Strange, I've had a very different experience.

On my first playthrough of FWE, I made it to about lvl 14 before running into a quest-breaking bug and taking a short break from FO3 as well as deciding to just start from scratch. Fresh install, all that jazz. I had Speech, Lockpicking, and Small Guns tagged, and I tagged Energy Weapons at lvl 14 to make use of the plasma rifle I'd found (which, honestly, was hella underwhelming as a weapon compared to laser rifles.) I'd played through with all of the DLCs installed, so I was rocking Winterized T-51B Power Armor for most of the game (though I'd switched to the Prototype Medic Armor when I found it in Old Olney) with a base DR of about 59. I believe I had 6 END, so I had something like 225 HP (this is just under roughly half of the HP I had in vanilla, which was about 510.) By that point, raiders were a mostly minor threat (befitting the low XP), though Ramboing in usually still got me killed if they were packing assault rifles and there were more than a couple of them. Super Mutants were about the same... mostly just an annoyance, but a large group of them (especially if they had FN FALs or M60s) could be a huge threat if I wasn't careful. Ironically Deathclaws, Yao Guai, and Wanamingos were almost nonthreats due to the Dart Gun being almost ludicrously overpowered (-1000 to both legs with one shot is a little... excessive.) At any rate, I enjoyed it - while power armor made it much harder for me to die, it didn't render me invulnerable. I suppose if you're looking for the Rambo experience vanilla provides, you'll be disappointed - I played a no-Sneak melee character on my vanilla playthrough and I could literally just wade through entire packs of super mutant brutes and masters and maybe use one stimpak the whole time, soaking bullets up like a sponge... and I wasn't even in power armor.

I'm now playing through FWE as a no-Sneak melee character (also with Energy Weapons instead of Speech this time) and I'm not using any DLC except Broken Steel, since I felt walking out of Operation Anchorage with power armor and great weapons was a little cheesy and neither The Pitt nor Point Lookout are that fun. I'm currently rocking about 210 HP at lvl 4 (7 END) and I'm at about 19 DR... and I can tell a major difference in how much damage I take, even though my HP values are mostly the same. But even so, the game mostly plays about the same - I usually use a gun to pick off the most dangerous enemies first (with my low DR, that's basically everyone except stragglers or people I've crippled) and then finish them with melee. I also have a decent Explosives skill, so mines and grenades are also a major part of my gameplay plan. FWE (and especially if you're also using MMM and the Increased Spawns esp like I am) requires more thought and planning in your game, and that often does mean more frequent quickloading, especially if things go sour (like a nade bounces off of thin air because the Gamebryo engine svcks.) Still, I enjoy it. While I'm not swimming in them, I do have enough Stimpaks to get by (I've got 5 now... on my previous playthrough, I was carrying more than 100 after completing Point Lookout, where I swear to god they're everywhere) and I also have enough Morphine, Aspirin/Ibuprofen, and Buffout to survive the harder fights. Expect to be using chems a lot in FWE, especially early on. I'm also using STR+END based healing on rest, and I can regain about a third of my HP with two hours of rest, and almost all of my HP with six. Obviously, this doesn't take care of being crippled... but that's what the Wasteland Doctor and Wasteland Surgeon perks are for.

If you're repeatedly failing a battle, try tackling it at a different angle. If possible, set up some mines beforehand and lure your enemies onto them. If you have cover or corners to take advantage of, grab your enemies attention and then throw nades around the corner. If you've got good Sneak, sneak around and use the autocrit bonus to instantly kill weaker enemies before they know you're there. Don't be afraid to use chems - there's a reason there are a skillion new chems in FWE. Morphine and Ceremonial Herbs should always be carried in case you get crippled and aren't in a position to use your triage. Aspirin and Ibuprofen add that little bit of extra DR that can make all the difference, you can't get addicted to them, and they're cheap. Tribal Healing Powder heals a pretty decent amount of HP for its cost, and Multivitamin Pills could be considered to be Buffout Lite (and without the chance for addiction.)

FWE ain't the mod for you if you're wanting to Rambo around like you do in vanilla. At no point will you be a god squishing cockroaches - even the lowliest raider can kill you in a few headshots no matter what kind of armor you're wearing, and that's a good thing. You also have to consider that raider probably won't be as accurate as you, and sure as hell doesn't have the HP or DR you've got. Frag grenades and frag mines are both powerful and plentiful - invest some points into Explosives so you can make good use of them, because they're one of the greatest equalizers, especially in the early game. A couple of well-placed mines can prevent you being flanked and can easily kill melee enemies, and some well-placed grenades can wipe out entire groups of enemies. With 35 Explosives, a single frag grenade will routinely kill at least two raiders and at least cripple two more. There's some risk involved in using them, but what's life without risks?

Also, pick up Dogmeat at Scrapyard as soon as you can find the time to head down that way (I find it best to go there on your way to Minefield for Moira.) He's not invulnerable like he was in vanilla, but he's still a useful distraction and sometimes just drawing one gun to himself and off of you can make all the difference.

Oh, and on the subject of radiation... it's fine. Rad-X is hardly rare (not to mention Sativex, which can be used in place of Rad-X in a pinch), and RadAway isn't very rare, either. If you find yourself running around in irradiated areas or swimming in water a lot, consider investing in a Radiation Suit. With the exception of Point Lookout (which fairly svcks anyway), most water areas can be avoided in the capital wasteland by taking the long way around.

Is there anyway I can restore the Bobbleheads to their vanilla properties? Also, is it this mod or DarnUI which removes the stealth indicators becaused I'd like those back too. Thanks for any help!

I don't have time for a proper reply to this great balance conversation right now, but I'll share a few thoughts, technical and otherwise:

1) Editing the weapon damage values back down is fine to do, but be aware that if you are using WMK, you'll also need to edit all the values back down in the FOIP patch, otherwise your modded weapons will be much more powerful than everything else.

2) The alternative to modding weapon damages on an individual basis is to just edit the http://geck.gamesas.com/index.php/Weapon_Damage_Formula back down. These include:

fDamageSkillBase
fDamageSkillMult

By default, they are both set to 0.5, so that all weapons to 0.5 their base damage + (0.5 * player skill level/100). So at 100 weapon skill, your doing the full 100% damage listed. Remember too that the in-game pip-boy damages are more of a damage over time or DPS indicator than raw damage values.

FWE on the other hand raises the base damage closer to 1.5 (I think maybe 1.45), and the skill multiplier is around 0.2 or 0.25, meaning damage is a lot less dependent on your skill, while overall damage has been increased close to 3-times vanilla.

I see on the page listed above there are also some gamesettings for armor, and those I haven't tweaked, but it might be possible to adjust that formula as well to make armor more signficiant.

3) It's interesting, some people find FWE a bit too brutal, and others still don't find it hard enough. I'm contemplating creating a "less hardcoe" and "more hardcoe" optional plugin that adjusts some of these gamesettings to make the world a bit more fundamentally challenging or easier, rather than relying purely on the difficulty slider to accomplish that.

Anyway, I appreciate everyone's perspectives. PizzaSHARK's assessment is about spot on for how I personally have to play FWE and how I hoped the mod would turn out. But that's not to say that everyone wants that =)

I appreciate the insight into FWE! I played last night and enjoyed my game quite a bit. May I ask what difficulty you play on?

Also, I have a question about FalloutEDIT: can I use this modify the skill points I earn each level? I want to earn about half as much as I already do. At the rate of skill point distribution, my tagged skills will be maxed by level 5. Then what? I distribute points into the rest of the fields? To me this kind of defeats the purpose of specialization. Why play a new character when I can just max all skills on one character?

Well, right now my character has small guns, explosives, and repair, with a bunch of points in medicine. I don't wander around try to rambo everything in the wasteland, because it's not my playstyle. I prefer to assess the situation and use carefully placed explosives and conserve my ammo. My issue right now is that on the game setting I play at (very hard), I almost never get to use the triage system. It may be a strange thing to say, but I'd like to get crippled more, rather than just die instantly to a couple of shots. I don't know why exactly I go down so fast. Do the damage percentages for limbs/chest not apply to the player or something? I believe right now if you hit a raider in the leg, it's 20 percent damage, and 15 percent in the arm. Either these damage values don't work on the player (100 percent damage no matter where you get shot), or I'm the unluckiest sob playing the game right now. I also sneak almost everywhere I go, so when detected, maybe getting headshotted all the time has something to do with the physical position. I like the challenge of the game as is (including all of the radiation changes), otherwise I wouldn't be so stubborn and move the difficulty slider down. I'd just like to see some way to use the triage system more regularly, because for me being a roaming wasteland/doctor surgeon and relying on yourself for medical aid is appealing. I don't mind getting taken out in a few shots, but it seems like every shot is a head shot.

As for dogmeat, it took me several tries to find him in one piece and rescue him. He can't take much punishment at all anymore, which is fine by me, but he does go down awefully fast. With MMM active, he just doesn't have enough HP to help out in a fight, because I have to babysit him. So for now, he just stays back at my home.

I'm fine with the game being hard - I just want armor to be useful instead of just a heavy hunk of metal taking up space in my inventory. I'd like enemies, especially enemies in power armor, to actually be dangerous. Unfortunately, by default the Enclave are less dangerous than simple raiders because Enclave weapons are inferior to simple Raider weapons like the assault rifles, or at least it seems that way to me, and the Enclave power armor doesn't protect them enough to counter the raider's ability to one or two-hit kill you.

I'm actually not sure what difficulty setting my game is on. I last played it back in November right after the game was out and without any mods, and after starting a new game I never thought to check what the difficulty setting is turned to. Probably Very Hard, since I remember wanting something of a challenge in my previous play-through.


Oh, right, companions. In my experience they're worse than useless in my current game. You have to really babysit them else they die real fast, and even using Phalanx or one of the other companion mods doesn't help much - they still only help out for the first few seconds of a fight before they're out of it.

The difficulty sliders are a strange thing. They don't just globally increase the damage, they actually reduce damage the player deals and increases the damage they recieve. So playing on very hard is going to result in things like power armor being way less effective than they otherwise would be. I'd try playing on normal. Again, one idea of making some optional difficulty modules would be to control difficulty at the game mechanics level, so that it applies to everyone equally.

FOOK made a lot of armor tweaks. Perhaps run that and see if their weapon and armor values help.

Wow...

Just realized that FWE and WeaponModKits conflict bigtime over the speed of Sniper Bullets... Default behavior And WeaponModKits is 10000 speed and 13000 range, FWE takes it up to 27000 speed and 30000 range.

Was this something that belongs in FOIP? Or am I missing a patch?

M

It should be in the FOIP patch. Make sure you are using the "Weapon Mod Kits - FWE Master Release.esp"

Don't play on Very Hard and complain that you take too much damage. :rolleyes:
In the vanilla game NPC's have a health penalty, turning up the difficulty just evened out the field. FWE already does that on Normal.


On my last character I wanted to try the high-level content immediately, so I cheated my way up to lvl 19 with the rewardXP command. I also gave myself a fair chunk of caps so I could buy some stimpacks and ammo. I used the Regulator start which gave me some armour and a gun, and went and got Ol' Painless right after, so I didn't have to cheat any more than that.
I still use the Regulator outfit, with some extras from Tailor Maid (formerly known as ShoulderPad), so I'm quite lightly armoured. Despite that I feel I can take quite few hits, and unless I'm facing multiple opponents I often get out of fights completely unhurt. Raiders out in the wasteland aren't even a threat since I can snipe them from so far off that they don't even aggro on me (headshot + sneak damage bonus + Ol' Painless = ouch). Enclave patrols and supermutants are a bit more challenging since they sometimes require more than one headshot, giving them a chance to notice me. Still, out in the wastes I have few problems aside from sudden attacks from deathclaws...
If I face large groups of tough opponents I find it useful to cripple the arms of a few before I try to kill them, since they won't be able to effectively fight back.
Indoors it's a bit more challenging though, since I can get gunned down by a good burst, but if I keep moving and try to get in the first shot I can take care of most situations. Also, mines always help.

The big gameplay mods I use are FWE and MMM, and all four DLC's (although I've only played BS and PL with this character).

Here's my suggestions based on what I've experienced with the new character:
* Make limb damage affect total HP more. Killing enemies with automatic weapons can take a ridiculous number of bullets, especially if you fire from a distance or from the side. They will get incredibly crippled of course, but putting 5 SMG shots in someones arm really should do something to their overall health. I suggest doubling it to 30% and 40% respectively.
This could also solve some of the shotgun issues.

* Add a level selection option to the alternative start computer, maybe in multiples of 5 to make the menu simpler. It shouldn't be very hard to write up a script that calculates the XP required for the selected level, using the formula in the http://geck.gamesas.com/index.php/Experience_Settings. Using the globals means it works even if the values are tweaked as well.

* I find that playing with Regulator clothing isn't much harder than with the Medic Power Armour, maybe armour could be tweaked to be more efficient?
There should be apropriate drawbacks however. You already get penalties to sneak, and of course non-powered armour is heavy, but if you increase DR significantly there is one more thing you could consider: penalising Action Points. AP does a lot of things that would be affected by armour, like sprinting, and reacting quickly (VATS/Bullet Time), so reducing AP while increasing DR would be a good tradeoff. Power armoured players would be good at wading in with guns blazing, but precision targeting and sneaking is harder giving lightly armoured players their own niche.
You'll probably have to do this by tweaking damage formulas, if possible, since the T-51b with helmet already gives you 75 DR and you can add chems to that. Can't get much higher.


Edit: Used the XP formula with the FWE variables which gave me 72200 XP to lvl 20. I started a new character and rewarded myself that amount in the shed with seemed to raise my level correctly to 20. I did not get the level-up menu, but I assumed this was because I was still in the shed?

Formula to lvl 20: (20-1)*((20-2)/2*400+200)=72200

Ok, so you cheated. And now the game is easy. How is this information helpful at all to people who don't cheat? Giving myself a ton of xp, caps, stims, then heading directly for the really good weapons (on normal difficulty I'm guessing) doesn't sound fun at all to me, but to each their own.

I'm trying to tinker with the various settings and make suggestions. I'm not sure if it's stated anywhere what difficulty level FWE was designed to be played at, but if it's normal, I'll give that a shot and see how it works out. I tried it once on a clean install (forgot to change the default difficulty) with the mods loaded, and I was pretty much able to run into a raider-packed springvale school and clean the place out rambo style while hardly taking any damage and only being lvl 2. That kind of situation isn't realistic at all to me, and the fun/novelty of it wears off quickly, so I turned up the difficulty. Granted fallout 3 isn't exactly realistic to begin with, but from my understanding FWE is trying to change that to make the gameplay more challenging and rewarding. I'm trying to find a good balance.

Since levelling doesn't actually make the game easier, due to leveled lists, I had to face Supermutants armed with M60's with only my trusty .32. Also, Ol' Painless is a snipers rifle, which doesn't help when you're in a dungeon somewhere facing said supermutant.
The XP I gave me was, as I said, to let me find the high level content, like Supermutant Overlords, not to make it easier. I have played through the game several times already, and I did play on Hard and Very Hard on the first, unmodded, playthrough.

The quip I made about the difficulty was meant as it's written, and the quotes show (IMO) that those who complained about a lack in balance all seemed to be playing on Very Hard. I now see that two of them was you, I did not intend it as a personal insult.

Note: I wasn't complaining about the game being difficult. I was complaining that armor doesn't offer any protection. I like the game being difficult. I don't like armor being useless.

I agree with Ridley here. We WANT this to be a "balls to the wall" experience. Which it is. However one aspect of the game is a bit skewed - you either die in a fight or you win without taking a hit. The problem is that the crippling aspects and survival gameplay simply don't provide the experience that we crave. The difficulty is awesome, but medical perks and triage don't have much use, which seems to defeat part of the purpose of FWE.

I do agree with both of these suggestions. Personally I'm somewhat of a [censored] and play on easy currently (thinking about advancing to normal though), after being slaughtered on my first attempt on very hard mode . But on the bright side, I don't have to reach for my quick load key as much any more and the Wasteland Doctor & Surgeon perks actually serve their purpose. It would be nice though to be able to gain some more protection from armor (for NPCs as well, of course), and reducing AP as a drawback is a rather intriguing idea IMO.

To comment on delamer's response concerning the PN "current status" window: the shortcut would probably be a better alternative to use (No idea why I didn't think of that myself ), but I'd still prefer being able to check my status quickly and uncomplicatedly within the Pip-Boy menu. If I'm the only one who thinks that way though, please don't feel bothered by my humble request .

Well, I tried my game on normal for a bit. Ran up against a group of 6 enclave soldiers near super duper mart, and I took them out so fast with an assualt rifle it was laughable. I merely ducked behind some rocks, popped out, fired, then ducked back. For a change, I darted out, and I was taking some pretty decent laser rifle fire (got cripplied in the head and chest), but other than that, it was really no challenge, which is kind of sad. I liked the aspect of finally getting crippled and using up my stims, but fighting enclave soldiers with power armor shouldn't be that easy, especially when I'm just running around in the armored vault 101 uniform.

Part of this goes back to the assault rifles I think. I was using a banged up regular assault rifle, and just a couple of head shots with that, and those big bad enclave soldiers crumble instantly. Even with the changes in 1g, assault rifles are still way too strong, especially with head shots. If anything, having power armor should help protect against small arms/small guns fire, whereas it should be more vulverable to laser/plasma. I see these outcast patrols limping around the wasteland, barely alive, and I believe the only thing that keeps them around that long is the 1 member who is always weilding the gatling laser.

Oh well, back to testing things out on hard difficulty.

I played vanilla on very hard. I play FWE on normal, and usually bump it up to hard after I get really good equipment (power armor, etc.)

On very hard, you do half damage and all enemies do double damage. Considering almost all small guns (and energy weapons, too, I think) do double damage on a headshot, that's quadruple damage - this is why you're dying in one or two hits, because you're getting hit for probably 300-450 damage after DR. FWE doesn't seem to be designed around playing the game on very hard - even with power armor and some of the best weapons available, I felt very hard was more of a pain in the ass than a challenge... having to sit there and shoot a super mutant master in the face eight times (yes, I counted) before the little [censored] will finally die isn't fun, it's irritating. You don't usually see this behavior on hard (where you do 75% damage and they do 150%.) All of your issues with getting crippled or outright killed so easily are due to playing on very hard - knock the difficulty slider down. Trust me, FWE is still a challenge on normal, especially before you start getting some of the better armor types. If you want a better challenge and are using MMM, enable one or both of the Increased Spawns plugins.

As far as Dogmeat goes, he can't die as long as he's with you, unless it bugs out - FWE sets all companions to "essential" (or that's what the readme says, anyway), which means they cannot be killed, just knocked out. If he gets knocked down, hang around for a couple of minutes or try waiting an hour or two and he should be fine. It does mean that once he's down, he probably won't be able to help you for the rest of that fight, but if he distracted that guy with the assault rifle long enough for me to blow his head off, then he did his job anyway.

For what it's worth, I do think that assault rifles are still too powerful, unless the damage numbers on the pipboy screen are off - 200 damage per bullet seems a little high. In fact, small guns in general seems like a really good skill. I took energy weapons this time since I didn't really use them much last time, but so far it feels like I'm better off using that .32 Pistol with 28 small guns skill instead of the Laser Pistol with 42 energy weapons skill :-/

EDIT: The Super Duper Mart is always amusing. This time when I found my way to the parking lot, I found a dead trader (with plans for a Deathclaw Gauntlet on his corpse), several dead Raiders, three dead Night Ghouls, a dead Deathclaw, and a single apparently random dead Bloatfly who probably was at the wrong place at a very wrong time. I've also found dead Enclave troopers, dead Outcasts, and dead Talon Company mercs there in other playthroughs. The raiders seem to be the only thing that's consistent across playthroughs

whow . . . great discussion. Couple of response =)

The pip-boy damage values are a measure of DPS, it factors in damage per bullet, your skills, the fire rate, the condition of the weapon, etc. No one has really figured out exactly what's it's calculating, and it isn't a reliable measure of damage. For example, your basic laser rifle does 50 damage in FWE (base) compared to the now reduced damage of 25-26 per bullet for assault rifles. However, the pip-boy damage for the assault rifle might be 150+ due to it being an automatic. Put an auto-fire mod on a laser rifle and the damage will go up a lot, well over 200.

As for difficulty, FWE has been tested and designed around "normal" difficulty. Much of FWE's initial work was rooted in attempting to level the playing field between the player and the opposition. For instance, the health calculations for NPC's resulted in less HP's per point of endurance for NPC's than players, this was equalized. Why would a raider with 5 END have less HP than the player with 5 END? In the original game, players didn't take double damage from headshots, now they do. I think these differences were a deliberate choice on the part of gamesas to balance the game they wanted it to play. I saw the differences and thought that it "cheapened" the experience, for lack of a better phrase.

Same goes for the difficulty slider, its an artificial balancing tool. The advantage the player has should be their ingenuity and ability to outwit the opposition, not just out-gun / out-last the opposition.

The consequence of this balancing has resulted in a bit of a "winner-take all scenario". You either get gunned down quickly, or you manage to clear the room. Bullet time, VATS, and the sprint mod are the tools that let the player capitalize on their ingenuity and essentially do the impossible.

Another personal objective was to improve the FPS aspect of the game. A good FPS player will be able to gun their way through Springvale at level 2, a weaker player might not be able to, and would have to come back when they get more gear. Some of my favorite FPS moments in other games had always been getting to a difficult spot/encounter and having to reload a dozen different times trying to figure out how to live. Some people may hate this, but I always enjoyed the challenge =) I felt playing the original fallout that I never had any worry about dying, so I had to greatly increase that risk, which in turn required a change in how I played the game.

.................

Okay, all of this being said, there is certainly room for tweaks and improvement while keeping the fundamental concept of FWE intact. Increasing the multipliers for the armor (damage reduction) would help make the player tougher in power armor, and also make the enclave tougher as well as other high DR guys.

Reducing the global damage base value will require more rounds to take down the enemies (and yourself), which could make the fights a more drawn out (maybe a good thing, more chance to be injured, etc.), but it will also make you burn through ammo faster, which increases the overall difficulty in that regard.

Another tweak I forget to do is to increase the projectile velocity for plasma weapons. They are way too slow right now, and fire from high level enclave can basically be "dodged" if you're fighting over longer distances.

anyway, gotta run!

Unless the weapon is single-shot, the damage in the Pip Boy is per second. So that 200 damage for the assault rifle is 200 damage/second. Not so bad, really.

EDIT: Woops, seems my reply got ninja'd by Mezmorelda.

I suppose I am a bit confused. Is normal FWE difficulty still a challenge?

I am afraid i ran into a small problem here. Some Npcs show White heads now When i deactivate every plugin related to FWE its ok again though. Updating with FO3Masterupdate didnt help unfortunately What can i do ?

I guess I've been being a bit of a die-hard with very hard difficulty. The vanilla game was a complete joke on very hard, and totally unrealistic (you could sit there and empty an entire clip into a raider's head and he still wouldnt die). I too really like the brutally difficult encounters that require thinking and fast reflexes to make it through.

As for the enclave soldiers/power armor factions, maybe I'm alone here, but they aren't nearly tough enough to me. Some of this has to do with the assault rifle problem, but I've seen enclave soldiers with energy weapons getting wiped out by raiders with assault weapons, and that just wrong in my view. The enclave are suppose to be sporting some of the most advanced armor and weaponry in the game - they really shouldn't be losing skirmishes to raiders in my view, unless a small group of them are getting massively outnumbered. When you come across several enclave soldiers, you SHOULD be really wary of them, especially if you're lower level. Like I said, I killed a pack of them at lvl 2 with an assault rifle I found off a body, and that's just not right. Lots of room for tweaks here and there - it's not perfect yet, but it's getting closer with every release.



I guess this is subjective, but normal difficulty FWE isn't that much of a challenge so far. I'll keep playing on normal for awhile as PizzaSHARK and others have suggested. Hopefully the difficulty will get better later on.

I am currently playing on Very Hard and just cleared Springvale on LVL2 and I must say I am a little disappointed, I really don't want to have this "winner-takes-all" scenario you described, since it just results in me quicksaving every few seconds, thus rendering any combat moot and totally destroying the flow of the game! I reloaded 6 times during my raid, mostly because since I'm playing with MMM Increased Spawns I was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of Raiders waiting for me inside the school, but once I got a few lucky shots it was far too easy! I didn't use a single stimpack or anything else to restore my health, since I'll either get killed straight away or kill everything without losing so much as a few AP (if at some point I had only one enemy left and used VATS for the fun of it)!

My verdict: If you want Fallout3 to be turned into Serious Sam with RPG elements where you have to quicksave every few seconds and reload many times, you'll find this mod to be to your liking, but if you want a serious RPG experience, with combat being an aspect of the game controlled by your stats, you'll be gravely disappointed, since you'll definitely need mad FPS skills to advance, if at the same time you want to have a decent challenge!

I think this mod could be really great and the effort that went into it is laudable, but it's only for a fraction of users and I think most people will find a better balancing in XFO!

My suggestion is to control difficulty using MMM's Increased (Increased) Spawns instead of the difficulty slider. Facing 6 enemies is a completely different thing to facing two or three. You could even lower the difficulty to Easy and go nuts with the spawning instead.

Also, on tangential topic: Traps aren't dangerous enough! I've never been seriously injured by any trap, except for mines and grenade bouquets (who, btw, are lethal).