Wasteland 3 Starter Guide
Starter Guide
This is a starter guide for new players in character creation, arguably one of the most important parts of the game. It covers how useful each skill is, the best quirks to build your character around, most useful background and its effect on gameplay and finally how you should build your characters attributes to compliment their chosen weapon.
Video Time Stamps:
0:00 Video Summery
2:04 Character Creation
2:43 Best Quirks
11:10 Attributes Build
20:57 Skills
Wasteland 3 Starter Guide
In the meantime note that their have been many changes since the beta and past Wasteland games. For example Intelligence no longer dictates how many skill points you get each time you level. It only rewards you with extra skill points at the start of the game. This makes intelligence rather useless until your building a character around critical hits and critical damage.
Effective Builds
While the video covers all you need to know about how all the mechanics of the game work and what the most useful skills are. This section focuses on some very effective character builds that will allow you to play the game efficiently and access everything you come across. I’d recommend watching the video first however and not just blindly following these setups.
IMPORTANT: You can build 4 custom characters and get an additional 2 NPC companions. BUT DO NOT max out any of your skills or attributes during gameplay, especially skills since they have increasing costs per level. To max out a skill at level 10 you need 28 skill points. you will come across armor that gives you +1 to certain skills, you will also find skill books which you should save until you reach level 9 in said skill in order to max it out efficiently. As for attributes (aside from charisma) only max them to level 9 since you can also find ‘dolls’ which give you +1 to your whole party’s attributes.
The Skill Point Farm
This character build is designed to level up fast and gain lots of skill points in the process. This setups attribute spread also naturally falls into being the perfect leader setup too!
Quirk: Pointdexter: This will give us an additional +! skill point each level up, when combined with our high charisma stat we will be levelling quickly to take full advantage of our extra skill point gain.
Background: Bookworm: This gives us another +5% experience boost. This can be rather overkill, but if you want to level quickly and gain access to lots of additional skill points levelling fast is the best way to do so. That said this background can easily be replaced for something else that compliments additional weapon damage.
Attributes
- Coordination 2
- Luck 1
- Awareness 2
- Strength 2
- Speed 2
- Intelligence 2
- Charisma 10
This may appear VERY extreme at first glance but it is in fact the most efficient way of levelling in the game. At 9 Charisma you get +18% experience HOWEVER at 10 charisma you get +30% experience, this makes it worth maxing early! It is very efficient to do this at the start of the game since you will be levelling up much faster in everything you do. Since we are levelling fast we will be able to round out our attributes quickly later on.
Focus Skills
Leadership: Increases your teammates chance to hit. Our high charisma gives us a massive leadership effect range, so we need to take full advantage of this. You can max this later in the game though, aside from speech options it has more value as your squad gets bigger.
Medicine: As you quickly level your character you will want to increase your intelligence since it scales with how much you can heal for. Since our leader is going to be in the middle of everybody it makes him a great healer. For this reason you will also want to boost your Coordination to 4 as well.
Any Skill: Since: You will have tonnes of extra skill points on this character the more the game goes on, feel free to invest into whatever skills compliment the rest of your party setup. Note that speech skills do not scale off your charisma so you don’t need to invest in these specifically.
Weapon Choice: A pistol works well with this class build, especially later in the game since having a high charisma gives us a high strike rate which lets us target foe’s body parts more often. That said you will find your positioning with this character to be out of range. For this reason the combination of automatic weapons and wired science can be very fun! Wired science lets you access powerful energy weapons that ignore Armor, but this means you will be investing in two skills instead of one.
