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At first glance the Fallout 4 Perk chart looks dizzyingly complex, but, just like riding a bike, it’s easy once you get the hang of it and can be potentially lethal in certain circ*mstances. This guide breaks down the stats that go into a Fallout 4 character and what kind of perks go with them, so you know what to invest in when you’re making your very own vengeful defrosted parent.
How Stats and Perks work in Fallout 4
When you first create your character you have to distribute your skill points between seven different stats: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck, and whoever at Bethesda first came up with the SPECIAL acronym should have at least got a free load of drinks at the pub. In Fallout 4 each of these stats also has 10 Perks related to it, which are unique abilities designed to give you the edge out in a post-apocalyptic world. You can purchase perks each time you level up (dinging a new level gives you one point to spend each time). 10 Perks for each of the seven stats = 70 perks in total, but most of the perks can also be increased in rank to gain even greater benefits.
Each perk is gated by how many points you have in the related stat, so, for example, the final Strength related Perk can only be unlocked if you already have 10 points of Strength. You can also use the points you get when you level up to increase your stats if there’s a certain Perk you want to get, or you can increase a stat for free by finding the Vault Boy Bobblehead for it hidden out in the Commonwealth. You can unlock Perks in any order you like, provided you’ve got the base stat high enough.
Strength in Fallout 4
Strength should be the focus if you’re planning on building a melee character, or a heavy weapons specialist – after all, who doesn’t enjoy a good rocket launcher every so often? The amount of Strength you have affects how hard you hit, as well as how much you can carry.
Strength Perks in Fallout 4
There are Strength Perks that can increase your damage when you’re unarmed, when you’re using melee weapons, or when you’re using heavy guns. All the Strength Perks are good if you’re building an unstoppable tank of a character (like Rooted, which gives you a bonus to damage resistance and melee attacks when you’re standing still), but there are some that are useful for most characters.
The ability to modify your armour comes from the Perk Armorer and you only need three points of Strength to access it. There’s also Strong Back, which gives you large bonuses to your carry limit, and Steady Aim, which improves the accuracy when you’re firing guns. This does sort of make sense, in that the stronger you are the better you can absorb recoil, but you need a whopping 7 points in Strength to get it.
Perception in Fallout 4
Perception is the stat that affects your accuracy in general, and especially when you’re making attacks in VATS. It’s a good stat to invest in if you favour rifles and like taking the long range approach.
Perception Perks in Fallout 4
The higher level Perception Perks increase your accuracy with VATS (even letting you target limbs that are behind cover). One of the most useful is Awareness, which shows an enemy’s damage resistances when you target them in VATS and only needs three points in Perception. Then there’s the Rifleman perk which steadily increases your damage with rifles, and the Sniper perk makes you more controlled when using scopes and allows you to hold your breath for longer when aiming. There are a few weird ones thrown in though.
Perception Perks are what allow you to pick both pockets and locks. Demolition Expert increases your damage with explosives as well as opening up the ability to craft them at the chemistry station (though we would have thought it doesn’t take much to be able to perceive an explosion). Night Person grants you extra Perception and Intelligence between 6.00 a.m. and 6 p.m. and Refractor grants you lots of energy resistance. No idea how that relates to Perception.
Endurance in Fallout 4
If Strength is how hard you can hit, Endurance is how hard you can get hit. Endurance sets your total health and how far you can sprint before your Action Points are totally drained.You can survive the Commonwealth without Endurance, you just have to be a little more careful as you go.
Endurance Perks in Fallout 4
Endurance Perks essentially help you stay alive. You can use them to decrease your damage resistance and increase your maximum health – these and Lead Belly, which reduces the rads you take from eating and drinking, are the first three Perks under Endurance. Further Endurance Perks will increase your resistance to radiation, limb damage, and chem addiction, the latter of which is really useful if you use a lot of chems to augment your abilities.
You can also get Cannibal, which restores health when you eat human corpses. It’s generally frowned upon when you do it in front of people, though.
Charisma in Fallout 4
In Fallout 4, as in life, you need Charisma if you want to get other people to do stuff for you. When persuasion options come up in dialogue you’re more likely to succeed the higher your Charisma is, so if you have extremely low Charisma you’re probably going to get in more fights and have less boyfriends and girlfriends. Charisma also limits the amount of people who will naturally turn up to live in your settlements: the game generates a maximum of 10 + your Charisma score.
Charisma Perks in Fallout 4
Charisma is potentially the most useful collection of non-combat Perks, depending on how you like to play RPGs. The Lady Killer/Black Widow Perk is great, for starters. It increases your powers of persuasion against the opposite sex, and deals extra damage to them to a max of 15%. Local Leader is great if you’re getting into building lots of settlements, and you get the chance to get out of fights altogether by pacifying enemies with Intimidation, Wasteland Whisperer and Animal Friend (though these are all high tier perks and require you having a lot of points in Charisma).
Charisma is also where you’ll find the Attack Dog Perk, which makes Dogmeat more useful in battle. Lone Wanderer is another good one: it increases your maximum carry weight and decreases the damage you take when you’re travelling without a companion, but you can still take Dogmeat, who doesn’t count as a person. Apparently nobody on the dev team saw All Dogs Go to Heaven.
Intelligence in Fallout 4
This is basically a measure of how smart you are, and the higher your Intelligence the more XP you earn from completely quests and mercilessly slaughtering everything you come across. Intelligence is for characters who don’t need to rely on strength because they’ve built or programmed something that will kill enemies for them.
Intelligence Perks in Fallout 4
A lot of Intelligence perks are high-tech in nature (Intelligence is where you can get the Perks for Hacking, crafting weapons and tech mods. There are also Intelligence perks to increase the effectiveness of medicines and chems, and Nuclear Physicist, the rank nine Perk increases the damage on your radiation weapons and gets more power from fusion cores.
A good Intelligence Perk if you’re doing a lot of scavenging for junk is Scrapper, which lets you harvest rarer components when you scrap weapons and armour. The final Intelligence Perk is called Nerd Rage! and grants extra damage and damage resistance when your health drops low enough, in a kind of Bruce Banner Hulking-out way.
Agility in Fallout 4
Agility not only increases your total Action Points for use in VATS and running away when you’ve gotten in over your head, but also determines how good you are at sneaking. If you’re well into stealth and becoming the terrifying moving shadow in the night then put some points into Agility.
Agility Perks in Fallout 4
A lot of the Agility Perks are geared towards making you a silent assassin. Sneak makes you harder to detect, and Ninja buffs the damage you do while sneaking. The slightly sinisterly named Mister Sandman increases the damage on silenced weapons and gives you one hit kills on any sleeping targets (though this does also obviously make you a dishonourable coward).
One of the most useful Agility Perks is Gun Fu, which stacks damage to every consecutive hit you make in VATS, but you need to have ten points of Agility to get it which is a pretty big ask out of the gate. At lower levels you can still get Perks to increase your AP regeneration and add buffs to damage resistence when you’re a Moving Target.
Luck in Fallout 4
Think of Luck as your wildcard. The more Luck you have the higher your critical hit damage and the faster the critical meter fills. If you have high Luck you’ll also get more caps and ammo from scavenging.
Luck Perks in Fallout 4
Some of the Luck Perks are pretty fantastic. Idiot Savant will randomly activate when you earn XP and multiplies it by up to 5 times. If you balance this out with the amount of Intelligence you have you can sometimes level up 2 or 3 times in one go if Idiot Savant kicks in on the hand in of a big quest, and is a faster way to level than by stacking all your points into intelligence. The Mysterious Stranger is a good man to have on your side: he randomly appears in VATS and takes out an enemy in one shot while some noir piano chords play. Bloody Mess only needs 3 points of Luck but will increase your damage and, more importantly, will frequently cause your enemies to explode like sacks of offal when you’ve hit them.
You can also use Luck Perks to beef up your critical hit damage and bank several critical hits on top of one another, which can be extremely useful. The highest tier Luck Perk is called Ricochet and will sometimes send an enemy’s bullet straight back at them, as if you were some kind of budget Superman. Don’t underestimate the Luck stat.
