Wasteland 2

I really want to know what happens if you use animal whisper on the rabbits in the Ag Center, there's a guy who's awfully attached to them... Guess I'll have to play through again some time!

 

you can animal whisper a cat and it gives you a crit chance bonus. I accidentally TKed it later. Sorry kitty.

 

I used it on a couple of them, but they just ran off (so I guess I didn't have to kill them at least...).

Some other observations now that I have played some more: Lock picking doesn't seem terribly important, as almost every locked thing I have encountered (excluding safes) could be Brute Forced open (though I imagine at least some of them would have been easier to lock pick). Its primary use seems to be opening weapon crates, since those can't be Brute Forced for some reason. Alarm Disarming also seems less useful than other skills, as I have so far run into a total of two alarms. Probably the single most used skill I have is Demolitions. So many trapped chests and doors...not to mention the mines. Wait, I take that back: Perception is the most important, so you can more easily identify traps.

Also, Heavy Weapons is cool and incredibly deadly, but god damn does it burn through ammo. If you want to use it, either have a back-up combat skill, or make sure not to have another character who shares ammo with your Heavy Weapons user (which, since early Heavy Weapons use 5.56, means no Assault Rifles).

 

Haven't used heavy weapons yet, but disarm comes in handy when you haven't killed everyone around and you want to sneak in somewhere.

Demolitions I don't give a crap about, land mines you can shoot with a pistol to blow up, the trapped boxes do like 15 damage which is so miniscule by mid/early game that I just tank it.

Perception is really important, I agree, otherwise you'll just kill yourself on land mines.

Lockpick vs Brute force, well, some things are easier to lockpick than brute force in terms of levels, so their effectiveness varies. Personally I've used more lockpick than brute force, brute forcing some fences when all else fails and thats about it.

Animal Whisperer would be useful, but the difficulty of lulling an animal seems to be really hard vs how quickly you can level the skill, so unless you really boost it early you won't have enough to be useful.

Leadership is good, adds aim % chance and makes your NPCs go rogue less often (they like to do that a lot).

 

I will grant that one can certainly get away with not bothering to disarm explosives, but I want that sweet, sweet XP.

One thing I am interested in hearing is how people feel about Charisma and Intelligence. Charisma, to me, seems like it's a stat you should have a lot of on one character for speech purposes, but it seems like the easiest stat to dump on everyone else. Granted, the bonus XP it grants seems good, I'm just not sure if it's worth giving up points in other more obviously effective stats. As for Intelligence, that one I can't make up my mind on. It is definitely important, I just can't decide how many points one should invest into it. Having it at at least 4 seems like a good place to start, but is it worth upping it to 7 or 10 to get even more skill points? I am currently running with one character at 10 and the rest are at 4, which seems good, but I am interested in what other people have done.

 

Yea I don't know the math on intelligence, the more you get the more skills you get per level so you level your stuff up faster, but obviously there's a balance between your other stats.

 

The math on exactly what each stat does is right here.

http://wasteland.wikia.com/wiki/Wasteland_2/Character_Creation

 

I know the math on each of the stats, I'm just curious what other people are doing, and how effective sacrificing other stats for extra skill points per level and/or bonus xp might be in the long term. Also, does anyone know if it is possible to ever increase stats after character creation? I happened to notice that Angela Deth (the follower you can pick up at Ranger Citadel) has more total stat points than the rest of my crew and I wondered if that was legit, or if the devs just cheated.

Also, just had a weapon with a 4% jam chance jam on the first shot 3 times in a row. There's a 0.0064% chance of that happening, or 1/15625. Will update if it jams again.

 

You get an extra attribute point every 10 levels, so Angela should one bonus point that your rookies don't.

I have intelligence and charisma at four for my whole squad, 'cept for one genius. Way I look at it you can either get more skill points per level, or you can get more levels... If you wanted to min/max a swiss army knife you could have one person with maxed int/cha but I prefer having a balanced squad. I've also heard that for charisma checks like recruiting new party members and so forth, it looks at your total party charisma, not just one character. Not sure how accurate that is... I've heard the same is true for luck affecting the loot you find.

 

Good to know about the bonus stat point (my squad is ~level 9 currently), though Angela has 3 extra attribute points, so I guess there was some dev cheating involved.

As for the Luck/Charisma aggregate thing, I could see that being the case, particularly for Luck. Though I hope it isn't for Charisma, as that seems kind of odd to me. Although with the way one can switch between characters while in a conversation I suppose it would make some sense.

 

For anyone who hasn't tried it, the detonate button on the in the Ranger citadel does work.

 

Anyone who clicked on the Davy Crockett and didn't press the button is an empty husk of a human.

 

fantastic game. once I finally found a group composition I liked and stopped rerolling by the 2nd-3rd mission, that is.

 

You'll get a bunch more people as the game goes on.