This Skill is AWFUL... Social Skills Analysis & Tier List | Starfield Handbook

deception is the perfect name for this skill because it sucks and you should never waste a skill point on it at a glance starfield's social skills look like a cool way to play as a silver tongued Wordsmith who's mastered the Arts of persuasion Commerce and Leadership and to a degree you can live out that fantasy but once you actually try to use half of these skills you realize just how janky and impractical many of them are today we'll be taking a closer look at exactly how all 16 of the social skills actually function and whether you should be investing any skill points into them as always my ratings are inherently subjective but I try to look at things as objectively as possible after thoroughly testing every skill let me know what you do and don't agree on and whether I've missed any more nuanced uses of these skills it was great to hear from all of you on the physical skills in my last video Let's Dive In First on our list is Commerce it's a pretty clear-cut skill we're at rank 1 you buy things for five percent less and sell them for ten percent more with each subsequent rank increasing those amounts by five percent if you're someone who earns the majority of your credits through selling items and you find yourself purchasing most of your ammo and supplies instead of Scavenging for them there's definitely a use case for some point investment here here if however you constantly complete missions and you loot every med pack in ammo crate you see then I'd be more hesitant to dump as many points into this skill personally I have 450k credits just lying around and all the ammo and Med packs I'll ever need and I've never put a single point into this skill the biggest selling point of Commerce is that it also reduces the cost of ship components which is Far and Away the greatest credit sink in the game if you're planning to build a massive custom ship then it's going to cost a pretty penny and this will definitely help reduce those costs if you're someone who has an XP or credit Farm Outpost setup this skill is probably useless to you since money is no issue All Things Considered there's nothing game changing about this skill and if you do even a reasonable amount of looting it's very easy to finish an outing with a bulk of sellable items to cover your in-game expenses I'd recommend maybe one point in Commerce since it provides a 10 increase to selling items versus the five percent increments you get from all further ranks we'll throw this into BTR across the board as someone who enjoys cooking I was really hoping for something exciting from Gastronomy but unfortunately it's just a giant lunch bag letdown each rank of gastronomy unlocks new recipes with Rank 4 giving you a chance to save ingredients while cooking sadly none of the recipes you unlock sell for any meaningful amount of credits and almost all temporary boost you get from food items last around three to five minutes on average and only a few last over 10. I don't know about you but there's no way in hell I'm opening up my inventory to snack on something new that frequently and I barely remember to sleep in a bed for my well-rested buff to begin with another unfortunate Discovery I've made is that you actually can't stack any of the same buff type from food the newest one will always overwrite the old one for example if I eat at Grandpa's meatloaf that boosts XP for 120 minutes then immediately drink an xpt that boosts for 30 minutes that 120 minute buff gets overwritten to 30. now knowing this I'd actually downgrade my nutrition rank for my last tier list from an S to a b it's still useful and would give you 33k free XP on the grind to Max rank everything but it's not nearly as good since it only works on a single XP booster this means there's basically zero point in upgrading the skill as shepherd's pie and Grandpa's meatloaf are XP boosting recipes that are not tied to leveling the skill and other recipes just aren't compelling enough to justify points I wish I had something better to say about this skill but it's mostly a waste of skill points unless we get some survival mode later on to add some elements of complexity that makes this skill useful the skill isn't 100 useless so I'll be generous and say it's d-tier but there's much to be desired here persuasion a keystone skill for anyone who really wants to maximize a speech-oriented playthrough if you've completed a significant number of quests you'll surely have had the option to partake in numerous persuasion instances but have you ever really felt like it was necessary to have skill points invested in it I'm expecting this to be an extremely controversial skill in terms of ratings but I personally think it's not worth putting even a single point into this skill for the average player if you have no issue with saves coming or you don't get hung up over failed persuasion outcomes in most scenarios I almost always back up a save out of habit before a big interaction like a persuasion attempt and if I really want to succeed I'll just revert to the same if I fail but honestly I only really care if I'm intentionally trying to play out every single dialogue outcome for lower research purposes this method obviously trivializes the need to rank up the skill but of course if you want to have an honest playthrough with all consequences included and you do care about the success rate of persuasion interactions then sure you've got a much more valid case for putting points here another important thing to mention here is that sometimes a successful persuasion attempt actually ends up being the most boring outcome in a questline so I'm often inclined to see what either failing the check actually does or not even opting for the persuasion attempt if that's possible that said it can just as easily help reduce the tedium of some quests upon a successful interaction so it does kind of balance out we're going to give this a dual rating as persuasion's perceived value will differ immensely based on the kind of player you are if you're like me and you save scum or you live happily with whatever the outcome of or persuasion attempt is then you should probably never invest points here until you have nothing better to put them in and you'd probably rank as a d to your skill if you run a social type character and making peace or convincing others to do your bidding is the Cornerstone of your playstyle or you just really like making sure your persuasion attempts have the greatest likelihood of success then you're probably thinking this is more of an 8-s to your skill Scavenging is another fairly subjective skill but I think it has legs to stand on in an argument for whether it's worth putting points into rank 1 allows you to find more credits when searching containers then you find more ammo at Rank 2 and then more 8 items at rank 3. unless you just blast through the game without hunting around for loot then you'll always get some value out of this skill and I honestly think it's played a huge part in why I have so many credits and so much ammo stockpiled each rank is useful but I think Rank 2 is The Sweet Spot I've personally never come close to running out of Med packs and it's hard to miss seeing those containers while exploring ammo on the other hand was much more painful to come by early on and it's also very expensive to purchase compared to meds as for Rank 4 of Scavenging I think it's one of the lamest unique Rank 4 perks in my opinion if you have a particular item track it will instead highlight that item orange instead of the normal blue Winnie of your skin scanner out this is only useful if you remember to track something in the first place and is pretty underwhelming as you're likely to be naturally looking at most highlighted items anyways to see if they're important while exploring it's a very minor convenience type skill with an infrequent use case I think generally Scavenging is a solid b-tier skill that isn't game changing but is certainly useful especially at rank 2. the rank 4 perk however is definitely D tier and isn't worth dumping the skill point into theft is another useful but not game changing skill rank 1 is required for being able to pickpocket to begin with Rank 2 increases your success rate by 10 30 for Rank 3 and then 50 for Rank 4 with the added ability to pickpocket holstered weapon as nice as getting the five finger discount on some weapons is I just don't find it worth the four skill points of investment and for that matter most of the time pickpocketing isn't all too special unless it's against a named NPC the biggest issue of course is that there's a chance that when you get caught that you'll have the guards called on you and that you get your assholed off to jail in a city or it causes a fight to break out in other places getting jailed just screws your gameplay flow and then you have to steal your stuff back and obviously combat can really mess things up too however theft is very convenient for stealing key cards off people and that can really expedite some class steps and give you access to areas you would normally not be able to reach similar to persuasion this is a skill that can be completely trivialized by saves coming so again if you have no qualms with that then rank 1 is surely all you'll ever need with all that considered I'd say theft is another B tier skill that certainly has its pros and I 100 recommend everyone puts at least the one point into it to unlock it but beyond that that's your prerogative personally I'd say they're better spent elsewhere even on something like Scavenging which we just discussed that's naturally built into your normal gameplay and probably rewards about the same amount of loot with none of the hassle so I spent ages trying to test out deception and either this skill is just completely bugged and broken or it's just complete dog [ __ ] supposedly with each rank you are more likely to have enemy ships surrendered to piracy demands and enemy con Ultra band scans become less effective for the Contraband scanned aspect I tried numerous tests of varying levels of deception and different percentages of shielded cargo filled with Contraband and there's never been a difference and even if there was there's no point in bothering with this skill because you can just pay around 5 to 10K credits for hundreds of kilos of shielded cargo that has over an 80 evasion rate already or you could just go to the key and sell your Contraband there where you don't even get scanned it's useless the piracy part of this seems to be just as bad because I could not for the life of me observe any noticeable difference when using this skill at rank 0 or rank 4. first off there's no clear way to discern whether a ship is stronger than you or not because you can't tell what the hell your own ship's level is and even against a dinky little level four ship I couldn't always get it to surrender something is clearly wrong here but it doesn't matter anyway since piracy loot is almost always mediocre when you compare it to boarding a ship and if you've ever tried conducting piracy in a system of friendlies you'll find out the hard way that it's barely worth it at all you either get jailed and have to pay off your Bounty or you just get blown to bits or you have to kill 20 other ships and rack up a 300K Bounty I don't know what I'm missing here but I think this skill is a complete dumpster fire if someone here can prove me otherwise please let me know because I'm not convinced that the skill even works and if it did it would be useless anyways big fat F if you enjoy in-depth research-based Starfield content then consider subscribing and turning on notifications so you don't miss my next analysis video on combat skills diplomacy is the first of four humanoid populating skills and honestly all of them are kind of underwhelming diplomacy is actually the simplest and cleanest of all of them and all it does is just make the targeted NPC stop attacking as you rank up diplomacy you'll be able to influence NPCs up to 10 and then 20 levels higher than you at ranks two and three respectively hovering forward you can force an MBC to permanently stop attacking unless you attack it again normally diplomacy only lasts for 30 seconds which is often more than enough in small encounters but in larger groups where you have way more enemies to deal with it's certainly better to have Rank 4 but is it worth four skill points probably not I really think it's hard to justify the biggest issue with this and the rest of the NPC influencing skills is the fact that you have to have your scanner out aim at the enemy and then actually conduct the influence check to see if it actually is successful if you're in the middle of a giant firefight this is a huge pain in the ass and in most cases leaves you fully open to receive fire and the check may not actually be successful and then they'll still come after you I could potentially see this being being more useful on higher level difficulties against enemies that you can't normally one shot but realistically anybody with a reasonably strong weapon is not going to have enough trouble taking down an enemy to make it worth having to pull your scanner out and do these checks against every NPC an unlisted benefit that diplomacy also provides however is additional dialogue options during persuasion checks these options typically are higher number value while also having a higher success rate making them great for increasing your likelihood of success in a persuasion check this is a nice small bonus that only requires one point of investment and the fact that the skill isn't entirely useless albeit very clunky and probably more impractical to use than just shooting your enemies it's not bad enough to warn an F tier ranking but it is definitely a detier skill in my eyes unless you believe you can reliably utilize this skill while in combat I wouldn't bother putting points into this intimidation is our second NPC influencing skill and instead of making NPCs stop attacking it makes them flee rings one to three are just like they were for diplomacy but Rank 4 is slightly different in that it doesn't make enemies Flee for an infinite amount of time it makes them Flee for a substantial amount of time this means 30 seconds at ranks one and three and 60 seconds at rank 4. there is actually a very specific use case for intimidation and I do think it functions slightly better than diplomacy because an intimidated enemy doesn't get reset if you attack them it's great for melee build or builds in general that lack strong DPS as it'll give you a 60 second window to just go to town on them one thing that is a bummer and this also applies to diplomacy and the other NPC influencing skills is that you only get one chance to actually try and influence them if it fails you can't try one of the other methods if it works you only get that one shot and you can't influence them again intimidation also comes with the hidden perk of having additional dialogue options added to persuasion checks overall I'd say intimidation is only slightly better than diplomacy but because it has that additional aspect of not reagoring after you you attack somebody who's intimidated I'd say that this at least warrants a rank of C again I wouldn't say four points is worth it for the skill even though that double duration is kind of nice moving on to some more unique skills we have isolation I think this is an awesome skill but of course the trade-off here is that you're gonna have to go it alone if you're sick of your companions getting mad at you for doing anything remotely morally questionable every rank of isolation gives you 10 weapon damage and you gain 15 damage resistance for each spacesuit and helmet equipped when you don't have a companion or crew member following you now when it says damage resistance this is specifically physical damage resistance and you can verify this by checking the status menu on your character as you rank this skill up all things considered this is absolutely nuts this is an incredibly strong offensive and defensive buff to your character obviously for the significant trade-off of not having a follower who can hold items for you act as a bullet sponge and distraction from enemies and be a supplemental damage dealer but I think the trade-off is pretty fair especially in area is where having a follower is inconvenient like in more stealth-based encounters where a follower would actually be detrimental to have around this is an amazing perk it would have been cool if there was a unique Rank 4 perk but honestly these pure stat boosters are some of the strongest of any individual skills so I'll let it pass if you're looking to go It Alone this is obviously one of the best skills in the game for you and it's got to be an S to your skill if you're planning to have a companion at your side you will probably never want to put a skill point into this and you would think that this is an F to your skill so there really isn't much in between on this one it's either great or it's useless negotiation is another fairly straightforward skill I rank one you gain the ability to access bribery and speech challenges similar to the NPC influencing skills ranks 2 and 3 reduced bribery costs by 25 and 50 and Rank 4 gives a chance for bribery to not cost anything at all putting one point into the skill obviously doesn't hurt as it unlocks new opportunities to perform speech checks but I would say putting a single point into any of the other NPC influencing skills is equally as good and it costs no credits to utilize again it's not a skill that's 100 percent useless but its utility is very very minimal it's also joining some of the other social tree skills in detail instigation is our third NPC influencing skill and instead of making enemies run away or stop attacking it forces enemies to attack their allies for a limited amount of time ranks one to three are identical to intimidation in terms of duration of effect and the level of NPC that you can influence however Rank 4 causes the instigated NPC to fight its enemies until it's dead this does look like something decent on paper as you would get another person to deal out damage and to soak up enemy fire the only issue is that this is extremely janky and half the time it feels like it's not working properly especially if there are no enemies within close proximity to the instigated enemy when this is the case or simply the only enemy in the area the instigated enemy will instead revert to attacking you therefore I'd only recommend using the skill when enemies are really clumped up together I wouldn't suggest ranking this up for Rank 4 as the 30 seconds is often enough to either finish the fire fight or have the NPC killed in the process similar to the other influencing skills instigation also provides unique dialogue options to during persuasion checks we'll also throw this one into C tier because when it actually works it is kind of useful but again it's still a clunky skill to utilize leadership is the opposite of the isolation skill and is all focused around companion Buffs at rank 1 your companion gains Affinity 25 faster which will speed up how quickly you reach major checkpoints and a romanceable companions questline Rank 2 adds 50 health and 50 kilos of carrying capacity which is quite substantial in most cases which translates to a 10 HP buff or a little bit lower depending on your companions level and the 50 kilos in most cases is close to around a 40 percent buff to carrying capacity rank 3 gives your companion the ability to occasionally heal you when your health gets low so when it gets red barred but honestly that amount of healing is quite minuscule and it's about the amount of half of a med pack Rank 4 however doubles the bonuses of combat and physical skills on crew and Companions and companions have a chance to pick themselves up from a down state so you won't have to use a med pack to pick them up this doubling of bonuses only affects the companion itself their skills do not translate to buffing you direct directly if we look at this example of the adoring fan we know that one of their skills is weightlifting and if you increase your leadership rank to Rank 4 they gain an additional 20 kilos of carrying capacity you'll find similar usefulness for any companion that has skills in the combat tree such as rifle certification on Samco or particle beams on andresia assuming you're making them utilize those weapons as well in combat I'd say rank one of leadership is more of a nice to have than anything as nothing's really stopping you from ever maxing out all of your character Affinity Rank 2 is pretty nice as the carrying capacity is a welcome buff Rank 3 is kind of useless and it doesn't happen very often and Rank 4 is also very good this isn't a game changing skill but the benefits it provides are fairly solid and if you're somebody who consistently runs around with companions then this would be a welcome skill to at least put a couple points into I'd say this is a strong b-tier skill that falls just shy of a all right we're getting closer to the end of the list here and next up we have Outpost management this is such a vague skill in terms of descriptions and I really don't understand why they couldn't have just given us numbers to make it more clear what the benefits are to this skill at rank 1 you get additional cargo links that can be placed at your Outpost and this increases the amount from three to six at Rank 2 you can have additional robots constructed at your Outpost and this increases the number again from three to six at rank three you get additional crew that can be assigned to Outpost and what this actually does is it allows you to add three additional crew stations to your Outpost which increases the total potential number of crew members from 6 to 12 as each Cruise station provides you with two crew the really dumb thing about this however and maybe this is a bug or maybe I'm not utilizing the Outpost system properly is the ship command for some reason is the determining factor of how many people you can actually place at a given Outpost at any time even if it says you can have 12 crew members there it's not actually true if anyone here has ever been able to have more than eight people at an outpost at a given time please let me know how you've done that the final rank of outpost management doubles the rate that extractors produce resources at and this is a pretty solid buff for anybody who's going deep into the Outpost building system every single ring provides a legitimate buff with rank 1 probably being the most useful if you go really complex into your Outpost building where three cargo links is probably not enough to get a good Farm running Rank 2 is useful but it's not nearly as impactful as the cargo links ring 3 is solid assuming you have enough crew members to actually utilize all of the Extra Spaces and Rank 4 is obviously great as it's appear doubling to your resource production assuming you're actively utilizing all of those resources this is a must-have if you're using outposts for XP or credit farming I'm going to be generous here and call this an S tier skill as each rank has a compelling enough argument for investing the point however I would say that this is a late game Focus skill but you won't be wanting to invest points into until you're ready to commit serious time to Outpost building manipulation is our final influence based skill and I have very mixed feelings about it the purpose of the skill is to allow you to take control of NPCs and make them do your bidding the only issue is that it seems like you can only ever input a single command for a controlled NPC to enact on this is particularly useful for scenarios where instead of having to pickpocket a key card you can manipulate an NPC and make them utilize the key card for you you can also use manipulation as a pseudo type of diplomacy where while they're manipulated they basically won't do anything and they'll kind of follow you around and you can force your manipulated NPC to attack another NPC manipulation also provides you with additional speech interaction options and these ones are typically the most potent and sometimes have an immediate effect on the target you're trying to manipulate because you can only seem to execute a single command on a manipulated enemy this makes the rank 4 perk almost entirely useless as any command you would give to a manipulated enemy is likely to take less than the 30 seconds that you get at any of the other ranks it's also worth mentioning that you can only manipulate one target at a time and if you try to manipulate somebody else it'll overwrite the previous command feel free to skip the next 10 seconds if you want a pretty well inconsequential spoiler but if you want to get a free rank of manipulation all you have to do is progress through the reunion Industries questline and you'll get a free rank of manipulation without having to invest the prerequisite amount of skill points that did the tree to unlock it because manipulation shares most of the benefits from the other influence based skills and because you can utilize this for things like key card access I think it's worth bumping it up to a b but just barely the rank 4 perk however is very bad and the only reason I put it in D instead of f is because it can act as a pseudo diplomacy second last on our list is ship command it's another clear-cut skill where every rank simply increases the number of active crew members you can have on a ship at a given time for some reason as we've already mentioned this seems to impact outposts as well and I'm not sure if that's a bug but that's how it works right now ranks one to three increase your amount of crew members by one going from four to five to six and then rank four gives you an additional two boosting the total up to eight this is a pretty solid skill assuming you have crew members that provide direct benefits to either your ship or Outpost Sarah Morgan for example has astrodynamics and while it doesn't increase your grab jump length it does actually decrease the fuel consumption for any of your jumps so skills like that are obviously very useful and the more that you have active on your ship obviously the more powerful you'll be I'd say this is a solid eight-year skill and the rank 4 perk is also solid as it gives you a plus two boost to crew members instead of the normal one last on our list is xenocio geology this is identical to the humanoid NPC influencing skills only this time it works specifically for alien creatures all four of the humanoid influencing skills are just lumped together into xenos sociology and all have the exact same effect as what we've previously mentioned subtle differences here being that all the influencers have a 60 chance of success and that every rank of Xeno sociology unlocks one of those influencers another key difference being of course that aliens are not going to have key cards that you can utilize making the manipulation aspect of it weaker and you can't control terramorph sadly given how janky and clunky it is to actually utilize these skills and the fact that you only get one try across any of the influence methods makes it far less desirable honestly it's kind of embarrassing how lackluster two of the three Master skills are in this tree despite the fact that you can get all four influence skills by investing in xenos sociology they're for the most part watered-down versions and fighting alien creatures is not nearly as difficult as humanoids with guns I think putting this in D tier is pretty fair as unfortunate as that is if you can't tell from most of my rankings industry I don't find the social skills to be that compelling a single point in Commerce will never hurt persuasion is extremely subjective to your playstyle Scavenging can be quite good especially the first two ranks theft at least one point is also useful all of the influence based skills are very clunky to use and honestly you're probably better off just using a gun in 9 out of 10 of those scenarios however they do provide additional speech check options which is a slight benefit isolation is an excellent skill for anybody who's sick of their Companions and the flip side of that for those of you who do enjoy your companions presence is leadership and it's pretty decent Outpost management is a critical skill for anybody serious about diving into that side of the game and finally ship command is an all-around solid skill if you enjoyed this video and are looking for more don't worry the rest of the skill trees are on the way if you're wondering what skills in the physical tree are worth your points then check this video out next I'll see you in the next one peace

Channel: UncleMumble

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Keywords: Starfield, Starfield news, Starfield rumors, Starfield weapons, Starfield Outposts, Starfield Crafting, Starfield Story, Starfield Lore, Starfield Quests, Starfield Spaceships, Starfield Traits, Starfield Skills, Starfield Backgrounds, Starfield Economy, Starfield Research, Starfield Planets, Starfield Factions, Starfield Crew, starfield direct, bethesda, todd howard, skyrim, fallout, goty, star, field, premium, settled systems, handbook, constellation, bgs, starfield handbook

Id: vBw4lBE2P3o

Length: 23min 17sec (1397 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 27 2023