If you look on the shelves inside his house near the room where you first wake up, you'll also find a laser pistol and ammo you can take with no damage to your karma. In the beginning of the game if you want to get your hands on some energy weapons, here's a couple I've found: Doc Mitchell should give you a laser pistol upon exiting his house, assuming your energy weapon skill is high enough. The Pulse Gun is used to take out any robots or people wearing power armor, while the Gauss Rifle and Laser RCW will vaporize anything else. For your choice of weapon, I personally prefer either the Gauss Rifle (you can find the unique YCS/186 Gauss Rifle in a mercenary camp), Laser RCW and Pulse Gun.

Honestly, the body armor you wear doesn't really matter, so wear whatever you feel like. Need an extra boost to complete a speech challenge, wear a piece of clothing with +speech. Having trouble surviving firefights? Wear something with a high DT. For your body, you can use whatever suits you. Since this energy weapon build focuses on critical hits, the 1st Recon Beret you get from Boone is ideal as it not only grants +1 perception, but also gives you a +5 to critical chance. Because you will most likely always be wearing glasses, helmets are out of the question. I personally prefer Authority glasses or sunglasses. As for armor, due to the four eyes trait you'll always want to have glasses equipped.

As with the other stats, an implant will bring this to the maximum value of 10. Luck is at a whopping 9 because critical hits will be an important part of this build, so the higher the better. Agility is 6 due to perks requiring this value, and an implant can raise it to 7. Intelligence is 6, but at level 2 I recommend you use intense training to raise it to 7, and an implant later on brings the final value to 8, which is more than enough to be able to max most if not all your skills. The only other thing affected by charisma is your companion's nerve, which really isn't that important. Even with a starting value of one, it isn't hard to increase your speech or barter to a acceptable level.

Charisma is 1 because it is the most useless stat in my opinion. You can choose to get an implant for each of your SPECIAL stats, or you can ignore charisma and/or endurance in favor of the increased DT and health regen. Endurance is also at 7 for implant reasons. Add any hat with +1 perception and an implant, and you've got yourself a perfect 10. Also, with the four eyes trait your perception will be 6 without glasses, and 8 with. Perception is at 7 because it is one of the determining factors of your energy weapon skill.

Fallout nv pulse gun