Just wondering if there's really any challenging enemies (not low-level cannon fodder) out there that have low DT? 'cos it seems like EVERYTHING that's any sort of challenge has very high DT, which is making me wonder why the hell I bothered buying and fixing up a minigun and gatling laser. These weapons are supposed to be powerhouses, yet I rarely get to use them on anything more challenging than some crappy jackal or fiend due to the way DT works. I have to keep going back to using single shot weapons like the magnum and sniper rifle, when sometimes I just really wanna wade in spraying a hail of gunfire.
I think I preferred FO3's method (i.e. damage resist, not damage threshold), 'cos at least in FO3 the minigun and Gat laser were powerful (as they're supposed to be).
So yeah, if anyone knows of somewhere I can get my bullet-spraying rocks off, that'd be great I just need a good dungeon/building/vault with lots of hard-hitting, high HP but low DT enemies.

Cazadores have 0 DT.


I don't like the gatling laser, burns ammo too fast. Laser RCW is better overall.

Oh true? Awesome thanks!
There's a bunch just north of Goodsprings I think, I'm gonna go mash 'em up
Also, I agree about the RCW being superior. But it just ain't as cool
At the end of the day...It's a GATLING GUN! that shoots FRIKKIN' LASER BEAMS!
The only possible way it could be any cooler would be if they replaced the "Gatling" part with "Shark"

The "Gatling Laser" isn't actually based on Gatling's ideas at all. Hooray language creep. Just thought I'd point that out.

Cazadores may have no DT, But they have a hell'ova'lota pain to give anyone that asks for it.

There aren't any, really. Cazadores have no DT but don't particularly have high HP either. It's one of the main reasons I absolutely hate the raw DT implementation in this game. I can only imagine why during the Gatling Laser R&D they said "Wait, football pads and a skirt reduce this weapon's effectiveness by 80%? PUSH THAT CRAP INTO PRODUCTION RIGHT NOW!"

If you use armour piercing rounds in the minigun you wont have a problem. With anything.

Actually, if you put armor piercing rounds in the minigun and fire at anything that has enough armor, you'll actually do less damage than standard bullets! Yay!

I didn't believe this was true but I ran some numbers

0 -> i{0} -> j{0} -> kfor i,1,30,1    ; standard rounds    max(12-i,12*0.2) -> j[i]    ; armor piercing rounds    max((12-max(0,i-15))*0.95,12*0.2*0.95) -> k[i]endforDT    norm   APi     j      k-----------------1     11     11.42     10     11.43     9      11.44     8      11.45     7      11.46     6      11.47     5      11.46     4      11.47     3      11.48     2.4    11.49     2.4    11.410    2.4    11.411    2.4    11.412    2.4    11.413    2.4    11.414    2.4    11.415    2.4    11.416    2.4    10.4517    2.4    9.518    2.4    8.5519    2.4    7.620    2.4    6.6521    2.4    5.722    2.4    4.7523    2.4    3.824    2.4    2.8525    2.4    2.2826    2.4    2.28(repeating)

So, it's true. At DT of 25 or higher, standard ammunition in a minigun does 5% more damage than armor piercing. Realistically I don't think this is really enough to get stressed out about, since the armor piercing obviously fares much much better at any lesser amount of armor, and the difference at DT 25 or more is only 5%. Let's not forget that the minigun shoots 20 rounds per second, too, so it will do more than 40 DPS to *anything* regardless of how much armor the target has has.

Logical failure yes, gameplay balance failure not so much.

Camp McCarran is fun to turn into meat with the Mini gun.
DT doesn't matter there, you will still murder everything.

I don't see how it isn't a gameplay balance failure. It's stupid that a player should really have to stop and do math to consider whether loading AP ammo against a target he knows has high DT is actually going to help him or not. The point of AP ammo is to do more damage against high armor, and prevent you from doing additional damage against no armor. I feel like if it fails at that task at any point - especially if the point that it fails is likely to be the most threatening/important target the player points his weapon at - you should stop and consider if there's a problem with your design. Were this to only fall apart at, say, the weakest/earliest enemy in the game, I might say it was an acceptable flaw, but instead it falls apart at the opposite point.

Really though, it's endemic to the core problem of high DPS/low DAM weapons in a system of pure DT instead of DT/DR. That's where the main balance failure takes place and trickles down into other specific problems like our above scenario.

Low DT high HP are Cazzador's, and feral ghoul reavers / glowing ones, hollow points eat through them at higher skill levels and sneak attacks.
High DT but lowish HP are giant radscorpions.

High DT and high HP's are deathclaws and strangely npc's from the two major factions namely NCR rangers their armour is meant to be DT 15, but they're over 20 / 23, the same for CL.

Deathclaws are DT 15, nothing in the game is higher if I recall.

Young Deathclaws and standard Deathclaws have 30 DT. Hell there are a lot of humans with more than 15 DT.

Edit - I think my numbers are based on Hard, actually. The DT changes with difficulty setting.

The Gatling Laser is the fastest firing peashooter in the world.

Oh, and Giant Radscorps have higher DT than 'Claws. Also, the 30DT Deathclaws are a bug: they only have one actor effect on them that gives 15 DT, but it's somehow being applied twice. IIRC a patch fixes that.

Dude, you're blowing this way out of proportion. Yes, the standard ammunition does more damage than armor piercing. Yes, it makes no logical sense. But the reality of the situation is that this only happens against a very few enemies that have absurdly strong armor values, and, the difference is only 5%. The weapon fires 20 times a second. You're never going to notice 5%. That's one bullet that missed the target instead of hitting, and with a weapon so inaccurate you're going to be missing a lot more than 1 in 20 times.

While an intellectual curiosity for people that are interested in the mechanics of the game, in this case the actual in-game effect is so ridiculously small and narrow in applicability that it's reasonable to approximate: armor piercing rounds will always do more damage than standard rounds.

No, I'm not. There's no real proportion to that problematic scenario; at a certain DT threshold, the bullets do the opposite of the thing they're supposed to do. Whether that is a huge deal to someone or not is an aside.

My point, though, is that the core problem is far more wide-reaching, and that above problem is only a small side effect of a badly designed set of combat mechanics. The impact of that particular ammunition is hilariously more dramatic in a minigun than it is for a different weapon because the basic damage mechanic is really skewed. You can draw the slider much farther down, where you get into situations where - if the target has only 10 DT - the gun is either doing 20% or 95% of the base DPS. That's a humongous discrepancy compared to the effect it has on other weapons. That problem draws back to the way the guns have to be balanced in this system where the only function in the formula that adjusts the damage is raw DT.

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/L30_Gatling_laser

why did they ever get rid of that in exchange for the crappy box we got in FO3?

There must be a multiplier, because I'm going on GECK numbers and Deathclaws possess DeathclawDTModifier as as attribute which gives 15 DT.

Looking at the GECK, I actually don't see a plain DT listing, though I see the modifier you're talking about. I'll probably jump in game and use Living Anatomy because even on Normal I think they have more than 15 DT.

I don't think anything has a base DT in the game, because I don't think DT is implemented as a "base effect" in the game, after all it wasn't in Oblivion or FO3, even though they both had DR implmented.

I'm fairly certain it's done through the actor effects I was talking about.

THough I'm far from a GECKspert and sometimes puzzling out the code is like deciphering Sumerian algebra.

Yes you are right, "base" DT is applied via "actor effect". What is strange is that ED-E have no armour at all (before modification). No wonder he goes down so easily in fight.

As for AP bullet doing less damage than normal bullet, that is how AP bullets work. AP bullet is usually made of hardened material (without going in to construction detail) which do not expand as much upon impact as normal bullet, causing less damage. 0.95 multiplier of AP bullets in game is actually very generous. AP bullet sacrifice damage for penetration.

Minigun 5mm AP bullet do not penetrate armour of 25 DT and higher so I fail to see why it should do more damage than normal bullet which also fail to penetrate. They are BOTH totally infective against armour that strong.

Those 20% damage going through any armour can be seen as 20% of bullets hitting vulnerable spot in armour: visors, joints, various openings or unprotected places. Yes it is simplification but everything in this game is.

So normal bullet doing slightly more damage against armour that strong is not that unrealistic.

Look at antitank projectiles. If you have two projectiles of same calibre, one HE and second AP and both are unable to penetrate armour of tank than HE one is going to be more dangerous.

I killed an NCR Ranger with an incinerator but I found their armor to only have about 15 DT but high HP. I gained 50XP after killing them, I think it was at the Correctional facility when I killed him. After that I took his hunting revolver and armor/helmet and ran off to search for a faction for Yes man, then found like 6 blind death claws, I thought they were actually blind! I was on this cliff and I guess they seen me, I ran for my life but no dice. Killed in a heart-beat. Brutal.

They're blind, but there's nothing wrong with their hearing or sense of smell.