I mean, power armor is bipedal tank suit. It's supposed to be impervious to small arms fire. Nothing short of armor penetrating rounds from a high powered rifle should be able to get through it. That means if I'm walking down the street and raiders are peppering me with shotgun blasts, assault rifle bursts, and handgun rounds, neither me nor my suit should take damage from that. I realize that *could* make the power armor OP against raiders, but that's the way it would really be and the way it was in the original games. The only things that should be of concern to someone in power armor are melee attacks from very strong enemies like deathclaws, high powered rifles, energy weapons, and explosives and even then, the suit parts should be damaged to "useless" before the person inside can be hurt. Like, if the right arm piece is all messed up from a grenade exploding nearby, then shots that hit you in the right arm would hurt you, but not anywhere since you still have full protection in other places.

I really hope this is the case in the stock game, but if not that's gonna be one of the very first mods I look for.

Good news, you will be immune to small arms fire.

but your dog wont be

That might actually be how it works; I don't remember if the raiders put a dent in our health bar during the E3 footage (but the Deathclaw sure did).

Wild speculation: maybe they bumped up the DR cap from 80% to 100%, and compensated by giving more weapons armor-piercing capabilities. Ballistics is just one type of resistance now, alongside energy resistance, so it may not be wildly imbalanced. That's probably definitely not how it works at all... but I have an idea for a mod now.

I'd love to see a source on that.

The deathclaw did take huge chunks of health, and I'm pretty sure I saw the player's health dropping slightly even to the raiders. Not much, almost negligible, but I saw it happening unless those drops were because all that footage was cut together from different plays of that same sequence.

Oh yeah, if the player doesn't take damage in some of that E3 footage, it's still no indication that's what it'll be like in the game. They probably recorded a lot of that with godmode on; you can see in some parts of the sequence that the Minigun doesn't actually consume ammo.

It may not be immune, but it will likely have the option to be incredibly resistant towards it.

But the dog is immune to death.

Meh in my book gameplay trumps lore any day, lore is a great spice, but like any other spice, its there to enhance the core flavour of good gameplay, but not overtake it.

Judging by what we seen so far in my book PA is looking good, any dmg the raiders made seamed minimal, so the PA is still doing its tank roll.

I hope we're not completely, Small arms should eventually be able to whittle down something... Especially because at some point, if you look at the footage, we will ourselves be fighting guys in power armor.

Armor has DR (Damage Resistance) that stops a percentage of all incoming damage, probably with a cap at 80 or 85 percent for balancing reasons. If power armor has a DR of 60% then you'll stop 60% of all damage from rockets, BBs, 9mm, whatever it is all the same. The only thing that will matter is DPS, a fast firing 9mm SMG will probably be more threatening and dangerous to someone in power armor than a .308 rifle.

This behavior in game annoys to no end. In FO3 the Power Armored PC can be shot to death by BB gun.

When envisioning whittling down, think Tank being bashed repeatedly by a baseball bat; which should be getting whittled? How many hits from a bat to dent a railroad track?

Power Armored infantry should be able to carry sawed off shotguns to clean their suits with; (as in clean off unarmored melee attackers in close quarters with each other.. To shoot wild and not care about friendly fire ~for being immune to bird shot).

Actually, I'd like to go the other way.

Make Big guns finally useful by requiring them as can-openers for power armor/vehicles.

You bring small arms against a power armor, it'll end in tears. Better bring a rocket launcher/heavy explosives as back-up.

Requires some minimal strategic thinking and shouldn't be too complicated.

This solves the loot-able power armor problem most elegantly I think.

Yeah, no. That kinda defeats the purpose of Power armor which is supposed to be a walking tank, literally.

Try shooting a 9mm at a tank in real life. I am sure you won't be able to "whittle" down anything, unless we're talking about a fresh paint job.

^Dis

The enemies in power armor should of course also be immune to low caliber damage.

The dog is immune to everything by default. He just gets winded every once in a while (just like probably all cNPC's).

What I'm thinking, a well placed bullet though should do damage I think. If they go that deep if bullets hit joints etc might do damage.....

Dog Power Armor DLC. Mark my words.

If I could, I'd give you guys all the thumbs up.

Thinking about how they overhauled Power Armor for the player character so that it behaves more like a vehicle than a general set of armor, and how we can put our own suit together, I'm actually betting the only NPCs we'll see in Power Armor are boss-tier ones.

In any case, I'm torn on whether or not Power Armor should resist anything 100%. Gameplay trumps realism; I think they could reasonably bump the cap up to 90% or 95% for Power Armor, but they don't need 100% immunity to small arms to make it a futile effort.

True, it doesn't need to be 100% but it makes so much more sense than a 9mil round punching a hole through 2 or 3 inches of armor. I could probably live with the PA itself taking very slight damage (no more than 5% and even that seems a bit much) from small arms fire but not the person inside, at least not until a section of the armor had been completely wrecked and rendered useless and even then, the only shots that should be able to hurt the person inside the armor are the shots that actually hit the damaged part of the armor, where the protection has breached.

Problem is, what about people who wants to rp characters that don't use that kind of weapons?

Too bad. Can't have it all.

Good thing Beth calling the shots then.