Fallout 4: Perfect Stats Build (or: Not Superman)

Note that I played this on Very Hard difficulty and decided to try this as an experiment.

Build Idea
I wondered what it would be like to play a Sole Survivor that was superhuman but didn’t have, in effect, magical powers (how do we explain Rifleman or Aquaboy with SCIENCE?). What if I were limited to things that were, theoretically, possible for someone like you or me? This build involves raising your SPECIAL stats to 10 (before collecting the bobbleheads), along with perks that you or I could have. This means you wouldn’t take the damage perks (either increasing damage or increasing resistance), Aquaboy/Aquagirl, Rooted, Awareness, Penetrator, Lifegiver rank 3, and the like- just something that you think, with enough practice or training, you could do.

Initial Stats
The initial build is geared toward getting lots of experience to decrease the grind of getting to having 10 in each stat, followed by picking up the various stat bobbleheads to get each statistic to 11 (and one stat to 12 with the I’m Special! book).

Strength: 3 (for Armorer)
Perception: 4 (for Locksmith)
Endurance: 3 (for Lifegiver)
Charisma: 3 (for Lone Wanderer)
Intelligence: 4 (for Hacker)
Agility: 6 (because I love sneaking)
Luck: 5 (for Idiot Savant)

Initial Perks
For this build, some of the initial perks that I chose were Idiot Savant, Scrounger, Hacker, and Locksmith. I actually played this without picking Rifleman, Sneak, Lifegiver, Lone Wanderer, Armorer, Gun Nut, Ninja, or Mr. Sandman until I got 10 in every statistic (basically, I didn’t pick anything really fun until I was done). I primarily chose perks to make sure that I could continue getting experience and didn’t have to leave any stone unturned- so I leveled up Locksmith to 3, Hacker to 3, Idiot Savant to 2, and Scrounger to 1 and pushed on until I reached my goal.

Why Scrounger?
One of the big issues with this build is that you are dependent on your loot until the perfect stats are done. You can’t use Rifleman or Gunslinger or Commando or Gun Nut to improve the effectiveness of a weak gun; you can only either improve it by finding the right mods or finding a better weapon. Scrounger is a convenience perk, but it was helpful to ensure that whenever I found a better gun, I typically had ammo for it.

Late Game Perks
Honestly, go nuts. The beauty of this is that everything is unlocked, so you can see which previously-ignored perks are fun. I personally got Rifleman upgraded as soon as I could (since enemies were becoming bullet sponges at level 70 or so), followed by Sneak, 1 level of Aquaboy, Lone Wanderer, Science, and Armorer. I found that Armorer was still helpful, but for my main weapons, I had already found or bought the mods for my guns, so Gun Nut still hasn’t been a requirement.

Melee Damage
Each point of Strength gives an additional 10% damage to melee and unarmed attacks.

Carry Weight
Each point of Strength adds 10 pounds to the character’s carry weight. This is nice but a minor convenience, depending on how much you like to grab everything that’s not nailed down.

Is it worth it?
Since this build used guns, this was mostly helpful for carry weight, where it allowed me to have fewer trips to a settlement or base (but Strong Back would have taken fewer perks and less investment). If you use melee weapons, however, 11 points of Strength is slightly more additional damage than 5 levels of Big Leagues or 5 levels of Iron Fist. If you plan to use melee, this is great! If you don’t, then maxing out Strong Back will likely cost fewer perk points.

Note that you would, if using my build, need to add some points to Strength to open Strong Back as an option.

VATS accuracy
I did notice that my numbers went up for VATS but it also doesn’t mean that you’ll have 80-95% accuracy on each limb. It did make a difference, but it was more subtle than you or I would like based on the investment to get there.

Is it worth it?
Not really. The Headshot companion perk will do more for you than maxing out Perception. If I were to do this again, I would raise Perception to 5 (for Demolition Expert) after finding an Explosive weapon and call it a day.

Hit Points
A perfect Endurance (11) will get you 8 hit points per level. The base value is 80. Therefore, after doing some math, you can get ridiculous amounts of HP with high Endurance. At level 30, your HP pool would be 320. This makes you more susceptible to radiation damage (as its damage is a percentage of HP) and, interestingly, makes different foods almost worthless for healing (their main value is giving you that sweet XP for making them). Upon reaching this, I quickly used the small-healing foods up (think mole rat chunks, iguanas on sticks) and was left with foods that healed at least 100 HP at a time. This also made stimpaks even more important than before; their healing is percentage-based and therefore stims never go out of style.

Sprinting
This actually was a quite noticeable difference for me. I raised Agility to 11 before I raised Endurance, so I already had a significant amount of Action Points. With both at 11, I could sprint for quite a distance. That said, because I wasn’t playing on Survival and could fast travel, sprinting quickly became something that I only did when I was exploring. That said, there is a strong synergy between high levels of Strong Back, 11 Endurance, and 11 Agility.

Is it worth it?
Actually, I think it is. It’s convenient and makes it easier to deal with hard fights as you can just take that much more punishment. Also, if you don’t mind hearing your character huff and puff, you can use sprinting much more liberally than I ever got to with my Endurance 3 and Endurance 5 characters. By the time I’m level 70, I feel like it’s only fair that I get to be a bullet sponge when most of my enemies are, too.

Speech Checks
With a Charisma score of 11, you will automatically (before the SCAV perk, before Lady Killer or Black Widow effects) succeed at every speech check.

Bartering
For bartering, you only get ‘perfect’ prices (for both buying and selling) at a Charisma of 16. Having a base Charisma score of 11 means that you can get the best prices for buying and selling with a single dose of Grape Mentats. Alternatively, you can get perfect prices if you have a Charisma of 12 plus 2 ranks of Cap Collector and the Barter bobblehead (so you can have a base Charisma of 11 and just wear some nice glasses and head to Barter Town [not related to Flavortown]).

Settlement Population
Finally, for settlements, a Charisma of 11 means that you can have up to 21 settlers in a town. However, Vault 88 seems to ignore this or have some other means to determine your settler number (my Vault 88 has more people in it than my Charisma would indicate, even after gear).

Is it worth it?
Well…not particularly. I do enjoy automatically succeeding at all the Charisma checks (I don’t care about the caps- the bonus XP is nice and not needing to save-scum is more convenient), but I don’t care about settler numbers. The price change is nice but if I really wanted great barter prices, I could get Cap Collector 2, the Barter bobblehead, and the barter magazines (and I like collecting the magazines, so this is realistic for me) and just need Charisma 8 (e.g., Charisma 3 for Lone Wanderer and pop a Grape Mentat when I want to trade) for fewer perk points than maxing Charisma. If you wanted to play the Charisma-based pacifist build, then perfect Charisma would be a necessity to get all the great perks.

Experience Earned
Each point of Intelligence adds 3% to all XP earned (so 103% at Intelligence 1 and 130% at Intelligence 10). The best XP gains, without going over 11 Intelligence, are with Idiot Savant rank 2 and Intelligence of 2, but the loss of Gun Nut, Science, Scrapper, Hacker, and Chemist are a big trade-off for my style of play. You can get higher average XP gains with Idiot Savant rank 2 and Intelligence of 15 or above than you get with Intelligence 2/Idiot Savant 2.

Hacking Minigame
I’m not sure what the formula is, but as your Intelligence increases, the number of potential passwords decreases. For easy terminals, I usually have 4 guesses and 4 potential passwords when Intelligence is maxed out.

Is it worth it?
If you are intending to go with a build that needs to level quickly, I find that high Intelligence is helpful. The math states that Intelligence of 2-4 and two levels of Idiot Savant is the ‘get lots of XP’ sweet spot, but the Idiot Savant bonus didn’t occur for me as often as I would have liked- your mileage may vary, but I preferred raising Intelligence to 12 (10 + bobblehead + I’m Special!) and using intelligence boosts to hang out around Intelligence 15 and get lots of XP from everything. The fact that high Intelligence trivializes the hacking minigame is a nice bonus and helps me speed through those more quickly.

Action Points
Every point of Agility increases your Action Point total by 10. The additional 100 Action Points, for me, usually resulted in at least one extra rifle shot in VATS and made it easier to sprint around when I was exploring the countryside. Interestingly, Action Point regeneration is percentage-based, which means that increasing the number of total Action Points also increased how often you could go into VATS and get a shot off.

Sneaking
Agility did seem to help with sneaking, but the effect was subtle and, frankly, ineffectual until I also leveled the Sneak perk. With Sneak 4, I seem to sneak better with Agility 11 than 7, but the difference is small enough that I don’t think anyone will care.

Pickpocketing
Agility is supposed to help with pickpocketing, but I generally don’t pickpocket anyone in the game.

Is it worth it?
I have mixed feelings about this one. I like sneaking, but the dedicated perk’s effects are so much greater than the effect of Agility. The increase in Action Points, combined with increasing Luck, made it so that I regularly got Critical Hits and got to use them fairly regularly. I got to use VATS much more liberally as these stats were raised, though the accuracy increase from Perception was a bit of a let-down. If I wanted a VATS build, I would definitely raise Agility and Luck again…and Perception reluctantly if I felt like I really wasn’t accurate enough.

Critical Hit Rate
With a perfect Luck of 11, it takes 5 hits to fill your critical meter. For me, this changed critical hits from ‘save this for a boss or legendary’ to ‘use this on a head shot when it’s ready.’ I found it a lot of fun to simply use the crits as they arrived, especially since I would get another one soon with my high Agility.

Perfectly Preserved Pies
Luck is supposed to increase your rate of getting the pies out of the Port-A-Diners, but I still haven’t gotten one. Besides, are you really dying to consume something that is over 200 years old (wine aficionados, don’t answer that)?

Mole Rat Disease
Luck is supposed to affect how likely you are to get the mole rat disease in a certain quest, but I always succumbed to the bug where if the nearby allied robot gets hit, for some reason I got the disease…

Item Drops
Your character’s Luck doesn’t seem to affect item drops at all. Even Scrounger and Fortune Finder are percentage-based, without an effect from the Luck stat.

Is it worth it?
Really, only if you’re running a VATS and critical hit build. Otherwise, if you’re not depending on critical hits, you can dip in and get what you want from the Luck tree. If you like VATS, it’s not a bad investment, but you can put points into other perks and stats to get a bigger reward.

What did I learn from this?
-Gun Nut and Science, as far as weapon mods go, are convenience perks. I ended up finding or buying weapons with the mods I wanted. It wasn’t that much of an inconvenience, as Legendary characteristics did more to determine which gun I would use than the mods.
-I did discover a glitch where removing the Large Magazine from a 10mm Pistol would result in me having a mod that I couldn’t equip (I couldn’t even re-equip it to the same gun). This was without Gun Nut.
-Overseer’s Guardian is a better gun than I thought, especially since it held up as the enemies got more spongy. Two-Shot anything is great. I got a Two-Shot Plasma Rifle and it’s been my go-to for high-health enemies ever since. I got a lot more mileage out of Spray and Pray than I had in previous playthroughs.
-Sneaking really doesn’t work without the Sneak perk, even with an Agility of 10 and most of the sneak magazines.
-Automatically succeeding at every Speech check is very convenient.
-I rushed to get Piper’s companion perk early since XP is such an important commodity in this build. It was worthwhile as I took a break to explore the map once I got it.
-Your stats are used several times in the USS Constitution quest to avoid some running around (e.g., rerouting wiring instead of needing to go fetch item x).

Would I do this again?
The build did provide an interesting challenge and brought some new life to an old game, at least for me- I had to play much more like a scavenger at first and through levels 20-40, rather than finding an interesting weapon and building perks around it. Strength opens up melee possibilities if I wanted them, Intelligence provides a nice base amount of XP, Agility does well when the stealth perks are activated, Charisma is convenient but not necessary, Endurance provides boatloads of HP, and Luck mostly makes critical hits a frequent treat instead of something you save for later. Perception was the main stat where the end result was pretty underwhelming.

What would I do in the future?
I would start by just getting the stats I needed for particular perks and only improve the base statistics once I maxed out my weapon perk, Sneak, Ninja, and Mr. Sandman, and got the exploration perks (Locksmith, Hacker, Aquaboy) to the levels that I wanted them at. Agility, Intelligence, and Luck are the main stats I would max out for a sneaky sniper build. Strength, Endurance, and Agility would be great to max out for someone in melee combat.

Thanks for reading and have fun!