Fallout: Election 2018!

This one snuck up on me. I hadn’t realized we were closing in on level 9 in our Fallout run, and it wasn’t until I started the game up again and it asked me for my choice of perks that I realized it’s time for yet another vote. Now, we’ve got the water chip, saved our vault, and are back home again. There is absolutely, positively, no more reason to go out into the wastes again. Honest. Don’t let the fact that there’s still half the map left and a bunch of mystery abounding fool you. We beat the game. Just have to talk to the Overseer again now that we’ve submitted our report to work it out. But, you know, given that we have the option to choose more perks, even though we’re obviously not going to have the time to make use of them before the credits roll which is going to be super soon, I figured I’d let you guys make one final choice on the direction of our Athena.

Our new choices with this level up are:

Animal Friend

This perk will make Dogmeat like us. Well, she already likes us. But this will make all the other animals we run across like us just like Dogmeat does!

No, no it won’t. But at least it will make it so they don’t want to murder us on sight anymore.

Better Criticals

We’re at the stage of the game where it doesn’t always oneshot the enemy when we get a critical hit anymore. Still does massive amounts of damage, but sometimes, an enemy is able to hang on long enough to die later. If that bothers you, you can take this perk, which makes our critical hits 20% more powerful when we do catch one.

Bonus Rate of Fire

So, when I’m presenting these perks, I am completely nonpartial. I’ve got my preferences, but I’m not going to try to color your choices. So when I tell you to vote for this one, if you have any love in your heart for me or for dear Athena, you know I’m still keeping that professional distance in there.

Right now, it costs 5 action points to fire a gun, or 6 if Athena’s wanting to target a specific body part. Athena’s got 9 action points to play with, so she can fire once and do something else, either move a bit or dig into her backpack, every turn. This perk will reduce the AP cost of ranged attacks by one. Meaning Athena will get to fire twice a turn. Effectively doubling her offensive capacity.

This is obviously the best choice. So much so, I don’t know why they even offer other perks to guns based characters at this level. But no pressure.

Dodger

We’ve got an Armor Class. This works just like it does in traditional tabletop games. The higher our Armor Class, the more likely we are to not be hit by attacks. AC comes from armor and stats. This perk increases the bonus we get to AC from our stats.

That was a lot of words to say it just makes us harder to hit.

Explorer

We’ve yet to run into any of them, but this game actually has a lot of interesting random encounters. Get to see some fun stuff going on. This perk increases our chances of running into one of them.

Mutate!

Back at the beginning of the game, you guys chose two special traits for Athena. You chose to make her smarter and more aware at night, less so during the day, and you chose to make her better than everyone else. If you were uncertain about either of those decisions, you could choose this perk and get a do-over.

A short list this time around. There are more that can unlock at level 9, but Athena doesn’t have the stats for them. But that’s ok. We’ve still got enough to choose from. Or, if you were interested, any of the previous perks are still up for grabs.

Here’s the complete list of what we’ve got available to us:

As always, vote in the comments!