With diminishing returns the higher DR gets, would there be a huge difference between, let's say, a fully upgraded T-51 and a fully upgraded X-01.

Yes.

does a bear in power armor poo in the woods?

No.

It poops in the power armour.

What do you mean by "diminishing returns the higher DR gets"?

I haven't done the maths, but I would tend to agree with this assessment. X-01 is the baddest of the bad boys. Put titanium plating on Mk VI and you are virtually impregnable. I seem to recall a quick assessment of a couple pieces of fully upgraded titanium plated T-60 and noting it had quite a bit less health to it.

What if the part covering the butt is missing?

This. Go hit by a Deathclaw in each type of Power Armor. X-01 offers the most defense and requires less maintenance. I rarely upgrade X-01 and it's only MK3

All these games are a database attached to a nice interface. They are numbers games at heart.

Taken from the wiki.

Damage resistance returns in http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_4. However, the stat is no longer a 1-1 relationship with actual % damage reduced, as its value can be in excess of 1000 on certain models of http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Power_armor_%28Fallout_4%29.

Instead, the amount of damage reduction the player character gets out of the damage resistance is actually based on how much potential weapon damage is coming in; unlike previous games, net damage reduction is based on a ratio between the potential weapon damage done and the damage resistance, with diminishing returns for high damage resistance.

The amount of damage reduced by damage resistance climbs very quickly until damage resistance is about half of the potential weapon damage, after which diminishing returns means you get less and less damage reduction per point of damage resistance. Notably, if damage resistance is exactly equal to the potential weapon damage done, then exactly half of the damage is negated. In other words, if you have 50 ballistic damage resistance and are shot by an enemy doing 50 ballistic damage, then you'll receive 25 damage.

Note that the most important factor is the ratio between damage resistance and potential weapon damage.

• 50 potential weapon damage against 0 damage resistance (no ratio): ~50 damage is done (0% damage reduction).


• 60 potential weapon damage against 10 damage resistance (1/6 ratio): ~57 damage is done (~5% damage reduction).


• 20 potential weapon damage against 10 damage resistance (1/2 ratio): ~13 damage is done (~35% damage reduction).


• 20 potential weapon damage against 20 damage resistance (1/1 ratio): 10 damage is done (50% damage reduction).


• 30 potential weapon damage against 60 damage resistance (2/1 ratio): ~10 damage is done (~61% damage reduction).


• 25 potential weapon damage against 500 damage resistance (20/1 ratio, easily possible with power armor):~4 damage is done (~83% damage reduction).

The upshot is that unlike previous games, it is very hard to get to the point where e.g. enemy damage is reduced to the range ~20%. In addition, because the ratio between damage resistance and weapon damage is so important and because damage reduction grows very quickly at first for low values of the ratio, a higher damage resistance pays off mostly because it gives you better damage reduction against more-damaging attacks, not necessarily because it gives you better damage reduction against the same, weaker attack as before.

In other words, going from 20 to 40 damage resistance will only further reduce the damage done from a 10-damage shot by about ~12% (~61% to ~69% damage reduction), but it will dramatically boost your damage reduction against a 100-damage grenade by about 23% (~10% to ~30% damage reduction). However, significant mitigation against such high damage is harder to achieve, since it is harder to get enough damage resistance to generate an appreciably high resistance-to-damage ratio. In otherwords, getting a 5-1 ratio is easy against a 20 damage shot, but very difficult (essentially limited to power armor) against a 100 damage grenade.

So the total ballistic damage res. of a T-51f is 1340, while a Mk VI X-01 is 1820.

My question is, is there anything that does enough damage to justify that extra 480 DR in order to get that 5-1 ratio.

This strikes me as a needless question. X-01 has much greater damage resistance and greater amounts of HP in the corresponding components. This means that it resists more damage, and can take more damage before breaking. Yes, it is absolutely worthwhile to use X-01 instead of T-51. The only disadvantage is that X-01 requires more materials to repair.

power armor health is more important than the dr, Xo-1 6 has 215 health in the limbs, and 860 in the torso, which keeps the suit intact longer, allowing you to engage multiple areas without having to return to your base for maintenance, at cost of higher material requirement

but a level 6 t-45 suit is more than adequate protection from non nukes, and is acceptable if you don't mind fixing it after every engagement, but at cheaper mat cost

Higher teir armor takes a lot less TIME to maintain than it's low level counterpart, which makes it convenient and allows you to preform larger scale exploration, and long term use without getting in the way, if you can afford the material cost when you do maintain it.

t-45 is a cheap response when you need firepower for one mission

x0-1 is the armor you explore the wasteland with.

My character is always in armor, so the fact I don't want to be tethered to my base makes thee x0-1 thde best choice, but if you only use power armor in emergencies t-45 is just fine for your needs,

That sounds very correct.

I don't know what the highest possible DPS of any given mob or other source of damage in the game is, I would suppose it would be in excess of 600 perhaps as high as 1000. However, in some circumstances it may be possible to be taking simultaneous damage from two or more high output sources and here the higher X-01 damage resistance might be a game changer.

Missiles, mines, and grenades deal 300 damage, nukes 468, anything else is not even breaking the 200 mark, with all but the rarest weapons with the rarest super upgrades dealing <100 damage, meaning you really only need the extra armor if you are particularly fragile, supremely tanky, can't move, or fighting suiciders and fatman wielding enemies using melee

enemies don't have weapon damage bonuses, weakpoint bonuses, or crits, so even the most powerful per shot weapon, which is an overcharged gauss rifle (unmodded gauss rifles are hyper rare as is) is dealing 184 damage, is going to require barely 900 armor to get to 5:1

The X0-1 is one of the main reasons I parked my first guy at level 65. He has a Mk VI with a Jetpack and fast legs. It keeps him alive through ridiculous incoming and if it gets too hot he leaves, sometimes vertically.

Interesting. But how does difficulty figure into that? Those numbers you quote, I assume they are for Normal difficulty, whereas Hard, Very Hard and Survival are, what? 2, 2.5 and 2.5 times more damage by NPCs (and half by PC? or threabouts?).

So a Super Mutant Suicider on Very Hard or Survival would deal 468 x 2.5 = 1170? Or am I totally off on some or all of this?

Really interesting and informative everyone. Thank you.

On very hard or survival the NPCs do 2x damage, so you're right.

On a separate note I don't use power armor, and although I died quite a bit because of missile launchers and mini nukes now that I'm at lvl50 the game is much easier. I can't imagine how easy it would get with power armor.

Then you get spanked in combat.

I've been talking about this for a while, both as the reason that Toughness is so powerful at low level, and why Ballistic Weave is rather ridiculous. I keep telling myself to make a chart, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

For the OP, I think T45 is good enough for most uses, and especially useful because it only requires steel and maybe a little circuitry to repair. The extra HP in higher armors is nice, but not critical.

The relationship of DR and damage can be visualized in this https://www.dropbox.com/s/6h9bfbs4048c1it/fo4dr.jpg?raw=1, made with the formula on thehttp://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Damage_Resistance. As already mentioned, the law of diminishing return applies: you block less damage percentage-wise going from 900 DR to 1000 DR than from 100 DR to 200 DR. Here is another diminishing return: for any given DR, the higher the incoming damage, the less you can block. At 100 DR, you can block 50% of 100 damage, but only 25% of 300 damage. The percentage will keep dropping as the incoming damage goes up until you can barely block any damage: at 100 DR, you can only block 1% of 700 damage; you might as well be naked.

I've spent the afternoon exploring the damage resistance function and found some very interesting things. I will post general findings in another thread tomorrow, but specific to Power Armor there are a few important points. (A lot of you may know these already, but I'll list everything for completeness.)

First of all, higher variants (a-f) of lower series (45-60) are equivalent. That is, the T-45f, the T-51d, and the T-60b are all exactly the same damage resistance and armor hit points. (I didn't check the X-01 and I didn't consider different mod availability in this anolysis.)

Second, the maximum differential damage absorbed between the best (T-60f) and worst (T-45a) power armors is only 86 points with an "incoming" damage limit of 500. (I chose 500 because it's slightly above the mini-nuke damage and higher than any creature can deliver, AFAIK.) That is wearing the T-45a you will take 250 points of damage and wearing the T-60f you will take 164.

Third, when you restrict the "incoming" damage to more typical ranges of weapons encountered the differential drops dramatically. At 100 max incoming they are only 10 points apart.

The takeaway is that the armors are VERY close in performance, and it would usually be better to upgrade a lower series armor to a higher variant than to switch to a higher series.

http://i.imgur.com/YHNfnmI.jpg of damaged reduced for each armor type. Incoming damage is across the top and max differential is on the bottom.

Hold now . . . it sounds like you guys are starting to anolyze with the goal to determine optimum "best practices" or some other "min/max-esque" end point, aka "theorycrafting." We've recently learned that FO4 has no theorycrafting as its predecessor, so I'd watch out if I were you'ze guys.

Some nice graphs there guys It warms my heart to see fellow nerds fiddling with their game data

Nononono.

There aren't diminishing returns. One of the things about damage resistance is that it is essentially an effective health multiplier. If you're taking half the damage, it's like you have twice the health. Taking one-third the damage means thrice the health. Even if the resistance is dependent on the quotient between damage and DR.