Help with creating melee/unarmed character

[Sinophile]

Hai Guyz,

 

I have finished my first play through of NV, but realized that even after 50 hours of game play, that There is a ton that I've missed. I play in hardcore mode, and wanted to make a "monk" type character(someone who doesn't rely on heavy weapons or technology). I have created several characters already, but I keep growing bored for some reason, or wishing I built my character differently. Anyway, here are my questions:

 

1.) Which is more fun and/or useful, melee or unarmed?

 

2.) Is survival more useful than medicine?

 

3.) Are skills such as luck and charisma any useful, or are they dump stats like they were in FO3(Keep in mind I don't intend on doing much gambling).

 

4.) Which quests are more fun, Mr. House or NCR? Last time I followed Yes Man, and I liked how I pretty much blew off the other three factions, for a truly independent New Vegas.

[Akimb0]

Hai Guyz,

 

I have finished my first play through of NV, but realized that even after 50 hours of game play, that There is a ton that I've missed. I play in hardcore mode, and wanted to make a "monk" type character(someone who doesn't rely on heavy weapons or technology). I have created several characters already, but I keep growing bored for some reason, or wishing I built my character differently. Anyway, here are my questions:

 

1.) Which is more fun and/or useful, melee or unarmed?

 

2.) Is survival more useful than medicine?

 

3.) Are skills such as luck and charisma any useful, or are they dump stats like they were in FO3(Keep in mind I don't intend on doing much gambling).

 

4.) Which quests are more fun, Mr. House or NCR? Last time I followed Yes Man, and I liked how I pretty much blew off the other three factions, for a truly independent New Vegas.

 

1) The best melee/unarmed perks require you to have both.

 

2) Not by a long shot.

 

3) Hm, sometimes useful to bypass a fight, however why would you want to do that? XP and items down the drain if you take the sissy route.

 

4) Up to you to decide, do them all and then choose for yourself which you liked more.

[DeathTyrant]

1. Agreed with Akimb0 - both are useful for getting the better perks, until the requirements are fixed (IF they are fixed). You will find extremely powerful weapons for both. Ballistic Fists vs Super Sledges and Knock-Knock or even Shishkebab with the Pyromaniac perk.

 

2. Medicine is more useful. You can solve more quests with it (helping tend to wounded et cetera), and Stimpaks are readily available both lying around and in stores. Plus Stimpaks have no weight, whereas Food and drink does.

 

3. Up to you. Luck is useful if you are going for a build that goes for maximum critical chance and damage. Charisma is good for chatty trader characters, but not all that important for a Close Combat berserker.

 

4. I have not done Mr. House yet, only Yes Man and NCR. I like NCR, but thought Yes Man was better. You can always do a lot of quest for each faction up until the last couple of quests, where you need to pick a side.

[Park77]

1) Usefulness: early in the game melee is. Later on, because of special attacks, I'd say unarmed is.

Interesting: Without giving spoilers, unarmed has 2 special attacks to choose from in VATS, and 1 occurs by chance (paralysing palm). Also, unarmed has up to 5 (6?) special moves you can execute outside of VATS, with different uses.

Melee weapons have only 1 extra move in VATS, and 2 outside of VATS. But each melee weapon type has its own special VATS attack, so that adds variety.

 

2) I've found how much you heal is more important than heal items and chems you can make. So medicine> survival. Besides, with all the extra caps you have from selling ammo and armor, you can pretty buy whatever you need.

 

3) LK: very useful for crit in Very Hard: Hardcore, since ST does not really affect damage like it should

CH: Unless companion nerve is really useful for you, CH is pretty useless. Speech can be built up using skill points, and barter shouldn't matter much, as you should have a lot of caps from selling guns and ammo.

ST: Only useful because a lot of the good melee and unarmed weapons have high ST requirements

AG: Not terribly useful, as VATS is less important with an unarmed/melee build.

PE: Don't need to see too far, since combat is up-close and personal. ED-E can take up the slack

IN: Higher than 5, since you need to invest in at least 2 combat skills

Rule of thumb: EN and LK should be high, good IN is nice too, just make sure the rest are high enough to meet your perk requirements.

 

4) couldn't say, but try not to piss off too many factions until you learn all 4 of the unarmed moves from them.

Edited December 11, 2010 by Park77

[pjz]

Survival has the big advantage of poison crafting.

 

Power wise, most melee weapons are really terrible compared to even basic unarmed weapons - Nash in Primm sells a bladed gauntlet, and very shortly afterward you can pick up some brass knuckles, and on to better weapons for sale at Novac (usually a power fist). Your best melee weapon for a long time, unless you metagame and go swipe specific things that are way off the beaten path, is ... a baseball bat, if you're lucky. When you start finding sledgehammers it gets a lot nicer. All the standard knives, straightrazors, switchblades, police batons, cleavers, machetes and all that are garbage, mainly because their base damage is too small to penetrate any DT, although that changes if you take Piercing Strike (imo that's a must have perk for any type of melee). As the others are telling you, you pretty much need both Melee and Unarmed to be exceptionally good at either one.

 

VATS tends to be a lot worse for you if there is more than one enemy, as you can't do anything but eat damage while your attack animations run, but vs. one enemy it's still good.

 

Here's the perk selections I like:

 

2 Intensive Training

 

4 Educated (int 4)

 

6 Toughness /1 (end 5)

 

8 Stonewall (str 6, end 6)

 

10 Finesse

 

12 Silent Running (agi 6, sneak 50)

 

14 Piercing Strike (unarmed 70)

 

16 Jury Rigging (repair 90) (for repairing the top shelf weaps with junk replacement parts)

 

18 Better Criticals (per 6, luck 6)

 

20 Ninja (melee 80, sneak 80)

 

22 Toughness /2 (end 5)

 

24 Slayer

 

26 onwards, whatever you like

[pjz]

Highly recommend these mods, they don't go overboard but fix some boned things in the vanilla game:

http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=36953 (less retarded survival recipes)

http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=35101 (a simple mod that allows you to craft throwing knives and spears, and recover them from kills)

http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=36638 (fixes the silly Ninja perk formula to do what it says, add 15% crit chance, instead of a multiplicative bonus)

 

Consider the sprint and bullet time mods also, although I haven't tried those myself. Those three above are imo pretty essential things that should have been in the vanilla game.

[Sinophile]

Well, according to the FONV wiki, the new patch will be out in a week or two, I think I will wait until then to start a new character. I didn't realize that the Shiskebab was available in NV, I assumed that it was dropped from the game. I hope that I can make a shiskebab wielding ninja like I used to have. It seems as though there are tons more unarmed moves than melee. The strange thing is in my last/first NV playthrough, I oftentimes had to use unarmed(I found something called Pushy, a very powerful unarmed weapons) in order to overcome the DT of many enemies, as my small guns(I was a gunsmith who invested all of her skills into repair and guns), literally did not cut it.