So I have played through a couple times and have noticed that armor and DT do nothing...at all.


IE) Level 6, wearing 1st Recon Beret and Classic Pack armored Vault suit DT of 6-8 (no Toughness Perk), Fight a Deathclaw and die in 3 hits (255 hp, so 85 HP per hit at least)

Then say you avoid Deathclaws for awhile and get Power armor and toughness perk and say level 23 wearing T51-b Power Armor and helmet with a DT of 33 , Fight a Deathclaw and die in 4 hits (310 HP, so 77.5 HP per hit at least)

so with a 400-500% increase in DT you get a whopping 7.5HP damage reduction....so why bother with heavy armor at all, its bulky and messes up sneaking...

(also tried against Ranged opponents to the same effect no viable damage reduction)

I know Fallout scales difficulty to level but making enemies always ridiculously difficult without a standby surgeon is silly and not overly fun when a Quest comes up to kill these enemies.

But on a side note Deathclaws cant climb so jump up on something high like a crane (Quarry) and you can shoot em all day long......kinda ruins the fun though, but you wont die....

Deathclaws have a very high DMG that trespasses any kind of DT

btw DT is the amount of damage required to hit the enemy, if deathclaws hits for 200, having 33 DT or 150 DT doesn't matter at all since anyways it will hit you

Deathclaws ignore DT if I recall correctly.

Well hell.....guess i will just throw ED-E and Boone at em then...

I think Deathclaws just straight up ignore DT, which is why the unarmed weapon you craft out of one of their hands has the DT ignore effect.

Probably done so that they remain somewhat dangerous throughout the game. Unfortunately it winds up being pretty badly balanced; they're a complete joke for melee/unarmed characters, guns/energy rely on massive sneak alpha strikes and explosives you just pay out the nose in terms of caps and pray you cripple a leg and have a quicksave ready.

No, DT is the amount of damage blocked from an attack. If a weapon does 25 damage and the enemy has 10DT, your weapon only does 15 points of damage to them. Deathclaws just ignore a majority of your DT though. It's not that their DAM is super high (if they had 200 DAM then people would die in pretty much 2 hits no matter what), it's that they almost completely ignore armor. Although their DAM is probably in the 70's-90's.

Yeah, Deathclaws bypass DT, so you may as well be naked when fighting them.

DT definitely does have an effect, though. Go to VATS and try to shoot a BoS Paladin in the head with a reasonably powerful weapon, for example. You'll notice that the Pip-Boy calculates that the Paladin will be killed with two or three shots. However, that's never the case unless you get a crit hit which negates the DT.

All in all, I think Obsidian handled armour well in New Vegas. Of course, I wish APA would make you an indestructable tank, but game balancing is vital. It's much better than Fallout 3, where it didn't really matter whether I wore T-51b or a business suit...

I really wish someone would rework the system so that it was more of a shared DT and DR for most enemies. Right now single shot weapons are almost always better than automatic or rapid fire ones. Reducing deathclaw DT from 30 to 15 and giving them 20%% DR instead would be better, since a 100 DAM sniper rifle would deal 65 damage/shot, and a 32 damage laser would still deal 11 damage/ shot, compared to the current 2.

Only for heavily armored opponents. Most animals and most human enemies have less than 8 DT, which means autoguns work just fine.



I was considering doing that for my Closer To Fallout mod, since that's how it was in the original games, but I kind of like Deathclaws being these nearly invulnerable murderbeasts that you need an elephant gun/anti-material rifle to hurt.

This would make a lot of sense seeing as (I assume) their melee attack exceeds every armor's DT... so why bother checking? :shrug:

~I don't like the idea that the weapon made from a deathclaw does this though... I mean the PC is not a deathclaw and does not have a deathclaw's power pushing the blade.
Deathclaws are not human and are not bound by the limitation of strength 10 (or at least shouldn't be)... IMO that "ignore DT" special ability should come with a stat check for Strength of 10.

*** Wait a minute... I'm forgetting that DT was subtracted from incoming damage, so you would want the check... or is FO:NV handling it differently?