I'm pretty far into the game now and I'm developing some pretty strong opinions on these two skills.


Initially, I was like "Psh, I played Fallout 3 and I was in nooo short supply of caps, I don't think I'm going to need Barter again."

It also helped that there was a brand spanking new skill in New Vegas, Survival, which let you live off the fat of the land.

Or so I thought.

After funneling a lot of my skill points and scavenging efforts into Survival and totally neglecting Barter, I feel like I have come to a conclusion.


I have made a massive mistake.


Allow me to elaborate on the situation with some basic Pros and Cons.


On the Survival side of the fence, the basic mechanics are using campfires to cook your own food, tan hides, make poisons, and be self-reliant. The reality is that the campfires are very inconveniently located (particularly bothersome is that none of them are near official Player Housing assets), the recipes require a lot of skill points put into the Survival skill to make even the most apparently simple things, scrounging up ingredients for these recipes is tedious as a whole plant will usually yield only one or two ingredient items, and the recipes then demand a lot of the ingredients (and even some insane ingredients - a tin can to make an omelet?) to make an item that is essentially kinda like a StimPak that, if you're in hardcoe mode, also mitigates your hunger.

The Pros? I'm struggling to find them. This skill is laden with Cons. Making poisons seems pretty cool until you find out it's a single dose, single strike sort of mechanic, and they're only applicable to melee weapons and spears (no duh, right?). I thought tanning hides was going to be a step into all sorts of cool armor modifications or other crafting, but it's essentially throwing a lot of these hard to obtain ingredients into a gecko hide that's worth a hundred or so caps. Nevermind, there's no profit to be found in Survival crafting in the first place - the ingredients are often worth more than the resulting product.


Barter. Let me tell you a little bit about Barter and why it's the better choice, and the choice I wish I had made. Number 1, Caps. Pure, simple caps. You save money and make a little more, and all this money you would see with Barter can supplement your diet and hydration with caps to spare on other actually useful things like guns, ammunition, and other supplies. Number 2, the Barter skill unlocks a highly desirable perk that halves the weight of anything in your inventory that weighs two pounds or less - take a look at your inventory some time and get a good feel for how many items would benefit from that. If you're in hardcoe mode, that means all the food and water and ammo you're lugging around weighs half as less. Further, unlike in Fallout 3, there are plenty of things to command the attention of your bottle cap collection - things like high-end medical procedures (you know the ones), gambling, item repairs, and weapon modifications.

The Cons? The only real Con is that you don't get to play with the shiny new Survival skill. I promise you you're not missing out on it, though. The bulk of its utility is in cooking dog, coyote, and gecko meat into steaks. That's just about it. It's the only reasonable recipe with a positive return - throwing meat on a fire and cooking it.

My bottom line is that Survival needs a lot of work, from recipe tweaks to ingredient yields and weights, more recipes that yield actual equipment and items (like non-addictive chem anologues!), to better campfire placement, and even making ovens/stovetops useable like a campfire (at least the ones in Player Housing and some popular shacks).

If you are playing hardcoe, I think Barter is the way you should go. It's the hardcoe golden skill. Drop 70 points in it and never look back.

Yeah, my first character was a Guns, Repair, Survival guy. Guns is obvious on how good it is. Repair gets jury rigging and things like hand loader for the best ammo in the game.

Survival? The perks are all about fighting animals. The recipes are not very good and you find too much food to bother cooking really. I stopped putting points in it at 60. I lived off Gecko Steak. You kill so many Geckos just wandering around you can sell half of it and still feed yourself.

I agree.

In fact, I think you're anolysis could be applied across a range of skills.

In my case, I concentrated on Guns early, backed up with repair and lockpicking. With the dumbing down of VATS, the Gun skill is less effective than it was in F3, and consequently I'm now wandering around with companions to make up for the lower lethality of my character. I've given up on increasing my Repair skill, because the dynamic of that skill simply means that instead of having a limit to how much repair I can do to a particular item, I can now fully repair it but it just takes more replacement parts.

I'm assuming that other skills work similarly, so I believe that next run through, if it happens, will need to be rethought out.

And yes, I wasted a fair amount of effort on Survival as well. Now I'm of the view that if I want a Stimpack, I'll go kill someone.

It seems they threw a lot of things into this game to make it 'different' to F3, and much of it was either window dressing or gimping.

Luckily I didn't really put much effort into Survival, I think its at about 35 or something right now, enough to cook meat I find.

Barter is a much better skill, not only is it just much easier to buy food and water than it is to find a campfire, but Barter also comes into play during many quest dialog options as well. I've started pouring points into Barter lately, haven't regretted it at all.

One skill I'm finding a bit lackluster this time around is Sneak, it seems like no matter how slow I move, how quiet I am, I'm always detected from what I consider to be pretty large distances, and with Boone, as soon as it goes to "CAUTION" he starts to open fire. Sneak was fantastic in FO3, it just doesn't seem to work in NV much at all.

Survival is disappointing on its own, but it unlocks Rad Child, which is one of the best perks in the game, especially on hardcoe. It costs 12000 caps to get the Phoenix Implant regenerating 1 hit / 10 seconds, or you can heal x2 your level of radiation poisoning each and every second with Rad Child. With sufficient DT, you can be invulnerable to most enemies in the game.

Also, neither Survival nor Barter are necessary for economics. High Luck characters can use slot machines to win well in excess of 100,000 caps (most slots results are bugged right now and don't work, but orange works and x3 orange is 32000 caps, x3 casinos with slots)... Barter is only useful for the challenges at that point. If you invested in neither Survival nor Barter and pulled 4 points of Int that you wouldn't need to pay for 60 skill points at endgame, you'd have 4 stat points to invest in Luck and reap the gambling whirlwind.

Jury Rigging is godly if you use high end weapons.

Ditto.
I think speech, barter and science are your best friends in NV they seem to come into play more than others, apart from maybe repair?

Agreed all around, including repair.

I've seen many more dialogue options I'd like to have chosen with those 4 than I have with Survival. All those wasted points.

I dumped all my points into speech a couple times and it has paid off in spades.

Putting points in speech is practically cheating.

Cazadors and radscorpions. The entomologist perk does wonders against them. That requires 45 survival skill, but going higher is somewhat iffy even with hardcoe mode. Better to pump the points into medicine and mass produce super-stimpacks.

Barter? meh...kill, loot steal and sell more stuff. Farming fiends will make you stupid rich with abit of effort.

I really, really like Animal Friend and ... what's it called? Light Traveler, I think. I tend to only wear clothes rather than armor anyway, and being able to move quickly (both in the middle of a fight and just for walking purposes) is key for the way I play. For those, you need Survival at 45, and before I even put any points into it, I'd already found two Wasteland Survival Guides. Wish I'd realized Rad Child was so good ... maybe I have space for that yet.

I am very pleased with how Barter has been improved from Fallout 3, though, including a couple great perks (Long Haul being another powerful one) and several dialog choices. (It always bugged me that haggling for more caps in Fallout 3 was a Speech check rather than Barter...) I don't need much in Barter because the way I play emphasizes immersion, and I feel like overfilling my inventory works against that, but I think the skill is way more interesting now.

I totally forgot about Barter showing up in conversation challenges a lot more in New Vegas. Yet another feather in the Barter cap.


That Rad Child thing sounds pretty cool, but in hardcoe mode we still have to think a lot about Limb damage. Maybe with some Adamantium Skeleton you can make a real tank like that, and the poisons would be handy for Melee. But I'm really not in the market to throw spike-knuckled jabs at a Nightkin's balls until he keels over and I can search him for a Rebar Club.

Almost huh. It has kinda cut some things short.

Forget barter, put points into REPAIR to get it to 90 and once you hit level 16, get the JuryRig perk - this will save/make you much more money than a good barter skill will!

It isn't practically cheating, it's taking advantage..

I have most skills around 50 except Melee around 30 and unarmed which I ignore. So my Barter and survival will likely get no higher than 50.

I only concentrate on maxing out guns and explosions............because I like to kill things.

Edit: Oh and repair. I need to keep my weapons tight.

Oh, I like to kill things in Post-Apocalyptia as much as the next guy, I promise.

You get that Barter up to 70, though - Pack Rat! hardcoe Must-Have Skill! Survival is a Bench Warmer!


I mean, wasn't Survival supposed to be the bread-and-butter skill of hardcoe Mode? Weird.

Yeah I havent even touched survival. Im doing fine just finding food anywhere I go, not to mention just buying a cheap meal from merchants(which I see ALOT more often then campfire pits). Barter> Survival

Survival is a useful skill, but it's pretty much more heavily geared towards those who would want to play on hardcoe mode. It does have some benefits, especially when you can make enough chems like Slasher and Rocket, and Party Time Mentats for when you really want to be charismatic.

If anything, you want to put in just enough points to flex it with the use of a magazine for those recipes otherwise just out of your reach that you'd rather use. But if nothing else, abuse it for the bighorner steak, immensely handy to carry a pile of those if you're the scavving sort. On top of that, it improves your benefits from any consumable, especially handy for hardcoe mode with thirst and hunger.

Consider Survival more of a necessary skill on hardcoe mode, less so much so otherwise. And having the Comprehension perk can make a big difference with a lot of the skills, especially survival, when used at the right time.

YES....*sigh*.....I should have picked Repair. Instead I have Bighorn Steaks whenever Iwant but lol, I could just buy them. I was thrilled with Survival because I wanted to make a tribal hunter character who used poison tipped spears ad such. Sadly, I can't even make poisons early game since I need to kill Cazzadores to aquire the ingredients, and on top of that it's only one does made!!! One dose!!!!!!!!


ONE

Still, I do like the skill, but the hide tanning is worthless and the poisons too small in quantity. I DO like the mass bottled water and such, Very cool. Also.....it's too bad that Cactus Water is bugged :C

Geeze I am starting to think of starting all over now, seeing how Survival is not so important now. Food is a plenty, do we really need to be the Chef Ramsey of the Wasteland?

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Rad_Child

Healing bonuses only apply when irradiated:

* Radiation Poisoning - HP +2 every 10 seconds
* Advanced Radiation Poisoning - HP +4 every 10 seconds
* Critical radiation poisoning - HP +6 every 10 seconds
* Deadly radiation poisoning - HP +8 every 10 seconds

You will still die when you reach 1000 rads.

Rad Child isnt anywhere near as powerful as you are claiming.

As for Survival its ok to pump a few points into it if you are playing hardcoe as it improves the amount of -H20 and -FOD you get from consumables.

Yes - Rad Child really begs for Toughness x2, Stonewall, the Nemean Implant, and Adamantium Skeleton.

And Pushy is relatively easy to get, and laughs at Rebar Clubs.

Oh, you got me!
Except those numbers are wrong. It's per second, not per 10 seconds. Know how I know? Because I have the perk.

I just tested it via the console and yes its per second. Its still questionable to be running around with -3END (-60 health), -2AGL and -2STR to regenerate 8 health per second. If you need regeneration you can just use one of your near infinite Stimpacks, Super or regular.