Mods in Skyrim exist that considerably change the AI so I see no reason not to expect them in FO4

But thats exactly the Problem. Perks should be necessary in Survival and when they make the Game in the most Cases to easy they are just unbalanced for that Difficulty. Damage Perks are so far necessary, Stimpack healing is at the End to high i mean you can heal the whole Healthbar? Thats insane, they become worthless and dont forget the Gear Values grows to with higher Level. I just dont like the Idea ignoring a Part of a Game because its just unbalanced, ofcourse atm we just can wait for the GECK or maybe Bethesda will improve it?

Oh it got hard again lol 7 Super Mutant Overlords, 1 glowing hound and 1 normal hound settlement attacked me, it was mayhem and really tough!

I used my semi-auto .38 pipe-rifle right up to level 25 or 26. (Then I found hardened combat rifle with a recon sight and just couldn't resist.)

I kind of like the way the game lets you keep a weapon you like and still makes gameplay viable even as you level up. I did notice a decided difference with the new rifle, however. Enemies that used to die after 6-7 shots now hit the ground in 1.

I've found that a "Found Item" playthrough on Hard seems pretty balanced to me. No improving and no modding. It's been challenging.

When I get tired of just surviving another day, I always have my Normal playthrough to fall back on. It's easy in cmparison.

I parked my guy at level 65. It was around level 35 in NV and I can't remember where F3 got parked. It's perfectly normal to become OP in a leveling RP type game.

My new guy uses Automatic Weapons and very little PA, mainly as handicaps.

Naw. It's a balance issue.

I'm wearing Military Fatigues, basic leather armor pieces (NOT sturdy or heavy) modded for "pocketed", and an Army helmet. I have 3 points each in both Toughness and Lifegiver (so I have the life regen which is veeerrry slow, and I believe it is disabled during combat). All other perks are offensive/crafting. That's it.

Level 25 or 26. Playing on Normal. Dogmeat and I took a casual stroll (at a walk) right through the bandit barricades outside of the Combat Zone in Boston. 2 Mk I turrets and 4-5 bandits firing non-stop. The only thing that took a chunk of health off of my bar were the 2 frag grenades that were thrown. Those alone knocked me down to about 1/2 health. The bullets were not even paper-cuts. Walked out the other side of the gate and out-of-range. Had just below 50% health.

No Med-X or chems of any kind. (This character is clean -- only uses Stimpacks.) Never healed once during the above. Even on Normal, that's pretty pushover difficulty.

While you were there you shoulda tried Swan. That was a disappointment. For something so tough, standing on a scaffold and throwing grenades at him shouldn't have been the easiest way. That was at about level 14 or 15.

Until you know how the perks really work in the game one has to pretty much try them to see their effect.

It does not help the game from lvl1 to 10 pretty much kicks your ass and leads you down the path of sneaky sniper who needs these perks to survive only by lvl 20 you realize you wasted them.

Since there is no respec your perks in the game at any lvl I had to make decisions to not use power armor or magic guns to keep the difficulty up.

Why play on normal then? It's stupid easy.

"stupid easy"?

Very easy, I dunno. I like stupid easy because you need no smarts. My survival runs, on the second now, at least demand some tactical thought.

Ha thats better then how I would have described it. I thought of it more as, player can drool on their keyboard while companion kills everything mode. I am not sure its even possible to die on normal unless the player handicaps his or her self. And thats coming from me, a guy that svcks at first person shooters.

No tactics. Just blowed 'em up and ate 'em. Me like Strong!

I'm at lvl 150, and mostly just exploring. I had to mod the game extensively to make it good at survival, more enemies, higher damage, normal heal speed, though I rarely need stimpacks, even with reduced loot. Got an AK to replace the bulky assault rifle, there's a guy on the Nexus making weapons now.

Had to nerf myself down from BW and full heavy poly armor, only wearing light combat armor chest and arm armor now. Have 1300hp though. I've always had endurance at 10 on every playthrough, and rifleman and gunslinger, with gun nut. Staying alive perks, and killing perks.

Unfortunately, the game has no longevity without mods. Normal and hard are too easy, very hard and survival are full of boring bullet sponges. I doubt I would have put 500 hours and counting into the vanilla game.

Though my final semester as a chemistry major starts tomorrow, so I won't be gaming much at all for the next 4 months or so.

In fairness, I'd wholly expect the game to become less challenging at level 75, 100, 125, let alone 150.

Poking in FO4edit indicates that enemies actually stop levelling at 35. Their damage and resistances are fixed, but for each level, they get a little more health - except after 35. The maximum level to which they will calculate health/AP offsets is 35, regardless of their actual level in-game.

Combine that with your weapons becoming much more advanced as you approach end-game, and it's no wonder the game suddenly becomes a drag.

I play the Fallout games like the main characters in the movie " Edge of Tomorrow " , in that I look to how things are going and then I might restart on another character, or in my case playing FO4, go back to my other character, as I have two characters that are kind of leap frogging through the game.

I did want to know the stories of the companions, and so I have a ton of perks that increase my damage, reduce damage when more than 3 enemies engage, increase my sneak attacks, give me a health bump when I get really low on health, etc.

I do plan to start a play-through once the GECK has gone live and some time has passed so mods will have been updated with the GECK in mind, and once I do that it's likely I will not be having every companion join me so that I end up with every perk.

Another thing one could do would be to Not read any magazines that buff you. This means you can still grab Picket Fences, HotRodder, and Total Hack, and maybe others not coming to mind. However if you read every magazine... your criticals for attack types and resistances, how much a stimpak heals, and how tough you are to detect while sneaking will all be increasing.

So really, you could just start another play through and make a few choices, like I couldn't care less about some vastly out of date magazine lying on a table, and I couldn't care less about bringing this person with me or working to improve my skills as a marksman, weaponsmith or armorer. These are all things some people really wouldn't do if they weren't playing a video game and they weren't a completist.

If you want a harder game and have it still be this game it's really pretty easy. Start a new character and roleplay a little.

Is it possible to change that Calculator?

I stopped playing at level 74. But I agree, once I got to level 45 and had Ninja VATS, it was too easy. 10x melee bonus made me stop playing. Tried to play another character opposite build but I got bored too.

It is if you make a mod for it, which http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/6289/?.

The main files include changes to animal mobs to make them tougher, so if you only want the changes to Calc Max Level, scroll down to the Misc files. Only affects wildlife at this time, though. (Esp since changing humans tends to erase their FaceGen data and give them default faces.)

The game was challenging when I encountered normal bloodbugs at lvl.9 when I decided to explore, but it suddenly screamed and died when I picked up the Deathclaw Gauntlet from the ground lvl.20 and up I just became this unstoppable killing machine, I couldn't stop laughing at this revelation when I encountered a Mirelurk Queen and killed her in 3 hits.

I did, actually! I was level 15-ish with my first character at the time. I don't read any hints or tips in advance -- I hate having surprises like that spoiled -- but I did check it out after "it" happened and I was smeared across Boston Commons. First, however, I reloaded and screwed that surprise up in the face, which I wouldn't call "easy", exactly. (svcker took about 10 full blasts from my laser musket [cranked up to 4] and 3 or 4 grenades before DOGMEAT finally got the killing bite in.) After claiming my prize and reading up on it, I was super-excited to know there were things like that out there. I have weapons that specialize in handling such problems now...



This, I thought, was a really nice addition to the game for a first-time playthrough. On subsequent characters, you will remember about them, but I still need to be ready before casually strolling up to a suspicious lump and poking it with a stick!

Well, right. What I'm arguing is that Normal difficulty should provide a balanced challenge while being sliiightly in the player's favor (avoid weapons that result in one-hit kills, give the player a fighting chance against cars going BOOM, no enemies with 98% resistance to certain damages...that sort of thing). I have played around with Hard, and I find that it's often just a matter of enemies soaking bullets and causing more damage. Honestly, I find it to be a fair balance, but all it does is make certain fights that should be open-and-shut take an annoyingly long time, once in a while. Later levels are still very easy. Max difficulty just makes the damage disparity even worse, and seems to land the player in almost impossible situations very regularly (at least early on).



I think damage should be universal-across-the-board. Higher difficulties should really create more things for characters to worry about -- sparser ammo, more extreme radiation, perhaps the need to eat/drink to recover full health, more "tough" versions of enemies showing up more regularly, stimpacks will only repair 50% of limb damage maximum, more of a chance to encounter situations you have to run from, certain enemies have decided strengths and weakness you MUST exploit to win.



I think this is something that all Beth titles need to start considering. "Increase enemy health and damage" is sort of an easy way out. Beth games are about the experience -- so why is difficulty only about damage? Why not have it leave damage alone and worry about other aspects: "You take the same amount of damage as you would on Normal, but on Hard, if you're arm is crippled, you can patch it up, but you'll need to find a doctor and pay to have it restored to 100%. On Very Hard, you'll also suffer a more drastic penalty to aiming and VATS and decreased carrying capacity until you're healed." Difficulty could affect the experience, not just make combat take 5 minutes on Hard simply to arrive at the same result as 1 minute on Normal.

This is very true -- of any RPG. There eventually comes a time when your character becomes godlike. It just seems to happen much more quickly in Bethesda titles. One of the first mods I always tend to download is something that slows down your rate of experience gain so that levels are spread out more. I play for immersion, so no fast-travelling, my characters are specialized (I purposefully nerf them in one area while being very strong in others), and I really take time and explore step-for-step along the way. This means that on default (for every Beth game since Morrowind) I level-up like a bat-out-of-hell-with-a-jetpack-high-on-caffeine. My first playthrough, I was over level 30 before I made it to Diamond City for the first time. That was all due to random exploration between Sanctuary and Lexington, a few Radiant quests, and building up 5 settlement zones.

But, in the end, regardless of how you get there, a level 100+ character basically means, "...he is the Kwizats-Haderach."

Time to start a new character.

Do you use VATS? Or sneaking? Or how do you manage to hit three times without being soaked in poison? I never use VATS and I find some encounters are not easy, especially melee combat.

TL;DR -- for my big post above!

To sum up, (lud...I've made this argument so many times over the years...) a character needs very pronounced strengths AND weaknesses in order to be interesting. There should always be the threat of failure, or there is no tension and we find it hard to care about a character. This, I feel, is as or perhaps MORE important when dealing with a playable character in a game. The tension comes from challenge. If a player character ever becomes "good at everything", they become boring. I still argue for maximum level caps and exclusive skills (Meaning: if you take one particular skill, it negates your ability to take another. Example: Damage Resistance negates Radiation Resistance. High damage resistance means strong muscle tissue and a fast metabolism. This makes you MORE prone to radiation sickness. So as one goes up, the other goes down.) This WOULD work for Beth titles because it:

1.) Ensures the game difficulties can be balanced for a set, maximum target. Say, Level 50. Now, enemies can be tailored to that ceiling.

2.) It creates specialized characters and ensures a constant threat of failure over the entire course of a playthrough.

3.) It makes managing the pace of the game much easier. There could even be temporary level caps in place depending on how far along the MQ the player is. (At least, this could be an option for players that want the freedom to explore without making the game too easy.)