Finished my first playthrough as a persuasive and (mostly) honest good character. Neutral good, if I had to give her an alignment. Only used handguns and shotguns (maybe 90% handguns, 10% shotguns) and the pistol I'd tinkered and modded made the final boss trivial on normal. Still want to do two more playthroughs: corporate stooge that uses melee/heavy weapons and kills a lot, and a long guns expert that relies on stealth and companions because they're super dumb.
Only issue is I'm hearing is a "kill-a-lot" run isn't really that much different than any other run. Maybe I'll just do my dumb sniper next instead of my asshole run?
Play on Hard, and do a companion (at least 50 in Leadership, but 60+ is better) build. Yes, they are
super dumb when you don't actually give them commands, but when you actually move them to a spot to hold at, they will chew through enemies that rush towards you (especially any beast type), and for humans, they can just stand inside any group of them an annihilate.
Parvati and Max are the best for this, due to their ridiculous active skills. Parvati literally teleports anywhere you can reliably shoot an enemy, stuns them, and Max can knock down any enemy in the game with his skill. I'm right at the end of my Supernova, no reload run, and I stopped having to actually do much of anything with them other than click their abilities once per fight for ages now. It's super cheesy too, because you can use their skills to prevent any enemy that's rushing you to hit you, it also slows down time for the enemies, while the second companion keeps on firing at full speed. The best weapons for them too that I've found are Heavy Machine Guns, but before you can find those, just the Light version will work well enough.
Sniping is fun, but honestly it's extremely slow compared to using companions to just rush everything. Mainly because stealth fucking sucks in this game for combat purposes. It's terrible. The only thing it seems to do is increase the rate at which the enemy "alert" meter decreases and resets them back to their normal, unaware state. With max Sneaking and the Tier 3 stealth perk, enemies still go into full combat after 1-3 kills the same way they do without those skills. The only difference is you end up waiting a little less for them to reset.
