Fallout Fallout 1-2 builds

[Beans00]

The best part of fallout 1/2 is playing random stuff that you like. If you have never played before, go in blind and take perks/traits that sound cool.
The games are a lot easier than Underrail, so it would be pretty hard to lock yourself out from finishing it.

When I was a kid I played a junkie/sex addict character(inspired by vice city, lol). I had small frame and chem reliant, no matter what I stole and sold anything I could find, to buy and use any drug or alcohol I could get my hands on. I sold all other companions into slavery aswell.

I robbed and cheated, I got married and sold my wife into slavery to buy jet a few houses over. I could use knives and small guns, but I usually ran low on ammo since I used it to score psycho and jet and mentats.


The name of this character was 'costco' after the grocery store. I was 12 or 13 years old, my mom got mad when she heard me tell my brother about what I was doing.

 

[Ryan muller]

My favorite Fallout 2 build "Implants run" (veteran, although a solid first time build too):


starting: | derived:
===========
S- 5 | 8 (red module, Power Armor)
P- 7 | 8 (green module)
E- 4 | 4 (taking a perk lategame for the fuck of it? meh)
C- 8 | 8 with upgraded implants, 10 without (blue module + perk) or 9 with Shades in second slot cause you only really need a Gauss pistol
I - 7 | 8 (yellow module)
A- 8 | 8
L - 8 | 10 (+2 Hubologist scan)

Traits: Finesse, Gifted
Tags: Doctor, Lockpick, Speech

Taking Perks as follows:
lvl3 - Healer (xp gain and healing gain from First aid/Doctor is underrated)
lvl6 - Bonus Ranged Dmg (slight compensation for Finesse, good for burst weapons too. Take Awareness here instead if not interested)
lvl9 - Better Criticals. No negotiation.
lvl12 - Living anatomy ofc
lvl15 - Bonus Rate of Fire (=3 shots from Gauss pistol)
lvl18 - Gain Charisma (I like taking as many companions, offsets Implant upgrades)
lvl21 - Awareness (roleplay flavor pick since at this point I'm in Power Armor, take whatever. Magnetic Personality here, for more companions)
lvl24 - Sniper (Cheese with Mentats if you didn't get green module yet. Game over, LK10 = crit constantly)

Lategame perks: Magnetic Personality, second level Healer and Bonus Ranged Dmg

Acquired special Perks that the build provides:

Vault City Inoculations
Vault City Training
Alcohol Raised Hitpoints II
Dermal Impact Armor (and optional upgrade)
Phoenix Armor Implants (and optional upgrade)

Style: Consuming Buffout and Mentats, sleeping with everything that moves, Savior of the Damned karma

Cheese:
1. Savescum to get Good vs Bad guys Map travel encounters, letting them kill eachother and picking loot throughout early-mid game
2. Discovering San Franciso after lvl 18. Save before entering the city, run to Red 888 guns shop and check if Gauss pistol / rifle (and later on just for the 2mm EC ammo) spawns, load until get
3. Same with NCR Bazaar, save b4 entering the map, you're looking for the ammo(3rd shelf) that can spawn up to 250 in stack, load until get.
Repeat every time you visit these places and no more 2mm EC problems.
4. Fun fact: Encountering Hubologists around San Fran is excellent for 3 reasons: you don't lose karma by killing them, they don't attack if you pickpocket fail, and they carry valuable shit. Strategy: Pickpocket the ones without visible weapon equipped - they carry several Plazma grenades. Take the nades and member them cause they'll still have one more in active slot, aka shoot them first. The ones with a weapon are actually packing a rare Heckler&Koch G11E variant. A great secondary weapon option for this build, bearing in mind that it requires STR 6.

Notable companion gear:

Vic - best with Gauss pistol
Cassidy - can shoot Gauss rifle 2 times later on
Skynet - same^
Sulik - I like to keep the Hammer/Super Sledge from San Fran thing going. Shame he can't use Cattle Prod, make it happen someone?

Notes:
A fun Sniper Perk secondary weapon option would be a FN FAL HPFA due to the highest burst crit output as stated in the wiki.
Passively boosting Energy weapons throughout the game is also a thing here, in case you wanna go for Alien Blaster Eye crits or you just like Laser/Pulse stuff.

Why living anatomy? It's very, very weak. Also this is a very squishy build, hard to recommend somebody for the first run.

4 ED isnt squishy

2 ED is however

 

[Ryan muller]

Jinxed alter crit tables to every entity in the game, including you, i dont think you can unlock higher tier effects with Better crits in this build. Correct me if im wrong

Jinxed doesn't alter crit tables, it changes the chance for a miss to be converted into a critical failure.

Critical failures are described here: https://www.nma-fallout.com/threads/critical-failure-tables.197165/

Luck does generally make your critical failures less bad, but doesn't do anything to your critical hits (aside from if you take better criticals).

Then luck does matter, the whole point was getting least terrible crit failures, strange tho, i could swear picking better crits in fact made me less susceptible to fucked up effects

Maybe im just imagining stuff, but i do recall getting less "weapon drop" turns post Better crits

 

[Average Manatee]

Then luck does matter, the whole point was getting least terrible crit failures, strange tho, i could swear picking better crits in fact made me less susceptible to fucked up effects

Maybe im just imagining stuff, but i do recall getting less "weapon drop" turns post Better crits

It does matter but it still isn't really *that* important. What you do is only take 95% shots, at which point you have a 5% of failing and then only 2.5% chance of critical failure. >5 luck does help make the failures slightly less bad overall, but just 6 is enough to eliminate the worst failures.

This is also why people do jinxed with unarmed. Unarmed lets you boost your AC far higher than everything else (like 90+), which means enemies are missing more often and therefore getting more crit failures. And if you critically fail at worst you lost your turn, you don't lost your expensive gun/ammo.

 

[Ol' Willy]

Finesse also means you can never use un-aimed fire at all, can't use burst weapons (great early game when you can otherwise kill things way stronger than you should be able to by point blank bursts), you basically have to use eye shots every time because otherwise your damage goes into the toilet, so you have to put every skill point into your weapon skill early game to compensate for -60% accuracy. It gets very slightly better with better crits since you replace the crit that doesn't bypass armor with an instant kill one, but its still really marginal. In the lategame sniper/slayer will make it not matter either way anyway

Finesse often goes along with Fast Shot. Since you lose crit bonus from aimed shot, you use every possible way to ramp up clean crit chance.

With 10 L and Finesse you get 20% crit right on lvl 1. Then you get three ranks of More Criticals to get it to 35%

35% doesn't seem much, but when used with burst firing weapons, especially miniguns, this works wonders

And obviously, once you get Sniper, nearly every hit is a crit and the build just becomes ridiculous

 

[Jigby]

The whole unarmed + hth evade + jinxed is a bit of a meme though. You do get +25 AC from 300% Unarmed, but you fight at close range, meaning enemies have no distance cth penalties. In contrast, you can easily boost your AC by fighting at range. 20 hexes is effectively +80AC and 20 hexes isn't too much. You can do that on most maps. Fighting at night is another +40 AC. And getting 300% Unarmed is really expensive, plus you have to waste a perk slot on Tag!. You'll probably also have to do some ugly meta-gaming, going to San Francisco early to get the free Unarmed training - to save at least some skillpoints.

Regarding Luck and Jinxed, I suppose from an Ironman perspective, LU>=6, guns and grenades are the safest. A bit sad that flares have the "unarmed" category - you could combine them with HtH Evade and fight at distance.

 

[Ol' Willy]

build

The big issue with this build is that you will be really short of Special points.

10L and 10 AG are non-negotiable. CHA is dumped as usual

You can't hard dump STR because full-auto weapons need it. Buffouts, STR implant and PA help, but the latter two come way late in the game

You need relatively high PER for being able to hit your targets, I think 8 is fine

END and INT have to be dumped, no other way

And the major pain is that you can't cheese it with Gifted since two traits are already selected

 

[Ol' Willy]

The whole unarmed + hth evade + jinxed is a bit of a meme though. You do get +25 AC from 300% Unarmed, but you fight at close range, meaning enemies have no distance cth penalties. In contrast, you can easily boost your AC by fighting at range. 20 hexes is effectively +80AC and 20 hexes isn't too much. You can do that on most maps. Fighting at night is another +40 AC. And getting 300% Unarmed is really expensive, plus you have to waste a perk slot on Tag!. You'll probably also have to do some ugly meta-gaming, going to San Francisco early to get the free Unarmed training - to save at least some skillpoints.

Just invest in sneaking and pick your fights at ease

 

[Jigby]

The whole unarmed + hth evade + jinxed is a bit of a meme though. You do get +25 AC from 300% Unarmed, but you fight at close range, meaning enemies have no distance cth penalties. In contrast, you can easily boost your AC by fighting at range. 20 hexes is effectively +80AC and 20 hexes isn't too much. You can do that on most maps. Fighting at night is another +40 AC. And getting 300% Unarmed is really expensive, plus you have to waste a perk slot on Tag!. You'll probably also have to do some ugly meta-gaming, going to San Francisco early to get the free Unarmed training - to save at least some skillpoints.

Just invest in sneaking and pick your fights at ease

Yes, but that goes contrary to the idea of a Jinxed build - the idea being you let yourself be purposefully shot at, so that your enemies can miss and break their arms or something. Hilarity ensues. It's not a powergaming build, it's mostly about lulz.

 

[Poseidon00]

Because of your tribal background, I always made a character with decent outdoorsman, melee weapon, and unarmed skills. Decent endurance, agility, and strength, but nothing too high or too low. Was this an easy way to play the game? Nope. But it felt appropriate.

 

[Average Manatee]

Finesse often goes along with Fast Shot. Since you lose crit bonus from aimed shot, you use every possible way to ramp up clean crit chance.

With 10 L and Finesse you get 20% crit right on lvl 1. Then you get three ranks of More Criticals to get it to 35%

35% doesn't seem much, but when used with burst firing weapons, especially miniguns, this works wonders

And obviously, once you get Sniper, nearly every hit is a crit and the build just becomes ridiculous

No, that's the exact opposite of what you want to do and absolutely awful pre-sniper. Just completely terrible. +30% DR makes strong enemies go from 40-50% DR to 70-80% DR. This is basically cutting your damage output in half. 35% crit rate when you're always taking a -50% damage output is the worst idea ever. Taking all those more crit bonuses is also an awful idea because it means you're forgoing better criticals and bonus rate of fire which is just nuts.

The big issue with this build is that you will be really short of Special points.

10L and 10 AG are non-negotiable. CHA is dumped as usual

You can't hard dump STR because full-auto weapons need it. Buffouts, STR implant and PA help, but the latter two come way late in the game

You need relatively high PER for being able to hit your targets, I think 8 is fine

END and INT have to be dumped, no other way

And the major pain is that you can't cheese it with Gifted since two traits are already selected

You don't seem to understand how FO combat works. PER is just a bonus to ranged chance to hit, but you don't need that at all with fast shot because you aren't taking an additional -60% from aimed shots.

 

[luj1]

Finesse also means you can never use un-aimed fire at all, can't use burst weapons (great early game when you can otherwise kill things way stronger than you should be able to by point blank bursts), you basically have to use eye shots every time because otherwise your damage goes into the toilet, so you have to put every skill point into your weapon skill early game to compensate for -60% accuracy. It gets very slightly better with better crits since you replace the crit that doesn't bypass armor with an instant kill one, but its still really marginal. In the lategame sniper/slayer will make it not matter either way anyway

Finesse often goes along with Fast Shot. Since you lose crit bonus from aimed shot, you use every possible way to ramp up clean crit chance.

With 10 L and Finesse you get 20% crit right on lvl 1. Then you get three ranks of More Criticals to get it to 35%

35% doesn't seem much, but when used with burst firing weapons, especially miniguns, this works wonders

And obviously, once you get Sniper, nearly every hit is a crit and the build just becomes ridiculous

ye thats cool

 

[Ol' Willy]

No, that's the exact opposite of what you want to do and absolutely awful pre-sniper. Just completely terrible. +30% DR makes strong enemies go from 40-50% DR to 70-80% DR. This is basically cutting your damage output in half. 35% crit rate when you're always taking a -50% damage output is the worst idea ever. Taking all those more crit bonuses is also an awful idea because it means you're forgoing better criticals and bonus rate of fire which is just nuts.

It doesn't work like that

While your non-crit hits are absolute trash, the crits are fine - especially those that ignore the armor and DR along with it. You compensate the lack of base damage with more crits, and considering that you will be burst firing all around - the chances are good

AP ammo also really helps, but because it is bugged in vanilla this build is best in com patched version

 

[Ryan muller]

you can compensate lack of PER with skillpoints regardless, so even with aimed shots PER isnt all that important. i usually just go 6 because of Better crits

 

[Ryan muller]

No, that's the exact opposite of what you want to do and absolutely awful pre-sniper. Just completely terrible. +30% DR makes strong enemies go from 40-50% DR to 70-80% DR. This is basically cutting your damage output in half. 35% crit rate when you're always taking a -50% damage output is the worst idea ever. Taking all those more crit bonuses is also an awful idea because it means you're forgoing better criticals and bonus rate of fire which is just nuts.

It doesn't work like that

While your non-crit hits are absolute trash, the crits are fine - especially those that ignore the armor and DR along with it. You compensate the lack of base damage with more crits, and considering that you will be burst firing all around - the chances are good

AP ammo also really helps, but because it is bugged in vanilla this build is best in com patched version

you are considering burst?

we are talking about FO2? honestly at close range bozar can kill literally everything regardless of Crits or not.

 

[Ol' Willy]

Late game, when you get Bozar...

Fast shot + 10AG + two action boys = 12 AP for turn which means two bursts and reload

Even before sniper, it's 30 shots per turn with 35% crit chance. Moreso, .223FMJ has -20% DR modifier for cases if you don't crit

After getting sniper, you can mow down entire Enclave patrols in just a couple of turns

 

[Ryan muller]

Late game, when you get Bozar...

Fast shot + 10AG + two action boys = 12 AP for turn which means two bursts and reload

Even before sniper, it's 30 shots per turn with 35% crit chance. Moreso, .223FMJ has -20% DR modifier for cases if you don't crit

After getting sniper, you can mow down entire Enclave patrols in just a couple of turns

Boozar RoF is high enough that the lack of critical barely matter, you will hit kill anyone regardless. my last build was a L1 big guns user

it just works.

i suppose having more is better for horrigan i think, aside from that, not a big deal. and it doesnt take that much time to get on strong big guns, flamer is also quite strong and you can get it in the way to New reno, 45-90 damage with the Mk2 ammo (which you can easily get at NR) also helps, making it extremely viable and useful during a good portion of the game even at L1.

Big guns is way too strong in Fo2 in general, you can break the whole game with it if you can endure Klamath, arroyo and the den

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

One of the reasons why I pick One hander over Finesse.

One Hander gets quite insane in Fallout with the .223 Pistol in Fallout or the Gauss Pistol in Fallout 2. If you take Fast Shot and combine that with pistols already requiring less AP, you can rattle off quite a few shots every turn. Without Fast Shot and a high small arms skill, you can shoot people in the eyes from across the map. If you see them, you can shoot them in the eyes. You can take out even some of the bigger critters in one to three shots. Pistol builds are some of my favorite ones in Fallout and Fallout 2, though it's easier to get the Gauss Pistol in Fallout 2(if it spawns in the game. It's actually possible for it not to spawn ever in a game of Fallout 2.) than it is to get the .223 Pistol in Fallout.

 

[Average Manatee]

It doesn't work like that

While your non-crit hits are absolute trash, the crits are fine - especially those that ignore the armor and DR along with it. You compensate the lack of base damage with more crits, and considering that you will be burst firing all around - the chances are good

AP ammo also really helps, but because it is bugged in vanilla this build is best in com patched version

Attacks in Fallout don't check their crit per bullet, but per attack. So no, just don't do that. Burst just makes it even more likely you won't deal damage unless you crit.

If you *have* to rely on crits to kill something (which you do with Finesse, because its basically like giving every enemy in the game free Psycho), then you are absolutely silly to miss out on +60% crit from aiming for the eyes.

The whole unarmed + hth evade + jinxed is a bit of a meme though. You do get +25 AC from 300% Unarmed, but you fight at close range, meaning enemies have no distance cth penalties. In contrast, you can easily boost your AC by fighting at range. 20 hexes is effectively +80AC and 20 hexes isn't too much. You can do that on most maps. Fighting at night is another +40 AC. And getting 300% Unarmed is really expensive, plus you have to waste a perk slot on Tag!. You'll probably also have to do some ugly meta-gaming, going to San Francisco early to get the free Unarmed training - to save at least some skillpoints.

Regarding Luck and Jinxed, I suppose from an Ironman perspective, LU>=6, guns and grenades are the safest. A bit sad that flares have the "unarmed" category - you could combine them with HtH Evade and fight at distance.

There is a bug with Tag! where you can get basically infinite skill points out of it. When you take it, it doubles the amount of points you have invested (including from getting training), but that can go (invisibly) over 300, and you can unallocate all those points at a refund of 6 skill points per point of unarmed. So if you persevere and just invest into unarmed and pick up the various trainings you can get like 600 free skill points out of it along with maxed unarmed skill. In total that single perk can be worth like 1k skill points.

You also get AC from not using your AP, so the trick is to just stand still at range and Neo-dodge bullets till everyone's gun explodes. Then they comes to fight you in melee and you can laugh at them falling over.

That said it is basically a meme build.

 

[Ol' Willy]

If you *have* to rely on crits to kill something (which you do with Finesse, because its basically like giving every enemy in the game free Psycho), then you are absolutely silly to miss out on +60% crit from aiming for the eyes.

If you go for aimed shots, you don't need finesse at all

I played sniper build countless times and never ever though about adding finesse

 

[Ryan muller]

If you *have* to rely on crits to kill something (which you do with Finesse, because its basically like giving every enemy in the game free Psycho), then you are absolutely silly to miss out on +60% crit from aiming for the eyes.

If you go for aimed shots, you don't need finesse at all

I played sniper build countless times and never ever though about adding finesse

wasnt his whole point that finesse sucked?

 

[Jigby]

There is a bug with Tag! where you can get basically infinite skill points out of it. When you take it, it doubles the amount of points you have invested (including from getting training), but that can go (invisibly) over 300, and you can unallocate all those points at a refund of 6 skill points per point of unarmed. So if you persevere and just invest into unarmed and pick up the various trainings you can get like 600 free skill points out of it along with maxed unarmed skill. In total that single perk can be worth like 1k skill points.

"you can get like 600 free skill points out of it along with maxed unarmed skill"
If you want to keep your unarmed at 300%, there's no way that you'll be able to get 600 free skill points on top of it. That would be one hell of a free lunch

The free skill points from Tag! is more along the lines of leveling up some skill for free, (like Science, can be leveled up to 127% just by reading books), then tagging the skill and lowering it to the pre-Tag! level, pocketing the delta. So you get ~200 or whatever of skill points for the perk slot and the skill remains at 127%. But unarmed doesn't have a book. To get 300% after Tag!, you need to increase unarmed to about 175%-180%. But in your case you want to Tag! it beyond 300%. I couldn't be bothered to math it so I cheated myself 20 levels worth of xp. To get to 190% Unarmed, it took me ~400 skill points, then after Tag! and lowering Unarmed from above 300% to just 300% I pocketed about 100 skill points, so I'm still ~300 skill points behind. There's about 45 "inflation free" Unarmed training skill points (of course the price paid is ugly meta-gaming, similar to doing a Navarro run) so even with those I'm ~200 skill points behind.

Also to test it I had to downgrade sfall to an older version, 4.1.1 (2018). I kind of wonder whether the bug with Tag! doesn't exist solely because of sfall. Thief has a similar bug (taking the perk, then lowering skill to pocket the difference; and I assume other skill gaining perks have the bug too) - I was a bit surprised when I found out that you can't lower your skill after Thief in non-sfall vanilla. [EDIT: nah, I guess it must have been in vanilla too]

 

[Jigby]

I did the Bonus HtH Evade thing a couple of times, but it always felt like too much work for not that big of a payoff. The skill progression is also ugly, you have to hoard skill points for unarmed (have to keep Unarmed under 100% so you can get the free training in San Francisco). So you can't increase your other skills that much (have to hoard), but you can't increase Unarmed either... and then you spend 2 perk slots (tag!, bonus hth evade) that on a normal build you wouldn't have.

 

[Rincewind]

But, sadly, the combat is shit.

So I agree with this:

Combat is easy and cheesable so the best build is just whatever gets you the most skill points so you can resolve quests in the best way possible.

 

[NecroLord]

I did the Bonus HtH Evade thing a couple of times, but it always felt like too much work for not that big of a payoff. The skill progression is also ugly, you have to hoard skill points for unarmed (have to keep Unarmed under 100% so you can get the free training in San Francisco). So you can't increase your other skills that much (have to hoard), but you can't increase Unarmed either... and then you spend 2 perk slots (tag!, bonus hth evade) that on a normal build you wouldn't have.

Worst impediment to Full Unarmed build is the majority of enemies carrying powerful ranged weapons.
You absolutely need Bonus Move perk, not to mention Full Action Points so you can close the distance between you and your enemies.