They are riduculously powerful. So much so its laughable/immersion breaking. Is there an individual at BGS we can slap? :slap:

They're not that difficult. <_<

^^^ Internet Tough Guy is Tough.

Absurdly high HP, heavy damage, treated too casually by the leveled enemy drop system. Does it have the 35 unblockable damage like the Overlord and anything in PL as well?

Same for Albino Radscorpions. I modded the HP for both creatures down. Even though the damage I do is higher than in vanilla (Using Arwen's mod) those things are real bullet sponges. And they don't even have good loot or anything like that.

I killed a few and then said 'screw that', and killed all others I found later with the console, until I made that mod.

I always have with me 5 Bottlecap mines and 5 nuka grenades along with 2 stealthboys just in case, also shoot from a far enough distance with a silenced 10mm, they don't know where they are being shot from, and of course there is always Jack :rock:

Now you have a reason to wear the ghoul mask :ph34r:

I've never even gotten the Ghoul Mask...

Sneak attack headshots with Sniper Rifles, mini-nuke IEDs*, plasma or laser SAW**, Nuka Grenades or the good old-fashioned Fat Man takes care of them.

* drop a mini-nuke next to a mine and lure the enemy to step on it (requires a mod to make mini-nukes explode when damaged) :nuke:
** WMK's auto-fire mechanism and extended clip on an energy weapon, extra pew-pew :gun:

Both reavers and albino radscorpions are vulnerable to the paralyzing palm-perk. Use that and stop your whining.

They are, indeed, a huge pain in the ass. 8d As Madcat pretty well explained.

Certainly not impossible, but I admit I didn't get through the first, and possibly not even the second time.

Though for me, deathclaws are worse. If I'm dealing with them alone, anyways. So usually I would just use the dart gun to cripple them to sluggish speeds and let Fawkes blast them away.

Not really. There are plenty of ways to handle them easily.

Reavers aren't a problem they're ghouls just shoot them in the head. I think they got the idea for Reavers from fallout Tactics.

It never ceases to humor me how people claim Fallout 3 was to easy, then when something is actually difficult, people like to whine.

So you don't see an inconsistancy between the uber-creatues (feral reavers and albino radscorpions) vs their cousins (feral roamers and giant radscorpions)? Difficulty is one thing but expending 300 5.56m rounds or draining a gatling laser to take one down is just goofy. And deathclaws are NOT in their class. Actually albino radscorpions are no where near as bad as reavers. A reaver is impossible to take down with 'reasonable' force.

Seems like a lot of people in this topic haven't tried using a dart gun. Makes reavers, overlords, and albino scorps very easy to deal with.

Alternative: Blast the legs away without the dart gun, at which point you can kite and headshot the enemy the same way you'd do with the dart gun.

Alternative: Complete Point Lookout. Gives you a massive damage bonus, which makes full auto weapons (chinese assault rifles, SMGs, miniguns, flamers, gatlings) immensely more powerful.

Alternative: Any weapon that does 1100 damage fairly quickly and the Reaver is toast. Super mutie overlords are 1250. Albino scorps are 1500. Behemoths are 2000.

Now, some math. Xuanlong, unique chinese assault rifle, does 11 damage per round. That's 100 rounds or some three mags, assuming you don't miss at all. Headshots generally do double damage so that's 50 rounds if you only hit it in the head. Still way too slow. Now consider the Terrible Shotgun. It does 80 damage or 160 if you hit the reaver in the face. Now, 160 that's quite a lot. To get to 1100, you really only need to hit it a mere 7 times or just over half a mag.

One more alternative: Sneak attacks. Sneak attack crits do a ton of damage, which means you'll have to do much less damage in normal combat. Sneak attack crits to the head of a reaver, possibly combined with the Better Criticals perk? Yeah, even better.

Finally, the last easy way of dealing with them that I can think of: Chinese stealth armor + Point Lookout + Ripper / Jack (unique variant). A bit of noisy buzzing but the reaver dies in a couple of seconds. Why? The Ripper hits 30 times per second and Point Lookout gives you two perks that each add +5 damage. That means +10 damage per attack, which counts 30 times per second with the Ripper.

Personally, I ended up simply using Vengeance (unique gatling laser) through most of Point Lookout and once you've got the two damage perks from there, you really won't have any issues whatsoever with reavers.


There's no reason to be this aggressive. There is quite a strange power jump between normal FO enemies and the enemies added in PL and BS. Albino Scorps in particular are oddly at 75% behemoth bullet sponge capacity and damned fast to boot. That said the dart gun gets them every time and their albino color at least makes it easy to spot them at a distance.

Oh and why are you suggesting a perk that only works with unarmed combat? I mean, if you're having problems with a specific creature, why on Earth would you fight it in hand-to-hand combat?

Because it works, of course. It was meant as a hint to OP who seems to have a problem...

I'm tired of people who says that reavers and albinos are hard enemies. They should try Halo2 on Legendary. Those Silver-Elites, they are a challenge.

Reavers...? Pffft...

and BTW, I'm not aggressive, you... :swear:

Downside with the dart gun is that you lose the sneak atack


Downside with the dart gun is that you lose the sneak attack bonus, unless you start with a sniping shot then shift to dart gun and next to a closer range high damage weapon.
Dropping a botlecap mine before going from sniping to close combat work just as well )

Point lookout perk and vengeance help yes. But any high damage weapon like Terrible shotgun, tri barrel laser even the old Xuanlong with point lookout also work well.

I also think that the reavers and Albino Scorps is overpowered, not so much problems with overlords except its hard to tell them from master so you except to snipe them. Might be that the tri barrel laser is less effective at long range.
Part of the problem is that they kill any followers except Fawkes very fast. You have the option to redraw under fire who makes the dart gun very useful, but followers don't do that.

If your having trouble read some of the posts here to get ideas on how others in the community deal with the tougher enemies, or you could lower the difficulty which would make it easier for you, or you could mod your fallout. With so much choice on how to deal with them I don't see an issue.

Standard combat shotgun works fine close up against all enemies including the albino's and reavers. Unarmed and melee work fine as well, in fact depending on what guns you carry (and perks) it might even be a better option to get up close and start swinging. Albino's aren't good at climbing so another tip is to jump on something and gain some hieght and stay out of their reach. Reavers have a ranged attack so this isn't as effective but head shots work fine as already mentioned.

The only problem I have with Reavers is when they start flipping out and when this happens they don't appear to take damage, or damage is greatly reduced, I don't know if this is true or right but I do know it's not worth wasting amo on them when this is happening. I found explosives made them stop flipping for long enough to get a few headshots off (which made them flip out again...). So it's possible to handle them even when this happens, just need a little bit of patience.

If I go up against reavers, overlords and albino's I don't expect to kill them quickly and not take any damage.

I think they aren't unbalanced and are arguably necessary given the extra 10 levels broken steel adds. When these things start showing up you should have some better weopons to help you out anyway.

I honestly believe reavers should be as powerful as they are now, it actually gives you something to fear in the wasteland when your lvl30. They are not as hard as people claim to be

Yes they can be tough. There are tactics to deal with them as mention above.

The problem is that all the complaining about the level 20 cap, resulted in Bethesda raising the cap (a bad decision IMHO, they should have increased the experience requirements for level 20 instead). And so by level 30 the player character would be way over powered. So they had to add some super enemies (Reavers, Overlords, Albinos) to compensate.

And there was the second and conflicting complaint about the game being way too easy. So I could imagine a frustrated developer thinking "You people want to be more powerful by raising the level cap, but your also saying you're too powerful already. I'm going to add a Reaver!"



Also regarding the post above on the Dart gun, yes the dart gun is an amazing weapon. And it makes Reavers easier. But they still have a ranged attack by throwing poo at your character. And unlike Overlords, they cannot be disarmed.

There is a sweet spot where the Reaver tries to get in close enough to melee attack and will not use the ranged attack. Staying in that spot and shooting all your ammunition to it's head should do it.

I've found the Unarmed skill to be highly effective. I send in a Nuka Grenade or Frag Grenade first, or lure him to either a Bottlecap Mine or two or three frag mines in a little pile. I'm playing on Hard, so this takes him down to about 50 to 75 percent health. Then I start whaling on him. He doesn't throw his poo when he is up close and personal. Paralyzing Palm, obviously, works wonders, but I have had success with this method without that perk. Just block well, and don't forget to dose up on Buffout and Psycho.

ha! try adams airforce base subway tunnels with 3 or 4 reavers at once. you'll be doing way more then whining
when the kick your butt LOL!

ghoul masks are pointless when you have companions..

anyways, critical sneak attack.. 2 head shots with sniper rifle
and there done.
level 30/very hard/no cheats

I agree with everything you said. Only two things I'd like to note.
1) Why oh why did I forget to mention chems? Jet + Med-X + Psycho = more AP, a good probability of being close to the max damage resist limit, and +25% damage. I haven't had to try this yet, but I'm guessing +25% also includes the Point Lookout perk bonus damage, which means that already stupidly strong weapons just became even more crazy.
2) The Point Lookout perks do work with all weapons, as far as I know, but it's obvious that a weapon that attacks 15+ times per second and gets that bonus damage to each attack is getting a bigger effect than a weapon that attacks once per second and only gets +10 damage a single time.


I don't think you should talk about "Broken Steel". It's not like the regular FO3 enemies were difficult at all before BS came out, and Point Lookout is arguably even more broken than BS, due to the perk bonus damage working the way it does.


I agree to some extent. I believe there should be somewhat more variants. Currently, there are the normal ghouls and roamers that a level 30 character is hardly going to notice, and then there's suddenly the reavers that do three times the damage and have three times the hitpoints. Why is there nothing in between? Same thing with scorpions and super muties. Why the massive jump? It feels... odd.


Again, two things I want to say here.
1) Yes, there absolutely has to be more powerful enemies in the game when the level cap is increased with 50%. Regular super mutie masters are really a joke at max level. What would feel a lot nicer and more thought through is if there was more than three dangerous enemies in the entirety of the wasteland and if the weaker dangerous enemies were somewhat more prevalent while the top level dangerous enemies are somewhat rare.

As it is, there's all of a sudden hordes of albino scorps and overlords and reavers running around. There's probably more albinos than there are normal scorpions. That's not really sensible, considering that albinos are the top level beastie. Same thing with reavers and overlords. They should be somewhat rare and then there should be some graduation of the still hard but not as hard enemies below their "rank". Difficulty shouldn't be increased simply by spamming a single kind of semi-boss monster, that's just going to get repetitive real fast.

2) No, the dart gun can't disarm reavers, but in my humble opinion it's a lot easier to shoot them in the face with your weapon of preference when they're not all over your face, and the only ways to ensure they're not are to make sure they can't reach you or to simply be able to outrun them. That radioactive puke is annoying, but it's a whole lot less annoying than getting knocked senseless at point blank range and not being able to do much about it because the darn reaver keeps moving.

All opinions and tactics appreciated but I still feel reavers are unbalanced. They spoil the game and give little sense of accomplishment (IMO). All I think going into a fight is 'well here goes another bucket of ammo and another bucket of stimpaks' and being forced to run backwards from one side of PL to the other is more than annoying.

The Burnmaster makes quick work of them :flamethrower: