Does anything other than power armor actually improve your survivability at all? There is an astronomical difference in armor rating on power armor (800 ish or so for for an early set) vs a full set of combat armor (100ish at most).

Not knowing how armor rating works in this game, but having done non scientific tests I've concluded that armor other than power armor = pointless. Go with with looks best.

Playing on survival difficulty, I use command console to bring 1 super mutant at my location. I stood point-blank infront of it naked (no armor) and let it attack me. I died in 7 seconds on average (repeated this 10 times, average lifespan was 7 seconds). I then put on full metal armor and did this same test (repeated 10 times), I lived almost 8 seconds (7.8 to be "exact"). Then I put on full combat armor and repeated again 10 times, I lived almost 8.5 seconds on average.

Then I put on T-45c power armor, repeated 10 times and my life expectancy was 38 seconds on average.. clearly a vast improvement over naked.

However, full combat armor vs naked increased my life expectancy by 1.5 seconds... I dont know what their armor formula vs damage is in this game but it clearly makes armor other than power armor completely useless. (also makes toughness perk utterly pointless since +10 armor per point from it amounts to basically nothing it seems).

Keep in mind that even power armor that gives 1,000+ armor lets through LOT of damage in survival difficulty vs simple enemies like raiders with pipe rifles.. so a suit of combat armor that gives 100 armor in comparison is basically offering 10% of the protection of power armor only... In otherwords, nothing. You're better off wearing clothing that you like best aesthetically and relying on generous doses of stimpaks, food and other drugs for survivability, not armor.

with normal armor you are suppose to take cover. that extra protection against stray bullet often mean life and death.

Yeah, I'm find things a little strange and inconsistent. I remember in FO 1 and 2 you could take 4 or 5 direct hits from a rocket launcher while in power armour and barely survive. Now in FO4, even on easy, 1 direct hit from a rocket kills you. I'm using T51e armour. If I get caught in the edge of a blast usually 2 or 3 pieces of the armour gets destroyed and if a second blast goes off before I can take down the Super Mutant shooting at me then the rest of the armour is destroyed. Just to reiterate, that's on easy.

Thankfully that doesn't happen too often because I usually see a SM encampment before they get excited and I search for any rocket launcher dudes first. The Meat sacks give them away. Not too helpful indoors though.

So it'll need a rebalance mod. I knew that before the game was announced

Sounds like they wanted to make the PA really stand out. That of course means that all other armor will svck.

Part of the problem is the difficulty setting of course, since Bethesda keeps believing that difficulty = damage multipliers I'd be interested to see those numbers on normal difficulty that does not have multipliers. I think?

The issue isn't difficulty, I'm doing fine on survival difficulty. My issue is the apparent pointless of all armor except power armor, as full combat armor or metal armor doesn't reduce damage any more than being naked does (again, 7 seconds surviviability naked vs supermutant, vs 8.5 seconds in combat armor.. in otherwords, non existant protection).

The armor rating system in this game is impossible to figure out. 1,000 armor rating from power armor seems to reduce maybe 80% of damage from a pipe rifle. 100 armor rating (what a suit of combat armor provides roughly) seems to stop less than 15% of damage vs being naked. My point is that on a gameplay level, what is the purpose of wearing armor other than power armor if it offers no tangible protection, let alone investing precious perk points into toughness perks that reduce damage by less than 1%?

I think they did a great job with the Power Armor,, but I think they made the fusion cores to available.

If the fusion cores were far more scares then you would have to be more selective when you can wear the armor.

As it is you can wear the armor continuously without any worry as you can pick up enough gear to trade for more cores at the very start.

I died less with armor than not wearing armor. Science.

It only sux when there are encounters that have clearly been tuned assuming you're using power armor so you're forced to use it.

I agree the fusion core is very easy to find. Probably it need a reduce in drop rate. In the game terminal notes or holotape you often see they mention they run out of their power reserves. So in most can they have to be selective of when to deploy it.

In one of the random BoS side quest a holotape mention that they run out of power and they have to destroy the power armor to avoid people looted it. This just mean how important of fusion core for PA and how little they usually got

I really hate how they handled power armor, or fusion cores rather. I love the concept but fusion cores are too damn common, hell everything is too damn common. If power armor offered half the protection and FC's were twice as rare i'd be happy, but i guess i'll just have to wait for the G.E.C.K to come out...

To use Power Armor as your main armor you really got to spec for it. Which makes you even worst off with normal armor.

On the other hand, if you do not spec for Power Armor, you will get less Fusion Cores then you will be using normal armor more.

In the end, I guess if people want to use Power Armor full time, that is a choice... but if then said people start saying that enemies are too easy even with higher difficulties then I really got nothing to say.

Power Armor being much more stronger then normal armor is not really a big deal breaker as we all have a choice in Fallout 4.

In fact, later in the game. If you want weak Power Armor, that is easily accomplished by using the T-45 suit Model A.

Did you upgrade your armor at all? and did you use the legendary armor or just the normal armor

If you play on lower difficulties you'll notice I don't have any combat armor I have upgraded metal and leather I realized that after dying too many times on survival I decided to bump down the game to very easy just to see how easy it was and holy crap it is a lot more easier

It seems to me that armor is fine, if anything the amount of damage the player takes while naked should be increased.

Also another 1.8 seconds of survivability is quite a large margin and well you really shouldn't be standing still in the open accepting damage.

Furthermore Perks...

Toughness adding increments of 10 when compared to non-Powered Armor situations is pretty good perk as a total of 50 points more is almost 50% increase and in some cases more protection than the armor the character is wearing.

Lone Wanderer, percentage damage soak is pretty king.

Rooted, another percentage damage increase, but for standing still.

Drugs, Physco, Med-X both offer Damage Resistance not sure but I think its not Percent Soak but rather just 25 points of armor value but that's actually decent considering.

Taking Cover or dodging so as to not take damage...Your not going to be doing either of these much in Power Armor its just not agile or small enough to make use of this tactic.

So overall I'd say that its actually fairly balanced considering that Power Armor is a vehicle and its meant to soak small arms fire. Its also not my fault if your using Power Armor all the time and find the game isn't challenging enough. Could the game be a tad better if the stuff wasn't laying around everywhere to be easily found perhaps but the game has barely been out long enough to allow the new balance settings to really sink in yet.

Cant forget that if your Power Armor parts start to fail that the amount of damage your soaking goes down but your still suffering from being a slow moving and large target that doesn't get much benefit from cover.

edit,

I'll tell you what though if your really hard up on a quick rebalance of Power Armor well...

Just make the repair's take rare components or change the amount of Steel from a mere 4 pieces of Steel to say something like 50 steel per piece to be repaired..In time that would really prevent you from using it 24/7.

Or make each piece require Circuit Components for repair as those are sort of limited and needed for other activities.

Top that off with giving being naked or not armored at all near fatal when taking damage.

Power armor is ugly though so I play on normal and wear weak clothes/armor that look good >.>

Totally agree with you. Fallout 4 is designed to be Open World and you can play in so many various ways. To those that say Power Armor is OPed, well just don't use it. Or use Raider or T45a armor.

Was fully upgraded regular combat armor. Which has an armor rating total of about 100... vs power armor of about 1,000.

People are missing the bloody point of my post... the Armor rating system in this game makes NO SENSE. 1,000 armor seems to stop about 80% or slightly more of physical damage from regular bullets. However, an armor rating of 100 (what you would have wearing a full suit of standard fully upgraded combat armor) only stops about 10-15% damage.

So ... an enemy sniper vs naked player, lets assume damage is 100 per shot:

Naked, you take 100 damage

Fully upgraded power armor, you take 20 damage.

Fully upgraded combat armor, you take about 85 damage.

Do you see the issue? The issue is that if your armor isn't power armor you take almost the same amount of damage as if you were naked.

Please note these results are from playing on survival difficulty. I didn't bother with lower difficulty settings as they're already too easy anyway.

I wish I knew what the armor vs damage formula in this game was because it's completely nonsense as it stands since naked vs full armor (on survival mode) is barely noticeable.

In fallout 3, the armor system was very easy to understand. 1 Armor rating = 1% less damage. So if you had 50 armor in fallout 3, you stopped 50% damage, etc (up to the cap of 80%). But in fallout 4 the math is random and seemingly nonsensical as only power armor seems to have any appreciable impact on incoming damage.

Survival mode is meant to be very difficult and how Bethesda games deal with difficulty is augmenting damage dealt and received. I believe that Survival mode is 2x less damage dealt

and 2x more damage received. I know for me on Survival mode I pretty much have to run for cover when I get shot the first time. Really best case I see the enemy before they see me.

However when a fire fight is going on I cannot leave myself open to often. In large fights I usually send my companion out as a decoy so I can line up shots. On occasion I will stroll out

into the wasteland forgetting I had Changed into my Charisma boosting gear which is just clothes barely better than being naked and as soon as I get shot once I am dead. So armor

typically allows me to survive 2-4 shots before I need to stimpack.

Yeah they are way to easy to get a hold of.

There's tons of vendors selling them for around 500 caps, and they often have 5 in stock. After I noticed this I started picking up all the useless guns I could find and bring them back to a vendor to sell them and buy fusion cores for the caps. (doesn't take long to get enough caps to buy their whole stock this way, and afterwards you just wait 24 hours and they will have restocked their inventory and you can buy 5 more)

I have 51 fusion cores at the moment, and I have only found around 15 of them out in the wasteland.

Survival mode doubles the enemy damage and halves your damage and drastically slows down how fast stimpaks heal you, but presumably doesn't modify the armor system - it simply multiplies enemy dmg x2 and halves yours. This still doesn't explain why full combat armor stops about 15% damage only vs naked and power armor stops 80% about.

I'm playing on survival and doing fine running around in clothing, no armor at all, because it doesn't add any appreciable survivability when I'm better off with no armor for reduced noise and easier stealth. There's just no way to justify the expense of caps and resources in upgrading / buying armor unless you run around in power armor since that's the only thing that appears to reduce damage.

As a mil-vet I gotta say I enjoy the almost one hit dead in any armor other than power armor the OP noted.

FO4 much more than the others has reverted to what is for me the basic truism of combat - accurate fire laid on the enemy before they can fire on you wins most combat.

FO4 combat in non-power armor is basically shoot first, kill first, and even for non-snipers the other military truism to survival - shoot and relocate, shoot and relocate.

Granted that in FO4 it kinda doesn't equate the other way with some bullet sponge mobs but am on survival mode and don't think I'm special re: video game skills, but long as I shoot and relocate constantly, with good cover, the armor I wear reflects what I expect from real combat - maybe, if I'm lucky, will stop me from getting one shot killed.

I only used power armor twice in combat. The first time when you have to use it for a quest and second time being later on in the mainquest just to protect me from Radiation damage.

The encounters hadn't been tuned because of power armor but because of balance overall. For example, my best weapon isn't my fat man. It's my combat shotgun. That shotgun literally has a much much higher DPS rating than a fat man and I flat-out slaughtered through any encounter with it now. Granted, I'm not playing on Survival but still, the point is there. You, the player, become rather powerful over time and thusly, the deeper you go into the Boston Wasteland (I prefer that name over the Commonwealth), the tougher the encounters will get because they were made for a stronger character. If you go too deep into the wasteland and ran into a bad encounter that you can't do yourself, then leave it be for now and do it at a higher level.

Power Armor really was just a means for lower level character to survive in tougher situations that aren't meant for their level. Basically, it's like giving Daedric Armor/Gear to a level 10 character in Skyrim so that they can defeat a level 40 enemy with pure strength instead of waiting (or using smarts to outwit the enemy). Which this is a good thing in my books... Bethesda has given us a choice of either making the game a bit more harder or easier for ourselves and I kinda enjoy that. In the end, it makes it more balanced and more fun in it's own way.

You've said yourself that regular armor does reduce damage. No, it isn't by a whole lot, but it is enough to let you survive at least a couple extra shots which can definitely be relevant in this game. Not to mention a lot of the legendary pieces have some pretty cool special bonuses. They wanted us to keep moving and finding cover like you should in a real fight, and the normal armors force you to do that. The reason power armor is so very much better is because they wanted to make it the walking tank that it's supposed to be, not just the best heavy armor. In my opinion, the system that they created actually does that very well. The only real problem with it is how readily available the power cores are. You can basically stay in the thing 24/7 with no problems because of how common they are (they aren't even expensive at the vendors) which kind of trivializes any normal armor. Although really I've found the whole game just has too much of almost everything. I've almost always had more loot than I could actually manage to sell at the vendors in Diamond City because they don't have enough caps to buy the absurd amount of stuff I find just lying around everywhere.

The problem is, due to perks from both leveling up and from doing things in the wasteland, you do kinda become a bullet sponge at higher levels... I'm kinda at level 50 right now and I can tank quite a bit of damage. Granted, I am wearing the Silver Shroud outfit which gives a decent amount of Armor points (not a full 100 though like combat armor or anything like heavy combat armor). Though I still do think a direct dead-center hit from an explosion may still kill me or bring me near death. I think. But it gotta be like dead-center accurate, unlike when I was lower level where just generally being near the explosion usually killed ya.

Also, this guy knows what he is talking about.

In my opinion, they basically made Power Armor the Fallout version of Spartan Armor from Halo, in a sense. The normal soldier armor isn't much so normal soldiers tends to get killed but specially trained soldier in powerful suits? They can take the heat and deal a lot back. That's the idea of Power Armor.