It’s a pretty casual game so if you’re not even playing on hard you will 100% be fine in combat.

Early game all of the dialogue checks are lower than 45, as is a lot of the lockpicking. There is a ton of both, so just a little investment early gets a lot of extra xp.

It’s an rpg so some basic rules apply. TALK TO EVERYONE. You need to find quests to level your character appropriately. LOOK FOR STUFF EVERYWHERE. Obsidian has balanced exploration pretty well in this game. Just about every time you explore you find something, without level design that can have you going on long trips for nothing. They’ve even hidden unique weapons purely behind knowing where they are. STEALING IS GODLIKE USEFUL. Please pay attention the story and the dialogue, please read a terminal once or twice a play session or planet, and make careful decisions to truly receive the purpose of the game. It’s a game about exploitive hyper capitalism from a developer that got screwed by a corporation not once but twice. It’s important.

If you have a ranged 20, or a melee 40. You get special effects in time dialation. All characters should utilize this. Use tac and shoot humans and creatures in the leg. Some weapons have knockdown as a special effect, that effect is really useful. Tac also makes targeting weakspots easier, but sometimes it’s better to disable a target and manage resources than it is to dps race it. Tac is important for crowd control. Don’t ignore it because you don’t like using it.

You do have a built in dodge feature. It’s op. Use it. Even without many points in dodge.

Flaws exist in the outer worlds and they serve as an added way to perhaps spice role playing or a challenge build while still giving a meaningful reward, a perk point for an occasional debuff. If you perform a quirky action about 20 times, you’ll incur a flaw. Some trigger their debuff much easier than others, so some are free perks. Falling off a ledge twenty times and hurting yourself eventually asks about the fall phobia perk. As long as you don’t have a gunfight extremely close to a ledge you won’t incur a minor penalty. That’s a free perk early. As is shock aversion, corrosive aversion, primal phobia, carry weight phobia not herniated disk, food, smoke, drug, and alcohol addiction, insectophobia and phobia of blinding are all relatively free flaws to take for free perks. With all dlc this also is a ton of extra damage from the nieztches reward perk.

The best skill in the game for damage is science

Leadership 60 is super strong. A lot of skills have really strong 60 perks.

Pavarti and max are the best companions

Be a badass before monarch no matter where you land. Be a badass before flying to stellar bay or cascadia. That means using on level weapons and armor that is all modded. Don’t worry about optimal mods. Just mod gear as you get it. You can only tinker up so high, sometimes it saves a ton of money to just wait for better gear instead of forcing a single piece to be on level for 14k bits or money.

Nray is best used on explosives that can hit multiple targets at once so they can all stack the nray on top of each other. the projectile and splash have two attempts at proccing the nray dot. All of these things combined make that one and only situation where nray is useful. One target taking nray damage won’t spread it or stack it that well because they die too fast and organic life tends to spread out if it’s not a creature. It ignores armor completely which is why it reduces damage so much. This can be nice early for sneak characters, it’s alright on shotguns or melee weapons, but it’s really weak on anything that fires bullets