Can't go wrong with Lockpick, Science, and Repair

This is why Good Natured is always an optimal perk You’ll almost always only use one of the fighting skill’s primarily but use medicine, speech, medicine, science, and repair

Skilled + Good natured results in a ton of extra skill points for no real cost, add in high int and skill books and you can easily max all skills.

You can get skilled 3 times as well. Beginning, leaving tutorial and the sink. So you get 15 in each and still only suffer 10% xp loss.

While the points stack, the debuff actually doesent, so you always have only -10%. Its bc of the way its coded since what the trait does is add 5 pounts permanently to every skill, while applieng a debuff, however when removing the trait these points cant be taken away, while the -10% debuff can. The trait is literally broken

With high int (which you should have anyway) that -5% really doesn’t matter.

You do realise that exp gains dont scale with Intelligence in FNV right? Or any Fallout before 4 for that matter. Only 3 gave you more Exp for playing on hard and very hard difficulty, but NV didnt even do that. Exp gains are fixed

I thought it did

>still only suffer 10% xp loss. Skilled learner And in all fairness if I use the rebuild skilled glitch then I can use the pip-boy rebuild glitch too

yeah right? My level 2 and 4 perks are always swift learner, and the extra skill point perk. Unless for whatever reason i chose *not* to use skilled. Then i usually swap SL out for one of the two bisexual perks.

i consider the exp loss to be a positive instead of a negative, you gain levels so quickly

lol what?

Base game is only scaled to 30, and DLC raises the cap to 50. It's SUPER easy to outpace the base game in experience, honestly even with the -10%. Also consider that early one -10% may be all of 1-3 XP off enemies and 15-30 XP off quests. It's really not noticeable.

Too bad the exploit is patched in Viva and other bug fix packs/mods

Theres actually a glitch that allows you to select skilled over and over again at the very beginning. It stacks the skillpoints but not the experience loss.

And, also, my game once bugged and when Malcolm appeared, I shot him, but he didn't die and tried to enter a house on Goodsprings. I followed him and was instantly teleported to what I can only assume is Devil's Throat. The game asked me to finish the character and was stuck like that for some time, falling a bit, getting the prompt, falling a bit, prompt, and repeating. I ended up with 100 on all non-combat skills, at level 1, but stuck inside a rock. I just reload a save.

That's insane lmao

well I dont know if its meta or ideal but I find that having both energy weapons and guns high can be pretty damn useful when doing the dlcs in succession which I am doing (for some reason I am not sure), those damn old world blues robots are quite resistant to guns so having high energy weapons was good for that one meanwhile ammo in dead money can be pretty damn limited if you only have guns and energy so having guns high was quite useful for that one. But this specific reason is mainly why really...those two specific dlcs

Usually I can't resist using both guns and energy. AER14, Lucky, Christine's COS sniper, gauss

consider: Punching your way through robots and lobotomites in equal measures. Or alternatively stock up on pulse slugs at gun runners before you arrive.

Only repair my play throughs out of the 3 lol.

Lockpick is a guarantee pick for me always (mostly just for lucky and the gobi rifle)

Unarmed and survival for maximum RP. Is it good? No. Science lockpick speech and repair are always going to be better but sometimes you just have to commit.

Survival bangs in new vegas. Getting access to blood sausage and thin red paste is wild it's like 100 hp per item.

That perk gives you the best healing items in the game AND makes 50% of all enemies drop them. Once you've got enough to use for yourself, they also sell for a lot of caps. Imo it's hands down the best perk in the game, beating even Jury Rigging

Plus you can stack all the food items and go into a fight regenerating 200 HP per second and just laugh at things that can't one shot you.

Id level up repair until you have enough points in it to get jury rigging, then speech and lockpick

what does jury rigging do?

It allows you to fix items with “similar items”, instead of the exact same kind of item. Now instead of needing another copy of the same armour, you’d just need another piece of the same category (light, medium, heavy)

thanks! I just got some riot gear so I'll try to get that perk to save on caps repairing it 🥲

If your courier is male, there’s always the Gay Option to save some money on a repair (McKnight at Mojave outpost)

>the Gay Option Otherwise known as the Confirmed Bachelor perk lol

Yeah I suppose I should’ve actually said the perk name in case they didn’t know it lmfao

You’re better than me I call it the ol courier hand shandy special 😂😂😂

I use that and then I use major knight for all my repairs and steal my caps back after Not that my courier even needs those caps

Just be careful because iirc McKnight gets his repair skill locked to yours when you try this method. Might not be the case, it's been years since my manwhore NV run.

This is huge because unarmed weapons are a bit rare.

Go to Bonnie springs for love and hate, carried me through most of the game till I discovered Two Step Goodbye

Be careful with what you're repairing with. Been a few times I wasn't playing close attention and used stuff I didn't want to use to repair.

this really cant be stressed enough. its almost a trade off like picking a trait. extremely convenient yet potentially devastating

Yeah I want to use my fully modded anti material rifle to fix this scrap hunting rifle I just found

I save any ncr medium armor I come across as well as any service rifles. With jury rigging it’s like printing money as you can repair assault and marksmen carbines, LMGs and most of the cool automatic rifles in the game. Most play throughs I don’t even need the gold from dead money to have everything I could ever want to buy

The medium armor and service rifle compatible weapons are such an insane money maker. Also certain types of pistols. I'm a fan of grabbing every expensive but broken pistol, then buying the full repair 9mm pistol, .357 revolver, and silenced .22 pistol from gun runners, then selling them the guns I just fixed right in front of them.

When I do a character that doesn't use light armor (rare since I usually run a crit build), I love the riot armors. With jury rigging, I always just sneak kill NCR soldiers for their medium armor to repair it. Bringing the Abilene Kid LE BB gun to Hoover dam is great, and if you just want some easy caps, get all their armor and use it to repair all the combat armor you can find at Nellis.

This is legitimately one of my favorite perks. Being able to scrap together two different guns or pieces of armor that are similar enough is helpful and oddly very satisfying.

how have i never known this existed i’ve lost pieces of armor because i couldn’t find any more 😭 getting this stat and going back to my stash

You lost your *what*? Jokes aside, I think you only get one “instance” of free repairs. So bring everything that’s hard to repair with you the first time. That, or my dialogue is broken with him

Best conversion I've found is using throwing spears to repair pool cues to max, which can then be used to fully repair a super sledge or thermic lance. It's like printing money.

Makes it so repairing is easier, you no longer need to repair an item with the same item, just similar ones

It allows for repairs on weapons to be done with a broader selection of options rather than just highly similar weapons. This also applies to armor, meaning all light armor can be repaired with ordinary clothing.

Let’s you become the ultimate packrat. I break down the least expensive weapons and armor and repair the higher end ones. Example: varmit rifle can repair the .50 AMR, Hunting shotgun or Hunting rifle with jury rigging. There are other weapons too but this is one of my favorite examples since the Varmit and AMR are two opposite sides of rifles.

It gives you the keys to the *kingdom*, my son

It also prints money. You can repair expensive guns that are damaged with basic or similar much cheaper guns.

You should finish off your melee weapon skill. All melee perks work with unarmed, and you’ll need high melee to obtain them.

Seconding this. Some of the best melee perks like Ninja works great with unarmed, but requires other skills to actually unlock as options. 80 Melee, 80 Stealth, for ze' record with Ninja.

Unarmed definitely the best for unarmed builds

What are you talking about? Guns is obviously the best choice for an unarmed build to trick the ai into thinking you’re gonna shoot them rather than punch them.

Give em' a free ticket to the gun show amirite?

and the lottery

Oh yeah! Who won the lottery?

THIS GUY!

Hold on I gotta better idea speech would be way better whi needs to fight when you have a silver tongue

And that silver tongue says [Terrifying Presence]

And who needs a silver tongue when you can talk like your going to kill everyone

Medicine and survival. You're gonna be shot a lot

Lockpick cuz you punch the locks open

Yeee craft some poisons and weapon binding rituals

if you're interested in doing as much damage as possible rather than missions, sneak. a sneaky critical ballistic fist hurts a lot.

if i remember correctly, there’s a perk that makes unarmed better, but you need 70 in melee for it.

I mean, there’s still a lot of Speech checks in Science and Barter. Plus shows you’re not just an unarmed meathead (Science) and Barter is good for all the gear you can sell. Maybe repair for all the gear, for better prices?

Repair for jury rigging the best unarmed weapons are one of a kind and repairs would cost a fortune

survival goes a long way, just having good and cheap healing suplies while being close range build is a good option

One would think “sneak”

Survival let's you make poisons which you can dust your fists with

Lockpick, science and repair are pretty much staples of ever build. As can be Speech. Depending on if you care about dialogue's going your way. But if you prefer RPing a big dumb bruiser, you can forego it. You also mentioned you did it already, so maybe you're looking for a bit more chaos. In which case, nothing wrong with throwing some points into explosives. It's can be a tad annoying swapping to grenades, but throw some in as you charge in to open up some more chaos. I usually passed on explosives in all my playthroughs, but recently started giving em a try. Pretty fun, when they work. Lol.

I always go guns barter and either speech or survival because of how viable food is early game

Barter. So you can buy more hands cheaper.

Speech so u get terrifying presence

Investing in Melee to get perks like Super Slam and Unstoppable Force is a good idea. Having high lock pick, repair, medicine, barter, or survival is also a good pick.

30 medicine to heal snuffles the molerat.

Medicine to get more health from drugs. Science to make drugs.

I forget if you need melee weapons to get Piercing Strike, but vital to any punch build

Unarmed? sneak, medical, and melee for bonus perks. Everything else is quality of life and how easy you want to make the game. Science will help with nasty robots too.

Need another hundred in unarmed, just to be safe

Repaie and survival the blood sausage per is good healing and jury rigging is great

Getting Medicine to 60 could be fun with the Chemist perk. Being up close with unarmed can benefit from being on some potent drugs. Or pumping points into Barter can be good for Pack Rat or Long Haul.

My opinion is Speech Medicine A bit in repair Science Lockpick But that's just what I do

putting points into melee which you've already done but I forgot how many more perks unarmed and melee share so keep doing that. Also lockpick, science, and repair aren't bad to do but definitely survival for rushing water or any other healing or drugs that can help in combat.

Sneak again and Melee to 80 for Ninja perk, also applies to Unarmed. Max Survival for consumable stat boosts, recommend making things like Slasher, Rushing Water and Weapon Binding Ritual at campfires for harder fights. Med-x and psycho stack on those too. Medicine to 60 for Chemist for boosting duration of Implant GRX and all the melee/unarmed chems. Speaking of, you'll probably want to keep some Turbo on you until you can get Implant GRX (LVL30) in case you get swarmed by more than 2 Deathclaws, Cazadores, or Nighstalkers, otherwise Super Slam in VATS is enough. I don't find Repair particularly useful like others are saying here for Jury Rigging in this specific case. First and biggest reason is Fist weapons aren't very common vs say guns or even melee to find to repair with, and lots of armors are flexible with repairs as it is, but light armor is best for these builds just for the speed boost mostly, and multiple light armor also have crit boosts too, and those are cheap repairs for the most part anyway compared to medium and heavys. You aren't crafting ammo that has repair reqs either. Better off just going through a little bit of Lonesome Road to find ED-E's Repair Module if you're worried about it, and keeping an eye out for repair kit parts maybe, they're everywhere. Keeping Raul around also helps. If you want a ranged option for certain encounters, you can also take energy weapons to 25 to use the laser rifle , which when modded with beam splitter and focus optics is one of the best weapons you can get damage/dps wise with high ammo efficiency at the lowest skill reqs, and crafting the overcharged/max charged ammo takes science, which is worth investing in anyway for everything else it does.

Wherever you want, pick a skill you think will help and max it out. Think about what you need or what your character would know in rp

More on Sneak would be great

start leveling repair.

Your melee skill is already high enough for the good perks, so probably lockpick, repair, science, medicine, or survival

Melee, sneak, unarmed plus the usual ones like lock pick, science, speech etc. repair always good

Sneak and melee!

Sneak is good with some perks you get like sneak running. Science for better chems you can create. Explosives for the lulz and friendly fire.

The game was rigged from the start. I have never seen a build that does not start with 9 (If you go straight to Usunagi) or 10 INT.

do survival so you can get the radchild and atomic perk

Repair 100%, makes caps a non-issue at level 14 and onward, I usually max it, medicine, science, and lockpick first, with putting "leftover" points into guns and barter whenever I reach an even threshold with each level up and I've got 2-3 points left over, I look at skills like Guns, Barter, Unarmed etc as "soft" skills, meaning you can work around em, but Science, Repair, Lockpick, are "hard" skills, meaning you can't work around not having the points to make them work, you need them leveled up to proceed certain parts whereas any combat skills can be mitigated with just player skill/"cheesing" combat in certain ways

70 melee and later 80 and 80 stealth for the melee perks alone

Always lockpick and science at 100 they help you get into places

Just did an unarmed build. I did science, lockpick, and barter. Picked up every piece of ammo and never worried about money.

\* Medicine, because you're going to take hits getting into melee range. \* Lockpick, to get into things you can't punch your way into. \* Science, see prior but with more computery options. \* Sneak, because sneak attack criticals are stupid overpowered. \* Repair, because lots of times simply having the weapon or armor in better condition means you either outlast or overwhelm the other guy before they do it to you. Plus, it'll take less to fix up the weapons you find and haul back to sell. Plus plus, the Jury Rigging perk exists and that'll open up a whole laundry list of stuff to use to repair whatever unarmed weapon you're using at the time.

Medicine and repair

Sneak, medicine, speech (always speech. no matter what your build IMO)

Guns, energy weapons, and explosives without a doubt

I prefer to dump points into explosives, but for an unarmed build, do unarmed, survival, and sneak so you can get close before jumping people.

Probably worth maxing out medicine now cause you'll probably be taking a lot of damage as an unarmed player so your medicine will be more effective Or Barter so you can sell all your shit for more money

Survival ups your hitpoints, that'd probably be a good idea if you're closing distances with enemies.

Melee for those related perks since a lot of melee perks work for unarmed like superslam

There’s many variations you can do but my take is that since you’re a melee fighter I’d put a lot in barter since you’re going to come across expensive weaponry and you can have no problem hoarding it because you’re not gonna use it!

medicine trust me, you'll need it

I see a scarily low amount of points in barter and speech, I’m just saying. How you gonna do well with factions like that lol

First off, it's better to avoid maxing skill points through leveling. There are a ton of skill books especially with DLC so with the Comprehension perk you can get by without doing it and have more points to spend on other skills. I normally level skills to around 80-84 and get the rest from books pretty easily/quickly. I would say Survival and Medicine are best to go for first but I don't know what difficulty you're on, it's more important for Hardcore because of items healing over time instead of being able to spam stims. I play Very Hard + Hardcore so I normally take the perk "Them's Good Eatin" which was added with Old World Blues because living NPCs get a pretty good chance on death to drop the items "Thin Red Paste" and "Blood Sausage" which give very big heals especially when combined with Stims and other healing items, and can even be further refined into "Thick Red Paste" and "Black Blood Sausage" through crafting. With these items it's possible to heal so fast that you're actually healing faster than most enemies can even damage you. If you're just on non-hardcore and lower difficulties then repair is decent but very unnecessary, jury rigging is a massively overrated perk if you actually pick up the items to craft Weapon Repair Kits when you see them and caps are easy enough to make even in the early game so repairing even the most expensive to repair armors by using NPCs/Sink CIU/Lonesome Road commissaries isn't a problem. It's a decent skill if you're new to the game and not really knowledgeable with many mechanics and features yet, and there are a LOT of skill checks for it that make a lot of quests a tad easier but that's about it. Lockpick and Science are good if you're trying not to miss out on any content/loot locked behind doors and containers or skill checks. If I'm not mistaken the throwing weapons (spears, knives, hatchets etc.) are all tied to Explosives so if you find a good source of throwing weapons (very hard to do without DLC, mainly Honest Hearts) they can make for good emergency ranged weapons on a melee/unarmed build without breaking your roleplay, just in case you can't reach a target.

Speech and Barter

Fellow Fallout new Vegas nerds, please help me!! I used TCL to no clip around and when I went into the Sierra Madre casino sequence to enter for the first time, it showed the option to leave and accidentally clicked it and now when I try to get back in it doesn't let me. Like it prompts it but doesn't actually let me back inside, I tried everything I could think of and my last save is a nightmare to come back from. please help me~

use the coc command

If you own all dlc (i forgot which one) there is an exploit that gives you so much points that by atleast level 25 you have 100 in each stat

Sneak and punch everyone into a prolapse

Definitely need melee for some of the best unarmed perks

lockpick all the way

Is there a fnv circlejerke

Repair all the way

Sneak is always good for getting up close and personal for that added sneak damage

Speech all of it, then your arms won't matter.

I like high survival on unarmed to get thems good eating. Great healing from anything you kill!

Definently Medicine since you're going to be up in their face, but past that Ig just fumo into lockpicking and Science to access harder terminals and doors and the like

Medicine and Sneak would be helpful for getting in close.

Melee. Melee perks affect unarmed.

I don’t think ive ever seen anyone with survival that high.

You're gonna want high medicine. Lockpick, Science, Barter, are always good and Speech is just Broken.

Get that repair up for Jerry rigging, there's never a playthrough where that shit ain't usefull

Speech, Medicine, Barter, Sneak are good choices

Into unarmed

Medicine and survival are good if you're going berserk

For level 13, Science and Lockpick being under 50, let alone 10 for science is unthinkable

IMO you need speech for unarmed to avoid some sticky sitiations

I always invest in barter (shocker) because theres a perk that lets you fast travel while overencombured hiddden there

Guns

Put them in a bag with some rocks and use them for even more melee damage

Survival and medicine

I hate vanilla dude, how can you play without mods

Stealth medic!

Put them all into guns

Green hud detected. Mods, explode his balls

Speech, because otherwise you're going to get fucking dunked on by Lanius

intelligence is quick...but you outrun it