Fallout: New Vegas Hints

Level 2 Perks

• * Confirmed Bachelor / Cherchez La Femme: With this perk, you do 10% more damage to members of the same sex in combat, plus you sometimes get special dialogue options that can help you bypass tough Speech checks, bribes, or other inconveniences. Most of your NPC opponents in the game will be male, so this is a good perk for male characters. Female characters should get Black Widow instead.
  
  * Friend of the Night (Perception 6, Sneak 30): You can see a bit better in darkness with this perk, but it's not really worth taking. For outdoor areas, wait until sunrise. For indoor areas, use the Pip-Boy light. Also, increase the game's brightness setting on the Settings / Display menu. (Besides all that, there's a chem called cateye that gives a similar effect at a stronger level.)
  
  * Heave, Ho! (Strength 5, Explosives 30): This perk makes all thrown weapons (including grenades) go farther and faster, but that's of very little use to most players.
  
  * Hunter (Survival 30): This perk gives you +75% critical damage against animals. Note that the increase only happens when you score a critical hit, and only applies to the critical damage component of that hit. Also note that it doesn't apply to insects (such as radscorpions) or abominations (such as deathclaws).
  
  * Intense Training: This can be a useful perk when there are no other available perks that you particularly want. Use it to permanently increase a S.P.E.C.I.A.L. attribute that you want to raise, keeping in mind that you can get a +1 to each attribute from implants, plus bonuses from certain wearable items and chems. Since you only get to choose a perk once every two levels in this game, you should always think carefully about all the other available perks before choosing this one.
  
  * Lady Killer / Black Widow: This perk is the same as Confirmed Bachelor / Cherchez La Femme except that it works on members of the opposite sex rather than the same sex. Due to this, it's much more valuable to female characters than male ones.
  
  * Rapid Reload (Agility 5, Guns 30): Your reload time for all weapons is reduced by 25%. This sounds useful, especially if you frequently use slower-reloading weapons like shotguns, but its value can be minimized by keeping all of your weapons reloaded outside of combat. Also note that you can instantly reload a weapon no matter what its condition is by unequipping and re-equipping it (which can be done very quickly via hotkeys).
  
  * Retention (Intelligence 5): Besides skill books that permanently increase a skill, this game has skill magazines that temporarily add 10 to a skill when used. In other words, they act like skill-increasing chems. Taking this perk triples the duration of any skill magazine's bonus. This isn't very useful due to the fact that you'll mostly be using magazines to boost your non-combat skills (like Lockpick and Science) for brief durations so you can pick open a tough lock, hack a hard terminal, or whatever.
  
  * Swift Learner (Intelligence 4): As in Fallout 3, you can take this perk up to three times to increase all earned XP by 10% per perk level. Also as in Fallout 3, the level cap makes this perk not really worth taking -- especially since 30 level-ups only gets you 15 perks now.
  
  
  The clear winner here is Confirmed Bachelor for male characters and Black Widow for female characters. The increased damage against male NPCs will be much more useful than anything else on this list.
  

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