First – apologies for the wordy post

I am starting over with a female character. I want a character that is a first class Sneak Thief, Pack-rat and a Long Range Killer who will be using V.A.T.S. a lot.

So I am thinking along these lines

Primary Attributes

S-7
P-6
E-5
C-5
I-5
A-8
L-4

Skills (Emphasis)

Medicine
Repair
Science
Small Guns

Perks (Emphasis to Level 10) By level 10 my character is pretty much what she will be.

Daddy’s Girl… Level 2, 3 ranks available
Gun Nut… Level 2, 3 ranks available
Swift Learner… Level 2, 3 ranks available
Thief… Level 2, 3 ranks available
Comprehension… Level 4
Educated… Level 4
Demolitions Expert… Level 6, 3 ranks available
Gunslinger… Level 6
Commando… Level 8
Scrounger… Level 8
Strong Back… Level 8
Finesse… Level 10 (Or maybe Mysterious Stranger but would have to
Increase Luck to 6)

Appreciate any advice… some of you world-class players have this stuff down pat… I do not.

Thanks

I prefer taking high perception and intelligence and high luck on a sniper,sneak thief charecter with emphasis on smallguns,repair and medicine..

I Barly ever use VATS, I kinda think its cheating to stop time..lol

Go intelligence to 9 so each time you level up you get more points to spend on skills, then when you leave the vault use intense training to get it to ten or go to Rivet City and get the bobblehead. Then when you level you will get alot more skill points to spend. The Special at the start spend it on agility for your small guns.

I'd go with:

Primary Attributes

S - 5 (boost to 7 with Ant Might and bobblehead)
P - 6
E - 6
C - 5
I - 7 (boost to 8 with bobblehead)
A - 6
L - 5 (boost to 6 with bobblehead)

Tag skills
Sneak
Small Guns
Repair

Perks (Emphasis to Level 10) By level 10 my character is pretty much what she will be.

Swift Learner…
Comprehension…
Educated…
Toughness...
Commando…
Scrounger…
Strong Back…
Finesse…

well if you have broken steel, I suggest staring with everything at bare minimum.
much more fun that way.

That's nothing but a waste of attribute points. You're going to max out most of your skills anyway, especially if you have Broken Steel, so why spend all those point to speed things up? I really don't understand why so many people have this fixation about maxing out their Intelligence, it's a complete waste. The one stat I'd max out is Strength, so you can carry more loot out of the areas you clear. Or maybe even Endurance as it gives you more hitpoints and better Rad resistance. Maxing Intelligence is totally unnecessary.

Waste of perks for pretty much the same reasons as above. Unless you're using a mod that drastically reduces the number of skill points you get in a game, then Educated and Comprehension are pointless to take. And so many people already complain that they level up way too quickly, why would you want to speed things up with Swift Learner? There's many more useful perks you can take instead.

Primary Attributes

S- 4 I don't find strength to be all that important. Between 5 and 10 you can only carry 50 more pounds of loot. After a certain point you'll only need to spend money on ammo and the occational repair. so that exta 50 pounds isn't going to make THAT much of a diference.
P- 7 A little extra perception never hurts. Being able to see your enemies before they see you is important for a long range style player. The bonus to lockpicks (for a thief) and disarming bombs is nice too.
E-4 As a long range player you'll (hopefuly) get hit less often. If you find yourself getting hurt too much you can always add to it with Intense training.
C-5 Good skill to have but don't forgo other stats for it.
I-6 As meantioned you'll max out the stats you want fast enough without high intelligence. If you don't have Broken steel you may want to add more to it though.
A-8 Small guns have IMO the best Long ranged weapons. Sniper rifle, Hunting rifle, Ol' Painless, Lincoln Repeater... Agility gives a bonus to that inceasing power and accuracy. Also adds a bonus to sneak.
L-6 Luck is good to have no matter what you are.

Skills (Emphasis)

Explosives - Very useful. Sneak up to a group of raiders and toss a grenade at their feet. Now that's satisfying. Laying mines as traps for partoling enemies is awsome too.
Repair - Crush a bunch of loot together to make it wiegh less and still be worth decent money. Also keep your stuff at tip-top shape.
Small Guns - Your primary weapons of course.
Sneak - Gives you a free shot with a bonus sneak-attack critical hit. Awsome for long ranged fighters.

Lock pick and scince are less important. Get them both up to 50 and you'll be abel to get into most locks and computers. Many of the realy hard ones have keys or password that you can find.
Barter may be worth considering if you want to make money.
Speech can also be very useful. A high speech level can make a lot of quest go much easier and can get you much better rewards for quests.
Medicine is very useful for making those stimpaks go further but you don't need to make it a primary concern.
Big guns are unnessarily heavy and ammo is hard to find. Ignore them.
You may want to put one or two points into either melee weapons or unarmed but no much. You don't intend on running out of ammo very often do you?
Energy weapons have some very good ranged weapons too. The problem is ammo.

Perks (Emphasis to Level 10) By level 10 my character is pretty much what she will be.

Daddy’s Girl… Skill bonus perks are useless because you'll level them up fast enough as it is. 5 points won't make a hell of a lot of deference anyway
Gun Nut… See above
Thief…See above
Swift Learner… 10% bonus to experience is negligable. You level up more than fast enough anyway.
Comprehension… Unless you actively seek them out, you won't find all that many skill books. a couple more points to random skills doesn't help all that much.
Educated… I would take this to augment your intelligence.
Demolitions Expert… Max this out ASAP
Gunslinger… The more useful weapons are based on the commando perk. don't bother with this one.
Commando… This will help you with most of the weapons that you will likely be using.
Scrounger… YOu can never have to much ammo.
Strong Back… This may be good to put to to augment a more "average" strength level. But is it worth using up a perk?
Finesse… Criticals are your friend no matter what.

Heres what I would do

Level 2 - Intense Training - Endurance [makes it an even 5]
Level 3 - Intense Training - Intelligence [any bonus to intelligence is a good thing.]
Level 4 - Educated [a little help leveling up doesn't hurt and it's better than adding another point to intelligence.]
Level 5 - Entomologist (requires 40 science)(if you don't want this you could use intense training again) [Giant rad scorpions are always a nuisence. Make them go away faster.]
Level 6 - Demolition Expert (Required 50 explosives) [Makes explosives much useful than the already are]
Level 7 - Demolition Expert
Level 8 - Commando [most of the best weapons are covered by this.]
Level 9 - Demolition Expert
Level 10 - Scrounger [ammo can be scarce at times. Even whe it's not, you can never have to much]

I'm enjoying myself so I'll continue on

Level 11 - Finesse [Who am I to deny that criticals are awsome. you want as many as you can get.]
Level 12 - Sniper [big help in VATS]
Level 13 - Robitics expert (requires 50 science)(if you don't want this you could use intense training again) [Makes the occational robot encounter easier to handle]
Level 14 - Silent Runner (requires 50 sneak) [just a bonus to stealth]
Level 15 - master trader [Not much else to choose from and it's not like better deals is a bad thing.]
Level 16 - Better criticals [Finesse makes them happen more often, this makes them better.]
Level 17 - Action Boy [A must if you use VATS a lot.]
Level 18 - Concentrated Fire [anoth must for frequent VATS users]
Level 19 - Tag [kind of running out of useful perks now. A 15 point skill bonus is always helpful]
Level 20 - Grim Reaper's Sprint [many consider this to be too powerful. It makes VATS (more) unfair.]

I don't have a list of the boroken steel perks in front of me or else I'd continue.
Sorry for the Wall-O-Text. This one got away from me.

Lets see I'd go with

Str 5
Per 6
End 5
Char 4
Int 7
Agil 7
Luck 6

I would Tag Guns, Speech, Science

Get Black Widow at LV 2, Comprehension at either LV 4 or LV 5, Strong Back at LV 8

It doesn't matter, becuase with broken steel you can have all special and all skills maxed out easily....

If you have Broken Steel then you will max all your attributes at level 30. At that point you'll have no benefit from going with 9 strength over 5 strength. Putting those point into intelligence, on the other hand, means your key skills will climb that much faster and that you have to read that much fewer books to get there.

As for maxing out strength, it's marginally understandable without Broken Steel but silly with. You get a mere 50 to carrying capacity for 28 levels. That's the same as picking up Strong Back. Going with 5 strength gives you a capacity of 200 until level 8, where you can take Strong Back and get to 250. That's definitely enough to get by.


Combining Educated and Comprehension when you've got max intelligence is perhaps overkill, but either perk by themselves is not. Taking Comprehension doesn't prevent you from taking any important perks so there's really no reason not to take it.

As for Swift Learner, you're quite right that you level up rather fast already, but what the heck else is there to take? Some skill perk? With Broken Steel, you're going to be scraping the bottom of the barrel at the later levels anyway, so again you're not losing anything with Swift Learner.

If you bring a follower or two on board, carrying capacity gets even less important. Fawkes and RL-3 can both carry about 200 pounds. And Fawkes won't wear armor, while RL-3 won't use weapons or ammo.

I like to try to have everything at least at 6, just because some of the really good perks require a 6 in that stat.

I never use Intense training... see little point in it, what with bobbleheads and other boosters.

I rarely use the stat boosters, other than Impartial Mediation if I'm playing a neutral character.

I typically build Small, Big, or Energy... but only one. And Unarmed or Melee, but not both. I select a weapon I want to use, and stick with it.

This might change once I get Broken Steel, but for now, I have to ration out my stats.

That depends on whether you're a pack rat, like I am. If I go into an area I like to haul out everything of value, and I don't want that to require half a dozen trips. With max Strength and the Strong Back perk, I can pretty much do it all in one go, and don't have to take the time to go back to an area to pick up any loot I couldn't carry out the first time. Plus maxing Strength gives me extra points in Melee, so that's extra skill points I don't have to invest in.



My first run through I took both of them, and even though my Intelligence wasn't maxed, only 8 with the Bobblehead, it didn't take me long before I had all my main skills maxed. After that leveling up became an almost pointless exercise since all I had left to invest in were skills I didn't use anyway. It made for a very boring game at that point, one which I finally gave up on.

Since you are planning on a female character I second what Terror said about taking the Black Widow perk. You will do a little bit more damage to most folks out there, and get some new conversation options that allow you manipulate quite a few male npcs.

That's all very nice, but the point is, non-maxed intelligence means permanently lost skill points that aren't ever coming back. Going with 5 strength + strong back until Almost Perfect at level 30 means absolutely nothing lost. Well, maybe a bit of loot over the course of the game but nothing significant, and it's not like anyone's likely to be running out of caps anyway.


That is probably the worst reason you could give to invest in strength. It's a one-time bonus of +2 skillpoints per point spent in strength. Even without Broken Steel, every point spent in Intelligence at char creation is 19 skillpoints PLUS a further +2 to science, repair, and medicine, three skills you're almost certainly going to want to invest in anyway.

In economics there's a principle called opportunity cost. When you make a choice, any choice really, there's a number of options you didn't go with. When you're considering the gain of whatever choice you made, you can't simply compare it with not having made a choice at all. You must always, always, ALWAYS compare it with the possible alternatives, meaning the opportunities you decided not to go with. That lost opportunities is also part of the price of your action. If you spend your money on apples then you can't also spend them buying oranges. Every apple bought is thus a lost orange.

Skipping economics and getting back to the point you tried to make, you're seeing benefit from gaining 8 skill points in melee from investing 4 points into strength for 9 total. True, that is a bonus from investing in strength, but that bonus is something like a third of what you'd have gained from investing just a single point more in intelligence. The opportunity cost is staggering. No offense meant, but your reasoning simply isn't sound in the above quote.


The levelling mostly is pointless anyway, at least if you've got Broken Steel. There's way too few quality perks so you're not really making hard decisions anyway. Toughest choice I had to make was whether to go with chemist or fast metabolism at 29. Kind of telling, I should think.

As far as skills are concerned, Comprehension really is a good boost. If you're suffciently determined, you really just want to bring all skills to ~45, with the bubblehead adding +10 and books doing the rest. Problem is, getting all those books is freaking annoying and you really want a few skills up high ASAP. Repair to 100, lockpick, your main weapon skill, medicine, maybe sneak too, science. That's easily 5-6 skills that you'll want to raise from a fairly low starting point. Say you want to add 60 points to all of them. Even with 10 int that's 15-18 levels we're talking about. Unless you're playing it smart and using Comprehension and bubbleheads to help out somewhat. And keep in mind that then barter, speech, and explosives will still be left at very low levels.

Thanks everybody for all the tips on my female character build... lots of really good ideas.

:)

Getting back to the last, Black Widow is a great perk, especially if you're not going to be a neutral character. I think that the Regulator and Talon hit squads are typically all male, as are the majority of the raiders and other trash you'll encounter. And, it allows you to end Blood Ties, Superhuman Gambit, and possibly other quests more quickly. It also gives you interesting new options in "Power of the Atom".