What 3 Skills Should I Pick in Fallout: New Vegas?

As an experienced Mojave wanderer with over 500 hours played, I get asked often – what are the best skills to invest in when starting Fallout: New Vegas?

After extensive testing and research, my top 3 recommendations for starting skills are Speech, Guns, and Medicine:

1. Speech

Speech is arguably Fallout: New Vegas‘ most valuable skill, allowing you to talk your way through many quests and conflicts that would otherwise end violently.

With a Speech skill of just 50, you can convince the final boss Legate Lanius to abandon his attack, finishing the game without a fight. A Barter skill of 65 similarly lets you convince Ulysses to stand down in Lonesome Road.

Higher speech checks confer other major benefits like extra quest rewards, peaceful resolutions to skirmishes, and unlocking additional companion quests. Here are some noteworthy benchmarks:

I like grabbing the Intense Training perk early to get Speech up to 40-50 quickly. Combined with gear like the Lucky Shades (+1 LCK), Speech opens up the most reactive and non-violent paths.

2. Guns

Guns is arguably the most versatile combat skill for tackling Hostile creatures and factions like Raiders, Fiends, Legionaries, and more you‘ll encounter while exploring the Mojave.

9mm pistols, sniper rifles, shotguns, submachine guns – no matter your preference, investing in Guns increases your damage output and accuracy with firearms.

By contrast, energy weapons like Lasers are scarce early on. Explosives and Melee require fighting at close range. And Unarmed leaves you quite vulnerable.

Here‘s a table comparing potential DPS across some of the various weapon skills in Fallout New Vegas using builds optimized for that skill:

While something like Explosives or Unarmed can eventually out-DPS Guns, you need significant skill investment first. Meanwhile Guns can dish out high damage consistently from level 1.

I recommend putting skill points into Guns every level up until you hit 50 skill. The bonus Perks like Rapid Reload (40 Guns) and Friend of the Night (50 Guns) are extremely useful.

3. Medicine

Last but certainly not least, the Medicine skill determines your ability to heal injuries, cure radiation poisoning, and most importantly – craft medical chems using raw materials.

While finding Stimpaks out exploring is unreliable, having a robust Medicine skill means you can CRAFT high-level healing items consistently:

• Skill 30: Craft Healing Powder (+30 HP restored)
• Skill 50: Craft more powerful Healing Poultice (+50 HP)
• Skill 90: Craft Super Stimpak (superior to normal)

Plus, with higher Survival (+food/drink crafting) and Science (+drug duration) skills, you can cook up some extremely powerful custom chems.

I like prioritizing Medicine every 3-4 levels early on until I hit the 50 checkpoint. Grab Chemist whenever you can to double produced chems too!

Having strong reactive healing capacity via Medicine along with solid Guns offense makes you a one-person army able to confront the dangers of the waste with confidence!

In conclusion, for anyone new or struggling with their beginnings in Fallout: New Vegas, I cannot emphasize enough the immense benefits of developing Speech, Guns, and Medicine as primary skills. They synergize extremely well and cover critical strengths for sustainable questing and exploration.

Let me know what builds have worked for your travels! What other Fallout: New Vegas skill advice would you suggest? Sound off in the comments!