not really. this depends on the player, and on the type of the character he wants to build.

Dude, you should really finish the game first, it'd improve your understanding of it.

Repair is not essential, it's the most useless skill in the game. Hacking is not essential, it's optional but useful. Maintenance is absolutely essential for everyone except pure melee builds.
Agility is better than Endurance.
Psionic is great, everyone should grab it. In my view powers like Invisibility or Aura are basically WIN buttons.

Overall SS2 is not very well balanced, not all builds are equal, not even close. If you want really easy game, go with Standard Weapons (6), Strength (6), Heavy Weapons (5 for GL), Psi (5) and Psi powers like Invisibility, Aura, Electron Cascade and Duplicate and your're set.

double post

it should be quite obvious to anyone who has actually played the game and understood the mechanics a bit that you have no clue.

guess that -35 rep of yours is well earned.

You really ought to elaborate more when you try to tell someone they are supposedly wrong. It's quite clear you've earned your rep by acting as self-imposed police of the forums. I don't use forums that often, if I did I'd have "rep" like yours. It's no wonder people like me have something like negative rep when people like you frequent the forums. Pretty backwards system.

If someone wants to prove me wrong they can go right ahead. I'm genuinely curious as to what people think.

I've only went through the game once, and I went melee mostly. Agility was extremely useful to catch some fast moving enemies later on, or even sidestep and avoid enemies. Not to mention to hasten the sometimes annoying backtracking times. It felt a lot more useful than endurance, which only marked how often I needed to head back to local surgical table.

Maintenance is highly useful as weapon quality drops very fast, and the maintenance kits are scarce, so having each "repair" 4 "health" points of a weapon instead of just 1 is very very usefull. Repair can come handy early on, when you get enemy weaponst that are jammed or broken, but you'll eventually get undamaged ones that you'll have to mantain. The only real use of repair is if you're not maintaning your weapons and so you need to switch your worn out weapons with the ones taken from enemies regularly. But those weapons are not high quality so it's not worth it. There are few places which can actually be repaired, but you'll get some auto-repair tools here and there which can be used at those points. All of this renders the repair skill essentially useless.

So just how frequent are maintenance tools later on and how early? I'm in the section where I just got that lecture from the hive mind.

You can get maintenance tools from the replicators, and they're quite cheap if you hack them first.

Also, the ADaoB mod lowers repair costs for a few weapons, so a level or two or repair isn't a bad idea with that... SecMod expands what you can do with repair, along with incorporating ADaoB's fixes (supposedly -- I accidentally broke my SecMod install so I'm not sure if this worked out or not, and SecMod has enough broad alterations that it's probably better to use it for a SECOND playthrough).

(I think the easiest way to make repair more useful would be to lower repair costs across the board, and make more things like replicators broken from the get-go, although that miiiight be obnoxious. If you could incorporate something where repair contributed to maintenance checks it might be good, though).

As amccour says, you can get them from the shops. Personally, I ran out of them at the beginning since I they only restored 1 gun health point, I never had enough. I then upgraded maintenance (up to 4, I believe) and that restored 4 points per use, which meant I started piling them up. But as I said, I mostly went melee, so if I was constantly using guns I probably would have used them.

Aalda11 is quite right about the tech skills.

Maintenance: Absolutely essential if you use guns - and you *should* in many situations (or equivalent PSI-powers).

Repair: Useless. Only time where you would need it to faciliate your life is a broken keypad on Recreations (where the charging station is) - but you can make a big round and approach it from the garden tunnels, so it is basically a nice-to-have. And if you carefully maintain your guns, they never get broken. So: Repair is not needed. And IF you should need it once or twice in the game, you can use the Autorepair-Tool. You can find a couple throughout the game.

Modify: Two levels are enough - for any further modifications, there are plenty of French Eppstein devices to be found.

Hacking: Very usefull to borderline essential - I usually almost max it out for the benefits of locked crates and cheaper Replicators.

This guide is quite useful:
http://shrines.rpgclassics.com/pc/sysshock2/upgrades.shtml

Also Research is technically an essential skill -- at least for level 1, since you do need to research one thing in the game to proceed, afaik.

The damage bonuses you get from research enemy organs are helpful, though.

Well, it's not so useful if you're playing pure psi. A pure psi player will only be carrying one weapon, the psi-amp. I find I have a lot of free inventory space when I'm playing pure psi, and a Brawnboost implant gives me an extra strip if I need it. If you're playing as psi, the level 2 Adrenaline Overproduction power will boost your melee attack far higher than increasing the strength stat will. There is also a level 2 psi power that temporarily buffs strength by 2 (forget the name). Mmmm.....HP is so low on Hard/Impossible that it's really not worth putting points into. On harder difficulties you have to use more evasive tactics and gun for the resurrection chamber to activate it ASAP. Bingo. Get it as high as you can - any stat can be raised to 6 with the upgrade stations. PSI can be buffed to 10 if you stack enough of them (PsiBoost implant / Psi Booster hypos / overcharging / think there's a level 2 power that buffs psi at the cost of double psi points for all powers). Again, at higher difficulties it's worth considering evading over tanking damage. It also reduces weapon recoil, although if you're a good shot with a mouse this is less essential. Nope. I always forget to put points into this as a hacker and round about Deck 4 my ability to hack stuff plummets, with odds of about 35-45% for even the simpler hacks like security terminals. You very definitely need it late-game for a navy build. If nothing else, it keeps security off your back, which means fewer alerts. It's actually pretty useful in places - the standard weapons track is probably the best weapons track for all-round damage dealing. Modding the weapons usually gives improved damage / clip size upgrades. I'll put these two together, as they're somewhat related.

Maintenance is far more important long-term than Repair. Firstly, you don't have to play the hacking minigame to maintain - a tool WILL raise your weapon condition by the value of your Maintenance stat, guaranteed. Fuck up the repair and you destroy the weapon outright.

It's worth sinking a few modules into maintenance - at least to level three. If you find an ExperTech implant later on you can improve it to four, and get 4 weapon condition per tool. I can understand if you feel like it's a waste early in the game as tools are scarce and your skill level won't improve weapons much. This will feel especially true in the level 1 cargo bays, which is a very challenging bit of the early game. My advice is to carry as many spare pistols / shotguns as you can carry and if one breaks, swap to another. Once your maintenance skill is up, stick to one weapon, and start modifying it.

As mentioned already, you can get cheaper tools by hacking the replicators. Maintenance also has the added bonus of increasing the amount of charge you can store in chargeable items like implants. You can get a lot of the key stuff done with level 1 research - and you don't even need to use modules to get that. There is an implant called LabAssistant which will buff the stat for you. It is worth researching the organs you find on different enemies though as you can obtain damage bonuses from them.

There will eventually be weapons, implants and armour in the game that you will need to research before you can use, which are of.....variable usefulness. At least be able to hack security terminals to stop cameras/turrets messing you about, but the hacks do get harder as you progress. You're only really wasting one inventory slot. If you're desperately short of space, toss the hypos and come back for them later. It will be possible later in the game to recycle unused ammo and hypos into nanites.

Don't open up psionics if you haven't and aren't going to use them much - your modules are far too precious a resource for that. Remember that you have to pay to open up a tier of powers as well as pay for the power itself.