Most high end melee weapons deal a hefty amount of damage so AP really isn't important to them.

Another ReBreather? What do you mean, re-equip it? I'm playing the PS3 version, in case it makes any difference to any of this.

The 20% bleed through of DT wouldn't be such a big deal if the armors also raised DR that is still in the game.

Well the wiki mentioned that DT, Damage Threshold, can be zero when Med-X or the ReBreather are used, regardless of what is equipped,

but I play on 360 so i cannot consistently test what is actually happening, so I could easily be wrong. :banghead:

Probs the best post yet?
Drop the useless mini gun.....
pick up a gauss rifle or sniper rifle....
use V.A.T.S....

Me for one, I took him out with ease.
Sniping and vats worked very well.

My gear was only NCR ranger gear =/
Sniper Rifle.
M1 Grand.
best of all AMMO =D
and your trusty items stempacks =/

so far the sniper and Gauss rifles are the best i've used in game.

They are wicked rifles! :gun:

While I have this thread, I would also like to ask "What do strength requirements do?" Even without a high enough strength value, wielding a weapon seems just as easy as it is when I finally gain a high enough strength value via implant and perks.

Well, I've only noticed a weapon sway that in most cases is simple to manage, or just takes time and skill to overcome, but I could be over simplifying.

If I'm not mistaken, the Praetorian Guard are using Ballistic Fists. They do 80 damage PER HIT. The best power armor in the game, fully repaired, will give you a max DT of 36.

I don't know what to say about the NCR soldiers with clubs, though. If you aren't exagerating, I heard that there's a bug where if you wear the rebreather the computer ignores all your DT. Next time something weak-looking like that hits you, look at the bottom of your screen and see if a little shield pops up. If it is, then that means your armor's DT rating was higher than whatever the bad guys are trying to damage you with. If that shield isn't popping up whenever you get hit, there is something wrong - might be a bug.

Just so you have a reference for how powerful power armor has the potential to be: My character got shot with a .44 magnum - it only did 3 damage per shot to me.

I dialed the 'bleed through' amount down to zero almost immediately, since it makes wearing lighter armors rather pointless and can also promote the 'death by 1000 cuts' crap when fighting raiders and whatnot while wearing medium or heavy armor. I also slightly increased the DT of the various forms of PA to make them significantly stronger than MK II Combat Armor, as I feel they should be.

As a result, Combat and Power Armors are noticeably tougher while using them and the latter actually lives up to the name. This applies to npcs as well, which makes getting the armor from the current owner a bit tricky in some cases and makes having a good supply of AP or Max Charge rounds on hand really matter.

Until I get the better weapons I now have to be more careful who I pick a fight with, and even then it's still not easy to take some foes down.

I think it might only be 10% if your DT is higher than the weapon you are being hit with. I had a DT of like 46 and got shot with a .44 magnum at point blank. It only did 3 damage. After I killed the guy that shot me and looted his corpse I checked his weapon - its condition was low enough so that the gun only did 30 damage per shot.

If you don't meet the Strength requirements of a gun, it will sway more when you try to aim it. If you don't meet the Strength requirements of a melee weapon, you won't be able to swing it as fast.

Why didn't they at least give power armor a higher DT to make up for this? I thought they understood people want power armor to live up to its reputation of turning the wielder into a moving tank, but they just repeated Fallout 3's mistakes while calling the system involved something else by changing the way DT works and giving such low DT ratings to armor in comparison to weaponry. Tanks really shouldn't have problems with a few weak, but fast, targets at once.

What part of "Ballistic Fists do 80 damage per hit" don't you seem to be understanding? In other words, Ballistic Fists are one of the best weapons in the game, right up there with Anti Material Rifles.


My character doesn't. He has a DT of 46. If your character does, you might be bugged. Take off the rebreather, stay away from the Med-X, pick a fight with Powder Ganger with a 9mm pistol or Varmint Rifle, and get back to us. Let us know if a shield pops up at the bottom of your screen every time you get shot.

My guns supposedly do 255 DPS, and these less armored pugilists with fancy gloves are kicking my ass when I'm supposed to be a walking tank. Then, some guys with clubs injure me. The shield pops up, but wooden sticks (or perhaps they were cattle prodders) shouldn't hurt, nor should a bumper on a stick. I had trouble fighting my way to Lanius' camp from the Hoover Dam. It just doesn't make sense. I should be able to walk into a room with 5 raiders in it shooting at me with pistols while I laugh as their bullets bounce off of my armor before I clear the room with a military-grade minigun, not use guerilla tactics because their bullets hurt. My DT is 25 (Are you wearing Enclave power armor, by the way?) and as I said, I found it ridiculously easy to take out a group of three Brotherhood members with power armor while using small, conventional firearms and no power armor myself while guys dressed in just metal torso plates without helmets and with only pieces of spring-propelled metal on their hands kill me while I have a minigun, 100 guns skill, 8 strength, and, supposedly, the defense of a tank. This just isn't how it should work. They were supposed to fix the mistake Fallout 3 made with defense, but they repeated it. It's getting tiresome. I want to spell it out for them (Bethesda and Obsidian) because it's ruining an otherwise very enjoyable experience for me.

POWER ARMOR = WALKING TANK

It should be impenetrable by everything short of highly destructive weaponry and/or AP rounds, as long as it's kept in decent condition. Perhaps even give energy weapons more penetrating ability.

First off, allow me to spell something out in case it wasn't made more clear in the earlier part of the thread: DAM and DPS are two different things. DAM is how much damage a weapon does in a single shot. DPS is how much damage a weapon can do per second if you continuously shoot an UNARMORED target with that weapon.

Damage Threshold (DT) subtracts from a weapons DAM. So let's say your minigun does 12 DAM but 240 DPS. If the bad guy you are shooting at has a DT of 12 or higher, only a small percentage of that 12 DAM is getting through.

The way that 240 DPS was originally calculated was that a minigun spits 20 bullets per second. So 12 X 20 = 240 DPS. Now going back to that example of having an armor of DT 12 or greater, your gun is not going to do 12 DAM per shot - it's only going to do 1. So with unloading 20 bullets per second into him, your DPS effectively got floored to only 20 damage per second.

That's how the devs intended DT to work.


Just out of curiousity, would you be complaining this much if they shot you with Anti Materiel Rifles?


You should only be taking like 10% of the damage the weapon actually does. Are your hit points dropping at a rapid pace or are you complaining about the fact you are able to be damaged AT ALL?


Yes I am. This is why I find it so damn odd you claim that you're dying all the time with power armor on. I wear the Enclave armor and helmet. What are you wearing?
I'm wondering if this is just a matter of perspective or what, because I have been able to get shot multiple times and the most I ever had to do to heal myself was drink a Sunset Sarsaparilla.


Those pieces of spring-propelled metal on their hands could be loaded out with armor-piercing slugs for all we know. In most other cases, though, you shouldn't be dying all the time.

Ofcourse it is 0DR....they have DT!

He has pathetic armor and and his head is completely vulnerable. A weapon that fires as many high velocity bullets as quickly as it does should kill him before he, with his fist thing, could kill me, the supposed tank. Or, in the case of Lanius, my military grade weapon should kill him before his car bumper on a stick kills me, the supposed tank.

If they were wearing power armor and wielding Anti Materiel Rifles, no, I wouldn't complain as much, assuming the experience was exactly the same, other than that. As it is, the half-naked fleshy things should be turned into swiss cheese, not be killing me with 4 hits while I struggle to kill them.



It's a little bit of both. Small weapons shouldn't harm me at all, in my opinion, but when facing multiple enemies wielding guns, my hit points are dropping at a rapid pace. I used up all of my 27 stimpacks going from the Hoover Dam to Legate's camp and the guy with the bumper as well as the guys with the ballistic fists are killing me far too easily while I'm struggling to do the same with this oversized, military-grade weapon. As a test, when I first got power armor training, I took my fully repaired suit and tried as hard as I could to clear the Strip. 3-5 NCR soldiers with clubs at once posed a very real threat to me.

I'm using Brotherhood T-51b power armor.

I just looked up Praetorian Armor: It has a max DT of 12... and you are shooting him with a minigun that can only do 12 damage per shot- case closed. Just because you have a very big gun doesn't mean it's going to do very big damage all the time. Go get some armor-piercing ammo.


At this point, I think your complaint has more to do with what the game art is presenting to you as opposed to how the developers balanced out the underlying rule mechanics. Maybe they should have stuck the Legion's elite in tribal power armor and made their ballistic fists steam-powerd glowy death machines to satisfy you. In the end, though, I now realize that you are complaining about the final boss battle which is SUPPOSED to be hard because... it's the final boss battle.


In that case I think you're freaking out just because the screen blurs and shakes a bit when you get hit with a low-caliber gun. This makes sense to me because while you may be wearing a metal suit, you are still vulnerable to some concussions inside that suit.


NOW it becomes all too clear to me: You're talking about the final battle! Jebus Christmas, guy, it's SUPPOSED to be hard because it's the FINAL BATTLE! Some of those Legionaries are shooting at you with Anti-Material Rifles and charging at you with Thermic Lances. Now I realize they also use smaller caliber weaponry like Assault Carbines, but they could be loaded out with AP ammo for all we know. The Legate is a VERY BIG DUDE who has killed hundreds of people by himself, so it should be no surprise he can tear you appart with his sword. For all we know, he MADE his sword out of the same metal as power armor or found something even harder to work with.


Now this is genuinely befuddling. A fully repaired suit of T-51b has 25 DT. Are you wearing a helmet at all? Maybe New Vegas will not let your DT protect you at all if you get hit in the head while not wearing a helmet.
What's your Endurance, by the way?

EDIT: After some quick research, I discovered that the MP's on the strip are wielding Cattle Prods. Cattle Prods do "fatigue damage" which means it might be outright ignoring your armor DT altogether. Kinda makes sense to me since cattle prods do their damage by shocking you, not necessarily bludgeoning you to death, and metal conducts electricity last time I checked.

It's not just that. My riot shotgun with the shotgun surgeon perk isn't helping very much either.


It can't get much harder than impossible for me. I don't play shooters. It's not something I can just learn how to do and leveling up more won't really give me much more to work with. How pathetic V.A.T.S. is in New Vegas isn't helping. With the gear known as equivalent to a walking tank, this shouldn't be this hard. Clearing the Strip shouldn't be that hard and fighting those with smaller weaponry should be laughably easy. This is power armor, the stuff that is that powerful, rare, end-game goal, literally made the character a walking tank in Fallout 1/2, and was supposed to become a walking tank armor again in New Vegas because of the return of DT. It feels more useless than in Fallout 3, to me, because I could at least deal with pretty much anything in Fallout 3 by the time I got power armor.

It didn't happen in Fallout 1/2 and it shouldn't happen with a true DT system, where dealing a damage value equal or lower than that of the enemy's DT value shouldn't deal any damage at all.

The strip is not the final battle, it's guys with clubs, gamblers, and some robots.

The suit without the helmet has a DT of 25. With the helmet, it's either 30 or 31 (can't remember if the helmet had a DT value of 5 or 6).

5

Shouldn't you be putting points in speech then?

There's a definite imbalance in the difficulty of the game when it comes to that last battle. The Legate, 2 guys with Ballistic Fists, some guys with chainsaws that seem to come out of nowhere, and some guys with guns (also seemingly out of nowhere) just rip you in half in seconds if you try and fight them straight on, but every fight leading up to it is nothing (unless you had fought 4 or 5 Deathclaws at once on level ground). When I got to that point, I just wanted to see the end of the game so I set the difficulty to very easy, and sniped the Legate before talking to him (1 shot critical to the head, then all that was left were the two Ballistic Fist guys who did nothing). It was very frustrating. I've seen strategies since then that used mines (since they will all run down the hill), miniguns with armor piercing rounds, missile launchers, etc, but on normal it seemed like an overly difficult battle (you can flame me all you want about me svcking but I cleared the Quarry without dying and yet somehow died 7 times against the Legate and his men before I'd had enough and just dropped the difficulty so I could watch the ending.

So they have a DT of 12, -10 for the perk, leaving them with 2 DT. Your riot shotgun does 9.5 damage per pellet, meaning it's lowered to 7.5 per pellet. Your shotgun shoots 7 pellets each pull of the trigger, meaning you can do a potential of 52.5 damage per shot provided every single pellet hits - which I seriously doubt they are given that you sound like you don't want to be anywhere near their Ballistic Fists (which is understandable). Praetorians have 195 health each, which means you have to shoot them 4 or 5 times each with that shotgun of yours.

PROTIP: The Shotgun Surgeon perk is helpful but it's not a game-winning perk.


That's understandable and very forgivable given that Fallout is an RPG first and a shooter second. But the more and more I look into what's going on the more that I'm beginning to think you're not very good at the RPG part of it either. Look, I hate to sound like a jerkoff like that, but... :shrug: I suggest you play in Very Easy mode.


In what manner? Are you having trouble getting high hit percentages or are you taking too much damage during a VATS shot? I use VATS as often as I can and hardly take much damage because of it. It enabled me to drop the Legate in only 3 shots.


I thought power armor was overpowered in FO 1 and 2 because once you found a suit, the game was basically over. NOTHING could touch you. Every battle from there on out was predictable and I could just fling caution and tactics into the wind. But that, admittedly, is just my own humble opinion. I'm glad power armor got nerfed in FO3 and New Vegas.


If you are having trouble and dying a lot from taking only 10% of a weapon's original damage value, there is something wrong and it's not the game...


I did some additional research and discovered the MP's on the Strip use Cattle Prods. Cattle Prods do "fatigue damage" which may be ignoring DT altogether. Fatigue Damage is supposed to knock people out instead of killing them outright. This kinda makes sense to me because those cattle prods are shocking you with electricity, and your power armor is made of metal. :shocking:

I beat the game on Normal difficulty and hardly took a scratch. I killed the Legate after getting close enough to talk to him, and I did it in only 3 shots before he could even close the distance to hit me with his sword. I'm not waving my E-peen around, I'm just demonstrating that it's possible to make a complete joke out of the FINAL BATTLE if you do the numbers right while leveling up.

The battle between Sojur and Seti18 is much fun to read.
by the way Sojur I am on your side.