Math Wrath

 is a perk in Fallout: New Vegas.

Effects
You are able to optimize your Pip-Boy's VATS logic, reducing all AP costs by 10 percent. Note that this perk applies across all weapons, but will also stack with weapon-centric VATS perks, like Plasma Spaz or Beautiful Beatdown.

Strategy
Compared with Action Boy, the usefulness of this perk is directly related to how much AP you have to begin with. If you have more than 75 AP, it would be better to take this perk. If you have less than 75 it would be better to take Action Boy. The reasoning behind this is explained below.

Math Wrath could also be thought of as increasing your total AP by 10% as well as increasing your AP recovery rate by 10%. Therefore this perk increases your total AP capacity by 20%. At 75 AP, the 15 AP you get from Action Boy would also increase your AP capacity by 20%. Because Action Boy's bonus does not change, it should be reserved for characters that would naturally have AP lower than this, such as those with low Agility. Math Wrath on the other hand is better for players who already have a significant amount of AP and want to boost their VATS ability as much as possible.

1.The reasoning above is flawed, for two reasons. First, reducing a cost by 10% does not equate to increasing the AP total by 10%. Mathematically, it would equate to increasing the AP total by 11.111%. Also, Math Wrath does not change your AP recovery rate, and even if it did, or even if you thought of it as doing so because you are pretending that it increases your AP pool rather than reducing your AP costs, a 10% increase in recovery rate definitely would not equate to a 10% increase in total AP. So yes, the usefulness of Math Wrath does vary by your AP pool size, but not at the cutoff point described above. Anyone with better math skills want to take another crack at it and find the true threshold?

2.At 135 Action Points, adding 15 AP from Action Boy is equivalent to reducing AP costs by 10%. X+15 = X/(1-.1)

3.Without Chems, even with a starting agility of 10 (95 AP) and the Kamikaze trait (10 AP) you would only have 105 AP, meaning that both ranks of Action Boy would be more valuable than Math Wrath. Nothing in Math Wrath indicates faster AP recovery.

4.The faster AP recovery assumption comes from the fact that the same number of shots can be fired with less AP and it takes less time to regenerate less AP, for example. Assume a weapon costs 10 AP per shot and you have 90 AP and that AP regenerates at 10 per second. That means you can fire 9 shots with that weapon, and 9 seconds later you will be able to fire 9 shots. With Math Wrath the weapon will be able to take only 9 AP per shot and fire 10 shots instead, 9 seconds later, another 10 shots can be fired. However you can also fire the original value of 9 shots FASTER as you only have to wait 8.1 seconds to do so. Therefore Math Wrath is indeed equal to increasing the max AP value by 11.11% AND increasing the recharge rate by the same value (11.11%), you must think outside the box. Therefore IF we assume that recharge rate is of equal value to maximum AP then we have a total effectiveness increase of 22.22% and we may assume that Math Wrath beats Action Boy at a threshold of only approximately 67.5 (67.5 x 22.22%= around 15)! We may determine the effectiveness of Math Wrath compared to Action Boy as soon as the following question is answered.

Question: Does increasing the total number of AP Points increase the recovery rate as well?

5.Of course, taking all three perks would be even more beneficial.

2nd Question: We can assume that you can round up to eliminate AP Costs with Math Wrath correct? For example 10% off of a 15 AP cost equals 1.5 which rounds up to 2 off, right?

6.The improvement works out to 11.11%, not 20% OR 22.22%. The calculation under point 4 is calculating the SAME bonus two different ways and then acting like it's two different bonuses and adding them together, which doesn't make sense because it's still the SAME bonus.

Here's another example: Assume you have 100 AP, it takes 10 seconds to fully regenerate all your APs (so 10AP per second) and you have a weapon that costs 10AP to fire (9AP with Math Wrath). After the initial round the baseline has fired 10 shots and has 0 AP remaining, Math Wrath will have fired 11 times and have 1 point remaining. After 8 seconds the baseline will have enough APs to fire 8 more shots (18 total, 0 AP remaining), Math Wrath will have enough to fire 9 shots (20 total, 0 AP remaining). So that works out to (20-18)/18 = 11.11% more shots fired. If you keep on firing, both scenarios sync up with 0 AP remaining every 9 seconds, with the baseline firing 9 shots in that period, and Math Wrath firing 10, so that still works out to (10-9)/9 = 11.11% more shots fired.