Opinion: the manipulation skill and the Internal Neuroamp is the Whirlwind Sprint of Stafield

[TheRightDoorIsNotTheLeft]

It struck me as odd how you have a manipulation skill in the skill tree and the Ryujin Internal Neuroamp, and yet there are only at most three situations that I know of where it makes sense to use it. After that, it's pretty much useless. All that in-game hype about the Internal Neuroamp, like Barrett saying you could control armies, and yet you can control only one person at a time. Even with a maxed out manipulation skill, use of the Internal Neuroamp isn't even guaranteed. Seems a lot over nothing. At least you could get some use out of Whirlwind Sprint in a lot of places. The Neuroamp? Not so much.

[EgoBallistic]

Yeah it's a very half-baked perk.  It was useful in those Ryujin stealth quests but otherwise there's no point, mainly because there aren't any other stealth quests that instantly fail if you get spotted.  The only real benefit of the skill is the [Manipulation] speech options that sometimes come up during Persuasion checks, but those seem to come up at random so you can't rely on it.

 

It would be a lot better if it were implemented like the "Favor" mechanism in FO4, so that the victim temporarily becomes a companion of sorts and you can tell them to use items, go places, follow you, attack someone, etc.  It wouldn't be very hard to implement it that way, someone already made a working "Command NPCs" mod so this would be very similar.