I am sure that you recognize Deacon's stock line spoken near the start of many fire fights while you have him as a companion. But, how do we do that trick?

High health is helpful in accomplishing that goal. Max health is determined by endurance and levels. More of each is better. You can get 11 endurance as a low level character by putting 10 into your starting endurance, and bumping it to 11 with the SPECIAL book. However, you must temporarily reduce your endurance below 10 before using the book. I do this by doing things in Sanctuary until tired, then becoming over-encumbered. You have to be in survival for this to work. If you want to run your play-though on some other difficulty but still want to use the book in this way, you will have to temporarily jump into survival.

Power armor gives far higher resistances than you can get with other armor, especially near the beginning when leather is the best regular armor that you can get, and ballistic weave is a long way away. The design of this build is to start using power armor very early. You acquire a full set in the process of rescuing Preston and company.

The OSG is a combat rifle. When combat rifles start dropping in the game, they will be "short combat rifles" with all basic parts, parts that you can make without any points in Gun Nut. As you level up, and points into Gun Nut become available (but not necessarily taken), combat rifles with fancier parts (parts that could be made is you were putting points into Gun Nut) start showing up in the game. Not too long after level 39 (when Gun Nut 4 is available) all of the fanciest parts (suppressor, .308 receiver) start showing up on guns in Arturo's and KLEO's inventory, or you may get lucky and loot a fancy combat rifle yourself.

Once you have a gun with a part that you would like to put on your OSG, just pop the part off by making a basic part (requiring no Gun Nut perks). The replaced mod will show up in your inventory and can now be installed on your OSG.

This also works well with energy weapons because there are many of those in the game. It will work less well with something like a radium rifle because there are fewer drops.

Prior to the Next Gen update, getting upgraded power armor without science was difficult. Now, it is easy. Just loot it from the Enclave.

Your starting power armor will be the T-45a set that you get from the Preston rescue mission. I suggest upgrading it to "b" as soon as you have the materials.

Your next set should be what the BOS gives you, which will be BOS II T-60b. Try to get it prior to high twenties level, when your T-45 will be a bit squishy and will start to break often.

Decide when you want to poke the Enclave. I recommend killing Pyro because it is easy. The Devil quest line is not worth the trouble for this build. It gives you X02, but you cannot upgrade it with this build. Also, it takes you near Ada. If you fight any of the robots that are fighting her, that will kick off the roaming robot squads. If you are trying for a low or no death play through, you probably do not want these until later in your run.

Taking any Enclave power armor will eventually trigger and Enclave ambush, which will spawn in behind you and will be a serious fight. I deal with it by jetting up, sprinting away, healing up, and re-engaging at long range with a scoped rifle.

This ambush is your first opportunity to loot upgraded power armor. The ambush seems to always consist of a power armor guy shooting a heavy flamer. This is not a long range weapon but be careful, the range is more than you think. There are two others with no power armor and plasma weapons. For the play through used to develop this guide, I killed Pyro and the ambush at level 34. I got a full set of Enclave Hellfire VI from the ambush for my trouble. The set looted from Pyro was basic with no upgrade. On a previous play-through, I finished the Devil quest line and killed the ambush at level 24. The ambush dropped a full set of Enclave Hellfire II. This might be level related, or it might just be luck, I am not sure. The important thing is that you should be able to get whatever you want if you keep poking the Enclave, which is great for this (no Science) build.

Strength 1
There is not much reason to put points in this while we are using power armor. We have the power armor's strength while we are wearing it. It only takes a couple of points to get to armorer, but that does not help us while we are in power armor, since we are going low int and science is out of reach.

Perception 9
We would like to get this and the other important SPECIALs for this build (endurance, agility and luck) to max with the bobbleheads. Since the perception bobblehead comes early in the run, we are maxing this one first. Bring perception up to 10 prior to picking up the bobblehead.

Endurance 10
Take this to 11 with the book as described above. The bobblehead is fairly far down the road, but it will take endurance to 12.

Charisma 1
This build is about winning combats, so I put all the points into that. I am generally raising companion affinities for their perks in early and mid game, but if you are not going to do that, consider going for Lone Wanderer.

Intelligence 1
We will depend on Idiot Savant for leveling speed. When I do the library, I leave the bobblehead where it is. There are nice perks in this tree, but none are crucial.

Agility 1
This is much lower than we need it to be. We will aggressively raise it with level perks.

Luck 5
We need this to be 5 so we can use our first perk in Idiot Savant. Again, this is lower that it needs to be, but we can raise it with level perks.

We want to take Idiot Savant levels as soon as they are available to get the most out of them. We want to bump perception to 10 before picking up the bobblehead. Other than that, there is no magic here. This is just what I did. Feel free to shuffle a bit to suit your own style.

2 Idiot Savant
3 Perception
4 Luck
5 Luck
6 Critical Banker
7 Agility (mainly to get some action points)
8 Agility
9 Luck
10 Grim Reaper's Sprint
11 Idiot Savant
12 Agility
13 Luck
14 Four Leaf Clover
15 Rifleman
16 Four Leaf Clover
17 Critical Banker
18 Rifleman
19 Rifleman
20 Better Criticals
21 Grim Reapers Sprint
22 Better Criticals
23 Agility
24 Agility
25 Sneak
26 Sneak
27 Sneak
28 Agility
29 Ninja
30 Ninja
31 Rifleman
32 Four Leaf Clover
33 Ninja
34 Idiot Savant

This build is vulnerable to explosions. A mini-nuke will get you every time, even in Helfire VI. If Science were availible, a possible solution would be to apply a coating for that.

A possible solution is to put points into armorer, transition out of power armor, and apply padded to a piece and dense to another. This should let you eat at least one mini-nuke. Moving out of power armor give you less resistance, but better stealth. A sweet spot level to make this change might be in the 40s.

Hope you enjoy the build. Comments appreciated.