1. SPECIAL isn't very hard because Perception and Charisma are pretty much useless in the game. PER 6 is prerequisite for Better Criticals so I'd stay at that, Charisma you can down to 3-4 and be fine with it. Strength at 6 is fine, you can lower gun requirements by 2 points with a Perk - and your companions can carry lots of stuff. Don't go crazy with Agility, you can take Kamikaze to make up for low values, but also don't go below 5 for perks. High Luck helps you in everything so don't save points here even if you're used to doing so ever since Fallout 1 and 2. Endurance is cool allowing to upgrade all other skills by 1 point with implants. I wouldn't save points here but I wouldn't go too crazy with it either, you don't need 8 implants, 6 or 7 is fine.
2. Repair isn't as useful as it used to be, no need to TAG it at all. Same for Speech, lines requiring high Speech aren't compulsory at all in the first part of the game and even if a new line appears most you need is 50 or so. Barter isn't very useful because if you scavenge much vendors will be running out of caps to pay for the guns you've looted. No need to TAG any of those, just keep looting and you will be rich.
3. Good TAGs are Science and Lockpick because those skills you want up very fast to open safes and locked doors for XP and loot. Pick third according to your liking, preferably with weapons you are intending to use so you don't need to invvest there until your normal skills are up. I'd advise taking Guns first, then learning other two to some medium levels but in the long run this tag doesn't matter much.
4. Traits were a no-brainer for me. +20% accuracy from trigger discipline makes up for low gun skills and you will only have trouble with gun jamming for 2s every once in a while. Action Points you get from Kamikaze make up for low Agility and allow to do enough close-up VATS devastation to never have trouble in corridors where you can't snipe.
5. As far as Perks go, with Comprehension and Educated you won't need to stretch yourself too much to pass majority of skill tests, just initially train things like Science, Medicine, Lockpick or Speech up to 55 and carry a magazine that can upgrade it to 75 if there's a place needing it so high.
6. After that you want to either boost your criticals to deal more damage from far away with sneak attacks - or boost your VATS skills with more accuracy and Action Points. And in general care rather for damage output than anything else.
7. Companions are godly. My favourite team was Boone and ED-E. ED-E is in Primm and makes up for low perception with his great scanners and all you need to fix him is a bunch of easily acquired parts (Scrap Metal, Scrap Electronics and Sensor Modules), Boone from Novac can kill pretty much every creature you want him to kill and do it in handful of shots. Even those armored Radscorpions are two shots for him. So instead of gun skills, just get Boone and let him do the killing until you get yourself proper weapons. He doesn't use ammo so he can save you quite a few bullets.
8. Guns. The best normal gun you can find early on is .357 Revolver called Lucky which is in the floor safe of the Gift Shop of the bandit hotel in Primm. 75 lockpick needed and there's a skill book there too. Another good gun is Ratslayer, unique Varmint Rifle in Broc Flower Cave (prepare to be radiated and rushed by rats there, bring Boone!). In the long run you want to discover Sniper's Nest near Cottonwood Cove (up on the rocks), there's a case there requiring 100 Lockpick so if you are going with a Sniper, you want his Lockpick at 80 + Comprehension quite early.
9. Energy weapons. First of all, you want a Laser Rifle with a Scope. Upgrades spawn randomly in stores so you want to discover a number of shops with them and then just make a trip searching for this upgrade between them. If you don't find, sleep 73h (shops refresh ev ery 3 days) and make another trip until you find it. Best pistol is Plasma Defender which is a unique Plasma Pistol. You can steal it from Freeside Silver Rush store, just run up north and use Stealth Boy to snatch it off the counter, it will have 100% conditions.
10. Ammo is easy to get, from stores and from conversions (learn to use the bench, learn what ammo types can be converted to another). Guns are easy enough to repair on their own, you find so many on raiders and such that it allows you to keep your stuff at 100% even if your Repair is 15. If you are using Energy Weapons you might want to go high in Repair early on and grab everything you need to manufacture Weapon Repair Kits (memorize what you need for those!), it's hard to fix a Plasma Defender because you won't find many in the game - and paying a professional to do it will cost thousands of caps.
11. Food and drink are only useful in hardcoe. If you aren't playing hardcoe, just memorize recipes for Stimpacks and your favourite drugs of choice (Psycho) and that's it.
12. Roads are safe and at level 2 or 3 with some cunning you can easily make it to Las Vegas to discover the best stores in the game (Gun Runners, Silver Rush). Equipment there is very expensive - but ammo isn't and upgrades are plenty there. So consider going south from Good Springs, east through Nipton and then north all the way up to Vegas East Gate to find those.
13. (I know I promised 12 but this one is kind of useful) Get a room in Novac and stash stuff there in the safe. Don't sell "Misc" stuff unless you know it's 1. not used for any recipe 2. used in recipes you don't want to use.

Rebalances required in future patches:
- Weaker companions. They should have level restrictions so you don't use them for combat to win everything for you too early.
- Perception and Charisma need a place in the game.
- More perps with energy weapons and sniper equipment - so you can repair those if you use them. Better sight range and speed for monsters. Lower, much lower general accuracy.
- More dangerous roads. Only actually tough spot is between Nipton and Novac - but once you know there are dudes on the rocks there you can easily win it.
- Gun skills should influence accuracy more, in VATS very close and outside of it when sniping. Most things on the map I can hit in the head with Guns skill at 15 at range of 5km and kill instantly with a sneak critical. And most things in buildings I just use VATS to headshot and crit-kill.
- More random monsters on the map!

Uhhh... I've found Charisma, Speech, and Barter very useful in this game.... and the vendors I've seen have always had well over 1000 caps...

I have to side with SgtReed here too, in comparison to FO3 Barter/Charisma/Speech are all very important now, in fact they include major shortcuts in some quests. The old lady wants 500 caps, I don't think so, speech it is! ( Especially since those dogs are intelligently placed around her to protect her from theft. ) I will also criticise your understanding of repair, getting items to the repair threshold with a high repair means it'll take longer to decrease below the threshold and even then it will still be a while. A high repair means you can sell most of the weapons you obtain - or in an intelligent way repair them higher for more caps. For hardcoe mode I'd advise those that haven't played FO at all to stay away perhaps even for a couple of hours, they'll get frustrated pretty quickly if they don't.

Otherwise good advice.

Reno

@ Reno

I almost went with hardcoe mode.... is it crazy? lol

I've done most of the game with high social skills, almost no gun/energy skills and 1 luck. Dare I say it's actuals fairly balanced...

All you really need to know is

Want high skills? You need INT (9 or 10 if you want to do everything)
Want Implants? You need END (8-9 to get them all)
Want BIG weapons? You need STR (8 for a plasma caster for instance: 200dps)

Also hardcoe mode is a lot of fun and unless you are hardcoe on the hardest mode the choices you make with skills/Special won't make a huge difference so just go with what looks fun.

Opting to be short sited and social seemed like the perfect traits for my hardcoe character.

The one on repair is really short-sighted. At 50 you can make "weapon repair kits" and those allow you to use the more exotic weapons where parts won't be raining from the heavens. I found those things very helpful in keeping my suppressed .308 Sniper Rifle and Assault Carbine in good CND.

And with Repair 90, you can eventually get the Jury Rigging perk which lets you fix something with anything else vaguely resembling your damaged item.

Repair is *definitely* worth investing in.

Another good thing about repair is all those quests that say this thing is broken go and get x y and z to fix it can be done without the items if you have high repair.
Tip for repair kits: rather than combining two expensive weapons to repair them then sell. Use repair kits on them both and sell both!

So you will TAG repair while you could just add one level worth of points to it, pick Comprehension and make all the Weapon Repair Kits (which you don't need at all if you don't use high-tech stuff too early) with those after reading a magazine? Eventually everyone will want high repair to fix Power Armor with Metal Armor - but not during first few hours for heaven's sake. Same goes for Barter pretty much, early on it's pointless to TAG it or invest points into it, it;'s not like Chet will make you rich with his 600 caps every 3 days. You will need it much later in the game.

I stand by my picks for new players. Lockpick TAG is to get faster to the good stuff. Unique Revolver, uniqe Sniper Rifle, other powerful loot you would otherwise have to come back for much later in the game. Science opens terminals like Primm or REPCONN place so it gives you uniques and strong loot early on as well. Weapon skill is TAG-ed because you want to spend your first few levels exclusively on Lockpick (up to 80) and Science (up to 55) and having weapon skill at 15 during that time would be pretty painful. Then I typically start going wider spreading points between weapons, speech, medicine, sneak, barter and repair.

INT + LCK characters rock this game. Social skills aren't dependant on CHA as much as they depend on skill points in Speech and Barter - and those you can get with INT. STR beyond 6? What for, there's a perk to lower reqs from 8 to 6 (or implant + intense training or armor) - if you want big guns at all (I play Sniper + Shotgun). Going beyond END 6 is tempting - but then again, 6 implants lets you pick all the useful stuff (you won't need to upgrade PER, AGI or CHA... there's no point to it). PER you need only for Better Criticals, other than that it's a waste of points and an implant (ED-E can detect stuff on the map while you are exploring).

If you say there's a balance between all SPECIAL attributes, prove it and play a guy with 8 PER 8 CHA while you have 4 LCK and INT.

Don't just take the Plasma Defender from Silver Rush, TAKE EVERYTHING!! Take what you can and sell it back to the Silver Rush lady, then take what else you don't want and sell it to some other chump. It's 2000 caps at least, instant access to Vegas and you get some good weapons. I left the flamer there incase i ever want to go back and grab it.

Yeah, these tips may be good for your specific style of play, but they aren't great for people new to the game, especially brand new people.

Better tips would probably be along the lines of:

1) Plan ahead, but don't be afraid to deviate. Generally if you're working a quest or two, your going to see a level gain in there somewhere. Especially early on. If you're 20 or so points away from a speech or skill check, hit another quest until you level. The more often you do that, the more experience you'll get, the less you'll have to worry about whether your skills are sufficient to do what you want to do.

2) Use your tags for the skills you're looking to pump first, or alternatively, tag skills you think you might need a little bit of points in early on, but you plan on ignoring after that for the first few levels.

3) There are very few exceptions where you won't have an option to open a safe or a room via a science AND a lockpick check. This was pretty much the case in FO3 as well, and I've found that pushing science early on is a pretty good way to have access to most everything you come across. I usually have my lockpick a full difficulty level or more behind my science, and as a pack rat AND a completionist, it's enough to see most of it. Ultimately, you probably want your science and lockpicking close to capped or capped. (There are PLENTY of science mags out there, so I suspect 90 should be fine for the duration. No need to go to 100. Probably the case with picking, though there are four or five doors I have in the back of my head that I have to return to after I get it up there, so it may be worthwhile pushing this to 100. But the science checks are so few and far between, in 37 hours I've seen 1 100 level terminal, and 3-5 science speech checks around 80, but you will stack up on programmers digests...I'm sitting on 5 right now with a science of 90).

4) Guns to 40 is a very solid build. At that point, you don't need middling skills in the other two if you don't want. I chose to transition from guns to energy, and plan on getting energy capped or close to it. That being said, you don't necessarily need to rush. They are a nice tag and forget-for-a-while skill.

5) Perks and traits are PURELY subjective. It's a pretty bad idea to just take anyone's preference on them outright, unless you understand WHY they are taking it, and it applies to your playstyle. Above all, the beauty of this game is the ability to customize your character completely to the way you like to play the game. Even for completionists, you can 'jack of all trades' it enough to be capped in several skills and still do pretty much everything well. It's just a matter of using the balancing of the perks and skill points.

6) If you want to ever have the option of making your life easier, and if you want to see a lot more of the game and make a lot more friends, CAP YOUR SPEECH SKILL. There are variety of speech checks (science, intelligence, strength, speech, barter, medicine), but far and away, speech is the number 1 check. You have FAR more options on how to complete things, including turning people against one another while keeping your hands clean. No matter what your playstyle is, with the exception of "I will kill every living, semi-living, and non-living thing in the wasteland, and then I will go about bathing in the puddles of blood and piles of circuitry and scrap metal", speech is a key skill.

7) I almost forgot. You don't need to tag, you don't need to level it, but get yourself a decent melee weapon (I started with the tire iron and am chilling with a dress cane now). A lot of the smaller to average size animals are stupid and slow, and you can circle strafe them while beating the crap out of them. This is still true at level 21, with 15 points in melee. This will save you a LOT of ammo, especially once you get to strong companions.

Picks for new players? What does that even mean? You can play this game anyway you want. I've pretty much done everything opposite of most of your points and I'm owning. I never take any Luck in FO games. It's at 1. My PER is 8 because with my play style I like to see what's coming from far away (and I don't like using companions so that point is moot). My strength is high for looting and because I won't have companions to use as mules. Really the only SPECIAL that can really gimp is INT because of the lack to points to distribute when you level up.

Point is, there's no perfect build. There's only how you want to play. Just about every quest has ways to finish it going a Speech route.

Perception useless? Sorry, but unless this guide is for pure melee users, it's WRONG.

Not everyone plays an RPG to min-max

12 tips for misinformed munchkins is a better title.

What does Perception have to do with ranged combat? Its been proven that Perception does nothing for ranged weapon accuracy. Perception and Charisma are worthless SPECIAL stats. Their only use is as a gateway to access certain perks. Charisma this time around doesnt even make Speech Checks easier. Its even worse than it was in Fallout 3.

EDIT: I also dont understand this so called "Nerve" stat. Ive had 1 Charisma all game and Veronica is still one or two hit killing everything with her Power Fist.

Perception affects how quickly the HDR adjusts to rapid light changes, how far away tick marks show up on the radar, and whether or not if hidden targets appear on the radar.

And while it may not have affected ranged combat in FO3, it does in New Vegas. Also in New Vegas, there are many hidden dialogue options only triggered with a high perception.

As for charisma; it's pretty useless, yes... Unless you like your followers to explicitly obey your orders and not go off and do their own thing because their nerve is low.

Ive had no problems with vision with a 1 Perception character. The radar isnt needed. Also hidden targets never appear on the radar unless you have ED-E with you.



Proven to be false. Perception does nothing for ranged combat outside of allowing access to certain perks.



Such as? And are they worth throwing away SPECIAL points for it?

THIS. Perception is far from useless. If you want to play a long range, lone sniper type it is key that you see your enemies long before they see you. And as noted there are quite a few dialog options that open up with PER at 7 or higher.

My PER is at 10, and I don't have ED-E in my group, yet cloaked Nightkin still appear on my radar. As for the radar not being needed, that's really up to each player to decide. Personally, I find it extremely useful when inside a building.




Proven by who? Where? From what I've seen playing the game, it does.




Most of them are Wild Wasteland encounters and can be quite rewarding. I haven't seen anything that requires perception higher than 7 though.

Proven by people looking at Perceptions details and functions within the GECK. Perception doesnt increase weapon accuracy as previously stated by the developers.

I'm actually planning on max-ing Repair so I can get the powerful .50 MG Hand Load.

I thought Charisma did play a bigger role in the game, especially since the percentages are replaced by skill levels. It does allow for shortcuts and other advantages. Personally, I still have it low for combat reasons, but it's never a stat dump.

Repair needs to be maxed if you have Hand Load and want the .50 MG Hand Load ammo.

Boone and ED-E - They're my companions right now. I swear, I'm actually competing against Boone for kills. This never happened to me on FO3.

Lastly, you will definitely need mad skillz to go thru I-15 on early game (LV1-10). I heard there was like a super Deathclaw there or something. All I know is there's a Deathclaw nest.

(Ah, crap... I forgot I had an initial post here >.< sorry for double post)

For those who defy to reduce their Charisma, look at my post here: http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1128920-companion-nerve/page__gopid__16555489&#entry16555489

This is an incredibly major effect of Charisma, and most likely explains Boone's predominance in combat.

Sorry, that and his sniper rifle too.

Reno

I have 1 charisma and Boone kills things in one hit... I've yet to see him cower at anytime. My personal opinion is that charisma still reminds a dump stat. Since companions are ridiculously strong. Veronica today one hit a giant radscorpion... I don't know if that's because of a bug or what, that some of them are so strong, but I've yet to see any detrimental effects on companions with 1 charisma.

I will say this though, my ED-E takes forever to kill even a dog. Maybe it's not affecting all the NPCS.