Vorph
Silver Baronet of the Realm
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I definitely agree that the extreme stinginess with skill points was a huge mistake; I was saying that from practically day one. There's no way an Obsidian game in 2025 has replay value that even remotely justifies making character building so restrictive, and yet they give you so few points to work with that you have to ignore a large majority of the skills. So much so that taking Dumb has zero downside whatsoever, and NOT taking Easily Distracted (and even more importantly taking it right at level 4) is the biggest mistake you can make. Once you figure out how to game the system that way it's not quite so bad, but it's still terrible game design.
It's also quite apparent after a while that some skills are vastly more useful than others. Don't have lockpick? You're basically fucked. Speech is the only way to get the best outcome in parts of the main quest and quite a few side quests as well. Engineering is right up there too and also has two of the best perks in the game. On the other end, hacking and observation give trivial rewards and at most a bit of 'flavor', and since there's so few points to go around spending anything at all on them is a big mistake. Same goes for stuff like Explosives, Science, and Leadership. They'd be cool as backup skills if points were plentiful, but since you never have any to spare there's zero reason to even consider them. Most of those perks associated with those skills are shitty too, making them even more pointless to invest in.
In the end I ended up with 18 lockpick/engineering/speech, 17 guns & sneak, and 2 in medical (for pharm-thusiast). IMO that's as close as you can get to the ideal build in terms of being able to get past every important skill check out in the world and also being OP with your guns to the point where even the hardest difficulty is a pushover.
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