Fallout: New Vegas Hints

Traits

• Traits are what you get to choose up to two of while still in Doc Mitchell's house at the beginning of the game. You can just skip the whole thing by choosing zero traits, or you can look through them and pick out one or two that you think will benefit you based on your play style. Traits differ from level-up perks in that they all have a disadvantage of some sort, and you can only choose them during character creation.
  
  * Built to Destroy: This trait increases your critical chance with all weapons by 3%, but causes them to degrade 15% faster. A higher critical chance is always good, but you'll have to really ramp up your Repair skill early in the game to help keep your weapons in good working order. As an alternative, you can have Raul as a follower to help slow down weapon decay. Either way, that's a lot of trouble to go to for a 3% critical chance increase, so you probably shouldn't bother. (Note that you can get your base critical chance up to 20% without it if you have a Luck of 10, the Finesse perk, and a 1st Recon Beret. Using V.A.T.S. would bring that up to 25%.)
  
  * Fast Shot: This trait increases your firing rate with guns and energy weapons by 20%, but decreases your accuracy with them by the same percentage. That can help with close combat, but being able to snipe accurately from a fair distance with a variety of weapons is too valuable a thing to mess up with this trait.
  
  * Four Eyes: With this trait, you gain one Perception point when you're wearing glasses (or two points if you're wearing the Lucky Shades), but lose one point when you're not. Thing is, this trait's positive effect only applies to the Perception bonus gotten from wearing glasses, but its negative effect counts as a permanent Perception decrease. That means your Perception will be the actual value minus one as far as all level-up perks that require a certain Perception level are concerned. Bad!
  
  * Good Natured: This trait adds 5 to your Barter, Medicine, Repair, Science, and Speech skills, but subtracts 5 from your Energy Weapons, Explosives, Guns, Melee Weapons, and Unarmed skills. This can be a bad choice for some players due to the reduction in all combat skills. However, if you plan to focus primarily on developing one combat skill, you'll be losing only 5 skill points that you care about, and gaining up to 25 skill points that you care about (depending on how many of the boosted skills that you value). If you'd rather specialize in two different combat skills, this trait can still be a good choice if you want at least three of the five skill boosts.
  
  * Heavy Handed: This trait makes your melee and unarmed attacks do more regular damage, but less critical damage whenever you score critical hits. This can be useful to melee and unarmed specialists who don't do things (like taking the Built to Destroy trait or pumping up their Luck stat) to increase their critical chance. Also, remember that V.A.T.S. in this game only adds 5% to critical chance, not 15% like in Fallout 3, so your critical hits will probably be few and far between in any case.
  
  * Kamikaze: If you want to increase your action points by 10, and don't mind taking a -2 hit to your damage threshold, you should choose this trait. The lowered damage threshold isn't that much of a problem (especially once you get some good armor), and having more action points is always a good thing since V.A.T.S. is so useful for up-close combat.
  
  * Loose Cannon: This trait lets you throw your frag grenades, spears, etc. 30% faster, but at the cost of -25% to range. Thrown weapons aren't all that useful for long-range combat anyway, so this is a fairly good choice if you plan on using thrown weapons (especially explosive ones) a lot -- provided there aren't two other traits you'd rather have.
  
  * Small Frame: This trait gives you an Agility point in exchange for making your limbs easier to cripple. Another Agility point means three more action points, but that's not much. It may also mean gaining access to Agility-restricted level-up perks without having to spend another starting attribute point on Agility, which can be a bit better. However, even though limb crippling isn't much of a problem (except in hardcore mode), you'll probably find two other traits you'd rather have. Kamikaze, for instance, is a much better one for boosting action points.
  
  * Trigger Discipline: This is the "equal and opposite" trait to Fast Shot. With this one, guns and energy weapons fire 20% slower, but with 20% more accuracy. This can help if you'd rather snipe at enemies from a distance most of the time, which is a good strategy in most outdoor areas. However, you can do that fairly well without this trait, and may prefer others.
  
  * Wild Wasteland: This very odd trait will cause you to get some weird little "extras" in certain areas of the game. Most of them are totally insignificant, but there is one up near the Brooks Tumbleweed Ranch in Zone 1 that's notable. A ways east of the ranch is a spot where you'll find some mercenaries if you don't have this trait, and some aliens if you do. You can get the unique alien blaster weapon from the aliens, and a unique gauss rifle from the mercenaries. Note that ammo for the alien blaster is even scarcer than in Fallout 3, whereas the unique gauss rifle uses standard microfusion cells.
  
  
  Well, that's a real mixed bag! I would recommend Kamikaze and Good Natured for just about everyone, though you should consider Heavy Handed, Loose Cannon, and Trigger Discipline before making your final decision.
  

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