Fallout: New Vegas Hints

Level 12 Perks

• * Fast Metabolism: Getting 20% more health from stimpaks sounds great, but it's not worth using up one of your 15 level-up perk slots. Instead, keep plenty of stimpaks on hand at all times. You could also have Arcade Gannon as a follower, which makes all health-restoring items give 20% more health.
  
  * Ghastly Scavenger (Cannibal perk): All this perk does is expand your cannibalistic repertoire to include super mutants and ghouls. Not recommended, especially since you have to already have the Cannibal perk to get it.
  
  * Hit the Deck (Explosives 70): This perk effectively increases your damage threshold vs. all explosives by 50%, including your own. This sounds like a great perk for explosives specialists, but it's better to just be more careful with your explosives and watch for mines and powder charges in areas where enemies have set them. (Note that a game update changed the DT increase from +50% to +25 points.)
  
  * Life Giver (Endurance 6): This perk permanently adds 30 to your max health. This can be a useful buffer against premature death in tougher combats, but so can armor and stimpaks. You'll probably never find this perk to be the best of the available lot.
  
  * Long Haul (Endurance 6, Barter 70): Being able to fast-travel while over-encumbered sounds great, especially to anyone who's played Fallout 3 and had to make many trips back and forth between loot-filled areas and their home base. However, those repeated trips aren't too unbearably tedious, and the Barter skill requirement for this perk is simply ridiculous.
  
  * Piercing Strike (Unarmed 70): This perk effectively reduces a target's damage threshold by 15 points if you're attacking with a melee weapon, unarmed weapon, or thrown weapon. That's a huge advantage if your character is focused on using such weapons, though the high Unarmed skill requirement will be hard to achieve for melee weapon specialists. Unarmed specialists should definitely consider this a must-have perk.
  
  * Pyromaniac (Explosives 60): This perk adds 50% to all damage you do with fire-based weapons like flamers, shishkebabs, and incinerators. Unfortunately, shishkebabs are very rare and not very powerful in this game, so this perk is therefore mainly useful to characters who specialize in using flamers and incinerators. Such a specialization isn't all that useful, and the irrelevant Explosives skill requirement pretty much kills this perk's appeal.
  
  * Robotics Expert (Science 50): With this perk, you do 25% more damage to all robotic enemies, and can deactivate robots if you sneak up to them undetected. Both of those perk features are nice, but the usefulness is just too limited for me to recommend it. When fighting robots, bring along pulse grenades and mines, plus some plasma weapons. (Note that there's a glitch that lets you sometimes deactivate robots even after they've seen you, though it doesn't always work. Also, you can repeatedly sneak-attack deactivated robots to get XP and loot from them.)
  
  * Silent Running (Agility 6, Sneak 50): This perk makes sneak-running as safe as slowly sneak-walking. This is a tremendous help to all stealth-focused characters who specialize in powerful melee sneak attacks. Non-sneaky characters and ranged sneak-attack characters won't get much use out of it, and should therefore skip it.
  
  * Sniper (Perception 6, Agility 6): This perk adds 25% to the accuracy percentage of all head shots in V.A.T.S. mode. It's not recommended for the same reason the level 6 perk Gunslinger and the level 8 perk Commando aren't.
  
  * Splash Damage (Explosives 70): This perk gives all of your explosives a 25% larger area of effect. Useful for explosives fanatics only.
  
  * Unstoppable Force (Strength 7, Melee Weapons 90): This perk greatly increases the damage you do with melee and unarmed attacks, but only when your target is trying to block your attack. That doesn't happen very often, especially if you're using V.A.T.S. (which you should be for close-range attacks).
  
  
  If you don't have a specialized character who needs Piercing Strike, Silent Running, or Splash Damage, look back through the earlier perks for something good that you passed up before.
  

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