Once you're at the point where you can start using your skill books you have to commit to a permanent set of characters or else waste a huge amount of skill points.
Except I popped skill books to hit r10 on a character that has armor/weapon mod, before realizing you can create a mule for it.
ronne
said is one solution, it has it's draw backs. Not only do you lose any skill book, removing any toon from the group, that has a follower attached, such as Maj. Tomcat or Polly, loses that follower, so I never went the remake and remove/delete route to respec.
Not sure about generic animals, but named ones like Tomcat don't disappear immediately. I originally thought animal buffs were party wide and had Tomcat following the wrong person, but removing that character and talking to him with someone else before leaving the area worked fine. Should be able to do the same thing if you're just remaking your character with Animal Whisperer. (And in Tomcat's case, you only need cigarettes to get him to follow and I wouldn't actually invest in AW on the character he's following until you have 2+ perk points you don't know what to do with.)
Personally I draw the line at save editing (unless it's to fix an actual bug) but I don't see anything wrong with using the recruiter dude as much as you want. They had to know exactly how it would be used when they decided to put it in the game. You can accomplish the same thing by following a guide written by someone who already knows how to build around the best mid-/late-game gear, what skills you need to hit all the important checks, etc. (like this one) and never have to swap anyone besides your weapon/armor modding mule, so what's the harm in a little trial and error + course correction, rather than feeling like you have a team of gimps and should start over?
Weird. You can definitely remove the character who has Major Tomcat, or even just dismiss him and he will wait wherever you left him. People say you can dismiss him at HQ and go do some exploring and he will still be there when you return, but I haven't wanted to risk that yet. There's some spots where you need to dismiss pets or else they will attack civilians and cause NPC companions to abandon you though, and I've successfully dismissed and then retrieved my pets in that case. Haven't tried any other pets since crit is the godking of stats in this game so cats are the only way to go imo.
L30 gets you enough skill points for 3 maxed skills, plus another at 8-ish, and some minor investments in skills great to have on most/all characters at a low rank (First Aid, Mechanics, Sniper Rifles, etc.), but every character needs a combat skill at 10 so effectively you get 2 non-combat skills to play around with. There's 16 total non-combat skills, so there's going to be at least 4 skills you can't max out across your whole party. Survival is shitty aside from the animal damage, and from what I understand Kiss Ass is pretty much useless, so those are no-brainers. Still leaves 2 things you can't take--and that's assuming you don't have multiple people with 9's in stuff like Weird Science or Animal Whisperer since they are important even when duplicated--so it really should be Weapon and Armor Modding that never leave HQ.
