I played Fallout 1,2, Tactics, and Fallout 3 and I used to understand damage threshold but it's been many years since I was a mechanics guru regarding the older games. I went to the fallout wiki and the article about Damage Threshold is very short and lacking detail.

I know that armor class is a matter of chance to hit. Damage Resistance is a stat that directly reduces damage you take from weapons. But then how is Damage Threshold different from DR?

Thanks

The short version is that a weapon must do certain amount of damage to affect the armour. For example a chinese pistol is not going to affect power armour.

Damage Threshold is an absolute value that is subtracted from the damage...it can reach zero (but woun't get below), Damage Reduction cannot...

DT is a solid number that must be surpassed in order to cause damage. Example: Your rifle does 15 damage. Raiders armor has a DT of 10. You do 5 damage to the raider.
DR is a percentage that is taken from the damage. Example: Your rifle does 20 damage. Raiders armor has a DR of 25. You do 15 damage to the raider.

Dr isn't in the game...

Doctor isn't in the game?

I know.
The difference between DT and DR was asked in the OP.

For DR, if the Raiders armor has a DR of 25, doesn't that mean that your 20 damage would be reduced by 25% so you would actually still do 15 damage?

Edit... and yes I know DR isn't going to be in NV, but just to get a clear definition.

Wait aren't those two the same exact thing?

No they are different. With DT, you would only take damage if it was high enough to pass the threshold of your armor.

Oh wait... unless you meant the math for damage done....

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/DT
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/DR

Explained in detail on the Fallout Wiki pages.
DR = -X% of whatever damage you get hit with. (IE. 100 points of damage done to a PC with a DR of 25 = 75 points of damage taken ~the rest is ignored).

DT = a threshold of X points that must be exceeded before you take any damage at all (meaning that an armor with a DT of 25 would completely protect you from an infinite number of 10 point hits).

Yes I meant the math. The only difference really is that the damage has to be above the threshold in dt but with dr it doesn't matter...damage dealt is the same though as can be seen by those two examples.

What? No, that maths was appallingly wrong. The example is worse than useless, but that should be pretty obvious.

For a 20 damage attack:
Against DT 10, you get 20 Damage - 10 DT = 10 HP lost
Against DR 25%, you get 20 Damage - (25% x 20 Damage) = 15 HP lost
Damage Threshold reduces the damage taken by a flat number.
Damage Resist reduces the damage taken by a %age.

Thank you all for the responses, this has been a lot clearer than the wiki entry. These calculations make it a lot clearer to me as to why in older fallouts, you could get 'hit for no damage' easier by upgrading armors and against certain guns, while in Fo3 you could have power armor but still be torn apart by a .44 or sniper shot.

It just seems though that Damage Threshold is more protective than DR, and that combat in New Vegas by this estimation might be a lot easier than Fallout 3 since you can go so far so early to minimize damage. If true, not good, because Fallout 3 was already too easy of a game.

You still have to find a big enough weapon to kill everyone else though.

I didn't provide the example I was replying to it. Thanks for breaking it down though.

It'll be easier when you take on weak ass Raiders with bad weapons. I'm sure the late game enemies will have plasma and explosive weapons to balance it out when you have power armor.

No it'll simply mean that, like in the older Fallouts, low level enemies stop being a threat at high levels and high level enemies are incredible challenges at low level. When you're in T51b, you can just ignore Geckos but Deathclaws will still be a challenge, and conversely you won't be able to kill Sentry Bots at level 1 by plinking away at an exposed wheel.

E: In fact, it'll make it more challenging at high levels. In FO3, T51 granted about 75% DR. Most small arms did <15 damage per hit, and plasma guns did 40. So if Power Armour granted 15 DT...
10 Damage bullet - 15 DT = 0 damage
10 Damage bullet - 75% x 10 damage = 2.5 damage
40 Damage Plasma - 15 DT = 25 damage
40 Damage Plasma - 75% x 40 damage = 10 damage
It would be far less effective against high-level weaponry than Fallout 3 armour.
Also worth noting that in Fallout 3, lots of low level enemies with fast-firing guns had a higher damage output than high level enemies with slow, powerful guns regardless of armour, whilst NV will fix that (as you can see from the above- 1 4-round assault rifle burst used to equal a single plasma round, now it's nowhere near).

The problem here is that everyone in the game world is getting more protection. More protection for you, more protection for them too. So what happens when you put it on Very Hard? Well, when we do that in Fallout 3 early on, it takes way more shots to kill and "tank" multiple headshots to the point of ridiculousness. That's with Damage Resistance. Do that with Damage Threshold instead, and they're going to be even harder to kill.

I know I know, FNV isn't released yet. But judging from the comparison of DR vs. DT, that seems to be the likely result based on what we know so far.

This scares me...

By the way, something I'd add: I'm not sure if DR is applied to headshots in Fallout 3, but if that is the way it is in FNV with DT, that would svck indeed.

No, please see my edit. It's only more protection against people with lower-level equipment than you, who you would already be able to beat quite handily in Fallout 3, whilst granting less protection against higher-level enemies. Also the difficulty slider is an utterly worthless thing that just alters the damage enemies take- if you want to increase the challenge, you edit the global damage multiplier instead.

What? Your math shows plasma doing 25 damage in new vegas with dt but only 10 damage with fallout 3's dr?

The problem with your example here is that you assume that by the time bolts of plasma rifle/pistol fire are flying around, targets will still only have 15 DT as in your 10 damage bullet scenario. DT will likely be higher enough to a point that DR calcs still lead to greater damage.

Also I disagree with you about what enemy activity was a threat in Fallout 3. I used npc inventory mods that added vanilla guns like .44's and chinese assault rifles to raiders as well as modded guns. Every time I would ever die would be due to some raider with a .44 or sniper rifle taking off big chunks of my hp consecutively, whereas an enemy with an assault rifle was easy to kill because their damage was over time and I could use that time to react more efficiently.



It actually raises NPC damage as well, while lowering your damage output. Difficulty in Fallout 3 is essentially in itself a global damage multiplier edit. On Very Hard for example, you do 50% of your Normal mode damage, and NPC's do 200% of their Normal mode damage. That's a global multiplier change, no?

Yes, and...? That was my point- DT is more effective at protecting vs weak weapons than strong weapons, whilst DR protects against them all equally.

Stromm: Why would they increase DT to make you immune to high-level guns in high-level armour? It's easy to tweak to make you immune to low level weapons, as I've proven. You seem to be assuming they'd purposely sabotage their own game design.
As for raiders with high-damage single shot guns, sure they kill you more often, but mostly because when you're taken down from 20% to 0% in one shot you don't have time to panic and stimpak. The bulk of the actual *damage* dealt will be from weight of fire, which is responsible for bringing you down to such a low health you can be taken out by heavy hitters before you have the chance to react.

Also... no, that's not a change to the global damage multiplier. The global damage multiplier is the gamesetting fDamageWeaponMult. All the difficulty slider really achieves is making it take longer for you to kill enemies, rather than actually making combat more skilled.

@thetalkietoaster your examples are flawed an every level. Your using a dt of 15 compared to plasma guns with 40 damage. There will be plenty of armor with very high dt and I'd think there will be armor over 40 and 50. The reinforced leather armor has a dt of 12 so power armor will be well above that.