squeehunter
First time out of the vault
SPECIAL was unbalanced from the transition from FO2 to FO3. The point of SPECIAL is that you have to make a descision about what kind of character you want to have. You only get five points to do that with. A lot of the usefulness of certain attributes was removed, making you not really see the need to add points to them and tempting you to bring them down to 1 and spending all of your points in other areas. If they're not useful in the first place, then it's like starting about with 15 points instead of five.
Perception - Perception has become the most useless skill. Other than skill boosts (big deal) it only affects your range of enemy detection. You can get the same benefits from just paying attention. I'd much rather have my points somewhere like in Strength or Endurance. Have it in addition to increasing enemy detection, affect your accuracy like it did in the first place.* Also, your ability to see at night time. The quest to get the sharpened spear in Arroyo would only activate if you had enough perception to notice that the bridge guard's was different. Maybe on your radar include white dots that only appear with sufficient Perception that lead you to interesting things. I don't mean loot, I mean like "This wall looks weak enough to be destroyed" or a quest or something. Shiny thing on ground...
*The ranged weapon skills make no sense. How exactly do you explain higher skill equaling more damage? I forgot who said it (Todd maybe) that origionally that was the case but it was too hard for anyone to shoot something. Well, geeze, you'd think someone with a low skill in something wouldn't be very good at it. (It's an RPG) I used a mod that did this exact thing and it worked great. Was the expected audience going to quit if they couldn't start shooting everything in sight right away? Yeah, it was harder to hit things at first, like it should be but it wasn't at all impossible. Once you get to 100% skill, the most accurate weapon in the game shouldn't have anymore spread and then the second most accurate gun should have slightly more etc. (You don't want to eliminate spread for entirely because that would mess up some guns being more useful for being more accurate) Ranged skills should affect, accuracy, reload times, and frequency of gun james. The same goes for explosives. How does a higher skill increase damage?
Charisma - Charisma was also nerfed. Even if you didn't want to be a diplomatic character in FO2, you didn't want to lower it too much because it affected the amount of followers you could have, which is something else that needs big fixing. Again, I forgot who said it but the justification for only one NPC at a time other than Dogmeat was AI problems. Again, I got a mod, had three followers based on my Charisma and it worked great. It felt a lot better too. So now, if you don't want to talk people into things, there's not much of a point in having Charisma.
Agility - Agility ranks #2. Unless you're using VATS a lot, this doesn't really have much of a use. Make it recharge your AP faster (it doesn't the last time I checked, only gives you more AP), and have it affect your chance to be hit like it used to do. And maybe have it affect your melee weapon speed.
-Less reasonable ideas-
Here are some ideas that I would totally understand if no one liked them. First, getting back to agility, make a second, automatic block based on Agility. Then, combine HtH with Melee. HtH always got the shaft when it came to weapon types so I say just stick them together so everyone gets access to all the weapons.
Perception - Perception has become the most useless skill. Other than skill boosts (big deal) it only affects your range of enemy detection. You can get the same benefits from just paying attention. I'd much rather have my points somewhere like in Strength or Endurance. Have it in addition to increasing enemy detection, affect your accuracy like it did in the first place.* Also, your ability to see at night time. The quest to get the sharpened spear in Arroyo would only activate if you had enough perception to notice that the bridge guard's was different. Maybe on your radar include white dots that only appear with sufficient Perception that lead you to interesting things. I don't mean loot, I mean like "This wall looks weak enough to be destroyed" or a quest or something. Shiny thing on ground...
*The ranged weapon skills make no sense. How exactly do you explain higher skill equaling more damage? I forgot who said it (Todd maybe) that origionally that was the case but it was too hard for anyone to shoot something. Well, geeze, you'd think someone with a low skill in something wouldn't be very good at it. (It's an RPG) I used a mod that did this exact thing and it worked great. Was the expected audience going to quit if they couldn't start shooting everything in sight right away? Yeah, it was harder to hit things at first, like it should be but it wasn't at all impossible. Once you get to 100% skill, the most accurate weapon in the game shouldn't have anymore spread and then the second most accurate gun should have slightly more etc. (You don't want to eliminate spread for entirely because that would mess up some guns being more useful for being more accurate) Ranged skills should affect, accuracy, reload times, and frequency of gun james. The same goes for explosives. How does a higher skill increase damage?
Charisma - Charisma was also nerfed. Even if you didn't want to be a diplomatic character in FO2, you didn't want to lower it too much because it affected the amount of followers you could have, which is something else that needs big fixing. Again, I forgot who said it but the justification for only one NPC at a time other than Dogmeat was AI problems. Again, I got a mod, had three followers based on my Charisma and it worked great. It felt a lot better too. So now, if you don't want to talk people into things, there's not much of a point in having Charisma.
Agility - Agility ranks #2. Unless you're using VATS a lot, this doesn't really have much of a use. Make it recharge your AP faster (it doesn't the last time I checked, only gives you more AP), and have it affect your chance to be hit like it used to do. And maybe have it affect your melee weapon speed.
-Less reasonable ideas-
Here are some ideas that I would totally understand if no one liked them. First, getting back to agility, make a second, automatic block based on Agility. Then, combine HtH with Melee. HtH always got the shaft when it came to weapon types so I say just stick them together so everyone gets access to all the weapons.
You start with 6, you put a hat on and you can already detect almost all enemies before they can see/sense you.
You can't hid.