A fat man, just to be sure.

Aside from their durability and their persistence, what special traits might the Synths have in combat? Any thoughts?

i dont see why synths being stronger than sentry bots would be illogical.. synths were created AFTER sentry bots.. so they could easily be more powerful/better designed.

HP-wise, they seem weaker... But I think their strength lies in their adaptibility to wield weapons, and their superior numbers... Synths wielding rocket launchers will be a big pain.

Just blow their arms off.

I fully expect "It's just a flesh wound" to be said by them.

When they're dead:

"I'll be... Back..."

Surely possible, but not always the case. The sentry robots were pre-war military equipment, made by a nation superpower. It could well be like pitting a 40's Sherman tank against a 90's SWAT van or one of the cars in Mad Max.

*And on the flipside, it could be like pitting the T-800 terminator against Johnny Number 5. (We don't know yet; but 'new' doesn't always equal 'better'.)

Elijah's LAER shoots out a blue beam in Fallout: New Vegas' "Old World Blues" DLC.

Fingers crossed for a Wild Wasteland perk...

while it does look to be challenging ,I imagine that by the time you run into them (short of running in one direction doing nothing else at all after leaving the vault )you'd have either procured or modified weapons to be suitable to fight them ,added with the level of damage on them from Vault boy knows what ,it wouldn't be to hard to blow bits off of them till you see something they need to continue operating and blast the bejesus outta it..

Maybe they could be like the Necromorphs from Dead Space but shooting all the limbs off doesn't completely destroy them. "Come back! I can still bite!"

This is perfect, imagine if you will a situation similar to the Blood test in the movie: The Thing (1980's version).

5 human males huddle together in a room, one of them is obviously a synth passing off as a human, Kurt Russle Wastelander pulls out a 10mm pistol and begins to shoot every person in the foot. All but one person in the room scream in pain as they recieve a crippled limb. All but one person instantly reach for a stimpack.

Or they could just do the blood test from The Thing, that would be dope IMO.

if you shoot their arm off that has the gun, that should logically disarm it. i dont think they will be much harder to fight than raiders personally. just a new faction