Fallout 3 Hints

Level 12 Perks

• * Cannibal: This perk lets you regain some health and lower your karma a tiny bit by feeding on corpses, plus helps you a bit when talking to fellow cannibals (which are very rare). It's really not worth taking for any character, even ones that pride themselves on being insidiously evil.
  
  * Fast Metabolism: Increasing your stimpaks' effectiveness by 20% sounds really good, but isn't very useful due to the extreme plentifulness of stimpaks in the game. Also, remember to conserve stimpaks by only using them during combat, since you can usually rest in a bed, drink from irradiated water sources, etc. to heal up outside of combat.
  
  * Life Giver: Getting 30 more health points permanently sounds helpful, especially if you have a low Endurance attribute, but it's really not very useful due to the same reasons given for not taking the Fast Metabolism perk.
  
  * Pyromaniac: This perk supposedly increases the damage of all fire-based weapons by 50%, but it in fact only does so for flamers, shishkebabs, and the unique alien blaster Firelance. If you're a flamer user, you can skip this perk and get the unique Burnmaster flamer, since it does the exact same damage as regular flamers do with this perk. For energy weapon users, the Alien Blaster will still be a bit more powerful than Firelance is with this perk. The only deciding factor should be the shishkebab, which becomes by far the best melee weapon in the game with this perk. That can be useful to just about any character, since melee weapons can help save on ammo. (Of course, so can other things, such as explosives and followers.) Stealth-focused characters will find this perk to be particularly useful, despite the difficulty of meeting its totally irrelevant skill requirement of Explosives 60+.
  
  * Robotics Expert: This perk allows you to do 25% more damage to robots, and to deactivate them if you can sneak up on them. Not a very useful perk, since sneaking up on them is so hard (unless you also get the Silent Running perk or use stealth boys a lot), and there are special weapons (like pulse mines and grenades, and the unique The Shocker weapon) that were made specifically for robot-fighting. Also, you mainly encounter robotic enemies in only a few specific areas.
  
  * Silent Running: The +10 to your Sneak skill isn't very noteworthy, but the ability to sneak-run without compromising your stealth is definitely something. Unfortunately, the minimum requirements for this perk (Agility of 6 and Sneak skill of 50) are rather prohibitive, and mean that you have to be pretty sneaky already, which reduces the perk's usefulness for most players. It's highly recommended for stealth-focused characters since it'll make you almost impossible to detect when used in conjunction with stealth boys or the Chinese stealth armor from the Operation: Anchorage game add-on.
  
  * Sniper: This perk increases the chance of hitting an opponent's head in V.A.T.S. mode by 25%, and is therefore a must for all V.A.T.S.-intensive fighters, and a must-not for everyone else.
  
  
  At level 12, Silent Running is a must for stealth characters, and Pyromaniac may be best for non-stealth characters who are focused on Melee Weapons. Otherwise, get Sniper if you're a big V.A.T.S. user, or yet another round of Intense Training if you're not. At level 13, get Pyromaniac or Sniper if you want it and haven't gotten it yet. Otherwise, get even more Intense Training, or if you've had your fill of that already, go ahead and get Life Giver for the extra health.

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