Fallout 4 Perk Tier List

Hey, having played a build where the point was to get dummy high perception so I could get max VATS accuracy on headshots, the utility of VANS is that after you've maxed PER you can get two more points from another perk. It's very build dependent, and kind of overkill, obviously, but that's the goal.

The last point on locksmith and hacker is literaly useless. You will have hundreds of lockpicks and worst case scenario you need to wait 10 seconds to try hack again. All of the damage reduction perks are nearly useless since the bonus is next to nothing and any armor will give way more damage reduction investing in healing is way better. Being not hit is the best defence. The steady aim perk is pretty good for automatic weapons and with chemist junkie build can make super accurate full auto build that just destroys anything. Bladed knuckle has bleed damage on it and is one of the most broken weapons in the game since bleed stacks and ignores all damage resistance also its not a legendary effect its just a mod for unarmed weapon. Thus making unarmed kind of stong early game. How ever the most op perk is sneak. You can find a bolt action pipepistol from dumling diner and mod it or any bolt action piperifle you find to be a silenced sniper rifle with in minutes of starting the game. Stealth sniper being the most broken op build in the game.

Penetrator lets you target power armor fusion cores and robot weak points from any angle

Y'all haven't done a blitz ninja build have you? The bonus damage from blitz is applied before ninja buff it's right cracked

I think Steady aim is bugged and doesn’t work on Shotguns

Melee builds are the most overpowered builds in the game. With Ninja x10 stealth crits, you can deliver INSANE damage

Aquaboy/girl is useful in standard survival. You can use the water ways as a safe way to travel and not have to worry about traps or ambushes.

Penetrator comes in handy if you want to force your enemy out of power armor. Shoot the fusion core and the fight becomes easier.

Thoughts, w/ a Survival POV;

“Blacksmith”-the DLC upgrades for baseball bats and sledgehammers must be crafted, and otherwise unavailable.

“Rooted”-works with Blitz. This combo has carried my Survival melee builds past level 50, without Big Leagues. Together, 4 total perk points, both Rank 2, for a powerhouse build, is hard to beat for efficiency.

“Penetrator”-enemies count as cover, so you can pierce through ones in front to the Target behind. Cannot be overstated how good it is against Power Armor and Sentry Bot fusion cores, rendering some of the scariest enemies into a cakewalk. Use 3rd Person to target from around corners, and you’ll get a ton of use from it, literally firing while safe.

“Toughness”-armor weight affects enemy sound detection, so this perk gives stealth builds a way to have DR without adding weight.

“Chem Resistant”-it’s more of a convenience perk, I’ve found, until late game on builds that use a lot. Primarily, because addiction drawbacks disappear while using. So in general, you’ll only be punished out of combat. Even though I often take it, when I do, i still have ways to cure addictions in my inventory. Between doctors and loot, staying sober through mid game isn’t hard for me.

“Aquaboy”-it’s top 3 for Survival. Swimming is Survival’s fast-travel. Makes getting places far faster, and most importantly, encounter-free. Swimming is so good, it’s single-handedly the reason why I stopped using Power Armor.

“Cannibal”-almost instantaneous healing in Survival. Nothing is even close, until Level 49’s Medic 4. Also, it feeds you for 24 hours, allowing Survival builds a carry weight-free option.

“Cap Collector”- there’s a limit to how high/low you can buy/sell, based on CHR. If you can reach 15/16 CHR, this perk literally does nothing. Take this perk for the settlement building aspect, unlocking Emporiums.

“Attack Dog”- Rank 4’s flat 10% DR is S-tier.

“Local Leader”- con: failed raid defenses will delete junk from workbench storage, including from ones connected by supply lines. Con: farmers and scavengers stop generating new stuff once there’s a certain amount stored in inventory, so keeping a large inventory that makes supply lines worthwhile, prevents those settler’s jobs from providing anything useful. (Related, is each food and drink item stored increases chances of raids.) Pro: Survivalists can drop off meat, drink and food, and mods in any connected settlement, and cook it or equip it in any other.

“The 3 CHR Pacify Perks”-gets a bump for using captured mobs as settlement defense with a Beta-Wave Emitter.

“V.A.N.S.”-potentially S-tier, as many players struggle with directions. For some, this perk single-handedly makes it possible to play and enjoy the game. With Rank 2 giving +2 PER, the points invested are almost exactly like they’re in PER, good on its own, but great if you’re already at max PER.

“Medic”-Rank 4’s healing speed increase in Survival is a game changer. Also, if you have high hp, over 1k, save a ton of carry weight, because you can heal with .6 units (water/Stimpack), vs 10 units (10 Ribeye Steaks).

“Gun Nut”-most overrated perk. Find and strip any mod you want. Bump up for unlocking defensive turrets.

“Robotics Expert” gets a huge bump for the mods unlocked when creating robots for companions or settlers. Some robots can become absolute powerhouses.

“Action Boy”- Survival top 3. You’re running everywhere. Also, VATS/Blitz builds rely on AP, and while in combat, your AP regen speed is reduced.

“Quick Hands”- if Rank 3 nets you 1 more VATS activation, it’s very much worth it.

“Blitz”- S-tier for melee. Blitz makes melee on par with gun builds, if not better than them. Even gun builds can use a medium range teleport skill in many instances, maybe to finish off a foe, and flank those remaining. In Survival, 1 point in Blitz is the single strongest combat option for early game (95% hit chance). 1 point in Blitz, Rooted, and Blacksmith (for a Serrated Combat Knife), and you can leave Sanctuary with a build that will carry you through 30 levels.

“Luck Tree”- most useless, or most OP. Any build wanting to go high Luck from the start is giving up a lot for rewards later on, as it takes many points in many perks to start kicking butt. In Survival, chances are you’ll be squishy and unable to carry much, since PER and AGI are the Luck Trees best friends. You’re better off investing into Luck once your build is mostly complete, if you’re newer to the mode.

chemist perk should have been at the top of s tier it is overpower since u can craft alot of good chems like overdrive and is a must in survival mod also u can get 60 buffout 60 jet 60 psycho and 60 mentats by doing diamonds city blues quest

Penetrator also works when your firing at the enemy behind the one closest to you, effectively allowing you to "Quigley" opponents.

Toughness is S tier, excuse me!? You do realise it's flat DR, not %? 50 DR for five whole perk points is beyond lackluster, considering that regular armor with ballistic weave gives you hundreds of DR and ER and power armor can give over 1000.

The actual damage reduction % in late game armor (which is when you unlock the highest rank of the perk) is literally single digit %. Again, for FIVE perk points. Putting those points to Lifegiver or just Endurance gives more survivability

The only time I'd consider this perk is if I went for some sort of no-armor or limited armor challenge. It's an F or at the most D tier perk. Refractor is even worse, easy F

Also you forgot to mention you can use Dogmeat with Lone Wanderer and still get the bonues

There's honestly a number of bad takes in this video.

- Rooted fires every time you use VATS so it's OP on a melee build.
- Toughness is almost entirely pointless midgame and on because armor makes it wildly redundant.
- Aquaboy/Girl with power armor allows you to basically walk anywhere in the overworked undetected, including right to spectacle island. It pretty much opens up a stealth highway across the map, which can be insanely useful in a survival game or early on.
- local leader distributes extra supplies between settlements, so if you have one settlement producing 1000 water, you don't need to build water at any connected settlement.

I hate that it takes 8 strength to improve bashing damage, if im running 8, why would i be using a non melee weapon?

Can u make a vid ranking fallout new vegas light armor

Charisma is such an insane skill tree in this game. You basically need it for survival for building shops with Local leader so you have more doctors in the world, Lone Wanderer is one of the best perks in the game, Attack Dog is a bit gimmicky but the last rank is fantastic, and the command enemies perks can help make an otherwise obnoxious amount of ghoul spam more manageable. Luck is still the best of course but that's always gonna be the case lmao.

I think aqua boy is good on survival. You wan't to avoid RadAway and RadX due to the side effect. Also if you're using power armor it's nice to be able to walk across water without drowning.

"Unarmed isn't very good"

Shows footage of your character being unable to kill a single supermutant with even a death claw gauntlet

"It's B tier"

Black widow is A tier. Ladykiller sucks though.

Speech check in Fallout 4?

Locksmith is pretty overrated. Safes and locked rooms just don't have enough loot to always justify the perk points.

Night Person has a ton of synergy for a stealth build, since it is harder to notice you at night.

Awareness and Sniper are great for a pure VATS build. Pair that with Macready's perk and you'll frequently get situations where you'll have a 95% headshot chance while torso shots have like 60.

Penetrator isn't just for wallbanging, it also makes it easier to target enemy's heads when they're positioned awkwardly. It also trivializes Mirelurks and Sentry Bots.

Lead Belly isn't worth it, even on Survival Mode. Even if you don't have the Sunshine Tidings perk magazine, you should never run out of rad-free meat.

Aquaboy/Aquagirl is one of the safest ways to travel in Survival Mode.

Bloody Mess really isn't worth it all the time. One perk point for 5% damage isn't that great and the chain reaction effect is stupidly rare.

Grim Reaper's Sprint is insane, it pretty much makes Action Boy redundant.

I gotta call shenanigans on Locksmith rank 4. By the time you can get it, you have so many lockpicks. Hacker rank 4 is pretty pointless too, but at least it saves you ten seconds every time you use it.

1. Blitz
2. Ninja
3. Savant

the scrounger perk is working triple duty here. as you mentioned it finds a lot more ammo, but higher ranks find rare ammo a lot more often, it finds fusion cores, and its also a great money maker in the game, even when factoring that ammo is valued poorly.

the second level of robotics perk gives you 40% MORE DAMAGE against robots, its a secret modifier of the perk ... However you lose this secret modifier at the third level>!

the thing about stealth in fallout 4 is, its busted but nothing is more busted than a melee stealth build, between blitz, rooted, ninja, big league's and the nuka world perk from the pack and the knife skill book. there is no enemy in the game that can survive you for more than 2 atacks aslong as you get the sneak atack. not even legendary enraged fog crawlers. and fun fact about ninja, unarmed weapons don't get the massive multiplier like melee, they get the same as guns.

TIL that some people don't use 3rd person for melee/unarmed, seriously, if you haven't played a melee/unarmed build in 3rd person, you need too, you can get some really cool animations that also serve as a tactical advantage like body slamming, kneeing someone in the face, and many weapons have one hit kill animations.

Personally I would put aquaboy/girl in S tier just because of how many shortcuts it can open up and it also allows you to do the tedious process of taking power armor through water if you feel the need to do that for whatever reason

I tend to run kellogg’s pistol on vats/crit builds, so i like VANS’ extra perception since i usually have max perception in the late game.

I don’t think local leader should be that low. If you enjoy building settlements, it’s a great perk. Obviously if you won’t be doing settlement building, it’s not that useful.

Cryolator is considered a heavy weapon by the game, so Dogmeating it early can give you a decent, relatively light heavy weapon early, only problem is ammo.

Best perk in the game is bloody mess. In my opinion, you need it for every build and its only 3 luck, or 4 can’t remember

Unfortunately, both Refractor and Toughness only give you an extra 10 points of ER/DR per rank, not 10 percent. Also, Refractor is pretty demanding on the PER tree with rank 7 so you gotta invest quite a few points into it.
Basher can be fun if you use mods, btw: I created a super short-ranged twin-barreled shotgun with a very pokey business end on it which deals more damage than your usual bayonet. It's so satisfying to blow two 12-gauge shells into a target's face when you're up close and persoinal and then finish the job by poking one last extra hole into them (or two in this case, as it's one pokes steel shard per barrel ^^).Also: Science is your bread&butter perk for settlement building, just like Local Leader 02. Always getting them asap whenever I start anew, although I just created a mod which removes LL02 as a requirement for most of the shops and workbenches and replaces them with getting a long list of tools you need to refurbish first instead. Puts a great twist into your shootin and looting routine. ^^

Speaking of a heavy weapons build, once I got the explosive minigun (which has only a 1/432 chance to spawn on a legendary enemy level 15 or higher without console commands) I never used any other weapon in the entire game. They all became boring.

Speaking as kind of a loner, a lot of non-social people and introverts are fond of animals/pets so Lone Wanderer working with Dogmeat makes sense to me

Toughness is not good, it gives only +50 DAMAGE resistance (Not Energy, or poison, or radiation) at 5 ranks. In a game where power armor can give you over a 1000 DR, and ballistic weave gives you 110, and standard armor gives you over 150 DR, and to cap it off DR has diminishing returns (+50 when you already have a 1000 is going to basically nothing) toughness is not worth it.

Aquaboy/girl does allow you to wear power armor while doing Libertalia and not worrying about falling and leaving your PA at the bottom of the ocean.

The knockdown portion of the second rank of Sniper can cause some pretty busted things to happen. Give your companion a automatic Gamma Gun and the gamma round animation will lock the enemy in the laying down/standing up animation and push them along the ground or into the air if there's a rise. Watching t posing Super Mutants cartwheel or helicopter across the screen is hilarious.😂

Party boy rank 3 gives you plus 3 luck per type of alcohol for example if you drink wine, beer, and whiskey you get plus 9 luck which is pretty stupid.
Basher is amazing with the mini gun as it turns it into a big chainsaw that crits. It also does pretty impressive damage on crit as it is boosted by better critical and all critical boost on the weapon it makes righteous authority hit like a truck it's pretty funny.

I better see VANS at S tier

Course ninja is op Bethesda and the stealth archer build always has been

Worth noting about Penetrator - it only affects hitscan weapons. Energy weapon damage will not penetrate walls. In addition, if you have a ballistic weapon with the Explosive legendary effect, that will still go off on impact with walls, rending this perk less useful if you have the best legendary prefix in the game. So it's even less useful than the description would imply!

Scrounger can be especially powerful for power armor: if you have power armor or a gatling laser, fusion cores are given more priority in spawn chance, so Scrounger increases the chance of finding them because fusion cores count as ammunition.

Big Leagues is significantly better than Iron Fist. Part of that is better weapons - Throatslicer especially is fantastic - but part of it is also that rank 4 of Big Leagues makes every melee attack create an area of effect arc that hits everybody in front of you. I've intentionally used bugs to make hundreds of enemies spawn, and killing six per swing with a knife was a lot of fun.

You actually got Toughness and Refractor wrong here, both values for damage resistance are not a 1 to 1 ratio and is in fact calculated based on a specific formula. In the early game, when enemies have less damage from their weapons, the damage resistance (Toughness) calculation is much higher, meaning with 10 damage resistance alone, you negate possibly somewhere between 5 to 50% of all incoming damage, however, as you progress through the game and level up, the scaling of the weapon damage also increases on enemies and the amount of damage they do increases, which lowers the value of damage resistance as a whole. Once you get to a point where enemies can shave off 150 damage alone in one hit, then the damage mitigated is just 1% with 10 damage resistance and roughly only 10% with 50. So I'd say, Toughness is great early game, but in late game, drop off SIGNIFICANTLY to the point their inclusion is just not worth it. I could see it being perhaps S tier for speedrunners, but for a longer playthrough with more involvement, it drops down to a B or a C.

For Refractor and its energy resistance, the calculation is slightly different, but is more generous compared damage resistance, but it does not scale 1 to 1 like previous games. I would say, it's weak early game which is paradoxical, because that's when it's strongest as an effect, but since almost no enemies have energy weapons early game, it's not a great investment, but as the game progresses and churns out more energy weapon enemies, so too will their weapons be stronger than usual, meaning you ironically have a weaker effect with energy resistance, but a greater uptime of its usage. So early game, B tier which diminishes tto being low B tier late game perhaps A or C, depending on how fast you progress.


If you want, you should check up the damage resistance formula for Fallout 4, it is incredibly different to the previous games.

Demolition expert can be S tier if you find any rapid fire weapon with the explosive legendary modifier..

Or something like the Kiloton Radium Rifle or Pray and spray.

Also, toughness is kinda trash in fallout 4. Life giver is better for defensive purposes.

To put it simple damage resistance scales is all funky, the moment you get power armor or Bullistic weave you won't notice the toughness rank.

When I play f4, i basically always get ghoulish and solar powered right away, so that i can start treating radiation as healing
standing on a pile of radioactive barrels is such a fun way to recover health mid fight

Hey ReapeeRon, big fan, love your tier lists on a lot of Fallout related videos (mostly biased on New Vegas considering it's lore and behind the scenes quality of life it has) just wanted to share with you my time playing Fallout 4 that I thought it might peak your interest somewhat with a build I like to call "The Red Ranger", a hybrid focus using VATS and Luck.
I did use a couple mods where I can wear NCR/Elite Riot Gear armor and get a Ranger Sequoia down at certain levels thanks to NexusMod so there's that, but I've mainly use only 3 ballistic pistols (Deliverer, Western Revolver, and the Ranger Sequoia) and 1 Lever-Action Rifle (Old Reliable) with the reload animation fix mod because... let's be honest in a Fallout 4 weapons tier list you'll put it down really low due to that bug that's never been fixed like the Big Brained perk in Old World Blues.

Maxed out Rifleman, Penetrator, & Concentrated Fire in Perception, Lone Wanderer in Charisma, Gun Nut in Intelligence.
A friend during my stream told me "I'm chicken" for not putting any in Gunslinger, and I took that personally and maxed it out since I had 6 spare points at the time along with maxing out Action Boy, Quick Hands, and especially Gun-Fu in Agility.
The danger right here is the amount of perks I focused on Luck as I only got Bloody Mess up to Rank 3 for 15% more damage, but as I build up I completely maxed out all the perks from the Luck Rank 6-10 (18 perk points and going up to Level 50 was somewhat a grind)

I'd recommend using a build like this if you ever get a chance (mod or not) to try out how broken it is especially if you ever decide to be one man versus an entire army of Synths/Ghouls/Super Mutants/etc. A Good example is targeting each enemy and only click 1-hit on each of their heads with a revolver or rifle and only activate Critical Banker to the first three as every 4th and later targets you click on will ALWAYS be crit regardless how far they went away or if they're around cover, and with the maxed out Luck you can keep firing multitude of enemies and building up AP and Crit Bank.

Sorry for the long post, I just thought I share a build I focus on and hope to hear yours and other reader's opinion on it, thanks for taking the time and hope to see more of your future vids.

Rooted is actually amazing for melee VATS builds, because when you are in VATS you are standing still. Rooted + Blitz is hella OP.