One benefit of diplomacy is it allows you to sneak by people. There was one mission where I was trying to sneak through. There was a guard facing the direction I wanted to go, I diplomacied him and then snuck right past.
My signature move is picking someone in the enemy line to temporarily win over so that they're too busy shooting him because the AI dictates he's the easier thing to shoot I move in and flank.
I wish the Trade Perk would also increasse the Traders max Money. Maybe about 25-50% per Rank. Sucks to wait 10 Times because you have Weapons you can sell for about 14k 😮
Why? I don't even need to wait, that's a chore. Just BUY stuff from them. I use minigun with 7.7mm and 11mm minigun, which results in over 11k of credits to buy all needed ammo. This puts every trader at about 16-18k credits. And then you have Trader Authority with over 20k credits because of that. I never wait, i am making them money during gameplay, by buying ammo, resources, anything i need. Money are certainly not an issue, so i don't really care that i can't get more than 5 or 11k of credits from traders pool. If we take Neon, i can get there about 11x3 + 5x5 credits. That's a whopping 58k credits per one run without waiting. And then of course i will buy shit as well. So i can sell well over 500 mass of shit from my ship in one go if i really want. You want to start using traders? Use minigun. That's the MOST fun weapon in game in my opinion. It's just absolute DAKKA gun.
I think the better option is that rank 4 should let you invest in traders permanently increasing the max money of a trader for example a trader has 10k you can use a one time option to invest 5k credits then from then on the trader has 15k credits
This only works if you're trying to dump mass. but if you're trying to make money, this still will only leave you with a net positive of the seller's original money.@@MrZlocktar
@@lobow0 Once again - why? It's the first Bethesda game where you actually has reason to buy shit from traders. You can't craft ammo, so the only way for you to buy the best ammo for best gun - is to buy it. You can't craft medicine, so again - buy it. And i am not talking about med packs. Isn't it simple enough to generate money for them by buying shit from them? Just use the goddamn traders.
@@MrZlocktarI have -50% weapon weight, +160kg carying capacity. When I come back from one mission with hundreds of guns, I need to wait around 4-5 times while going to 3-4 vendors. So yeah that’s actually a huge problem, why sell higher price if I need to sell less items? Also, at end game, most legendary weapons will sell for about 20-30k. No vendors have such money so you just loose a lot of money if you sell it
Also on the ship command ability, he referenced sarah morgans ability to lower fuel costs, but in her unique case, her own leadership ability allows you to assign her to your ship regardless of your crew capacity or crew member limit. Have 3 crew slots on your ship that are full? You can still add sarah to make 4 crew members. So if you have max ship command and 8 crew slots on your ship filled with 8 crew members, sarah can still be assigned as your ninth crew member
@@zeroone8800 vasco provides 1 free reactor power, sarah doesnt take up any crew slots as well as lowers grav jump fuel costs. Test for yourself. Get a 3 crew capacity ship, assign 3 crew, and then add sarah to make 4. It will let you. Vasco always takes up one crew slot when you assign him to your ship.
@@jacobwilliams9438 not a bug. every ship skill on a crew member can "stack" with your own to an extent. how much depends on the skill. the shield skill for example if you get the one guy with 3 shield skill and yours is maxed he still buffs the shield and gives you one free power in shields. Vasco with 2 in his shield skill buffs by the same amount but doesn't give the free power in the shield. but Vasco also gives 1 free power to place wherever due to another skill
okeey thats why i can't put more crew in my ship even though i have space for 9 crew lol and i've been wondering why ... why this skill is not in pilot tree ?!
Ship Command is a great skill and most people want it. Unfortunately you have to spend so many other skill points in the Social Tree on junk skills just to unlock the ability to spend skill points in Ship Command.
For me, persuasion was an incredibly useful skill because I played the entire game every major side quest, and then did a speed run to new game + 10 and persuasion was incredibly valuable. It’s giving the last boss battle which would be incredibly repetitive and take another 15 minutes per play
It's funny I purposely reloaded my save the first time around because I succeded in preventing the final fight because I wanted Eternity's Gate but I would also opt for your angle in the subsequent NG+ playthroughs
FYI, you don't have to dismiss your companion for isolation's bonus to kick in, it turns on just from telling your companion to wait. So even if you don't like having a companion in normal gameplay, you can have one with you as a pack mule and just tell them to wait somewhere when you don't want them getting in the way.
@@hahahadeath1974 Correct. The description for the skill is inaccurate in more ways than one. I can only guess they were going to design it that way originally, but opted for more lenient restrictions and forgot to change the text.
Manipulation also has another (kinda niche) use: when you kill someone and want to take their clothing, but it doesn't show in their inventory, you can manipulate someone else to loot their bodies. If you kill the manipulated looter, they will have the clothing you liked in their inventory... its very strange, but it works. This is how I got enough swimsuits for my entire crew lol.
interesting, that’s good to know. i stole the swimsuits from the beach houses in paradiso so got like 3 but could probably use more when i level up ship command and hire more playmates for my party pirate ship 😂
Well you can do it their way, or you can just sleep/wait 24 hours planet time on Venus, which believe it or not (physics of Venus' spinning/orbiting around the Sun) is 243 days Universal Time, and most areas/items in the game reset after about 7 days, so wait/sleep 24 hours on Venus then go back to Paradiso and all items you stole should be restocked and ready for more looting. @@medovk
What vendor does one use to get that many credits? I've tried selling crafted goods at the key then waiting 48 hours for a reset, but it would have taken hundreds of hours to earn that much using that method, and the bottleneck is how long it takes to wait, not how much I can sell my infinite crafted goods for.
@@b130610Hu? Just sell every now and then at New Atlantis, the only way you can have top much is if you're looting 10+ outposts in a row. And if you're just grinding money through outposts, you're always gonna have too much and fly around to different cities to sell.
It's really not, the most expensive ships will only cost you around 1billion credits at most, you're obviously just maxing out the build limit with absolute rubbish that wrecks your ships performance. And if you have 3 billion credits you are obviously outposts grinding, so you have easy infinite credits, so credits aren't an issue. You're just stupid no offense.
The enemy influencing skills are better paired with stealth, similar to how you’d use illusion magic in Skyrim. They’re still not amazing just because stealth in general is rather lackluster, but you can get some decent use out of them in those situations.
This is a really good point. I think I should have added a short comment about how opening an engagement from stealth can make these skills a little easier to weave into your playstyle. Of course you could instead just stealth attack those same targets but the option is at least there to mix things up
@@unclemumble Manipulation sometimes trivializes stealth attacks that would otherwise be difficult/impossible by letting you single out and move targets one at a time. In particular, the play pattern where you manipulate some high health or otherwise inconvenient target (at up to 30m of range) to just walk to where you are and take a melee sneak attack instead of a ranged one is very powerful. This synergy with concealment (a broken skill) alone raises it to obligatory tier for specifically the stealth use case in my opinion
So as i saw it manipulation works different and it really depends on situation - if you will use it on enemy that is near another enemy they will attack manipulated, if you will use it in a stealth missions like in rujin and use manipulation on a lone enemy then other enemies won't attack you while you have manipulated enemy active. Npc can open locked doors if they are novice and advanced only.
Stealth and these skills are all far longer than a XM2311 silenced shot to the head. When it's putting out 400+ Damage it doesn't really matter how much health the target has any more.
Makes the experience much better the less you have to save scum therefore I personally love the persuasion skill and find it to be one of the first skills I try to max out. My character is also a space scoundrel.
Finally someone keeping it real with the commerce skill. Almost everyone tells you to take it, but I don't get it. Money is not the problem, if you don't buy guns all the time and don't waste too much on ship development. The real issue is vendor credit limits and commerce makes it kinda worse: You are full with loot and want to load it off but the vendors don't have enough money to buy everything (so you have to wait for the vendor inventory refresh and trading your real life time for in game money - this sucks!) But with commerce you sell less loot for the same amount of money (=vendor credit limit) meaning you will have to wait longer to get rid of the loot (but you get a bit more in game money - still I value my real life time way higher than in game money). Great video. I can't wait for the next skill tree! :)
Dude 100% on the waiting to sell loot because I sell it for MORE is the funniest part. I don't even have points in commerce and I'm still holding onto around 600k worth of survey scans and millions of credits worth of random crap sitting in my storage 😂
I mean if your only goal is to clear out the merchant's gold, you could just jettison items after draining the merchants in the system you go to. Commerce just gets you there faster. Probably still not worth it, but don't create problems for yourself that you don't need to. No need to wait around for the inventory to reset. Commerce skill is about the only way to make ship stealing worth it, which isn't profitable but it is fun.
@@Citizen5101 stealing ships seems fun until you realize that in order to do so the crappy, broken ship you just stole became your home ship and you now have to fly that garbage can to the next ship yard to sell it, hoping nobody is attacking you on the way (coz you have a highly optimized main ship that can handle anything, but for some reason you're sitting in the garbage can - wtf!?) And for some reason any decent weapon is more worth than a great space ship (if you include the registration fee). Until they change that system somehow I wont steal ships and stick to looting spacer and pirate hideouts :)
I think Persuasion is either a 0 or 3-4 skill. Either you do a lot of side quests with a lot of persuasion checks, or you don't. In the long run it will save you time and get you access to options you wouldn't have otherwise, but you can complete the entire game without persuading anyone. Ultimately, it's a single skill instead of a whole suite of skills, and it can be an enormous time-saver, so I say A tier. It's one of the most valuable social skills.
I'm inclined to agree. In terms of QoL alone, I feel it warrants an A or B, then bumped up to A when you consider the times it can bump up payouts or down prices.
Yeah it's such a playstyle dependent skill that it's pretty much impossible to have a consensus on what the right ranking is. Successful persuasion is either important to you or you take them as a bonus and that dictates a ton of the perceived value of the skill
With so few point per level, you have to be super careful of what benifits your game play. I think they need to give more skill points per level and an option to reset with like one time payment with credits at the med center that changes your character.
i could definitely see Instigation being potentially useful for chaotic stealth builds, like causing a distraction to pull enemies away from where you’re trying to sneak
Heck yeah. For real, I was searching your channel this morning looking for the sequel of your Physical Skills tier list and was sad it wasn't finished yet. Then BOOM. Like you read my mind. I appreciate this, no other RUclipsr has covered the skills in such a critical and analytical way. Thank you
The persuasion skill, if anything, is a TIME SAVER. In many instances it helps to avoid the "go talk to this guy for me and then I'll help ya out" which in some quests can save you a whole hour or two of gameplay. I'm looking at you Kelton Frush from "A Tree Grows in New Atlantis". That quest sucked! I'm hanging with companions on my first play through but will definitely be doing Isolation Rank 4 on the next one. That's a sick perk.
100% persuasion has some legitimate benefits but it's all about perceived value. I'm someone who willingly does every silly little task that gets asked of me in quest lines because I'm looking for every possible dialogue line and quest interaction for lore collection purposes. Obviously there will be many people like yourself who would sooner high five an ashta than collect those silly probes for Kelton so you'll put this much higher. Very much a to each their own skill so I'm not surprised to see lots of opinions here which is totally cool!
And that is exactly why these games are so wonderful! You can literally play it any way you want! Back in the Fallout 3 days when I had lots of free time I would 100 percent everything. Now that I'm 36 and juggling a career I try to squeeze in what I can, having said that I've dedicated 90 percent of my gaming time to Starfield. Having a blast! Excited for your Science and Tech tree vidoes! @@unclemumble
I legit only put points in persuasion and other tier 1 skills, is because 90% of the social tree is dog $#!+, and I want ship command that for some god awful reason is a tier 4 skill
I love this insight. I hope Bethesda watches videos like this because they could really improve the game with little changes to things like this. I have a video request. I play RPGs for a great story and I'm curious which traits have the most impact on story. I know some have a major impact like adoring fan and kids stuff, but I can't seem to find any story about alien DNA. I'd love video breaking down this sort of topic.
Granted I haven't put as much time into the game as the people posting videos, but so far I think you're right. I have seen my background and other traits come up a few times, but the only NPC who mentioned alien DNA was a doctor who offered to "cure the affliction" and remove the trait. I also have the Wanted trait and my head canon is that I was experimented on and left to continue my life on the same world, but was (unknown to me) still under observation. When I started planet hopping I was no longer a subject in a controlled environment, if the experiment makes me dangerous I'm a liability. So I think of each encounter with bounty hunters as related to Alien DNA, but they are two separate things and so far no one mentions the experiment.
Well alien DNA isn't worth it I wished the they allowed you to change with new game plus you get more health but your items don't heal as much making it kind of useless
@mr.nuticus7821 Alien DNA is objectively one of the best traits you can start with, adding a permanent 50 oxygen to your meter(50 hp too but as you level that becomes ignorable at 20 hp per level). The hp is whatever as food is trash for hp unless you do a super low level challenge run (food is a single point so healing 5 hp goes down to 4). An the med kits and such lose a single % per second going from 40% hp recovered to 30% which seems like a lot but even "end game" med packs will still heal for half health. There's only three other ways to get improved oxygen levels. tera firma (which stacks for a permanent double oxygen level of 200 when on a planet, does nothing in space so back to 150 with Alien DNA) spaced is just tera firma but for (what a suprise) space, and the fitness perk which adds a flat 30.
These videos are exactly what I’ve been looking for. Skill placement is so important and there are for sure some that look great on paper but simply aren’t. I appreciate you validating my own opinion on persuasion. Can’t wait for the next one
I think the problem with giving the skills tier lists like this, is most skills are totally subjective worth. I am level 65, and have five skill points on combat. 2 in ballistics, 2 in pistols, and 1 in reload. I don’t die in fights, and almost nothing I can’t put down in 3 to 6 shots. Though it helps that I found an Advanced Magshot at like level 18 or some such. At this point, adding any more to combat would make me OP. Lots of social skills are nice just to mix it up. But I feel one of the upsides to Starfield is all of the skills are there to enhance how you like to have fun, as opposed to must have skills like lots of other games.
You're totally right, it's actually very difficult (and in some cases impossible) to give an objective rating for most skills. I do think there are some skills that stand above (or below) the rest regardless of playstyle that warrant the ratings. It's a fun exercise nonetheless and I enjoy hearing differing opinons!
@@unclemumble Yeah, it is a fun exercise. I always find it interesting where people put their skill points in games. Actually says a lot about the person I find. Anyways, love your videos, and looking forward to more of them to come.
Like me and my val'ruun plasma shotgun. I have maxed shotgun, plasma, maxed ballistic and almost maxed sniping and they all give damage benefits to that one weapon, its damage in the description is close to if not over 1500.
On the Diplomacy one… I found it really useful, in combination with Stealth when you have to break into businesses and/or areas… you can scan them with Diplomacy and sneak around them easier and stay hidden. Only found useful in one quest line so far though… so very niche I should say… a lot of the skills are that way, they work better in combo of something at a certain time in the game….
I was also thinking about its usefulness for stealth, but mainly its use in stealth combat where you can calm enemies that you accidentally get seen by, then re-position yourself so you're hidden and kill them with a sneak attack.
Great coverage! Two notes - 1. I think it is extremely appropriate that you rankings for the top tier skills spell out BAD 2. Persuasion: I have points in this and I have to say I feel like it is utterly useless. The persuasion minigame feels like it is completely in conflict with the actual conversation you are having. In almost all cases, there seems to be a "right answer" based purely on dialogue and if you don't pick it, the NPC will react negatively no matter what your skill level is or what the difficulty level of the comment is. I THINK it is helping me when I pick a more "difficult" response that is the right one, but it is very hard to see the real results with out rigorous testing in a way that is counter to how I want to play the game (I am not save scumming for this playthrough)
I'm on level 53 and have a few more skill purchases in the bank but I'm holding off on waiting for the next two videos. I dumped everything into Tech happily but I have one skill purchase in Combat and a few in Science. I'm super apprecitive of the level of detail you are doing with these videos.
Commerce is also a double edged sword if you go full in. At rank 4 commerce, you can barely sell one weapon to a merchant. It's great if you buy a lot, but a pain if you sell a lot.
There's a mod on Nexus that randomly increases merchant credit totals by 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50%. It's just a bat file you run through console once you load into game. Had the trade authority merchant in the well have 360k last night. The UC surplus vendor had about 3500, instead of his usual 1500. Mod is an absolute must.
What I do is buy out all the ammo, resources or meds to increase the amount you can sell. Even buying 30ks worth of ammo I get my money back and then some. Aswell as always going to the trade authority first, as they start with 11k in their pocket.
You slept hard on diplomacy. Rank 4 essentially reads (75% chance to instant kill an enemy) you can walk into a room with 10 people and isntantly "kill" 7 enemies. It doesnt just stop an enemy from attacking you, it makes an enemy completely unaware of your Actions. You can break the law right in a pacified NPCs face and they do not care. You can stealth around a room using diplomacy before a fight starts so when you start engaging the enemy, most of them just won't care or help their friends. Its honestly super broken and the jankness of the scanner can be worked around by only taking 1 of those social skills so you can quickly hit the A button and not have to cycle through options. Its really really really good
Great points! I didn't realize that this makes them ignore criminal actions, I would 100% upgrade this now knowing that. It's also nice that it's the first option on the list of influence skills so it's easiest to execute. Thanks for sharing! Definitely a niche use case, but a very good one! My gun will still do the talking in most cases 😅
@@unclemumble definitely character dependent (or player) but I'm using a melee Jedi kind build and so having a ranged option to eliminate an enemy with a click of a button has made the build feel whole. Recommend for melee for sure
Love this skill list. I play the diplomat, I talk so many people down from bad decisions. Having points in it is cool for leadership and ship captain too
I set this to watch later for when I’m about to sleep, but I just wanna say ALMOST 20k SUBS BRO!!?? It’s great to see you blow up like this man, 2500 to 20k.
Welcome back my dude, hope you've been enjoying the game. It's been going well, there's so much to cover just in gameplay aspects, let alone lore and interesting quests to stumble across
@@unclemumble I’ve heard rumors about a rogue terrormorph attack that completely boiled over and wiped out a large facility. I’ve also heard about a dungeon of sorts with an entire underground forest of alien life. Dude… I got my own complaints with the game so far, but it’s really amazing most of the time and I’m just as locked in as I thought I’d be.
@@universal_wisdom3416 yeah the game is definitely far from perfect but I'm thoroughly enjoying it despite the flaws. I've stumbled across some pretty crazy stuff as well. Hopefully will find some time to make videos on them soon
On Crew Command: Crew skills in general don't stack. For example, if you have both Amelia Earhart and Sam Coe on your ship, which both have the Piloting skill (increases ship movement speed), you will not get twice the benefit - just the benefits of the highest leveled version on your ship. In addition, a lot of the benefits are rather minor. A crew member with ranks in a ship weapon skill will reduce the cooldown of the weapon by 10% - so if a pulse laser takes 5 seconds to recharge from empty, the crew member will lower it to 4.5 seconds. In addition, Sarah Morgan's Leadership skill gives you an additional +1 to crew capacity just having her on - she's effectively "Free crew" With this in mind, Crew Command isn't very useful. Especially with how many non-Constellation crew members only have 1-2 low level perks shared with a Constellation member. It's mostly a roleplay/aesthetic perk for people who want a ship with lots of crew in it. In addition, Isolationist also applies its damage buff to ship weapons if you don't have any companions, as it's a universal damage up. This even applies if you have crew on your ship. And alongside that, it only checks for Human companions - Vasco, being a robot, does not invalidate Isolationist.
If you invest a couple of points into ship design, you can just buy a multi frequency scan jammer from either Crimson Fleet (The Key) or The Red Mile. I've used that with shielded cargo and my evasion went to around 89% with no points used in deception.
Deception is weird because I feel like they mixed up the contraband scan effect with the payloads perk instead, there's even a tooltip on loading screens claiming that payloads increases your chance to evade contraband scans. Might be worth testing.
Well, in a manner of speaking. Payloads increases your cargo by a percentage, which should include shielded cargo. Scan detections are based on the size and value of the contraband measured against the total shielded cargo capacity and whether a scan jammer is present.
^^ this, so they stack together, increased shielded cargo capacity means that contraband takes up a lower percentage of space, making it harder to scan, then the deception further increases the chance to pass a scan.
You do say your analysis is subjective, but i don't think "I don't use consumables so the skill to make consumables is useless" and "no one should put points in persuasion because you can just save scum if you fail" is helpful analysis for people trying to figure out how useful the skills are for their intended purpose.
Great video and great commentary! I think the Ship Command skill is in fact bugged as it should not control how many people you can have at an outpost. Looking forward to you next deep-dives!
I put points in Persuasion, Commerce, and am now putting them in Theft. You've sold me on Scavenging, and I'll be investing in Leadership for the next 4 skill points. All I want is the Ship Command perk, but it's buried behind a "pay wall" of perks.
The speech skill is heavily needed for the ryujin quest line due to them wanting you to be sneaky and not kill so you end up having to either sneak or pass speech checks to get the full pay during quests but other than that it’s not crazy important
It's not really important even for that just quick save before persuasion attempts just spam the highest fill eventually it'll work only mission it might have been useful for is the last one where you have to steal from the place on jemison which I forgot about manipulation and just killed everyone inside after not being able to sneak even with max stealth and the suit I continued the quest after work and forgot I has gotten a skill either way I still got paid a ton
Theft was the first skill I leveled up all the way. I found it useful in encounters because you can steal the weapons off of all the npcs and then when you fight, they are unarmed. I've run into this a number of times
How about. Taking a beautiful in game picture of my mountain side home outpost only to realize that it is now added to my in game loadscreen rotation with a random tooltip added below. Wow! The small innovations to the overall experience has earned BGS and MS a new fan.
"If you're sick of your companions getting mad at you for doing something slightly morally questionable..." I felt this. I had the entirety of constellation turn against me because of an errant shot FROM A TURRET, hit a freestar security ship during a scuffle I jumped into, and then defending myself against the security ships counted as murder. Also Sarah is like "We're all from different backgrounds here. Just don't bring security to our door. Otherwise, I don't care what you do." But when I commit stealth murder for the purposes of taking a ship, suddenly she does care, they all do. Even though I didn't bring security to their door.
Something worth mentioning about persuasion is that after completing the Ryujin faction questline… ***SPOILERS*** …you’re gifted the neural implant that allows you to manipulate NPCs during persuasions. It’s always a green colored option that gives +4 to +5. Lowkey broken lol
FYI: ships surrendering isn’t based on the ship’s strength, but the strength of all ships in the area. Trying to get any ship to surrender around Jemison is nearly impossible. With a high powered ship, you can have reasonable success around Akila. Also, Piracy is useful for Galbank ships in orbit. You can get a Galbank Stormrider to surrender, loot 25k credits, then pay off the 1200 bounty and repeat. That said, it’s still a slow way to get credits that you don’t really need. I only did it to level the skills.
THEFT: If you steal something while crouched, with no one in the room, or nearby, and no one in line-of-sight, you still have a high chance of alerting security to your theft. Yes, you read that right. When you leave the building, you will be met on the street by local security guards. This is highly variable, and unlike Stealth, there is no Theft Meter. Even when you max out this skill you will only have about a 4 out of 5 chance of success each time you steal/pickpocket. NOTE: You will not be able to know if a particular theft attempt will work until after you try it. Always save your game before attempting to pickpocket or steal. Most NPCs in cities have only about 80-100 credits in their pockets. Not really worth the effort. Some specific NPCs have quest items that can be stolen that will make a particular quest easier, but this is a relatively rare occurrence, and you will always have another way to get the quest item.
9:22, Deception in my opinion is meant to be paired with the shielded cargo and sensors jammers to make it almost impossible for contraband to be detected. But if you’re save scumming I can see how it could be pointless. So D for a no SS smuggler build, F tier other ways
Yes, you don't need the sensor hammers if you have this skill... And the piracy part DOES work but apparently only has higher value the further away you are from the major systems..... And many of these skills are beneficial to sneak builds. Using intimidation etc while hidden against groups is quite helpful...
It's basically impossible to be detected anyways though. My tests were at 98% shielded cargo capacity (literally had 126 harvested organs on the ship) and every single rank was exactly the same. It simply does nothing. I wouldn't even care if I got caught with contraband though because if I did it means I forgot to just bring it to the key/den where I wouldn't get scanned
Been waiting for this ever since I saw the physical one. Just as good. Just as concise and well explained. I saw a video recently that claimed to have a breakdown of all skills. It somehow had over 200k views yet it was total trash. It was mostly just reading them all out loud, something anyone could do. Keep going with the excellent content. Hope your channel blows up like it deserves to do.
Really appreciate that. I'm definitely trying to add more than verbatim reading of the skill descriptions and I make a point of spending hours testing each tree in different scenarios. I definitely don't catch everything but I sure get close! All in hopes of giving something genuinely useful to all of you! Cheers
You can get unique powerful weapons from pickpocketing . I really wish they had added a option to be able to reset your skill points . Even if you could only do it once
On the opening inventory comllaint. I found I had stacks of food and stims, added the two most useful/most I had to my quickbar and found myself using them more often, even clearing out full stacks. I'm a full on stim addict now.
Instigation is a lot easier to use when you don’t have any other social skills. It’s most helpful for non-stealth when you want a person/guard gone, but dont want a bounty for murder. That guard that caught you getting your stolen items and contraband back? Just use instigate and let his friends get rid of him for you. Getting the neuroamp from Neon makes it even better. Commerce and Scavenging make the NG+ experience much smoother. Isolation is S tier for me. I never played with companions in Skyrim or Fallout and I loath missions that force me to have one. I usually end up shooting them in the back of the head when they wander into my firing line.
persuation is THE most important skill in the game imo. theres literally hundreds of chances to put this skill to the test and with it maxed out u never fail anything, save yourself the trouble of reloading saves a thousand times, breaking your own immersion and max this out as soon as possible to always get what you want in a conversation with a npc, defuse aggression that may be life saving not only to yourself, but also to npcs to get a happy conclusion to a quest, haggle to get more money from quests, and many other benefits. for a game where u probably spend more time talking to npcs than actually playing, you'd be crazy not to max this first
diplomacy is good for just running through a building with your scanner up spamming e, saves a lot of time if you're trying not to kill people or if your weapons suck
As a heads up the Leadership skill/perk right now is bugged and will disable follow up dialogue from quests and a few other things. You gotta use console commands to remove it. Not sure if adding more ranks fixes it, but just going 1 I was losing all the follow up dialogues (IE: no talk about results of Fleet quest, or Vanguard quest, etc).
Hey! thanks, great analysis, I usually love social skill in bethesda games, but I have 4 in persuasion, 1 in diplomacy, and the 1 free manipulation point and feel pretty underwhelmed so far. Your analysis seems to track quite well with how I have experienced my 50+ levels so far. I am quite bummed diplomacy doesn't have more larger impact options as you would think you would be solving issues between large factions with DIPLOMACY... maybe I miss-interpreted the usefulness. I put 4 in persuasion but definately feel I coulda done with less, so I agree there. I save scum hard, more to prevent lost time if a crash occurs, I usually go with the result on conversation etc, but even then 2-3 points or even just 1 in persuasion is enough. ONE thing that would be cool to see in these videos would be HOW YOU would level up those skills, IF you wanted the master skill, which skills would you find WORTH putting points in, in order to get up to tier 4 skills. Looking forward to your future vids, thanks again!
Great to hear thoughts from a social skill player! I can definitely try to share more of those thoughts in the wrap ups. I've gone with general advice on what skills are worth the points but from an objective standpoint I've left my personal opinions out mostly as my playstyle is probably VERY different from most people since I'm doing a lot of research and lore collection. I'll have some strong opinions on the last two trees though as they're my favourite by a mile!
I'm baffled how Bethesda thought giving vague descriptions and not numbers was a good idea. Especially on the simple ones that are just a static increase in some regard. Same goes with any "Small chance to" okay but HOW small? 1%? 00000.3%? Ughhh can't wait for modders to just give full on descriptions of these.
tell me about it. I'm doing my combat skills testing right now to figure out what the hell these "chance" descriptors mean. "humans can enter a downed state earlier" "increased accuracy" "notably increased accuracy" like lol...
I do a lot of looting, and I generally don't abuse credit glitches. So I maxed out Commerce pretty quickly because I pick up a LOT of weapons and sell them. I try to empty all vendors as often as possible. The other perk to weapon looting is I find real good weapons real fast, so rooting through pockets and chests and locked rooms garners a ton of weapons I can then go sell. Ammo gets expensive REAL fast for the few weapons I use so having a ton of guns to sell to pay off the ammo AND take the vendors credits is always a plus. Maxing commerce means I can have a greater buffer on stored income (i.e. weapons, ammo, resources, components, and ships).
Using stealth + Instigation skill you can make enemies pick off each other without risking or endangering yourself. While you could just use a sniper rifle, if you can't OHKO an enemy, or you just want to 'thin the herd' before a fight starts, I have found that's the best use-case for Instigation.
With the new difficulty systems there is a food and thirst penalty. Dehydration and malnourished. They fuck your character up. I turned them on and started gastro and I’m loving it.
Boy did I find this out the hard way. For my diplomat I ended up with 2 commerce, 1 persuasion, 2 scavenging, spreading one point through influence skills for speech checks, 4 in leadership and 4 in ship command. It's kind of a slog but spreading one point across multiple skills doesn't make it too painful and you could in theory be done with the tree at level 15.
In your intro i kinda expected to give you a thumb down and quit watching halfway through, but you so dilligently also consider the viewpoint that isn't yours and give a seperate grade for that, that I after only 5 minutes hand you my thumb up and guarantee i will watch until the end. You're a real class act! :)
They took a step into the right direction with social skills. Gastronomy should alter max hp and medicine should heal. That would give food a unique and highly useful niche to be used in tandem with meds. It would also make the perk highly desirable. This perk will matter more when they eventually implement survival mode.
I save scum for some things, but was surprised to find I don't like save scumming persuasions. It feels more immersive for conversations to be non-deterministic.
Love how there is not a single option out of the whole social tree to talk your way out of the guards-caught-you-go-to-jail situation. One would think that it’s the most obvious use case for persuasion/intimidation/BRIBERY, but not Todd Howard.
This guide is wonderful. I subscribed on this one alone and I'll be sure to check out your other ones. Also something you can test but from my understanding is that Vasco doesn't count as a companion and isolation may still work with Vasco. If you can test that out and give a update on the skill would be cool.
Glad to hear! I'll have to give that one a try though I have a feeling he will still count unless Bethesda put in the extra effort to treat him as a non-companion/crew for this unique purpose. It would definitely be cool if this is the case though and if it is I'd expect leadership to similarly not work with him which would only be fair
@@unclemumble Well I suspect it works because I I heard that Vasco works with the introvert trait. But that only works cause the con specifically says human companion. Was curious if it also applied for perk.
If anyone has had an issue leveling starship command because their ship kills aren’t counting, for some reason you can’t use a commandeered spaceship. It has to be one that was given you you or legally purchased. I destroyed like 40 ships using my personal ship, that started off as an ecliptic something or another, and couldn’t get any of the kills to count. Switched to an narwhal based ship afterwards that I had bought and every kill counted. Both ships had the same crew and crew count, so that was the only difference.
12:42 - Vasco & Isolation = best combo! 🙂 16:27 - not related to the skill, but if you equip "+X carry capacity" items to your companion, save the game > close the game > reload, you'll notice that his/her carrying capacity reset to the default value after each new gaming session. The only workaround for this is to talk to him/her after starting the game and unequip & equip that/those item(s).
1. Gastronomy still has beneficial effects - imo worth it but most food recipes aren't worthwhile. 2. You can't steal most equipped weapons that are worth a damn. 3. You called it exactly right on the Influence etc skills though. 1 point is enough. But even if 1 ability would unlock ALL those skills together, it would only just be worth it. Even if you throw manipulation in. (like how Xenosociology works) I'm working on a social/stealth build but yeah most times I can still gun enemies down with 0 physical and 0 combat skills.
Commerce is another skill, like Diplomacy that adds a lot of nice dialog options, adding a lot of value to that first point. Agree with not needed to go beyond that though.
I'm a little dissipated with Persuasion, it's application feels a little shallow. What I would want it to be is an opportunity to unlock new quest options. Or have funny dialog options, like you've convinced a gangster that you deserve 90% of the cut & his ship, while you see an intense rage coming from that gangster who cant believe how badly he's getting hosed yet is agreeing to it.
Not saying this changes anything at all about your assessment of the piracy skill, but higher ranks of the scanning skill tells you more information about ships you see in space, so it might make the piracy skill more useful when you know what cargo they are carrying with rank 4 scanning. I don't know, i don't use either skill
You can, it's only if you have an active follower. It's just because crew is the term for less important characters like Heller or Moara that can follow you vs companions like Sarah and Andreja. Isolation works fine even with people on your ships and outposts
The only reason that I thought about investing in social skills is for the ship command perk. Which is painfully set at level 4. Now I have to invest 9 points just to unlock it. That is a real pain in the neck.
A strong B skill that falls just shy of A would be a B+ skill. Also, basic statistics class reveals that most skills would be C for average, fewer skills would be D and B, even fewer are F and A, and only 1 skill would ever be S tier. Knowing how to grade stuff properly helps the students understand the true worth of things.
I find the comerce skill actually makes things harder. Prices being better means vendors run out of money way faster, so you are left having to wait more to unload the same amount of goods. More often than not just getting rid of the stuff is more important than actually getting credits.
The way to manage this is to also have a good spaceship with plenty of cargo space. Then you can keep a huge stock in your ship and empty out any merchant you visit without having to worry about being slowed down due to encumbrance. My ship has like 12000 cargo space while still being top tier for combat/travel. Whenever I visit a merchant I haven't been to in a while I just flip to the ship cargo and empty out their cash with the loot I got in my cargo.
@@TheRealXartaX having that much cargo space is ridiculous. I don't loot every pen and paper cups I only loot high value low mass items and contrabands, and the commerce skill fits perfectly for that
@@TheRealXartaX ah ok if you're going for building stuff i guess then you can never have too much cargo space. I'm on a space bandit/runner character build so speed and disabling enemy ships is more important than cargo space for me.
@@kenhew4641 You can have a ship that can get to any POI from warp-in in a single boost and with extremely strong weaponry without giving up that kind of cargo space. Requires maxed tech skills like piloting and such, though.
Personally I liked Persuasion. Understand that at higher levels you can not only succeed more often, but you get auto succeeds and you do those for the highest points and the more important conversations. I found it as useful as skills like Jump Pack, Pilot, and Security. For me it was a must have. And yes I typically do not save before doing things to cheese them, like persuasion or checking legendary drops. I never looted boxes in the ground or cheesed it through walls. I never built an XP farm. I also never built a hollow box shaped ship. I will never waste points into Commerce again. I have probably made over 2 million. Isolation is a hard one because the companion quest lines are great. It takes a while to go through them, so you will not really be able to use this skill until very late on. And unless you are playing the harder levels you really do not need the extra resistances, but will likely need the extra carry capacity. Now most people say weight lifting is a must. It is nice, but really I only took it because I was struggling understanding all the red markings in the ship builder when I was trying to add cargo capacity to the ship. I thought because it was red it was an error or that I was really killing the performance of the ship as cargo is so heavy. It turns out it was not a big deal so now I can easily dump off stuff at the ship. This made followers usually plenty to clear a large base. I just wish the companions would stop reminding you they have something so often. Every time you fast travel or have a loading screen they will remind you and it is annoying. The problem with Leadership is I think it is a second tier skill. I will not put any points into anything but persuasion and that will take a while to get to level 4. I will need to waste a point into something like Commerce just to be able to unlock Leadership. This means I have likely already gotten affinity with at least 2 followers before I can even get the skill... unless I waste a bunch of points. They made the base building almost worthless except for money and XP farming... which is boring. They could have made base building great, but they did not. It was more of an after thought at best. Ship Command is great, but the prerequisites mean you have to dump a ton of points into social skills and that is just not going to happen until very late game if not SN+. Now one thing I have noticed is you never take into account magazines. Some abilities when stacked with certain magazines can make things a bit different... either making a skill better or making it less worth taking the skill at higher levels.
On a second note, we need also an increase in ship command. I want to make the use of dreadnought sized ships for all kinds of things. Extra firepower....transport entire Armies...have a hull that tanks things. Perhaps once we get good update on ship buildings and increase the size cap
Isolation is actually pretty bad because a lot of the time you're forced to take a companion with you. The illusion spells have always been super janky to use. In skyrim they were useless past the mid game because all the enemies would eventually scale past the spells level cap. Now that they go up to 10-20 levels above the player's level they'll always be usable against endgame enemies. Didn't know they added extra dialogue options.
Persuasion is super helpful but you still need to wear a persuasive outfit and probably pop a hippolyta for the harder interactions, and it gets much better when you upgrade diplomacy as well.
Because of the way crew bonuses work the ship command skill is actually pretty bad as having Sarah doesn't take a crew slot and having her, Vasco and Sam on your crew actually provides you with all the impactful crew bonuses you can have and an extra slot for someone else.
Great breakdown. Thanks for pointing out that Diplomacy, deception, intimidation can add dialog options on persuade tests. I’ve dropped a rank in each now
Piracy is worth it, just open your scan and check if there are galbank ships. There's also other ships that tend to have more loot, sloops if I'm not mistaken. Usually galbank ships are strong, so don't always surrender that easily. But if I'm being honest, there's no amount of ships that could destroy mine
This is the first of your videos that I have come across. You did a great job breaking them down by use case and showing how different play styles may or may not value the skills. I would suggest maybe changing your ranking system from S-F to 0-4 denoting how may points you think should be in a skill. Scavenging gets 2, Deception gets 0, Outpost gets 1 or 4. Just a thought. You're doing great. Thanks for the breakdown. I hope they come out with a way to respec our characters. Of course they may have one and I just haven't found it yet.
SHIP COMMAND: This is mostly a roleplay/flavor skill, and you will never find more than 1 rank in this skill is at all useful to gameplay. There just aren’t enough companions/crew with meaningfully useful skills for you to need more than 4 crew slots on your ship. The minimum of 3 crew slots(plus Sarah for 4) is more than you will ever really need.
Isolation is worth a couple points because every time you go through the unity you're alone again, and survivability is always lowest at the beginning.
Deception basically takes the place of your Comm Jammer for shielded cargo when it's upping your chance to evade scans. I had a comm jammer for all my time from rank 1 to 4 so I didn't see the effects until I forgot a comm jammer on my new ship, which put the chance to evade at 90% without a comm jammer (equivalent to the best comm jammer available at level 50ish). It's almost useless, but it's useless because you can get a comm jammer fairly easily if you know where to look. If you don't want to waste time or money on a comm jammer, and you get your shielded cargo bays from your outpost and don't know where else to get one, maybe you can look into Deception. Unlike Diplomacy and Intimidation, though, I've never come across a Deception conversation choice in my 300+ hours of play. I'd rank it at D and the reason I started a new character.
Best thing about the diplomacy skill is the new dialogues it enables in persuasion. The actual skill is so janky that its basically wasted perk point unfortunately.
You can use Manipulation on the same target multiple times to give more orders as long as it's still within the original timeframe, but it runs a check _after_ each action that might block you from further actions. It's actually really useful for sneaking around, not only because you can make people open doors for you but because you can send them off to start fights and draw attention elsewhere or have them turn off an alarm to lower guard alertness, or just have them run off into oblivion. Sometimes you can even get NPCs to steal valuables for you, in which case they pick them up and hand them over to you without you getting any bounty when they get caught.
The way I play Starfield, Diplomacy is always done with bullets so I invest my diplomacy points in the Combat tree.
A fellow fan of aggressive negotiations!
One benefit of diplomacy is it allows you to sneak by people.
There was one mission where I was trying to sneak through. There was a guard facing the direction I wanted to go, I diplomacied him and then snuck right past.
Great point!
My signature move is picking someone in the enemy line to temporarily win over so that they're too busy shooting him because the AI dictates he's the easier thing to shoot I move in and flank.
It also doesn't alert enemies if you fail, which is great.
Really good to know ty, wow learn something new all the time. Starfield truly gets better and better 😊👍
I know exactly what mission you are referring to also. I had to stun that guy unfortunately. Didn't have diplomacy unlocked at the time
I wish the Trade Perk would also increasse the Traders max Money. Maybe about 25-50% per Rank. Sucks to wait 10 Times because you have Weapons you can sell for about 14k 😮
Why? I don't even need to wait, that's a chore. Just BUY stuff from them. I use minigun with 7.7mm and 11mm minigun, which results in over 11k of credits to buy all needed ammo. This puts every trader at about 16-18k credits. And then you have Trader Authority with over 20k credits because of that. I never wait, i am making them money during gameplay, by buying ammo, resources, anything i need. Money are certainly not an issue, so i don't really care that i can't get more than 5 or 11k of credits from traders pool. If we take Neon, i can get there about 11x3 + 5x5 credits. That's a whopping 58k credits per one run without waiting. And then of course i will buy shit as well. So i can sell well over 500 mass of shit from my ship in one go if i really want. You want to start using traders? Use minigun. That's the MOST fun weapon in game in my opinion. It's just absolute DAKKA gun.
I think the better option is that rank 4 should let you invest in traders permanently increasing the max money of a trader for example a trader has 10k you can use a one time option to invest 5k credits then from then on the trader has 15k credits
This only works if you're trying to dump mass. but if you're trying to make money, this still will only leave you with a net positive of the seller's original money.@@MrZlocktar
@@lobow0 Once again - why? It's the first Bethesda game where you actually has reason to buy shit from traders. You can't craft ammo, so the only way for you to buy the best ammo for best gun - is to buy it. You can't craft medicine, so again - buy it. And i am not talking about med packs. Isn't it simple enough to generate money for them by buying shit from them? Just use the goddamn traders.
@@MrZlocktarI have -50% weapon weight, +160kg carying capacity. When I come back from one mission with hundreds of guns, I need to wait around 4-5 times while going to 3-4 vendors. So yeah that’s actually a huge problem, why sell higher price if I need to sell less items? Also, at end game, most legendary weapons will sell for about 20-30k. No vendors have such money so you just loose a lot of money if you sell it
Also on the ship command ability, he referenced sarah morgans ability to lower fuel costs, but in her unique case, her own leadership ability allows you to assign her to your ship regardless of your crew capacity or crew member limit. Have 3 crew slots on your ship that are full? You can still add sarah to make 4 crew members. So if you have max ship command and 8 crew slots on your ship filled with 8 crew members, sarah can still be assigned as your ninth crew member
@@zeroone8800 vasco provides 1 free reactor power, sarah doesnt take up any crew slots as well as lowers grav jump fuel costs. Test for yourself. Get a 3 crew capacity ship, assign 3 crew, and then add sarah to make 4. It will let you. Vasco always takes up one crew slot when you assign him to your ship.
Wait, so that's not a bug? That was 'bugging' me.
@@jacobwilliams9438 not a bug. every ship skill on a crew member can "stack" with your own to an extent. how much depends on the skill. the shield skill for example if you get the one guy with 3 shield skill and yours is maxed he still buffs the shield and gives you one free power in shields. Vasco with 2 in his shield skill buffs by the same amount but doesn't give the free power in the shield. but Vasco also gives 1 free power to place wherever due to another skill
okeey thats why i can't put more crew in my ship even though i have space for 9 crew lol and i've been wondering why ... why this skill is not in pilot tree ?!
Ship Command is a great skill and most people want it. Unfortunately you have to spend so many other skill points in the Social Tree on junk skills just to unlock the ability to spend skill points in Ship Command.
The main issue with social is to find enough reason to invest into lower lever skills to unlock leadership, outpost management and ship command.
For me, persuasion was an incredibly useful skill because I played the entire game every major side quest, and then did a speed run to new game + 10 and persuasion was incredibly valuable. It’s giving the last boss battle which would be incredibly repetitive and take another 15 minutes per play
It's funny I purposely reloaded my save the first time around because I succeded in preventing the final fight because I wanted Eternity's Gate but I would also opt for your angle in the subsequent NG+ playthroughs
FYI, you don't have to dismiss your companion for isolation's bonus to kick in, it turns on just from telling your companion to wait. So even if you don't like having a companion in normal gameplay, you can have one with you as a pack mule and just tell them to wait somewhere when you don't want them getting in the way.
Oh that's really interesting and makes it even viable to use both isolation and leadership in tandem. Great share!
So just to make sure before I invest in it
I can still have crew in my ship and the perk will be active, just can’t have companions following me?
Be careful with waiting, they'll still follow you into new places like ships and need to be told to wait again.
@@hahahadeath1974 Correct. The description for the skill is inaccurate in more ways than one. I can only guess they were going to design it that way originally, but opted for more lenient restrictions and forgot to change the text.
Thanks for the info. Hate that we get stuck with followers during main and major quests when we want to play solo.
Manipulation also has another (kinda niche) use: when you kill someone and want to take their clothing, but it doesn't show in their inventory, you can manipulate someone else to loot their bodies. If you kill the manipulated looter, they will have the clothing you liked in their inventory... its very strange, but it works. This is how I got enough swimsuits for my entire crew lol.
interesting, that’s good to know. i stole the swimsuits from the beach houses in paradiso so got like 3 but could probably use more when i level up ship command and hire more playmates for my party pirate ship 😂
😂👍
@@blackvx gotta get them proper uniforms when on board, less is more
Well you can do it their way, or you can just sleep/wait 24 hours planet time on Venus, which believe it or not (physics of Venus' spinning/orbiting around the Sun) is 243 days Universal Time, and most areas/items in the game reset after about 7 days, so wait/sleep 24 hours on Venus then go back to Paradiso and all items you stole should be restocked and ready for more looting. @@medovk
Wonder if this would work on Freestar Rangers. There is a badass duster that I want, but only one NPC wears it in the game
As someone who has spent 2.6 Billion of their total 3.1 BIllion on ships, Commerce is a must.
I'm scared to ask how big your ships are 😂
@unclemumble probably at the build limit
What vendor does one use to get that many credits? I've tried selling crafted goods at the key then waiting 48 hours for a reset, but it would have taken hundreds of hours to earn that much using that method, and the bottleneck is how long it takes to wait, not how much I can sell my infinite crafted goods for.
@@b130610Hu? Just sell every now and then at New Atlantis, the only way you can have top much is if you're looting 10+ outposts in a row. And if you're just grinding money through outposts, you're always gonna have too much and fly around to different cities to sell.
It's really not, the most expensive ships will only cost you around 1billion credits at most, you're obviously just maxing out the build limit with absolute rubbish that wrecks your ships performance. And if you have 3 billion credits you are obviously outposts grinding, so you have easy infinite credits, so credits aren't an issue. You're just stupid no offense.
The enemy influencing skills are better paired with stealth, similar to how you’d use illusion magic in Skyrim. They’re still not amazing just because stealth in general is rather lackluster, but you can get some decent use out of them in those situations.
This is a really good point. I think I should have added a short comment about how opening an engagement from stealth can make these skills a little easier to weave into your playstyle. Of course you could instead just stealth attack those same targets but the option is at least there to mix things up
@@unclemumble Manipulation sometimes trivializes stealth attacks that would otherwise be difficult/impossible by letting you single out and move targets one at a time. In particular, the play pattern where you manipulate some high health or otherwise inconvenient target (at up to 30m of range) to just walk to where you are and take a melee sneak attack instead of a ranged one is very powerful. This synergy with concealment (a broken skill) alone raises it to obligatory tier for specifically the stealth use case in my opinion
So as i saw it manipulation works different and it really depends on situation - if you will use it on enemy that is near another enemy they will attack manipulated, if you will use it in a stealth missions like in rujin and use manipulation on a lone enemy then other enemies won't attack you while you have manipulated enemy active.
Npc can open locked doors if they are novice and advanced only.
Stealth and these skills are all far longer than a XM2311 silenced shot to the head. When it's putting out 400+ Damage it doesn't really matter how much health the target has any more.
@@loomzoom what it does specifically depends on what you click on with the cursor after it succeeds.
Makes the experience much better the less you have to save scum therefore I personally love the persuasion skill and find it to be one of the first skills I try to max out. My character is also a space scoundrel.
True but you could just keep a dress and a couple bottles of wine on you.
And the persuade pills
@@MrGhosta5 yeah but even those will altogether only get your success chance up by like 20% or so, persuasion gets it up by 50%
Finally someone keeping it real with the commerce skill. Almost everyone tells you to take it, but I don't get it. Money is not the problem, if you don't buy guns all the time and don't waste too much on ship development. The real issue is vendor credit limits and commerce makes it kinda worse: You are full with loot and want to load it off but the vendors don't have enough money to buy everything (so you have to wait for the vendor inventory refresh and trading your real life time for in game money - this sucks!) But with commerce you sell less loot for the same amount of money (=vendor credit limit) meaning you will have to wait longer to get rid of the loot (but you get a bit more in game money - still I value my real life time way higher than in game money).
Great video. I can't wait for the next skill tree! :)
Dude 100% on the waiting to sell loot because I sell it for MORE is the funniest part. I don't even have points in commerce and I'm still holding onto around 600k worth of survey scans and millions of credits worth of random crap sitting in my storage 😂
Didn't one of the skills in Skyrim boost the amount of gold the merchants had?
@@adamcline4320Fallout 4 as well. I think you could do the same in Fallout 3 and NV with perks
I mean if your only goal is to clear out the merchant's gold, you could just jettison items after draining the merchants in the system you go to. Commerce just gets you there faster. Probably still not worth it, but don't create problems for yourself that you don't need to. No need to wait around for the inventory to reset. Commerce skill is about the only way to make ship stealing worth it, which isn't profitable but it is fun.
@@Citizen5101 stealing ships seems fun until you realize that in order to do so the crappy, broken ship you just stole became your home ship and you now have to fly that garbage can to the next ship yard to sell it, hoping nobody is attacking you on the way (coz you have a highly optimized main ship that can handle anything, but for some reason you're sitting in the garbage can - wtf!?) And for some reason any decent weapon is more worth than a great space ship (if you include the registration fee). Until they change that system somehow I wont steal ships and stick to looting spacer and pirate hideouts :)
Isolation is great for NG+ especially since at least one of the unique NG+ universes makes constellation companions unavailable
I think Persuasion is either a 0 or 3-4 skill. Either you do a lot of side quests with a lot of persuasion checks, or you don't. In the long run it will save you time and get you access to options you wouldn't have otherwise, but you can complete the entire game without persuading anyone.
Ultimately, it's a single skill instead of a whole suite of skills, and it can be an enormous time-saver, so I say A tier. It's one of the most valuable social skills.
I'm inclined to agree. In terms of QoL alone, I feel it warrants an A or B, then bumped up to A when you consider the times it can bump up payouts or down prices.
Yeah it's such a playstyle dependent skill that it's pretty much impossible to have a consensus on what the right ranking is. Successful persuasion is either important to you or you take them as a bonus and that dictates a ton of the perceived value of the skill
The manipulation implant almost nullifies the need to level persuasion.
@@goatlord7310 Manipulation implant?
@@thevoxdeus attained by completing the ryujin industries faction quest line.
Love that you do this for the skill trees. Can’t wait for the full collection. Keep up the great work!
With so few point per level, you have to be super careful of what benifits your game play. I think they need to give more skill points per level and an option to reset with like one time payment with credits at the med center that changes your character.
i could definitely see Instigation being potentially useful for chaotic stealth builds, like causing a distraction to pull enemies away from where you’re trying to sneak
Your guides are great, keep it up! Loved the physical tree one and was waiting for more.
Cheers!
Yep, 👍👍
agreed.
I want more too!!
Heck yeah. For real, I was searching your channel this morning looking for the sequel of your Physical Skills tier list and was sad it wasn't finished yet. Then BOOM. Like you read my mind. I appreciate this, no other RUclipsr has covered the skills in such a critical and analytical way.
Thank you
Cheers, glad you're enjoying!
The persuasion skill, if anything, is a TIME SAVER. In many instances it helps to avoid the "go talk to this guy for me and then I'll help ya out" which in some quests can save you a whole hour or two of gameplay. I'm looking at you Kelton Frush from "A Tree Grows in New Atlantis". That quest sucked!
I'm hanging with companions on my first play through but will definitely be doing Isolation Rank 4 on the next one. That's a sick perk.
100% persuasion has some legitimate benefits but it's all about perceived value. I'm someone who willingly does every silly little task that gets asked of me in quest lines because I'm looking for every possible dialogue line and quest interaction for lore collection purposes. Obviously there will be many people like yourself who would sooner high five an ashta than collect those silly probes for Kelton so you'll put this much higher. Very much a to each their own skill so I'm not surprised to see lots of opinions here which is totally cool!
And that is exactly why these games are so wonderful! You can literally play it any way you want! Back in the Fallout 3 days when I had lots of free time I would 100 percent everything. Now that I'm 36 and juggling a career I try to squeeze in what I can, having said that I've dedicated 90 percent of my gaming time to Starfield. Having a blast! Excited for your Science and Tech tree vidoes! @@unclemumble
I legit only put points in persuasion and other tier 1 skills, is because 90% of the social tree is dog $#!+, and I want ship command that for some god awful reason is a tier 4 skill
I love this insight. I hope Bethesda watches videos like this because they could really improve the game with little changes to things like this.
I have a video request. I play RPGs for a great story and I'm curious which traits have the most impact on story. I know some have a major impact like adoring fan and kids stuff, but I can't seem to find any story about alien DNA. I'd love video breaking down this sort of topic.
I'll have to consider a short video on the traits that goes into more depth than my other video on character building from a few weeks ago
Granted I haven't put as much time into the game as the people posting videos, but so far I think you're right. I have seen my background and other traits come up a few times, but the only NPC who mentioned alien DNA was a doctor who offered to "cure the affliction" and remove the trait.
I also have the Wanted trait and my head canon is that I was experimented on and left to continue my life on the same world, but was (unknown to me) still under observation. When I started planet hopping I was no longer a subject in a controlled environment, if the experiment makes me dangerous I'm a liability. So I think of each encounter with bounty hunters as related to Alien DNA, but they are two separate things and so far no one mentions the experiment.
Well alien DNA isn't worth it I wished the they allowed you to change with new game plus you get more health but your items don't heal as much making it kind of useless
@mr.nuticus7821
Alien DNA is objectively one of the best traits you can start with, adding a permanent 50 oxygen to your meter(50 hp too but as you level that becomes ignorable at 20 hp per level). The hp is whatever as food is trash for hp unless you do a super low level challenge run (food is a single point so healing 5 hp goes down to 4). An the med kits and such lose a single % per second going from 40% hp recovered to 30% which seems like a lot but even "end game" med packs will still heal for half health.
There's only three other ways to get improved oxygen levels. tera firma (which stacks for a permanent double oxygen level of 200 when on a planet, does nothing in space so back to 150 with Alien DNA) spaced is just tera firma but for (what a suprise) space, and the fitness perk which adds a flat 30.
These videos are exactly what I’ve been looking for. Skill placement is so important and there are for sure some that look great on paper but simply aren’t. I appreciate you validating my own opinion on persuasion. Can’t wait for the next one
I think the problem with giving the skills tier lists like this, is most skills are totally subjective worth. I am level 65, and have five skill points on combat. 2 in ballistics, 2 in pistols, and 1 in reload. I don’t die in fights, and almost nothing I can’t put down in 3 to 6 shots. Though it helps that I found an Advanced Magshot at like level 18 or some such.
At this point, adding any more to combat would make me OP. Lots of social skills are nice just to mix it up. But I feel one of the upsides to Starfield is all of the skills are there to enhance how you like to have fun, as opposed to must have skills like lots of other games.
You're totally right, it's actually very difficult (and in some cases impossible) to give an objective rating for most skills. I do think there are some skills that stand above (or below) the rest regardless of playstyle that warrant the ratings. It's a fun exercise nonetheless and I enjoy hearing differing opinons!
@@unclemumble Yeah, it is a fun exercise. I always find it interesting where people put their skill points in games. Actually says a lot about the person I find.
Anyways, love your videos, and looking forward to more of them to come.
Cheers!
Like me and my val'ruun plasma shotgun. I have maxed shotgun, plasma, maxed ballistic and almost maxed sniping and they all give damage benefits to that one weapon, its damage in the description is close to if not over 1500.
You dont have too go alone for isolation, you just tell your companion too wait and instantly activate the bonus and they will come fight anyway
Notice that the highest levels in the social tree spell bad. That should pretty much tell you everything you need to know😂👏
On the Diplomacy one… I found it really useful, in combination with Stealth when you have to break into businesses and/or areas… you can scan them with Diplomacy and sneak around them easier and stay hidden. Only found useful in one quest line so far though… so very niche I should say… a lot of the skills are that way, they work better in combo of something at a certain time in the game….
I was also thinking about its usefulness for stealth, but mainly its use in stealth combat where you can calm enemies that you accidentally get seen by, then re-position yourself so you're hidden and kill them with a sneak attack.
I have over a hundred hours in this game and haven't used stealth once
@@buster7618there are few stealth missions
Its better to use diplomacy - when they are under it they just won"t care if you are there or not
I think he left us a hidden message about Social skills in the 4-th row.
Wish level 4 of deception made it so you had a chance not to get a bounty from piracy. That would make it more worthwhile.
Great coverage! Two notes -
1. I think it is extremely appropriate that you rankings for the top tier skills spell out BAD
2. Persuasion: I have points in this and I have to say I feel like it is utterly useless. The persuasion minigame feels like it is completely in conflict with the actual conversation you are having. In almost all cases, there seems to be a "right answer" based purely on dialogue and if you don't pick it, the NPC will react negatively no matter what your skill level is or what the difficulty level of the comment is. I THINK it is helping me when I pick a more "difficult" response that is the right one, but it is very hard to see the real results with out rigorous testing in a way that is counter to how I want to play the game (I am not save scumming for this playthrough)
I'm on level 53 and have a few more skill purchases in the bank but I'm holding off on waiting for the next two videos. I dumped everything into Tech happily but I have one skill purchase in Combat and a few in Science. I'm super apprecitive of the level of detail you are doing with these videos.
Subscribed bc I like these kinds of videos. Great info, your Physical Perks video was spot on. Now time to start this one....keep up the good work.
Welcome aboard!
I save-scummed persuasion early on but later I just put skillpts in it because I couldn't be bothered anymore.
Yeah it's a pain if you really want those checks to pass
Commerce is also a double edged sword if you go full in. At rank 4 commerce, you can barely sell one weapon to a merchant. It's great if you buy a lot, but a pain if you sell a lot.
There's a mod on Nexus that randomly increases merchant credit totals by 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50%. It's just a bat file you run through console once you load into game. Had the trade authority merchant in the well have 360k last night. The UC surplus vendor had about 3500, instead of his usual 1500. Mod is an absolute must.
What I do is buy out all the ammo, resources or meds to increase the amount you can sell. Even buying 30ks worth of ammo I get my money back and then some. Aswell as always going to the trade authority first, as they start with 11k in their pocket.
You slept hard on diplomacy. Rank 4 essentially reads (75% chance to instant kill an enemy) you can walk into a room with 10 people and isntantly "kill" 7 enemies. It doesnt just stop an enemy from attacking you, it makes an enemy completely unaware of your Actions. You can break the law right in a pacified NPCs face and they do not care. You can stealth around a room using diplomacy before a fight starts so when you start engaging the enemy, most of them just won't care or help their friends. Its honestly super broken and the jankness of the scanner can be worked around by only taking 1 of those social skills so you can quickly hit the A button and not have to cycle through options. Its really really really good
Also should be mentioned they all have BAse success rates and diplomacy is the highest at base 60% the only on I've yet to test is intimidation
Great points! I didn't realize that this makes them ignore criminal actions, I would 100% upgrade this now knowing that. It's also nice that it's the first option on the list of influence skills so it's easiest to execute. Thanks for sharing!
Definitely a niche use case, but a very good one! My gun will still do the talking in most cases 😅
@@unclemumble definitely character dependent (or player) but I'm using a melee Jedi kind build and so having a ranged option to eliminate an enemy with a click of a button has made the build feel whole. Recommend for melee for sure
Love this skill list. I play the diplomat, I talk so many people down from bad decisions. Having points in it is cool for leadership and ship captain too
I set this to watch later for when I’m about to sleep, but I just wanna say ALMOST 20k SUBS BRO!!?? It’s great to see you blow up like this man, 2500 to 20k.
Welcome back my dude, hope you've been enjoying the game. It's been going well, there's so much to cover just in gameplay aspects, let alone lore and interesting quests to stumble across
@@unclemumble
I’ve heard rumors about a rogue terrormorph attack that completely boiled over and wiped out a large facility. I’ve also heard about a dungeon of sorts with an entire underground forest of alien life. Dude… I got my own complaints with the game so far, but it’s really amazing most of the time and I’m just as locked in as I thought I’d be.
@@universal_wisdom3416 yeah the game is definitely far from perfect but I'm thoroughly enjoying it despite the flaws. I've stumbled across some pretty crazy stuff as well. Hopefully will find some time to make videos on them soon
On Crew Command:
Crew skills in general don't stack. For example, if you have both Amelia Earhart and Sam Coe on your ship, which both have the Piloting skill (increases ship movement speed), you will not get twice the benefit - just the benefits of the highest leveled version on your ship.
In addition, a lot of the benefits are rather minor. A crew member with ranks in a ship weapon skill will reduce the cooldown of the weapon by 10% - so if a pulse laser takes 5 seconds to recharge from empty, the crew member will lower it to 4.5 seconds.
In addition, Sarah Morgan's Leadership skill gives you an additional +1 to crew capacity just having her on - she's effectively "Free crew"
With this in mind, Crew Command isn't very useful. Especially with how many non-Constellation crew members only have 1-2 low level perks shared with a Constellation member. It's mostly a roleplay/aesthetic perk for people who want a ship with lots of crew in it.
In addition, Isolationist also applies its damage buff to ship weapons if you don't have any companions, as it's a universal damage up. This even applies if you have crew on your ship. And alongside that, it only checks for Human companions - Vasco, being a robot, does not invalidate Isolationist.
I love how during your summary at the end, the final line of skills just downright spells out 'B A D'.
Can't wait for the other skill reviews/ranking, Great Job! XOXO🥰
Thanks, combat in the works now!
Yay!@@unclemumble
If you invest a couple of points into ship design, you can just buy a multi frequency scan jammer from either Crimson Fleet (The Key) or The Red Mile. I've used that with shielded cargo and my evasion went to around 89% with no points used in deception.
Deception is weird because I feel like they mixed up the contraband scan effect with the payloads perk instead, there's even a tooltip on loading screens claiming that payloads increases your chance to evade contraband scans. Might be worth testing.
Well, in a manner of speaking. Payloads increases your cargo by a percentage, which should include shielded cargo. Scan detections are based on the size and value of the contraband measured against the total shielded cargo capacity and whether a scan jammer is present.
^^ this, so they stack together, increased shielded cargo capacity means that contraband takes up a lower percentage of space, making it harder to scan, then the deception further increases the chance to pass a scan.
I think scan percentage is based on conteband to total cargo capacity ratio. If so it would decrease the chance
You do say your analysis is subjective, but i don't think "I don't use consumables so the skill to make consumables is useless" and "no one should put points in persuasion because you can just save scum if you fail" is helpful analysis for people trying to figure out how useful the skills are for their intended purpose.
Great video and great commentary! I think the Ship Command skill is in fact bugged as it should not control how many people you can have at an outpost. Looking forward to you next deep-dives!
Really enjoy these deep dives into the perk trees. Looking forward to seeing the rest!
I put points in Persuasion, Commerce, and am now putting them in Theft. You've sold me on Scavenging, and I'll be investing in Leadership for the next 4 skill points. All I want is the Ship Command perk, but it's buried behind a "pay wall" of perks.
The speech skill is heavily needed for the ryujin quest line due to them wanting you to be sneaky and not kill so you end up having to either sneak or pass speech checks to get the full pay during quests but other than that it’s not crazy important
It's not really important even for that just quick save before persuasion attempts just spam the highest fill eventually it'll work only mission it might have been useful for is the last one where you have to steal from the place on jemison which I forgot about manipulation and just killed everyone inside after not being able to sneak even with max stealth and the suit I continued the quest after work and forgot I has gotten a skill either way I still got paid a ton
Theft was the first skill I leveled up all the way. I found it useful in encounters because you can steal the weapons off of all the npcs and then when you fight, they are unarmed. I've run into this a number of times
Sounds like my strategy in Baldur's Gate. Command: Drop weapon is a powerful drug.
How about. Taking a beautiful in game picture of my mountain side home outpost only to realize that it is now added to my in game loadscreen rotation with a random tooltip added below. Wow! The small innovations to the overall experience has earned BGS and MS a new fan.
The frames in photo mode a worth a look. I'm on the cover of the flight manual! it pops up on the loadscreen sometimes
"If you're sick of your companions getting mad at you for doing something slightly morally questionable..."
I felt this. I had the entirety of constellation turn against me because of an errant shot FROM A TURRET, hit a freestar security ship during a scuffle I jumped into, and then defending myself against the security ships counted as murder.
Also Sarah is like "We're all from different backgrounds here. Just don't bring security to our door. Otherwise, I don't care what you do." But when I commit stealth murder for the purposes of taking a ship, suddenly she does care, they all do. Even though I didn't bring security to their door.
Something worth mentioning about persuasion is that after completing the Ryujin faction questline…
***SPOILERS***
…you’re gifted the neural implant that allows you to manipulate NPCs during persuasions. It’s always a green colored option that gives +4 to +5. Lowkey broken lol
It's mentioned in the video...
FYI: ships surrendering isn’t based on the ship’s strength, but the strength of all ships in the area. Trying to get any ship to surrender around Jemison is nearly impossible. With a high powered ship, you can have reasonable success around Akila.
Also, Piracy is useful for Galbank ships in orbit. You can get a Galbank Stormrider to surrender, loot 25k credits, then pay off the 1200 bounty and repeat. That said, it’s still a slow way to get credits that you don’t really need. I only did it to level the skills.
You probably put more time into analyzing the skills than people at Bethesda put into "designing" them in the first place
THEFT: If you steal something while crouched, with no one in the room, or nearby, and no one in line-of-sight, you still have a high chance of alerting security to your theft. Yes, you read that right. When you leave the building, you will be met on the street by local security guards. This is highly variable, and unlike Stealth, there is no Theft Meter. Even when you max out this skill you will only have about a 4 out of 5 chance of success each time you steal/pickpocket. NOTE: You will not be able to know if a particular theft attempt will work until after you try it. Always save your game before attempting to pickpocket or steal.
Most NPCs in cities have only about 80-100 credits in their pockets. Not really worth the effort. Some specific NPCs have quest items that can be stolen that will make a particular quest easier, but this is a relatively rare occurrence, and you will always have another way to get the quest item.
9:22, Deception in my opinion is meant to be paired with the shielded cargo and sensors jammers to make it almost impossible for contraband to be detected. But if you’re save scumming I can see how it could be pointless. So D for a no SS smuggler build, F tier other ways
Yes, you don't need the sensor hammers if you have this skill... And the piracy part DOES work but apparently only has higher value the further away you are from the major systems..... And many of these skills are beneficial to sneak builds. Using intimidation etc while hidden against groups is quite helpful...
It's basically impossible to be detected anyways though. My tests were at 98% shielded cargo capacity (literally had 126 harvested organs on the ship) and every single rank was exactly the same. It simply does nothing. I wouldn't even care if I got caught with contraband though because if I did it means I forgot to just bring it to the key/den where I wouldn't get scanned
Been waiting for this ever since I saw the physical one. Just as good. Just as concise and well explained. I saw a video recently that claimed to have a breakdown of all skills. It somehow had over 200k views yet it was total trash. It was mostly just reading them all out loud, something anyone could do. Keep going with the excellent content. Hope your channel blows up like it deserves to do.
Really appreciate that. I'm definitely trying to add more than verbatim reading of the skill descriptions and I make a point of spending hours testing each tree in different scenarios. I definitely don't catch everything but I sure get close! All in hopes of giving something genuinely useful to all of you! Cheers
@@unclemumble Well you're doing a great job. Thank you.
You can get unique powerful weapons from pickpocketing . I really wish they had added a option to be able to reset your skill points . Even if you could only do it once
On the opening inventory comllaint. I found I had stacks of food and stims, added the two most useful/most I had to my quickbar and found myself using them more often, even clearing out full stacks.
I'm a full on stim addict now.
Instigation is a lot easier to use when you don’t have any other social skills. It’s most helpful for non-stealth when you want a person/guard gone, but dont want a bounty for murder. That guard that caught you getting your stolen items and contraband back? Just use instigate and let his friends get rid of him for you. Getting the neuroamp from Neon makes it even better.
Commerce and Scavenging make the NG+ experience much smoother.
Isolation is S tier for me. I never played with companions in Skyrim or Fallout and I loath missions that force me to have one. I usually end up shooting them in the back of the head when they wander into my firing line.
persuation is THE most important skill in the game imo. theres literally hundreds of chances to put this skill to the test and with it maxed out u never fail anything, save yourself the trouble of reloading saves a thousand times, breaking your own immersion and max this out as soon as possible to always get what you want in a conversation with a npc, defuse aggression that may be life saving not only to yourself, but also to npcs to get a happy conclusion to a quest, haggle to get more money from quests, and many other benefits. for a game where u probably spend more time talking to npcs than actually playing, you'd be crazy not to max this first
diplomacy is good for just running through a building with your scanner up spamming e, saves a lot of time if you're trying not to kill people or if your weapons suck
As a heads up the Leadership skill/perk right now is bugged and will disable follow up dialogue from quests and a few other things. You gotta use console commands to remove it. Not sure if adding more ranks fixes it, but just going 1 I was losing all the follow up dialogues (IE: no talk about results of Fleet quest, or Vanguard quest, etc).
That is terrible. Can anyone replicate this? I am ready to start putting points in Leadership, but I will hold off if it’s going to nerf dialogues.
Hey! thanks, great analysis, I usually love social skill in bethesda games, but I have 4 in persuasion, 1 in diplomacy, and the 1 free manipulation point and feel pretty underwhelmed so far. Your analysis seems to track quite well with how I have experienced my 50+ levels so far. I am quite bummed diplomacy doesn't have more larger impact options as you would think you would be solving issues between large factions with DIPLOMACY... maybe I miss-interpreted the usefulness. I put 4 in persuasion but definately feel I coulda done with less, so I agree there. I save scum hard, more to prevent lost time if a crash occurs, I usually go with the result on conversation etc, but even then 2-3 points or even just 1 in persuasion is enough.
ONE thing that would be cool to see in these videos would be HOW YOU would level up those skills, IF you wanted the master skill, which skills would you find WORTH putting points in, in order to get up to tier 4 skills. Looking forward to your future vids, thanks again!
Great to hear thoughts from a social skill player!
I can definitely try to share more of those thoughts in the wrap ups. I've gone with general advice on what skills are worth the points but from an objective standpoint I've left my personal opinions out mostly as my playstyle is probably VERY different from most people since I'm doing a lot of research and lore collection. I'll have some strong opinions on the last two trees though as they're my favourite by a mile!
I'm baffled how Bethesda thought giving vague descriptions and not numbers was a good idea. Especially on the simple ones that are just a static increase in some regard. Same goes with any "Small chance to" okay but HOW small? 1%? 00000.3%? Ughhh can't wait for modders to just give full on descriptions of these.
tell me about it. I'm doing my combat skills testing right now to figure out what the hell these "chance" descriptors mean. "humans can enter a downed state earlier" "increased accuracy" "notably increased accuracy" like lol...
I do a lot of looting, and I generally don't abuse credit glitches. So I maxed out Commerce pretty quickly because I pick up a LOT of weapons and sell them. I try to empty all vendors as often as possible. The other perk to weapon looting is I find real good weapons real fast, so rooting through pockets and chests and locked rooms garners a ton of weapons I can then go sell. Ammo gets expensive REAL fast for the few weapons I use so having a ton of guns to sell to pay off the ammo AND take the vendors credits is always a plus. Maxing commerce means I can have a greater buffer on stored income (i.e. weapons, ammo, resources, components, and ships).
Using stealth + Instigation skill you can make enemies pick off each other without risking or endangering yourself. While you could just use a sniper rifle, if you can't OHKO an enemy, or you just want to 'thin the herd' before a fight starts, I have found that's the best use-case for Instigation.
With the new difficulty systems there is a food and thirst penalty. Dehydration and malnourished. They fuck your character up. I turned them on and started gastro and I’m loving it.
Persuasion has been my single most useful as I'm kind of obsessed with success rate.
Boy did I find this out the hard way. For my diplomat I ended up with 2 commerce, 1 persuasion, 2 scavenging, spreading one point through influence skills for speech checks, 4 in leadership and 4 in ship command.
It's kind of a slog but spreading one point across multiple skills doesn't make it too painful and you could in theory be done with the tree at level 15.
In your intro i kinda expected to give you a thumb down and quit watching halfway through, but you so dilligently also consider the viewpoint that isn't yours and give a seperate grade for that, that I after only 5 minutes hand you my thumb up and guarantee i will watch until the end. You're a real class act! :)
They took a step into the right direction with social skills. Gastronomy should alter max hp and medicine should heal. That would give food a unique and highly useful niche to be used in tandem with meds. It would also make the perk highly desirable. This perk will matter more when they eventually implement survival mode.
I save scum for some things, but was surprised to find I don't like save scumming persuasions. It feels more immersive for conversations to be non-deterministic.
Love how there is not a single option out of the whole social tree to talk your way out of the guards-caught-you-go-to-jail situation. One would think that it’s the most obvious use case for persuasion/intimidation/BRIBERY, but not Todd Howard.
This guide is wonderful. I subscribed on this one alone and I'll be sure to check out your other ones.
Also something you can test but from my understanding is that Vasco doesn't count as a companion and isolation may still work with Vasco. If you can test that out and give a update on the skill would be cool.
Glad to hear! I'll have to give that one a try though I have a feeling he will still count unless Bethesda put in the extra effort to treat him as a non-companion/crew for this unique purpose. It would definitely be cool if this is the case though and if it is I'd expect leadership to similarly not work with him which would only be fair
@@unclemumble Well I suspect it works because I I heard that Vasco works with the introvert trait. But that only works cause the con specifically says human companion. Was curious if it also applied for perk.
If anyone has had an issue leveling starship command because their ship kills aren’t counting, for some reason you can’t use a commandeered spaceship. It has to be one that was given you you or legally purchased. I destroyed like 40 ships using my personal ship, that started off as an ecliptic something or another, and couldn’t get any of the kills to count. Switched to an narwhal based ship afterwards that I had bought and every kill counted. Both ships had the same crew and crew count, so that was the only difference.
12:42 - Vasco & Isolation = best combo! 🙂
16:27 - not related to the skill, but if you equip "+X carry capacity" items to your companion, save the game > close the game > reload, you'll notice that his/her carrying capacity reset to the default value after each new gaming session. The only workaround for this is to talk to him/her after starting the game and unequip & equip that/those item(s).
1. Gastronomy still has beneficial effects - imo worth it but most food recipes aren't worthwhile.
2. You can't steal most equipped weapons that are worth a damn.
3. You called it exactly right on the Influence etc skills though. 1 point is enough. But even if 1 ability would unlock ALL those skills together, it would only just be worth it. Even if you throw manipulation in. (like how Xenosociology works)
I'm working on a social/stealth build but yeah most times I can still gun enemies down with 0 physical and 0 combat skills.
Commerce is another skill, like Diplomacy that adds a lot of nice dialog options, adding a lot of value to that first point. Agree with not needed to go beyond that though.
I'm a little dissipated with Persuasion, it's application feels a little shallow. What I would want it to be is an opportunity to unlock new quest options. Or have funny dialog options, like you've convinced a gangster that you deserve 90% of the cut & his ship, while you see an intense rage coming from that gangster who cant believe how badly he's getting hosed yet is agreeing to it.
Love that idea and your example 🤣
Not saying this changes anything at all about your assessment of the piracy skill, but higher ranks of the scanning skill tells you more information about ships you see in space, so it might make the piracy skill more useful when you know what cargo they are carrying with rank 4 scanning. I don't know, i don't use either skill
That's a good point that'll be worth mentioning in the science tree! Thanks!
Unless the info is wrong, it says no team mates or any crew. does that mean you cannot have any crew assigned to ships as well?
You can, it's only if you have an active follower. It's just because crew is the term for less important characters like Heller or Moara that can follow you vs companions like Sarah and Andreja. Isolation works fine even with people on your ships and outposts
The only reason that I thought about investing in social skills is for the ship command perk. Which is painfully set at level 4. Now I have to invest 9 points just to unlock it.
That is a real pain in the neck.
@Unclemumble The Robots count as crew members for outposts that's why it lists 12 crew as the max possible 6 robots, 6 crew.
A strong B skill that falls just shy of A would be a B+ skill. Also, basic statistics class reveals that most skills would be C for average, fewer skills would be D and B, even fewer are F and A, and only 1 skill would ever be S tier. Knowing how to grade stuff properly helps the students understand the true worth of things.
I find the comerce skill actually makes things harder. Prices being better means vendors run out of money way faster, so you are left having to wait more to unload the same amount of goods. More often than not just getting rid of the stuff is more important than actually getting credits.
The way to manage this is to also have a good spaceship with plenty of cargo space. Then you can keep a huge stock in your ship and empty out any merchant you visit without having to worry about being slowed down due to encumbrance. My ship has like 12000 cargo space while still being top tier for combat/travel. Whenever I visit a merchant I haven't been to in a while I just flip to the ship cargo and empty out their cash with the loot I got in my cargo.
@@TheRealXartaX having that much cargo space is ridiculous. I don't loot every pen and paper cups I only loot high value low mass items and contrabands, and the commerce skill fits perfectly for that
@@kenhew4641It really isn't if you're keeping a large stock of crafting items.
@@TheRealXartaX ah ok if you're going for building stuff i guess then you can never have too much cargo space. I'm on a space bandit/runner character build so speed and disabling enemy ships is more important than cargo space for me.
@@kenhew4641
You can have a ship that can get to any POI from warp-in in a single boost and with extremely strong weaponry without giving up that kind of cargo space.
Requires maxed tech skills like piloting and such, though.
Personally I liked Persuasion. Understand that at higher levels you can not only succeed more often, but you get auto succeeds and you do those for the highest points and the more important conversations. I found it as useful as skills like Jump Pack, Pilot, and Security. For me it was a must have. And yes I typically do not save before doing things to cheese them, like persuasion or checking legendary drops. I never looted boxes in the ground or cheesed it through walls. I never built an XP farm. I also never built a hollow box shaped ship.
I will never waste points into Commerce again. I have probably made over 2 million.
Isolation is a hard one because the companion quest lines are great. It takes a while to go through them, so you will not really be able to use this skill until very late on. And unless you are playing the harder levels you really do not need the extra resistances, but will likely need the extra carry capacity. Now most people say weight lifting is a must. It is nice, but really I only took it because I was struggling understanding all the red markings in the ship builder when I was trying to add cargo capacity to the ship. I thought because it was red it was an error or that I was really killing the performance of the ship as cargo is so heavy. It turns out it was not a big deal so now I can easily dump off stuff at the ship. This made followers usually plenty to clear a large base. I just wish the companions would stop reminding you they have something so often. Every time you fast travel or have a loading screen they will remind you and it is annoying.
The problem with Leadership is I think it is a second tier skill. I will not put any points into anything but persuasion and that will take a while to get to level 4. I will need to waste a point into something like Commerce just to be able to unlock Leadership. This means I have likely already gotten affinity with at least 2 followers before I can even get the skill... unless I waste a bunch of points.
They made the base building almost worthless except for money and XP farming... which is boring. They could have made base building great, but they did not. It was more of an after thought at best.
Ship Command is great, but the prerequisites mean you have to dump a ton of points into social skills and that is just not going to happen until very late game if not SN+.
Now one thing I have noticed is you never take into account magazines. Some abilities when stacked with certain magazines can make things a bit different... either making a skill better or making it less worth taking the skill at higher levels.
Commerce can get you extra dialog options, so may be useful to put a point in it.
@@argel1200 I doubt it makes any difference unless you are researching lore and what to see all conversation options.
On a second note, we need also an increase in ship command. I want to make the use of dreadnought sized ships for all kinds of things. Extra firepower....transport entire Armies...have a hull that tanks things. Perhaps once we get good update on ship buildings and increase the size cap
Isolation is actually pretty bad because a lot of the time you're forced to take a companion with you.
The illusion spells have always been super janky to use. In skyrim they were useless past the mid game because all the enemies would eventually scale past the spells level cap. Now that they go up to 10-20 levels above the player's level they'll always be usable against endgame enemies. Didn't know they added extra dialogue options.
Persuasion is super helpful but you still need to wear a persuasive outfit and probably pop a hippolyta for the harder interactions, and it gets much better when you upgrade diplomacy as well.
Persuasion has come in handy when I need to persuade bounty hunters to leave rather than fight their usually better ships.
Because of the way crew bonuses work the ship command skill is actually pretty bad as having Sarah doesn't take a crew slot and having her, Vasco and Sam on your crew actually provides you with all the impactful crew bonuses you can have and an extra slot for someone else.
Great breakdown. Thanks for pointing out that Diplomacy, deception, intimidation can add dialog options on persuade tests. I’ve dropped a rank in each now
That's exactly what I did as well. A single point is all I could really justify and they've come in handy a few times so it feels worth it
Piracy is worth it, just open your scan and check if there are galbank ships. There's also other ships that tend to have more loot, sloops if I'm not mistaken. Usually galbank ships are strong, so don't always surrender that easily. But if I'm being honest, there's no amount of ships that could destroy mine
My favorite use for manipulation is telling people to go into corners so I can kill them stealthily
This is the first of your videos that I have come across. You did a great job breaking them down by use case and showing how different play styles may or may not value the skills. I would suggest maybe changing your ranking system from S-F to 0-4 denoting how may points you think should be in a skill. Scavenging gets 2, Deception gets 0, Outpost gets 1 or 4.
Just a thought. You're doing great. Thanks for the breakdown.
I hope they come out with a way to respec our characters. Of course they may have one and I just haven't found it yet.
SHIP COMMAND: This is mostly a roleplay/flavor skill, and you will never find more than 1 rank in this skill is at all useful to gameplay. There just aren’t enough companions/crew with meaningfully useful skills for you to need more than 4 crew slots on your ship. The minimum of 3 crew slots(plus Sarah for 4) is more than you will ever really need.
Even large ships start to feel overcrowded really fast, too. keeping numbers down is good just for the sake of sanity.
Isolation is worth a couple points because every time you go through the unity you're alone again, and survivability is always lowest at the beginning.
Deception basically takes the place of your Comm Jammer for shielded cargo when it's upping your chance to evade scans. I had a comm jammer for all my time from rank 1 to 4 so I didn't see the effects until I forgot a comm jammer on my new ship, which put the chance to evade at 90% without a comm jammer (equivalent to the best comm jammer available at level 50ish). It's almost useless, but it's useless because you can get a comm jammer fairly easily if you know where to look. If you don't want to waste time or money on a comm jammer, and you get your shielded cargo bays from your outpost and don't know where else to get one, maybe you can look into Deception. Unlike Diplomacy and Intimidation, though, I've never come across a Deception conversation choice in my 300+ hours of play. I'd rank it at D and the reason I started a new character.
Best thing about the diplomacy skill is the new dialogues it enables in persuasion. The actual skill is so janky that its basically wasted perk point unfortunately.
Yeah I just put 1 point in each for the extra speech options. I can never bother to use those skills in combat, my gun can do the heavy lifting there
You can use Manipulation on the same target multiple times to give more orders as long as it's still within the original timeframe, but it runs a check _after_ each action that might block you from further actions. It's actually really useful for sneaking around, not only because you can make people open doors for you but because you can send them off to start fights and draw attention elsewhere or have them turn off an alarm to lower guard alertness, or just have them run off into oblivion. Sometimes you can even get NPCs to steal valuables for you, in which case they pick them up and hand them over to you without you getting any bounty when they get caught.
I have had lots of luck with persuasion skill, but I understand your point