Wearing any helm with the stealth armor just ruins it for me. I actually think 1st recon beret, authority glasses and Remnant Power armor looks pretty sweet.

30 on my last character, and lost more health due to slower reactions, cazadors, radscorpions, deathclaws, lakelurks, nightstalkers all but lurks are fast and all have attacks that ignore DT.
Mutants, geckos and ghouls come up with fast plentiful attacks and come in numbers and some not so rare breeds again have high AP attacks.
Npc's have a mixture of attacks and have greater numbers, a cowboy repeater or better is common on quite a few, and semi automatics pump out enough shots that if surrounded will knock down even a level 30 toughness 7 characters health.
Light armour, weapon combos for any situation, companions, tactics and speed are the best defense.

You're right though mkii is ugly.

That's probably how I'm going to play on my 2nd run. The MK2 armor is the bee's knees for the final battle since you don't get to control the pacing and it's a lot of random spawned enemies at close range. The extra DT on the MK2 armor was very much needed (I'd have been cut to ribbons in my traditional sheriff's hat and duster).

...

I would really like to see more armor variants added, half of them could be re-color / re-texture of existing models and I wouldn't care. (I'm not that fond of the combat armor helmet... or the grey color of the armor itself.) In Fallout 3, I used to use a grey camo variant of Reilly's Rangers armor (exact same stats, different coloring).

I've played the whole game on normal in reinforced leather.. I slap the mkII combat on companions. I seriously haven't had any problems unless rushed by a pack of deathclaws or reavers. I do a lot of sniping. I do want to eventually build a light armor/melee/unarmed character. I guess taking a couple perks of toughness and getting the implant will help with that. I doubt that character is going to have much charisma or intelligence.

I guess armour would be more beneficial with Melee characters, having tried that for several hours, but with my usally sneaky sniper style character, i like the Reinforced Leather Armour but would be happy with any of the nice looking Merc outfits. Mainly becasue you can take down enemies before they know you are there the majority of the time. I trired the Recon Armour & man that looks liek something out of TRON , i agree, allot of the armour is ugly.

armor is only really beneficial to melee players - everything else doesn't really matter, especially on very hard. if you take more than a certain amount of damage in a given time period, your fight is already lost and you have to reload anyway.

on that note.. i've been having fun with NCR combat armor, pre-war hat, and a power fist. Sometimes I swap in a bumper sword for good measure. I swear getting hit with a giant rusty blade should hurt more than getting punched with a pneumatic fist weapon.

I used the space suit for a fair amount of time, somehow it has the same defense as the reinforced leather armor despite being lighter, and comes with radiation resistance, I don't get why it doesn't let you breathe under water though, and if you're worried about looking silly, you DEFINITELY don't want to wear it. I just went with it at the time because I was low level so I was putting function before design. Once I could afford the reinforced combat armor MK-II, though, I bought that, and haven't changed out of it since, though I'm wearing the normal combat helmet instead as my current character has the Four Eyes trait, and while the visor doesn't seem to prevent wearing glasses, I noticed that it seemed to clip slightly with the glasses I was wearing at the time. I haven't felt the need to change since, the only thing I've seen which really offers better protection is power armor, and I can't wear that right now since I don't have power armor training, and even once I can get it, I'm not sure if I want my current character to wear power armor or not. So I guess basically, what I'm saying is that light armor is good at low levels, but once you can get better things, I'd just as soon not bother.

I don't really like the designs of any of the light armors in the game, except for some of the clothing, which, due to its lack of protection, I don't really want to use. Except maybe some of the Legion armors, and they look sort of out of place in a world of power armor and laser guns, plus, I don't to be attacked by everyone because of the armor I wear, really, I'm reluctant to wear any faction armor for this reason, bu at least with NCR armors, I'm safe around most of the common people in the wasteland.



Of course, with power armor you still benefit from the damage threshhold added by perks or implants, so you can still get more defense with power armor, the question is just whether you WANT to wear it or not.



You know, that's something I never quite got. Why are the higher level unarmed weapons so powerful? I just don't see how punches, no matter what you put on your hand, could do more damage than actual melee weapons.

The recon amor is a great light amor mam !!!!!!

I've found leather armor reinforced just right for my characters, of course I won't go melee with deathclaws wearing it.
It works out just right for those moments I'm caught off guard, like when I paid a third visit to nipton and a viper gun slinger appeared behind me from no where and got off a couple of shots before I realized what was happening.