I made a huge mistake by not choosing to level-up my lockpick skill, and I'm on my last 5-10 levels, and I have lockpick around 50-70, speech 60-65, barter 100, and I also have repair, science, and sneak around 30-50. What other skills do you suggest I level up other than combat/weapon skills?

Back before I installed all the dlcs, and the level was 30, I only ever raised one combat skill (except one cowgirl character that I had to raise melee to get the perk). This allowed even poor intelligence characters to raise most of their non-combat skills to respectable levels. I also used to make sure I raised lockpick up fast enough to get Lucky when I hit Primm, but I no longer do. There's just so many weapons in the game now that I'm always using something else every playthrough.

What I recommend is this: Decide on your character's role-play before you start your game. You don't have to do a complete top to bottom custom build, just have an idea what your character's strengths and weaknesses are. Then raise the skills you want you character to master accordingly. It may mean your merchant character has a crappy science, or you doctor character can't pick a lock to save his life, but, IMHO, it's more fun to do a full-on role play than it is to worry about maxing all your skills or trying to do every single piece of game content with one character. You may not be able to get into that one very hard locked safe. No big deal. The super-uber weapon in there probably wasn't any better than the three or four super-uber weapons you probably already have.

-Gunny

Thanks for the info, I currently only use 1 playthrough, and im not really trying to role-play, I'm trying to find out the skills that are used more throughout the game

The most useful, in general, would be Repair (90 needed to get Jury Rigging perk), Speech, and Lockpicking. If you are not interested in role-playing and just want to level the skills that will give you the best benefits throughout the game. Science and Medicine are good to have some points in as well, for specific parts of the game, although I never max them out and wouldn't classify either as 'must haves'. Barter is seldom chosen much, as even with a pretty low level of it, you can still have plenty of caps without too much effort. Again, these are just generic picks, and can vary wildly depending on a player's specific build choices. Myself, I wouldn't ever play without maxing out Sneak as early as possible, it is always one of the 2-3 skills I max out first. But that's just me.

Specific weapons and combat skills are completely a matter of preference.

My 'main'/first characters pretty much ignored the combat skills and focused on speech, lock-pick, science, and barter... with repair, survival and medicine close behind.

Science is more useful than lockpicking IMO. There are tons of science skill checks and a lot of terminals to hack, plus useful workbench recipes, while lockpicking pretty much gives you more loot, which isn't exactly in short supply. Repair, speech, and science are probably the most useful non-combat skills.

OK. That's cool. It's still gonna depend on your playstyle quite a bit. IMO the most important non-combat skills are, in this order: Repair, Speech, Lockpick, Science. Science goes up if you're playing an energy weapons contric character. Repair is even more important for a guns character. Sneak, I consider a combat skill, but that depends on playstyle. Playing a sniper? High sneak. Playing a ninja or assasin? High sneak. Otherwise, don't worry about it, unless you wanna take a minigun into the casinos. hardcoe players will get the most from Survival, and medicine can be a helpful skill for all builds too. You can leave Barter at beginning levels and still become richer than Bill Gates, but there are a few perks that need it and some end game skill checks it helps too.

All of this is moot though, if you dl all the dlcs. With a cap of 50, it doesn't take much to max all your skills even with a 1 IN. What may help you some would be to look at http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout:_New_Vegas_perks, figure out which perks you really, really want, and make sure you get to the required skill level for them.

Give us a little more info on your playstyle/build and we could be more specific.

-gunny

I'd say, Repair, Speech and guns. And then if you were to pick a fourth, it'd be a tie between medicine and lockpick

I have a tendency to raise my lockpick as soon as I can. I like to have access to Lucky and the Gobi Campaign Scout Rifle, and if I am not putting points in speech, I can also get Vance's 9mm Submachine gun. So lockpick alone gives me 3 amazingly cool weapons that are not overpowered but just fun to have. Also I got mods with a lot of safe's and stuff. In one of my mods, there's a quest that requires you to lockpick a very hard lock for example. I just like the fact that I can have access to any room or area I want in the game, there's probably one instance in the entire game where you can't gain access to a room with lockpick and only hacking a computer.

I know this is going against the trend but I'd advise against putting any more points into Lock Pick (in fact I never put any in at all any more). Unlike Fallout 3 there aren't a lot of locks that need picking. The only thing you need high Lock Pick for is to get Lucky and the Gobi Campaign Rifle. While those are both excellent weapons they aren't that much better than other weapons you can get without sinking all those skill points into an otherwise lacklustre skill.

Unless you have a compelling role playing reason Barter is also not very useful in my opinion. Repairing high end weapons with repair kits and jury rigging will get you all the money you're going to need in the game. In fact, in Hard Core mode where you can't wait around for vendor resets without taking a heavy food/hunger/sleep penalty, you're going to be clearing the vendors out of cash as it is.

Speech is useful if you want to get the best "good guy" solutions to a lot of quests. If you have the Comprehension perk and the Lonesome Road perk DLC though you only need to raise it to 70 and you can get to 100 though a Meeting People magazine and the US Army General's Outfit. In your case, since you already have Barter at 100 you only need to raise the skill to 65 as the only 100 Speech skill check in the main game has a 100 Barter check as an alternative. (There's a 100 Speech check in Lonesome Road, again for the "good guy" ending, but it can be bypassed if you've explored thoroughly enough).

Repair to 90 for Jury Rigging Perk is pretty hard to pass up. You can make do with Weapon Repair Kits and having vendors repair you armor but that gets expensive over the course of a game. Especially if you want to use power armor and high end weapons.

A high Sneak skill, is probably the best armor and damage multiplier in the game. If you can kill the bad guys before they even know you're there you'll save a fortune on healing supplies and armor repairs and sneak attacks will do x4 damage for body shots and x8 damage for head shots with nearly all weapons (even more for some like the Paciencia which has a high Critical Damage).

Looking at what you say your skills are at I'd give priority to raising Repair to 90. Sneak would be nice but it may be a bit too late to max it out so you may have to settle for using more healing supplies :wink_smile: . Science can also be useful but isn't required in the main quest.

Speech speech speech

I got 100 lockpick and 100 speech and thats really all you need, but if you really want more i would recomend getting your guns, barter and sceince up. My stats are baisicaly only 5 stats. Speech 100, lockpick 100, sceince 90, guns 90, sneak, 50 sneak some barter, but i forgot the exact numbers. This is the build i go with most of my playthroughs and i would recomend it.

It looks to me like you wasted all your points on barter, which is next to pointless is you have high lockpick and sneak, beacause you get good items with em. for you i would recomend mostly focusing on leveling up lockpick to 90 (w/ skillbooks) , mabye level up the level for what ever gun your using to atleast 50, but the more the better. As for speech, speech may be important, to get most of the items involved in speech you need around 70 id say, and there is only two 100 speech requirments, one at hoover dam and one on lonesome road with a 100 barter alternitive i think, the only other high speech requirment i can think of is a 95 one at the end of veronicas quest. You still can and ignore the lesser skills until Lockpick and a combat skill are done. For now, dont worry about sneak, beacause i manage fine with 50 sneak and you can always use a stealth boy or reload.

^^ This. In spades. That's how I roll, too. As anyone who's ever been in a fight with your own life at stake can tell you, giving your enemy an even break is for fools and dead men. Sneak lets you control the situation and the tactics, instead of just reacting after the lead is already flying.

Speech (if you like a lot of "easy way outs" or just plain more options in dialogues)
Your weapon skill of choice.
Repair to at least 50 for weapon kits (I end up with so much money having it higher to repair w/non-like items isn't really necessary...tho it is useful)
Sneak to 50-75. Never needed higher to feel sneaky enough (especially as a sniper), but again that's personal preference/playstyle. Also, I tended to rarely use/would save up Stealthboys so by the time I really wanted them, I still had lots.

I personally hate the hacking mini-game so I ignore that one. But if you do like the mini-game, I can see it being a lot more fun to choose over plain ol' boring lockpick.

Everything else isn't all that important imo unless one is specifically role-playing a certain way, or perhaps if playing hardcoe (the cooking one).

The longer you don't raise speech, the more dialogue options you miss out on. If I am focusing on speech, I raise it up by 2 every level, no exceptions.

Lockpick can be done from early to mid game, if you wait too long though, you'll end up going through DLC's and passing up on locks. If you absolutely must have Lucky, or Gobi Campaign Scout Rifle, or Vance's 9mm submachine gun.

I only raise up my science if I am using energy weapons so I can make max-charged ammo, there aren't enough terminals out there to make it worth while, and the few terminals that are locking off areas almost always can be lockpicked. I used to raise my science to 50 sometimes if I want to make exotic drugs, but med-x, psycho, and Implant GRX is good enough for me.

Barter is important to raise early if you are going for the pack rat perk, one of the best perks in the game.

The only reason I raise up my repair skill is so that my weapon repair kits repair more health. I only use jury rigging to repair my armor, I use weapon repair kits to repair my weapons that I sell and use. You can totally get by without jury rigging though, it's more a conveniance than necessary, you can always just bring your armor or clothing to Major Knight to repair.

I raise up my survival skill just for the perks. I raise it up late game.

Medicine I raise up early and often.

Lockpick is always the first thing I level to 80, with Comprehension the only skills you should level to 100 are weapon skills. I don't feel secure until I have Lucky in my hand.