I've recently had a thought. So skills go up to 100, and that basically means at 100 you can use pretty much any tool within that skill that is available in the game. This is all well and good, but i think it can be expanded upon. If you give someone a gun they could probably become compitent with it in about a week, assuming they lived with it night and day, relying on it for their survival every waking moment. (this would be the 100 skill level with guns) But after extended practice a person can become not just compitent, but excelent, achieving levels of ability that surpass the avaerage person. Assuming that a person spent an extended period of time with a tool they could become a true master at that tool. Gunslingers who've spent their lives training with their weapon can acheive feats of near superhuman abilities.

I guess my point, to make a long point short, is that I think there should be a level beyond 100. Something that would allow a person to truely invest in one or two skills and become more than just compitent bu exemplary.

What do you think about Fallout New Vegas skills? Where do you think there should be improvements?

100 in the skill doesn't mean you're excellent at it?
What? We need to be able to do parkour with two plasma casters to be excellent at it?

What point would it serve to further advance in a skill if you've already met the limit?
What would the new cap or new skill grant the user?

Yes. Tag skills should be able go up to 150 and all other skills should stay at 100 to emphasize the power of the tag perk. I'm not sure how it could work out for skills like speech or barter but at least it could emphasize character customization.

This is brilliant. :icecream:

Agreed.

But... To be truly balanced, we need to be weaker at weaker levels. I, for example, didn't find any substantial reason to raise my skill above 60. Don't know how low this goes post patch, but I never had a reason to raise the skill above 50. And that bothered me. So a Skillcap raise or a skillpoint cost raise could solve the problem.

If not, watch Antichrist and then tell me about your problems. :laugh:

At 100 the skill is maxxed, considering guns in reality this means that every round should be on target, but as this is still a RPG one must "roll the dice" in order to score what should be essentially a hit 100% of the time. I think that OP you have that it is just at 100 you have attained that skill level your talking about so there is no need to increase the level over 100. It is annoying to be dead on aim only to have bullets 3,4,5,6 miss entirely, sometimes I can not buy a hit that is part of the fun. I was when i first started playing FO3 and FONV a bit pissed that even at 100 i could not hit everytime, regardless of aim but i also see that sometimes i am not even close but the game will still give me the hit because of the 100 skill. It is the way of things, you take the good with the bad and roll on. In FO i think the way it is done is fine really, 100 is no guarantee of a hit plus the game still managed to blend the player's skill with the randomness of life, even marksman miss on occasion and it should be that way if i hit everytime i pulled the trigger FONV would be easy winning everytime would be boring.

I do see the point so maybe the only skill the player could max past 75 would be the tagged skills which could then be raised to 100, this would not change much i think and would definately limit the way a player could resolve a quest as some lockpicks, comp terminals or speech options would not be avalable at all because the player unless tagged those skills specifically at the detriment of combat skills like guns etc. by doing the limit at 75 and only allowing the player to advance to 100 any tagged skill (for a total of 4, 3 the player picks at the very beginning and the 4th is a taken perk) this would in alot of cases limit the players ability to make an OP character. As is is right now all one has to do is advance enough in levels, my last character hit 34 before i finished the game, at which point there was very few points that my character could not reslove because of the sheer number of skill points i could use. I went into DM at level 26 and blew the place down, passing speech, lockpick, science and repair checks easily as my character was pretty set up.

I have a new character i just started on tuesday May-3-11 and to make it difficult on myself i picked my 3 tagged traints and i could not place any points in any others untill i had all 3 to 80, which limited how i could do some stuff early in the game, but now i am able to add points to the other perks and the game will become easier as my medical/survival/repair skills increase and open up better tech or more options to complete a quest.

Asai

This I can agree with. I often delay raising any of my combat skills until certain non-combat ones are capped, and even when using weapons that have a skill requirement of 75 or 100 while my skill is, say, 40, I don't really feel the penalties doing so imposes.

Not fond of the skill point cost increase idea, despite it accurately mirroring the fact that the better you are at something the harder it is to improve in that area. It wasn't even needed in FO2, as raising even one skill to the 300 cap would have taken over 250 (125 for tags, as they raised at a 2:1 rate) skill points and you weren't going to max more than a few even if you managed to grind to the L99 cap. The 5 skills that had magazines would have needed less, since you could get them to 100 with those before putting any points in, but even then that's still a 200 (100 if tagged) point investment to cap one of those skills. It didn't help that, aside from the Skynet quest and it's huge (at least 145 IIRC) Science requirement, there was no real reason to raise any skill much over 100 in the first place.

A skill cap raise I could see, but, as mentioned above, there needs to be a reason to raise the skill that high. In the current system only Lockpick, Science (when applied to hacking), Medicine, and Survival would gain any benefits from going over 100 (the latter two due to scaling effects of related items), and even then you're not seeing much of said benefits save in the toughest of circumstances.

What I would like to see is a return of the FO1 cap of 200 per skill, while retaining the 1:1 increase ratio, coupled with a rebuild of the perk system such that there are perks with really high (i.e. 125 or higher) skill requirements that build on perks with lower requirements of the same skill in order to truly master that particular area of expertise. For example: a Science perk with requirement 150 that allows either the removal of a certain number of 'duds' depending on a comparison of your skill to that of the computer's difficulty rating, or gives one additional allowance reset after you use any provided by the bracket codes, that you would need to have the Computer Whiz perk to get (said perk itself would be completely revamped into something more useful).

For combat skills, have perks of such levels affect things like wear rate or ammunition strength; a master armorer could create custom rounds that are far less deleterious to the weapon they are meant for than someone just starting into making 'home-brew' ammo, especially where Explosive weapons are concerned.

Well since your charecter is the only one in the game with 100 in anything, he is already the best gunman in the mw.

I see your over all point, but the NPCs will not be able to complete. They are stuck where they are at.

BOS should be better ew specialists than you, but Im pretty sure thet are 67 ew.

Vet Legionaries should be better than your guy can be at melee, but I bet they are not close to 100 melee.

You already are the man in the mw.

I think there should be caps for skills based on your S.P.E.C.I.A.L.
but nothing too bad,
anything Lower than a 5 would be capped at some lvl

Like Strength lower than 5 would limit how high your Melee Weapons could max out (ie: 4 strength you could only hit 85, 3str = 65, 2str = 45, and 1str=25)
Perception would effect Energy weapons, Explosives and Lockpicking.
Endurance: Unarmed, Survival
Charisma: Speech, Barter
Intelligence: Medicine, Science, Repair
Agility: Guns, Sneak

and that brings me to Luck, anything under 5 Luck should Limit the ammount of loot you find, and Should also cause mishaps on the play (which is lacking in the vanilla game)

make SPECIAL actually mean something

it would be interesting to see new things that u can learn if u have maxed skills say like quest rewards

the things is u can afford on normal mode to play a random char but on hardcoe and very hard setting things are different , u're whole character needs to be synchronized with u're perks , and skills , u can't play a low endurance . strength character if u 're melee cuz u 'll die alot ( don't say : oh i 'll just load 10 times until i'm lucky and do it ) more or less ... u can't have a shooter caracter with melee perks .... it will work on normal mode , but on hardcoe it won't do it