Skill points, when is it a good idea to stop spending? FLT2

[badpoetry]

Hey, what's up, I'm new around here, on account of just recently getting into the Fallout series. I'd always heard it was a classic RPG series, but had never bothered to get round to playing, thought I'd get into it seeing as the 3rd one's around the corner.

I'm playing through Fallout 2 at the moment though, and I've got a question about the skill points system. At the moment I'm rocking 131% on small weapons, 100% on lockpicking and 100% on speech.

At what point does advancing these skills any further become pointless? How amazing can a guy be at lockpicking before it becomes an exercise in futility to keep piling on the points? Are there benefits to taking my guns skill as high as 200%? 300%? Help me out here.

Thanks.

 

[badpoetry]

Oh yeah, and are there any time restriction quests like in the first game?

Like in the first game, if you went to certain areas after 100 days had passed, they would be destroyed and stuff.

At the moment I'm pretty much taking my sweet time, exploring everywhere.

 

[Darek]

From The Nearly Ultimate Fallout 2 Guide:

As a rule, it's not worth it to raise most skills above 101%. Combat skills can be improved beyond that for an extra edge until you reach the point where you get the maximum 95% chance to hit against all opponents and from any reasonable range (which takes a bit longer if you practice the art of aimed shots or blows). Unarmed is an exception if you make use of the HtH Evade perk, though at high levels you'll have to spend quite a lot of skill points for each point of AC. Science has a few uses above 101%; most are strictly marginal, but go for it if you don't have anything else to do with the points. Most often you can just try again if you fail a skill check, even in dialogue. Sneak, Steal and Outdoorsman might seem like exceptions since failure has more of an immediate effect in these cases, but your rate of success hardly rises linearly with skill level anyway; quite likely the chance of success for Steal and Sneak is capped at 95% even before modifiers are applied, just like Outdoorsman.

 

[Kuj2]

So basically - don't raise non-combat skills over 100% (except Science up to 121%, gotta need it for the Brain Bot - if you want it, that is), and as for combat skills, pump 'em up 'till you rock with 'em. And as for the limits, there is no such thing. When you trigger some ending, you get it even after the maximum 13 years.