I played FO3 on very hard with the Broken Steel DLC, so I can attest to the fact that the FO3 version of the Grim Reaper's Sprint did NOT kill everything. Yes in FO3 vanilla it was pretty badass, but once Broken Steel came out it lost some of its teeth.

The Broken Steel bullet sponges (and to some extent the Swampfolk from PL and the Shielded Aliens from MZ) made GRS significantly less useful, since they would rarely die in a single volley of VATS. You would have to do some FP shooting to bring down the HP enough for GRS or use VATS/GRS to get the lesser targets out of the way so you could focus on the bullet sponges.

Granted, FONV is a slightly different animal and although I've only made it to level 14 or so (restarted the game twice to re-roll my stats), I could say that close to mid level, sneak attack criticals from far away are much more important than VATS. Playing on hardcoe/Medium a single VATS volley is not going to kill anything that can potentially kill you, especially when you are firing from a distance.

Yes VATS does help when you are cornered and surrounded and your opponents are in the 95% VATS head shot range, but if you play carefully enough the only times you have to deal with that is if you are ambushed.

Granted, I do have to play to level 20 and actually get the GRS perk in FONV to make a better opinion, but as it stands right now, I see no reason to nerf it.

The old GRS is good for crowd control, but only if you can manage to kill at least one member of that crowd with a single VATS volley. Against any serious opponent GRS is useless because it's contingent on making the kill in VATS. If you miss that boat, you are on your own, and that just my humble opinion.

I'm not sure I entirely agree here. Maybe if you didn't upgrade to DLC weapons and were stuck with vanilla this was true, but if you upgraded weapons and leveled to mid-20s with GRS available, it still reached the same end situation.

With a tri-beam laser or gauss rifle I still consistently could kill one enemy in one VATS round and endlessly repeat.

The real treat was when one of those super 30+ enemies showed up it was usually with a bunch of smaller enemies too. Lets say a ghoul reaver showed up with 3 feral roamer buddies. VATS would be set to one shot on a feral, 2 on the reaver. The feral would get one-shotted, and I'd get two hits into the head of the reaver. Repeat again, feral was popped in one hit, reaver took two more to the head, head is now crippled, shots to the head get bonus damage. Last "free" VATS round, feral goes down in a hit, reaver takes two bonus-damage hits to the head. Last round of VATS, three bonus-damage very-high-crit-chance headshots on the reaver and he better be dead by now.

And because in VATS mode you're invulnerable to damage you could still take out ANYTHING without taking a scratch. 200 stimpacks in inventory and I didn't need to touch them once I got GRS.

The Mothership Zeta weapons were the absolute ultimate for this because they could gibb lesser enemies easily and still lay a serious smackdown on a tough baddie like an overlord or reaver. How easy the game was REALLY depended on the order in which you did the DLC. Because OA didn't depend on your inventory if you were good at fighting freehand (without vats) and had a decent small guns skill you could pull out a winterized T51b and a gauss rifle early on, use that to do the MSZ content to get those superpowered alien guns and then use those to mop up Broken Steel. At level 26 or so head over to Point Lookout and own the place. Then because so much of The Pitt has you without your natural inventory go there last with your uber level 30 skills and clear out the joint.

I played on the PS3 so there was a minor problem with ash/goo piles not clearing up and respawn areas that I came back to got sort of "bogged down" with all the accumulated ash/goo piles, so I kind of stuck with the conventional weapons such as Lincoln's Repeater and the Unique snipers.

That would probably explain why GRS was not as OP for me as others. Also I liked to playing on Very Hard, so the bullet sponges were more "spongier" than usual...

My only slight bugbear (and it is slight) with the perks is the lack of anything top-tier when reaching level 30. In 3, your reward for reaching the level cap was one of the uber-perks (though GRS was definitely overpowered without BS/Very Hard mode), and I liked this. It was a fitting reward for reaching a point where you are no longer a mere mortal, but becoming a semi-legendary superhero. In NV, there are no new perks beyond, what, level 26 or 28? So there is no super-perk to choose to crown your arrival at level 30. It's tricky, 'cause anything too powerful -- like GRS, or Almost Perfect -- does unbalance the game severely, but I would still like some unique, "only for the best" style perks to choose from to provide that feeling of coronation, to be the icing on the 'reaching level 30' cake.