There’s so much customization available at the start of Wasteland 2, it’s hard to figure out what’s useful and what isn’t. Some skills are absolutely required to survive in the Arizona wastes, while others are pretty optional. Check out some of our general recommendations and don’t hit a wall before your Ranger career gets off the ground.
For a hilarious look at life in the post-apocalypse, join James as he tackles this historic sequel in GameFront’s Wasteland 2 video walkthrough. If you’re on the hunt for more tips like this, march toward the Wasteland 2 cheats compendium where every guide, article and extra gets linked in one easy to browse location.
Party Character Creation Beginner’s Tips & Tricks
Party creation is a daunting task in Wasteland 2. With so many attributes and skills to take, it’s very easy to screw up and leave your new team of Rangers unprepared for the challenges they’ll face.
Below we’ll go over what attributes to take, and four sets of skills you’ll want to generally use.
Basic Party Attribute Distribution:
The distribution of attributes below is a generic “basic” all-around recommendation suited for ranged characters. Characters with a focus on melee should dump their “Charisma” and increase “Strength” then “Speed” — but especially “Strength”.
- 4 Coordination
- 1 Luck
- 4 Awareness
- 4 Strength
- 4 Speed
- 8 Intelligence
- 3 Charisma
Why these stats? Let’s go over each:
- Coordination: This stat increases ranged accuracy and AP. AP is one of the most important stats, having plenty of Action Points means you can move, shoot, or heal more often during a combat turn.
- Luck The dump stat. Lower it to 1 on every character unless you’re feeling like roleplaying. Luck increases critical chance in combat along with other random bonuses, but doesn’t come into play often enough to be useful.
- Awareness Another very important stat. Boost Awareness to keep Combat Initiative at a minimum of 12, otherwise enemies will be able to outmaneuver you in combat. Combat Initiative dictates turn order, and you don’t want enemies attacking before you do.
- Strength Simple — increases the amount of stuff you can carry. Keep it at 4 to ensure you’ll be able to wear good armor later. For melee focused fighters, increase this stat to 5 or 6.
- Speed Increases evasion and movement speed in combat. While moving in combat isn’t really that important, you’ll want to keep evasion regular. Dodging attacks every so often makes life much easier.
- Intelligence The most important stat in Wasteland 2. Bump it up to 8 or 10 — the higher it is, the more skill points you’ll be rewarded for leveling up. That means you’ll be able to max out skills faster and have more skills at your disposal. An invaluable attribute that needs to be high right from the start.
- Charisma Another dump stat. Charisma has no benefit for dialogue — Hard Ass / Smart Ass / Kiss Ass are separate skills — and is counted cumulatively for the entire party. That means having one character with high charisma is fairly useless. Give every some Charisma for this stat to be effective.
Party Skills Distribution
When starting Character Creation, you’ll need to create four separate characters to form a basic team. Below we’ll give our recommendations for a basic spread of skills — change it however you want when you play.
This is just a general overview of useful skills. Switch up weapons however you desire, but every character should use a different weapon so there’s no fighting over ammo.
1. Main Character Skills:
- Assault Rifle: The most basic and useful weapon in the game. There’s no situation where the Assault Rifle isn’t useful.
- Perception: Traps and ambushes are a constant problem in Wasteland 2. Give the leader Perception to discover these fast.
- Smart / Kiss / Hard Ass: Bring one of these social skills to open new question solutions and rewards.
- Demolitions: Disable traps. Great to use in conjunction with perception.
- Computer Science: Helps hack robots, open chests and get through doors later in the game.
2. Infiltrator Skills:
- Sniper Rifle: Powerful long-ranged support. Keeps the infiltrator out of harm’s way and keeps them useful in the late-game.
- Pistol: Keep one on hand for close encounters. The pistol is weak, but devastating against early enemies.
- Lock Picking: Crack open locked doors, get places you don’t belong and open up new routes or shortcuts.
- Alarm Disarming: Awesome skill to go with safe cracking and lock picking. Alarms summon enemies and cause problems.
- Safe Cracking: Get valuable treasure with this invaluable specialized skill.
3. Doctor Skills:
- Blunt Weapons: Any melee abilities works well for the doctor. Give your doctor a high “Speed” attribute to get around faster.
- Shotgun: A great secondary weapon that goes well with the extra “Speed” attribute you’ll want to heal party members anywhere.
- Medic: Heal wounds in combat. Somebody absolutely must have this skill and the next or your team is brown bread.
- Surgeon: If a character is bleeding out or suffering status effects, the Surgeon skill comes into play to fix it.
4. Engineer Skills:
- SMGs: A weak but useful weapon for the early game. Keep it low and switch over to Energy Weapons once ammo becomes easier to find.
- Energy Weapons: Deadly against robots and armored enemies but weak to fleshy raiders early in the game.
- Weaponsmithing: Powerful crafting skill that lets you add mods or disassemble worthless guns for scrap to sell.
- Mechanical Repair: Required often for quest solutions. Build it up and you’ll find tons of places to use it.
- Toaster Repair: A super weird skill but handy for bonus chests. Comes up way more often than you’d think.
Tips & Tricks
Make sure every part member uses a different type of weapon. Ammo is scarce so you don’t want to split it between party members.
Heavy Weapons are exceptionally rare. They’re super cool, but never a good replacement for Sniper Rifles, Assault Rifles, or Energy Weapons. SMGs and Pistols are only useful early in the campaign, while Bladed Weapons are weak compared to deadlier Blunt.
Don’t give your characters too many skills. Try to focus exclusively on four or five skills and max them out for each character.
There are tons of skills to try out. Don’t be afraid to give them a shot. Wasteland 2 is a tough game, but never impossible. If you want different builds, go right ahead. These are just general suggestions to help point newbies in the right direction. Goodluck, rangers!