Hey guys I recently started a new character. He's a battle hardened ex-Legionnaire who excels at CQB and hand to hand combat. I also wanted to give him decent melee skill, since I've heard from a lot of you that melee and unarmed go hand in hand. Any tips? I've never actually played an unarmed or melee character before, and could use some help and ideas from you guys. So far I've taken the Heavy Handed perk and given him high strength and endurance. I know the unarmed and melee weapons are few and far between at the beginning of the game, so any ideas with that would be awesome as well. Thanks in advance guys!

No one?

Rejoin the legion if you want to, and find the paladin toaster and the super sledge "Oh Baby"!

Unarmed and melee complement each other because they have perks that work well for both skills, if you take the heavy handed perk it's best to not put much into luck because crits won't be to important to you. I would put endurance high so you have more health and get more implants, and an intelligence of of four is still a good amount of skill points. I would go with light armour so you can close the distance faster. Hope this helped

- focus on melee in the beginning, until you find/buy your first power fist.
- when you get to Novac, don't forget to svck up to Ranger Andy (his house is next to Cliff Briscoe's). He will teach you ranger takedown, which imo is the most useful unarmed power attack of the bunch. It's a lifesaver in situations where you're outnumbered and outgunned.
- if you're male and you don't want to rejoin the Legion, you can get your rep high enough with the Legion to get Antony to teach you his powerful unarmed power attack by fighting in the arena. (Actually, not sure about this. You may also need to turn in a few NCR dog tags.)
- If you give Veronica formal wear, Vera's dress or the White Gloves outfit she will teach you her unarmed Scribe Counter, but imo it's not that useful.
- the Khans can teach you Khan Trick if you're friendly enough with them. Just do their drug-dealing quests. Not particularly useful, but still nice to have.
- you already know it, but don't neglect one skill or the other. Even if you decide to go full melee, for instance, you'd still want to get Unarmed up to 70 (I think) for the awesome Slayer perk
- shout LEEERRROOOOOY JEEEENKINS when you close in to attack. It makes this build 50% more fun.

Lol thanks. At first I was just using the combat knife I found in a grave near goodsprings. I just got my first powerfist from Cliff in Novac though, and I just learned Ranger Andy's takedown too. I think my Powerfist is GRA too

...why in the hell did you choose Heavy Handed as a Trait? Overall you get less bang for your buck with that and actually makes things even harder for Melee/Unarmed Users (unless you are always wielding Oh Baby!)

wish you didn't take that trait and instead went with Built to Destroy. Anyways Melee weapons have the highest critical damage within the game (at first no, but with Just Lucky I'm Alive, Better Criticals, and Elijah's Ramblings, you knock up the critical damage up to x3.375, literally tripling over the usual damage any weapon could make, and if you're great with sneaking around, even though I'm not into it, you should also take Ninja. Basically makes you kill anything with a bat of your eyes.), so the Heavy Handed trait kind of kills it for you. other then that, Unarmed/Melee is pretty much straightfoward.

Get slayer, pyromaniac(if you have OWB a super heated saturnite power fist with pyromaniac can do more damage then a ballistic fist), better crits, super slam and unstopable force

Heavy handed is pretty good if you are not focused on crit only builds. Pretty much everything has been said like take melee first and then get unarmed up for the perks. Ranger takedown is the best as well as getting paralyzing palm. Get slayer, use rushing water and turbo and watch everyone get sliced (or punched) like they were butter!

Hoping to get Greased Lightning soon. Not sure where to find it though...

Heavy Handed is only decent towards several heavy duty weapons. After that, no, Heavy Handed svcks overall on that part. Without that Trait, your critical damage boost would rocket up to 3.375. Do you know how powerful that is? here's an example:
With Chance's Knife, you merely get 22 Critical damage with 22, making it 44. Not much for now, but with Better Criticals, Just Lucky I'm Alive, along with Elijah's Ramblings, it boosts the critical damage to:

22x3.375=74.25 critical damage +22=96.25 damage per swipe. that's extremely powerful right off the bat.
now with Heavy Handed: 22x0.4x1.5x1.5x1.5=29.7 critical damage+26.4 damage=56.1 per swipe

you basically nearly wipe out almost 50% of your potential power, this is only useful for weapons that have a low chance or small weak Critical damage, you might as well get the damage boost. (the lowest I noticed so far in critical chance is x1 in Melee and Unarmed, and the highest you can get on that without magazines is 33%, which is actually pretty decent considering how merciful the game is with criticals. With Comprehension and True Police Stories, that boosts up to 43%, which is pretty deadly on it's own right there.)

Even then, Heavy Handed drops very rapidly in usefulness, even something as the Chainsaw, with 8 Critical Damage. Sure it looks pathetic, but with all the critical perks, it shoots up to 27 critical damage, and automatic Melee/Unarmed weapons check for criticals 30 times per second I believe. So the damage basically shoots upwards once you start rolling in crits. Like I said, Heavy Handed is overall a very terrible trait. My opinion? Go for Built to Destroy.