Wracked in the Wasteland Part 2: All aboard the Struggle Bus

July 26th, 2016 by Contingency Plan

I started this series doing some serious base building. I could feel I was getting behind the games power curve so I was looking for some quick XP. I did nothing but build up 4 settlements, set up supply lines and try to get a steady supply of food and water as the next few quests were pretty far south and I knew all that running meant I would need to have supplies.

After I left the safety of my settlements I proceeded to die. A lot. One shot by a radscorpion. Two shot by a ghoul I didn’t see. One shot by a mine. One shot by a stray grenade that was thrown while I was in VATS and immediately blew up when I exited. Beat to death by a baseball bat weilding raider. The list goes on. Between level 10 and 20 I was beatdown and humbled many times over. At one point, I really did want to quit.

The game turned around a bit after I got the legendary laser rifle from Danse after completing the first brotherhood quest. (I made it into a pistol to fit my build) Which by the way, I died 3 times just trying to kill the ghoul waves at the START of the quest chain. The one where Danse is in front of the police station and some lowly ghouls swarm the area. Except on survival these lowly ghoul sprint at you and surround you and pretty much instantly kill you. Yeah.

After this, I finally had a bed to sleep in at the station and decided instead of continuing to quest I would just run straight to Diamond City to get some new gear as I find if you don’t continually upgrade the enemies rapidly outpace your offense and defense. This turned out to be a good idea (the first in awhile) I was able to get a ton of food, water I was good on from my settlements.

I really want to not run back to safety after each single quest is completed but every time I’m feeling bold and try to to do quests back to back, I die randomly and lose about 20 minutes of real world time and want to nerd rage. There were a good amount of times I thought I was getting too far behind the enemies, for example the mirelurks. They took an incredible amount of punishment from me, yet could one or two shot me. I sucked it up and wasted a ton of ammo just to complete the water pump quest. You really have to aggressively upgrade your weapons to keep up with the enemies and still almost all my perks have to be damage related so I can stay ahead. I’m really tempted to go a chem route with this gal, but I have way too many points invested in luck and agility to even touch that right now.

Overall, the build is beginning to flow. When four leaf clover or Grim reapers sprint procs I can see the killing machine begin to run smoothly. Once I make it far enough along to have these perks maxed out I’ll finally be able to branch out into more fun perks, like Party Girl. Because I really want to RP this gal as a drunk gunslinger.