The main way you customize your playstyle in Fallout 4 is with the perk system. There is a wide variety of perks in Fallout 4 to accommodate any build you want to make. Ranging from the option to boost any weapon damage to giving you the ability to talk your way out of fights. With a large number of perks in the game, some will be better than others. Let’s go over the best perks in Fallout 4.
Best Perks in Fallout 4
While you can get every perk in the game, you wouldn’t want to waste any of your precious perk points on perks that are bad. Unlike companion perks, you can’t change out perks you select from the perk chart if you don’t want them anymore. So knowing which perks are good is essential. Let’s go over some of the better perks for you to pick up.
Idiot Savant
You would obviously want to get XP as quickly as possible and Idiot Savant can greatly help with is. Taking this perk will give a random chance for you to get three times the experience you would normally get whenever you gain XP. Getting rapid kills or building up your settlements is the best way to take advantage of this perk since each kill you get and object you place gives XP and can trigger the perk.
The only issue with the perk is that the lower intelligence you have the higher chance it has to trigger. There are a lot of intelligence perks that you will want to get as you play the game. You could start out with low intelligence and farming some levels with Idiot Savant. After you have gotten a decent amount of use out of the perk, you can boost your intelligence and get whatever perks you wanted.
The perk will still trigger if you do have higher intelligence, just not as often. So you will want to have low intelligence if you plan to use this perk at all.
Hacker and Locksmith
Although these perks are under two different stat lines, they are quite similar in what they do. Both perks allow you to hack or lockpick open higher-level computers and doors respectively. These are key perks to have no matter what your build is since the best loot tends to be hidden behind a lock or a computer.
While you can choose to focus on one or the other, the best bet is to get them both maxed out with six perk points total. This will allow you to hack or lockpick any computer or door you come across in the wasteland. Which can open different options for completing missions and allowing you to get the best rewards.
Gun-Nut and Scientist!
This is another two-perk option but the perk you choose comes down to the type of weapons you want to use. Both of these perks are tied to the ability to modify your weapons with better parts. The higher level of the perk, the better mods you can put on your weapons.
The difference in the perks comes down to the type of weapons they affect. Gun-Nut unlocks mods for any bullet-firing weapons that you use. Such as the 10mm pistol and pipe guns. While Scientist! unlocks mods for energy weapons like the laser musket and the laser rifle. There is also a melee version of these perks called Blacksmith. Taking that perk will unlock mods for melee weapons to help make some of the best melee weapons even better.
Depending on what build you are going for, getting one of these perks is almost necessary. Since not only do weapon mods increase your magazine size and help you deal with recoil, but they can also increase your weapon’s damage or crit chance. Thus making even the 10mm pistol a viable late-game weapon with the right mods.
Local Leader
Settlements are a great way of earning passive income and items while you go explore the wasteland. Sure you need to put in a bit of resources to get them built up and functional, but once you do they are pure profit. Of course, some of the profitable buildings are locked behind this perk.
The perk does provide some other useful benefits on top of unlocking more buildings for you to build. The first tier of the perk unlocks the ability to set up supply lines between settlements that you own. Once you have a supply line set up between multiple settlements, you can access anything that is stored at any workbench in the supply network.
This makes building up settlements much easier as you can access all your junk at once instead of needing to carry it around with you. The second tier perk is where you unlock the workstations and market building for your settlers to work at. These will generate caps and items for you as long as a settler is working the building.
Fortune Finder
If you don’t want to put the effort into building up settlements for your extra caps and just want to fully explore the wastes, then Fortune Finder is up your alley. This perk will increase your odds of finding random caps in the containers you search. Quite a simple but very effective perk.
Each tier of the perk increases the number of caps you will find when the perk activates, so you will want to level up the perk as quickly as possible. Once you manage to get the perk to max level it gets a bonus effect. There is a chance on kill to make enemies explode into a shower of caps.
If you really want to make the most amount of caps for your time, you will want to get both Fortune Finder and work on your settlements with Local Leader. However, if you want to leave settlements alone and side with a different faction then Fortune Finder is the perk for you.
Critical Banker
Even if you don’t consistently use VATS in Fallout 4, Critical Banker is one of the most useful perks in the game. Critical Banker will allow you to hold onto a crit in VATS to be used when you want to. Normally getting a crit in VATS is a hard enough task for one AP bar, so having the ability to build up the bar over multiple uses of VATS.
Using a crit in VATS can allow you to easily to a losing fight into a winnable fight. The amount of damage that one crit can do is quite staggering. Allowing you to kill some bosses in just a few hits. You can also store more than one crit for VATS depending on which tier of the perk you have. At max rank, you can hold up to four crits for VATS at any time, which can be enough damage to easily take down a super mutant behemoth.
You can also pair Critical Banker with another luck perk, Better Criticals. This perk allows your criticals to do anywhere from 50% to 250% extra damage. Combine four stored crits with a 250% damage boost and nothing can stand in your way.
While these are the best perk in the game to get, some other perks can prove to be useful depending on what build you are doing. There are also plenty of mods out there that can help with rebalancing perks in the game to make some of the useless perks actually worth taking.
Fallout 4 is available right now and playable on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC.
