speech seems worthless, it never allowed anything amazing, the best it did was allow me to buy weapons from the supplier at the dam early on and not having to kill the ranger for BoS, it never opened up an amazing quest or granted me something powerful I'd miss without having speech.

Well, what's the point in having any stat except perception, strength, and luck above 1? And with ED-E, you don't need Perception, either.

I mean, if we don't care about the secondary functions of the stat such as the fact that Nerve would improve the companions and maybe they're not all as awesome as Boone normally. Maybe you don't want to gamble, so you don't care about luck, put that down to 1 too. And we're ignoring the perk requirements. So only Strength is needed for weapon requirements. Maybe you could have some intelligence. Since each int point is only 1/2 a skill point per level.

How you think a high speech letting you avoid the final boss fight is "nothing amazing" and "worthless" is lost on me.


Sorry if I'm being defensive, but it comes when everything about what you wrote is so completely narrow. Boone is great, yeah, we get it. Doesn't mean Nerve isn't useful for the rest of the companions. The higher a stat starts, the less points you have to put into the related ones. The higher they all start, you'll have better barter. And the perk requirements. And it lets you avoid the Lanius fight entirely.

High speech doesn't point to high charisma; and what is that hardest fight you are talking about?

I'm kinda glad that CHA is a dump stat, and that LUC *can* be a dump stat, depending on what you do.

That allowed my Power Armor Unarmed character to start with STR 8, PER 5, END 9, CHA 1, INT 10, AGI 6, LUC 1. Or something like that.

It also allowed my mean, ornery, gambler Cowgirl to have STR 7, PER 5, END 6, INT 7, AGI 5, LUC 9.

So I'm all for Charisma being worthless.

He dismisses both speech AND charisma. I took back calling it the hardest fight because the Legendary Deathclaw might be harder. Lanius.

Intelligence is also a dump stat if you hunt down skill books and not aiming for multiple 100s in combat skills

Lanius knee before the mighty Pushy and Scribe Counter on a Unarmed 24 character......a baby DeathClaw can put up a tougher fight.....

Speech is maybe the most overpowered skill in the game, you can save yourself so much hassle with a good speech score. Charisma does seem quite worthless though; I took a charisma of 7 partly for RP reasons and partly because I thought it'd affect how many companions I could have a la Fallout 2, and have been regretting it the whole playthrough.

I still couldn't play a CHA 1 character though. I wanna be a likeable guy, not a Piers Morgan-style charisma-vacuum.

Intelligence is the opposite of a dump stat. It is the single most influential stat in the game. Upping your intelligence has more impact on the strength of every single build than any other stat. Skill points are king.

Luck is also pretty useful. Other than intelligence, I fail to see any other stat being a better option to raise than Luck except Strength for very specific builds (i.e. mostly unarmed, and some melee builds). It simultaneously gives you higher critical rates which is huge with the addition of DT, and a free 50k-200k caps, which makes it more useful for getting rich and keeping your ammo reserves up than Barter by a long shot.

Charisma isn't useless. High speech and barter are pretty essential to completing many quests in the game. Obsidian made it possible to roleplay a non combat type character without getting pummeled thanks to Charisma raising your companions damage. If you don't believe me, try a character with really low charisma and speech/barter. At very hard, hardcoe, companions are mostly useless except Boone and Veronica with a PC patch. And they have to be well equipped. And you'll get incredibly frustrated at how many quests you can't complete because your speech is too low.

Well, all SPECIAL stats can be dump stats depending on your preferences. The only real reason for even having SPECIAL stats are the different Perk requirements.
Given enough skill points/books and every build can work.

If different skill checks were associated to SPECIAL stats instead of skill levels (i know a few are, but it's mainly perception or intelligence) it would be a whole different matter.

:rofl:

Intelligence is easily the single best SPECIAL on the game with Endurance and Strength following behind.



Poor argument. You can have a high Speech and Barter while having 1 Charisma.

But you can have high speech and barter without bothering with charisma though, right? Sure, you get a small penalty to those skills with low CHA, but that can easily be offset with magazines/chems/clothing.

Also, hasn't INT been depowered? The number of extra skill points it gives you seems far lower than it was in FO3, so I dunno if a char with INT 9 has much in the way of an advantage anymore. I don't like playing stupid characters, so I haven't tested a low INT build though.

Which is why I pointed out that your charisma score, not speech or barter skills, affects the strength of your companions.

Though charisma isn't essential to speech and barter skills, it does give you free skill points in both, while not essential, makes it helpful.

So the argument was that taking those two facts into consideration, charisma isn't "utterly worthless." It was never my intention to prove it was the most useful SPECIAL stat, because it obviously isn't.

Not if you know where to spend your skill points.

Minimum Intelligence 3 plus implant rush allow you to significantly boost up your special but not much impact on your skills.

This argument doesn't make any sense. Skill points are skill points. They make your character better at something. Just because you can play effectively without more doesn't mean more of them are useless. The question is if 60 skill points by level 30 for every 2 points of intelligence is more or less effective than adding 2 points to some other SPECIAL stat, which it clearly isn't.

Strength: carrying stuff is useless with companions, and 30 skill points is obviously better than 1 base SPECIAL point
Perception: Pretty useless in general. My Sniper build is just as effective with his base of 3 and with his effective of 7.
Endurance: Only a minority of players play hardcoe, and even those of us that do should have figured out food and water aren't really a problem. More hit points is hardly better than raising a different skill by 60 points.
Charisma: once again, your companions don't become so much more effective that it's better than giving yourself the extra skill points. And you get way more extra skill points for speech/barter with two intelligence than you do with two charisma
Agility: Again, running faster has little mechanical benefit and 60 points for SNEAK is obviously a better effect
Luck: Since no skill can really raise your crit chance, and two luck is arguably more effective at getting you caps than 60 Barter, this is really the only stat that stands a chance against intelligence. But since it's a specialized skill, I think we can claim intelligence is still the best skill for the vast majority of builds.

The thing is you can have 100 speech without having high Cha, as I said I have 80 (100 with magazine) making it a worthless stat. You can be a diplomat AND have 100 gun skill. They really screwed up imo, in Fallout 1 and 2, your stats actually mattered. Now, they really don't. Want Followers? You HAD to have charisma. Want skill points? You HAD to have high int. a Sniper HAD to have good per. etc. Now, you can have 6 int and have more skill points then you can use. 1 cha = 100 speech with ease. Many stats also required 6+ for the good perks... this game makes it way too easy, especially with 100 being the cap.. they really need to bring it back to the old school fallout 1 and 2 system imo, with there being no skill cap, and skills getting more and more expensive per point over 100.

As for speech being worthless, yeah, it lets you avoid fights as it always did... but it doesn't let you do anything guns doesn't You can just kill people. My point is, it doesn't open up any big quest lines, it doesn't grant good xp, and it doesn't get you anywhere shooting the place up doesn't. I think the game should play out quite differently if your a diplomat, but atm it doesn't, the only diff is getting by with words or getting by with bullets.

Adding 2 points of intelligence does not earn you close to 60 skill points by level 30. At most it adds 33 skill points over 29 levels. Each special stat governs at least 2 skills, so at most you gain 4 points from Intelligence governing 3 skills, and you only gain .5 skill points per level per Intelligence now. It's not the absolute must have stat it was in F3 anymore.

2 Strength also save you a perk
Perception beyond 6 have been worthless for the last two years
2 Endurance give you 2 more implants, unless you have 7 already
For melee Agility would need to be 7 sometime, I can diverge 1 point here

Use spread sheet by nuclearsean I can get 1 skill @ 50, 1 @ 75, 3 @ 90 (all non combat) and 1 combat skill @ 100 without reading any books with Good Natured and Int4. Books brings another 72 to 96 points in. That gives me enough points to have 5 non-combat skill about 90. Then with more books for the secondary combat skill can easily reach 60 for perks.

Now how you can tell me Int is the best special ever?

Charisma of 7+ gets you some unique conversation options out at Nellis AFB. I haven't seen much for it elsewhere, but I rolled with a CHA 7 anyway at the start.

To get the highest possible stats and SPECIALs you need IN 10 for the skill point bonuses and EN 9 to get the max available implants (actually 8 if you start with INT 10 since you can't raise past that).

ST will depend on the weapons you want to carry though I'd say 6 is the magic number with the weapon handling perk to bring it to 8 (for weapons) the only penalty you would have is with miniguns.

The rest of the SPECIALs will depend on the perks that you want, so no more than 6 on any one stat (5 if you plan your implants correctly) on any of the other ones and if the perks you want do not use PE, CH, AG and/or LK, they can be potential dump stats too, though it can be a tough sacrifice since some of the better perks have that 6 point requirement using the various SPECIALS.

LK can go either way, though it's helpful if you are looking to break the banks at the casinos. You get some nice stat bonuses all around in the beginning too if you start high with this one.

CH is the most obvious dump stat the only reason to go more than 1 is you are building a "no kill" pacifist character w/ companions in hardcoe mode and even so, you probably don't want to go more than 6 to get the Animal Friend Perk

Charisma is pretty awesome if you are Ok with being a "team player". You could, for instance, take mostly non combat stuff and keep a companion well supplied with a good weapon and good ammo. I have a whole character built around just that. Most people want to be the person who doe the damage, however.

As with all SPECIAL stats in NV you only really need enough to qualify for the perks you want. Charisma just happens to lack any "must have" perks on par with the likes of "Better Criticals", "Toughness" or "Strong Back".

As with all SPECIAL stats in NV you only really need enough to qualify for the perks you want. Charisma just happens to lack any "must have" perks on par with the likes of "Better Criticals", "Toughness" or "Strong Back".

the only must have perk for almost all characters is educated. an it only takes 4 int. There really are no must haves.