- Damage of all weapons in this category would be based on Survival skill.
- All weapons would require certain levels of Survival skill to be used.
- All weapons would have extremely low STR requirements unless thrown.
- Thrown would get direct damage bonus from STR.
- All weapons and ammunition you could manufacture using Survival skill and items found commonly in the wasteland.
- Survival perks like Hunter or Entomologist would benefit additional damage to these weapons.
- This would be a perfect backup skill for everyone using more expensive or difficult main weapon, for example from the explosives category.
- All weapons would be considered silent unless explosive ammo is used.
- All weapons would have low base damage and high critical damage supporting usage of them on sneaky hunter-like characters.

Weapon choices would include hunting equipment such us:
- Throwing Knives
- Throwing Hatchets
- Throwing Spears
- Traps
- Bows
- Crossbows

Ammo choices would be normal, exploding or poisoned arrows and bolts. All of them could be manufactured in infinite amounts using Survival skill.

What do you think?

I'd rather have Throwing skill back and a new skill completely for arrow-based weaponry (bows, crossbows).
And traps should belong to Security skill (which they didn't put into the game :banghead:).
But no, I don't think Survival should be a combat skill.

pretty good idea i think! i mean survival doesnt have much going for it right now. your idea makes a hell of alot of sense to me. hope you're listening obsidian/bethesda!

Bah, they should just bring back the old Traps skill, for disarming and laying traps.

I think traps should belong to survival.

Traps wasn't great to begin with.

Cold ballistic with their own skill is reasonable, but I think bring throwing back is the true answer.

Yeah I think it's a great idea. Bows and crossbows wouldn't do a lot of damage but would let you add poison to a real ranged weapon (not just thrown)

Actually now that I think of it, they could do pretty good damage but all arrows should have like a 4x penalty against armor (crossbow bolts 2x)



Those would be 3 useless skills. Don't see how you could possibly justify adding them.

Security would be way better than having traps, lockpick and hacking divided amongst other skills.

If there are enough arrow-based weaponry with multiple different ammo types with explosive arrows for high DT targets then it's a perfectly viable combat skill.

And throwing is also a completely viable combat skill, just needs a few more weapons and a little better availability (Maybe have a tribal who sells throwing knifes/spears/hatchets exclusively), and grenades needs to be a combo weapon, meaning if you have high Explosives you can use them to perfection or if you have high Throwing then you can use them to perfection, it is a viable combat skill, it just depends on how the game is designed.

Makes sense to me. This skill should also encompass making of armor from skins. Golden gecko-skin leather armor would be both stylish and very protective, once you had enough skins to make it.

Basically anything that falls under the heading of "surviving off the land" should be governed by the Survival skill.

Something else that comes to mind is "musk salve", that you make from animal products. It lets you disguise yourself (by scent at least) as the type of animal in question. They will no longer chase you down from long range, but instead do the Coyote-style defensive posturing, and only attack you if you get too close (or attack them first). So if you make Nightstalker Musk Salve and use it, for a few hours the Nightstalkers will leave you alone unless you bother them.

Oh in that case Security would be completely overpowered. One skill lets you hack any computer or pick any lock?

I really don't think there would be that many arrow based weapons, unless you were fighting tribals (and if that was the case they would probably be low level weapons).

Throwing has never really been worthwhile in fallout. Adding it to explosives was one of the few really good things Fallout 3 did for the franchise (besides bringing it back).

I don't find it overpowered. Science is barely a useful skill in New Vegas anyway, there aren't as many computer to hack as in FO3 so I never see any point in picking Science unless I'm an EW character and in that case I just pick it to recycle ammo better and create max charge.
So adding the hacking thing with lockpick to it's own skill makes sense to me.

All depends on how the game is designed, if they were to add more tribals in one of the upcoming DLC's it would mean you could get more from them, and if you add explosive charges to the tip of the arrow they could make it to high level weaponry and hell, what if you could get plasma charges from people? Would make the arrows/bolts even better. And then we have flaming arrows and poison arrows which could be great for low DT enemies. And we could have weapons like from Mad Max Thunderdome which use arrows as well.
It's not impossible to have these weapons belong to their own skill and be perfectly viable.

Again, all depends on how it's designed, in the old games the skill was barely useful since the weapons were so rare and grenades had a tendency to drop right in front of your feet. But it is possible to expand on the skill, just like they did with Explosive in New Vegas, and make it into a useful skill.
Just cause it was crap in the past does not mean it's too late for it to stop being crap.

I like the fact they reduced the number of weapon skills. I wouldn't want them to split categories again, I only want to give an idea how new weapons can be worked into the game to make one skill that isn't typically trained high and which perks aren't particularly good become a bit stronger and more interesting adding another option for character development.

I'm quite happy to be honest how they did weapons in categories in FNV getting rid of all the useless stuff making each category a viable choice for entire game. I think they will merge unarmed and melee eventually into one skill too.

Since the higher your survival skill is, the better the poisons you can make; it seems redundant to have weapons crafted at a fire which would require survival skill. If you have not tried poisoning a melee weapon yet, it can really be a game changer.

Though a crossbow or bow would be a nice ranged weapon. Poison arrows would easily compete with any guns based character.

To some extent, merging unarmed and melee is just like merging EW and guns.

Maybe unarmed/melee should transfer as Blunt and Blade weapons; blunt weapon skill can be use to open locks and blade weapon skill enhance survival.

Eitherway, I think this should be in the next game instead of a NVoverhaul

There aren't enough ways to deliver poisons into enemy body. Bows and crossbows would be perfect for it - but they aren't even in the game.

Adding them into one of existing categories wouldn't really be possible, they don't fit anywhere. That's why I chose to base them on Survival instead. A skill that isn't valued very high and which isn't trained high even on hardcoe characters. They would breathe some life into it - and add some cool equipment at the same time. Something everyone could use as secondary. Or something you could even go through the game using and not even have any proper weapon skills. Perfect for low STR peaceful characters.

I think if everything in that suggestion were implemented, Survival would become the most overpowered "universal" skill ever in the entire series. The weapons are all upside and no downside with minimal requirements, even getting damage bonuses from other skills. You're getting combat effectiveness from a healing and crafting skill- meaning piling points into it would make you better at crafting, healing yourself, and fighting. So instead of needing to put points into several skills, you pile'em all into survival and ta-dah, instant uber-character?

No. Just...no.

I think I'd rather see this implemented:



Makes about as much sense as a crafting skill doubling as an extremely powerful, low-reqs combat skill, eh?



What's perfect for peaceful characters is not fighting. Not the contradiction of having no "proper" weapon skills, but being absurdly powerful in combat anyway.

You could balance that using damage and access to resources required to make particular types of weapons. I never wrote crossbow would hit like AMR. It could as well hit like Cowboy Repeater - and topped with poisoned bolts it could maybe outdamage one with Cowboy perk. Making explosive arrows could be as hard as making a powder charge currently. So on.

First thing people would be doing if ammo factories shut down would be going back to bolt and arrow. Having bows and crossbows in the game makes more sense than having lasers in it. Those not even being present in the game is just an awkward oversight inherited from original Fallout games for some reason (engine coding laziness most likely).

Worth addressing that eventually. If not DLC then maybe next Fallout.

And then when you agree those deserve a place in the game, it's a question of finding them a skill to be associated with. Survival fits best for me.

There are alreay hatchets and spears in the game.

What other survival weapon would you need besides your trusty rifle?

Hell, I'd just like to see a [censored] crossbow in a game published or made by Bethesda again.

Hmmm.
I was prepared to dismiss this idea out of hand but, after some thought, I think some form of your suggestions might actually increase my use of the Survival skill. I've given the skill a go as it currently stands and have found that it just doesn't suit my play style at all. Currently, I just don't get any real enjoyment from collecting the materials to use at campfires and the perks presently associated with Survival don't really appeal to me, with the possible exceptions of Rad Child and Rad Resistance. Oh, it's not that all of the Survival perks aren't in some way useful, it's just that for my style of play, there are others in other Skill categories which I find more useful.

However, building a bit on your suggestions and those of Momaw ... specifically, crafting armour from skins ... having the ability to make use of maybe some sort of revised schematic idea similar to that in Fallout 3 in order to make "survival-type" weapons out of the debris found in the Wasteland would go a long way in to making more use of the Survival skill. I find the idea of being able to craft armour from creature skins especially appealing as it would allow the player to get something of an even more customized look (important to those of us who play a lot in 3rd person) as well as providing a pretty cool diversionary game mechanic.

There are a few things I'm not sure about, though.
Primarily, traps. What is hampering my agreement is that I find the current system of aligning traps to the Repair skill to be very logical. It makes perfect sense to me that since the traps in FO:NV are mostly mechanical in origin (with the exception of grenade cluster wire traps) that they should be governed by Repair. I'm not sure how I would feel about having the ability to disarm these traps (a game mechanic I enjoy greatly) reassigned to Survival. I guess it might work if there were a separation in trap types; say, assign mechanical traps to Repair and other, more primitive wire-base traps to Survival. It's a thought, anyway, especially since disarming landmines is (logically, I think) assigned to Explosives and somewhat sets a basis for the idea.

Also, I really wouldn't at all like lumping actions such as hacking and lockpicking into a single Security skill. If anything, I think that lockpicking should be aligned with Repair ... again, because of the mechanical aspect involved. Having hacking aligned to Science makes perfect sense. There is a vast difference in the ability required to hack a computer terminal versus picking a mechanical lock. Now, if the majority of the locks in NV were electronic, then that would be entirely different.

I have to admit that having throwing weapons governed by Survival does seem somewhat logical, especially since I think the related perk is Cowboy (?) but I don't make much use of them so I'm hardly in a position to speculate. I do think that if any "silent weapons" such as bows and arrows were introduced (which I think would be logical as such weapons would certainly be used widely in a post-apocalyptic world) then they should be aligned to Survival, especially if they were crafted by the player from materials found in the Wasteland. But, at the same time, that would bring up the idea of more mechanical versions of such weapons: i.e. crossbows and such, as Defaulted mentioned. I think that the main reason these types of weapons haven't shown up in the games is because they don't really go with the 50's type Sci-Fi feel that Fallout goes for. :shrug:

Anyway, I voted "Yay" as I think that some version of your suggestions is workable.

Indeed, Repair would be another logical category for this kind of equipment. But my original idea was to have all the possible hunting/tribal equipment in one place and in a skill that isn't otherwise particularly useful (goes for the perks too, even radiation ones - I can more than afford 100 credits to fight it down and even if I couldn't I'd just go hunt some Fiends or Super Mutants to sell their junk and pay for it). I think only newbies to hardcoe mode tag Survival and train it up to 100 and only in their first hardcoe runs. This is pretty much the truth for Cannibalism as well, "I need to eat corpses or I will starve" is something you very quickly find to simply not be true with the amounts of money and food available to you and short travel times on the world map to water and meat.

So, giving all the hunting stuff (thrown, traps, crossbow, bow) to Survival would strengthen this skill rather than making Repair stronger - which already is extremely useful and I think there aren't many people without Jury Rigging in almost all their characters. Repair would work too, but I don't think it'd add as much variety to our characters as boosting Survival would. At least that's my idea of it.

Just make it so we can pick up our thrown weapons.

Bows would actually require pretty high strength skills. If you've ever used one you'd know how hard it is to pull the string all the way back and hold it there. They are powerful though and can easily kill unarmored and light armored opponents. I think bows would have something like a 3x DT modifier. Crossbows don't require that much strength to actually fire but they take a really, really, long time to reload. You can only fire like 5 or 6 a minute. They are way more powerful than bows and I think they might even be able to break through something as tough as Combat Armor Mark I. The DT modifier would either be x2 ir x1.5 for a crossbow. They would fit into the survival skill nicely but I think explosive tipped arrows should need some explosives skill, obviously. You wouldn't make them at a camp-fire you would make them anywhere in the wasteland as long as you have a high enough skill, but maybe if they make a new workbench or something it could require a slightly lower survival skill to make it.

I'm for making armor and a bow with survival at campfire, but crossbows should be made at workbench w/ Repair.