Ok, so my PA character is level 6 right now and I have just started the BoS quests (I actively sought out Cambridge so I could get it sooner rather than later), but I haven't used my PA much yet due to wanting to collect enough FCs (I think I only have one or two in my inventory currently). It's something I'll build up to, for sure. Nuclear Physicist, based on what you guys have been saying, sounds like a good perk to have overall, regardless of gameplay. If I want the most out of PA, i should make sure it lasts, otherwise it's a chore to go to DC to buy cores all of the time. I, personally, am a VATS user, so hopefully the AP use via VATS doesn't drain my FCs, just sprinting...

All AP usage drains cores faster, even VATS.

If you made it to Cambridge, between the Corvega plant all the way up to Sanctuary Hills, I can think of 6-8 guaranteed cores you can grab pretty easily.

They are -

1. Mole rat den beneath the Red Rocket near Sanctuary.


2. Robotic Salvage Yard east of Sanctuary (grab the holotape and self destruct the sentry bot for 2 FCs - stand back! and get a sweet flame paint job from inside the building by grabbing the magazine which gives your PA +1 Agility)


3. USAF Station Olivia - Only a few raiders and you can grab it out of the FC generator at the bottom (suit of random PA at a downed vertibird between it and the salvage yard).


4. Federal Ration Stockpile - Aboveground, facing away from the raiders. You can grab it without a fight if you're sneaky. There's a trailer on the western side of the compound with another partial suit of PA you can grab.


5. Super Duper Mart - Clear out the ghouls, grab the pile of supplies (get the magazine off the rack near the Pharmacy) and get the FC out of the generator in the back room.


6. Starlight Drive-In - There's a storage room behind the movie screen. It's a Novice lock to get into it. On one of the shelves is a full fusion core.

Just those should get you 7 FCs above what you got from the Museum of History.

Just remember to always check large indoor areas for fusion generators which may have an FC. Always look on the roof for those as well. If you see military vehicles, check every crate and ammo box nearby and you may find some.

Get a suit of +Charisma and carry it with you (Clean Black Suit, Black Rimmed Glasses, and a Militia Hat or Formal Hat is +4 Charisma) to get prices in your favor at vendors as much as possible. I suggest working out some way to make caps throughout the game. A lot of people recommend getting 5 industrial water purifiers set up in Sanctuary. You'll see 100+ purified water deposited in your workbench each day, which you can pull out and schlepp to a vendor and trade for Fusion Cores. I started small, and by constantly purchasing FCs with Purified Water and Jet, I have 270 cores at level 88 (meaning I've already burned through dozens).

Try to keep your VATS use to a minimum to start and you'll be fine. I didn't sprint much either in my early T-45. Don't act like you're invincible (the T-45 certainly isn't), but if you use cover intelligently, you'll find you are way harder to kill with conventional arms.

T-51 is about 20% more damage (at the same lettered variants) reduction than T-45 and is the most telling against the stronger things due to how DR works. Basically DR is compared to the incoming damage of the attack. For every one point of DR you have, you reduce 1 point of damage to .5 instead of 1. For each point above, you are giving additional, but diminishing lessened damage. If the damage exceeds the DR, then the 50% reduction in damage is lessened. The lower the damage of the hit, the higher percentage of damage is removed from the total. By making sure you only take glancing hits and are the edges of explosions instead of dead center, you'll gain the most from your armor.

In short, any power armor is good against small arms, like pipe weapons, and are nearly equally effective thanks to diminishing returns, but against heavier guns and stronger enemies, the stronger models will be needed to keep up with the incoming damage getting higher.

9 INT for nuclear physicist and scrapper and 10 STR for pain train and heavy weapons (best with gattling laser)

The most ridiculous heavy weapon I've ever used was a Minigun with Explosive Ammo and the Explosives Expert perk.

Like a portable, exploding blender you can point at people from long range.

That's a shame. I find it much harder to shoot enemies without VATS (hip-shots and down the sights) in this game than games that are labeled as FPSs, so I'd end up wasting more ammo in the long run if I refrained from using VATS. Plus weak spots on certain enemies which may not be easy to manually target in some cases. This is why I'd want my FCs to last longer, and have a collection of them.

And I'm assuming that to gain protection from rads or while underwater in PA, you have to have the helmet equipped as well? It's strange putting effort into making my character look a certain way and then never see his face in conversation scenes while in PA.

yes but I mean out of weapons that are not random legendaries for console players, I know on PC you can just spawn whatever weapon you want but for everyone else legendaries you want are hard to find.

I drop out of the PA for most conversations. Gotta show off my Minuteman General duds (with the +3 total Charisma).

The helm being removed doesn't stop you from going underwater, but does reduce the amount of time you can hold your breath (no recycled air). When it comes to rads or incoming damage, the only change is the value of the helm's DR being removed from your total (and taking a lot harder hits when it comes to head shots).

So if your helm is 200 DR (with a total DR for your character at 1100) and you remove it, you now only have 900 DR. That's the difference between 2-3 letter grades of upgrades. So... pretty significant. Also account for the fact that the helm is the second most armored piece of the suit (behind torso) due to the importance of it.

In short, I'd leave the helm on. Pop out of the PA for important (and safe) dialogs. When you do enough Railroad quests you can add Ballistic Weave to your favorite suit and look spiffy while not having to cart around combat armor to stay safe outside the PA.

My inventory after clearing out loot and rewards each evening looks like this out of the PA:

Missile Launcher

Gauss Rifle

Minigun

Super Sledge

Aid Item

Aid Item

Aid Item

Aid Item

General's Outfit

General's Hat

Glasses

Ammo

Ammo

Ammo

Ammo

Ammo

Ammo

Ammo

210/350 (with 500 carrying capacity in the armor).

I find inventory management to be pretty important with Power Armor, actually. Especially if you end up with heavy weapons as they weigh a freaking ton. Plus you need looooooooooooooooooooots of salvage and junk to upgrade your armor and mod it. So every pound of space is precious.

Which is why I suggest just a Charisma suit to be in when you pop out of it. if you want to wear actual armor underneath it (due to not having ballistic weave yet), then I suggest a suit of combat armor with the ultra light mod attached. Plus you have a higher AP pool when out of the armor, which is great for your VATS build. Makes most of the pieces weight around 1 pound.

Hope that helps. My current playthrough is 'All PA all the Time' starting with that T-45 in Concord, so I really went to the mattress to make sure I had the materials needed to make it work. I really loved getting into that first T-51 suit as it felt like such a big moment to finally upgrade.

Since I'm still so early on this playthrough, my character is currently wearing BoS Fatigues, Black Rimmed Glasses, and Military Cap (which simply looks good combined, and fits the background and mindset I imagined for this guy). And using Righteous Authority at the moment.

I scrapped all the non-essential stuff in Sanctuary and Red Rocket basically right away, so I got plenty of metal. I plan on hopping back into certain locations I already cleared out just to pick up the rest of the junk.

I guess another reason why wearing the PA helmet is a better idea is because it's the only way you can have a flashlight, I realized, so that's a bit of a letdown. But I'm not afraid to hop out of my armor if I need to.

TBH, I was just a lucky bastard and had it drop off a gunner. Playing on Very Hard I get a phenomenal amount of legendaries, so it was inevitable some were pretty good.

Sounds cool.

I also scrapped Sanctuary and Red Rocket to the foundations before even heading to Concord. It was nice being able to repair and lightly upgrade the T-45 right off the bat.

Just remember -- there's nothing wrong with playing it conservative to start. PA builds really start to blossom around 15-20 when they start getting into the various mods and upgrades on their armor and having enough perk points to get damage boosts on their primary weapon to match their level. That and T-51 or T-60 armor with the BoS. The early levels the armor is there to help you survive, and by high level the armor itself is the weapon with Pain Train and mods and bonuses that boost your ability to fight.

There is nothing more satisfying than shoulderblocking a supermutant off a skyscraqer.

I recommend getting scrapper 2, as repairing and upgrading PA can require a lot of ceramic, aluminum, and oil. Science, Armorer (obviously) and I recommend Strong Back. Even with the boost to strength you will want to horde components and being able to run and fast travel encumbered is reeeaaally nice.

Strong Back 4 is fun when you can delay looting until after everything in an area is dead. Load yourself down thoroughly, exit the building if necessary, then fast travel to Sanctuary, turn to your right (unless you moved the fast travel point) and then hit "Transfer' followed by "Deposit All Junk", then go right back into the field. I've dropped over 500 pounds of junk into the bench at once like that.

Yes there are lots of people who don't think the thief/assassin build is clever, who never use sniper rifles and don't use sneak for more than a few seconds at a time. I basically just use it for the 2x modifier on grenades or the first shots with the assault rifle, then ignore it for the rest of the battle.

Just don't bother with PA for melee/unarmed unless you want severely gimped damage. Max dmg unarmed PA with all perks was a huge disappointment considering how unarmed skewed the mods are. Takes 5x more punches to kill anything. Supersledge loses 100 dmg. Legendary gear > Power armor all day.

First, if you are going to compare the Unarmed damage in Power Armor to anything, it should be an Unarmed weapon.


Second, while I have heard that Unarmed damage in Power Armor is lower than with Unarmed weapons, to me, this is nothing more than a playstyle distinction. Unarmed weapons focus on making sure that your enemies die first, while Power Armor focuses on making sure that you die last.

Waitaminute. Let me see if I get this straight:

Same toon, using a melee weapon will do LESS damage while wearing PA than while not wearing PA?

That doesn't seem to make sense given that STR is the attribute for the melee perks (and is the attribute the modifies melee damage right?) and PA inherently boosts strength. Not saying it doesn't work that way, I haven't noticed; but if it does work that way it is badly designed, if not bugged.

What the heck is an "unarmed weapon?" If you are unarmed that technically means "you have no weapon" you are using "only your body (but especially hands, feet, teeth, elbows, knees, cranium) as a 'weapon'."

Fusion Cores shouldn't be a problem. I have been playing with a character who sometimes uses Power Armor, sometimes doesn't, and I have been taking them when I find them and I have about 40. I haven't bought many of them. For AP there are a couple of perks in Agility that lets your AP regenerate 25% and then 50% faster.

Ah yes, Action Boy... that's just a great perk to have in general, especially when level 3 Strong Back drains your AP while you collect more junk.

He's probably talking about getting legendary traited items that boost strength higher due to the collective bonuses than power armor can due to the lack of sufficient legendary items that are power armor capable of doing the same thing.

A full suit of PA (any model) with motion assist servos and either a Military or BoS paint scheme on it tops out at 14 Strength, because there are currently no legendary PA items that I am aware of that boosts strength beyond this..

If you can somehow get +1 Str/End legendaries for all six armor slots and have a base strength of 10, then use a bobblehead to increase that base to 11, you can top out at 17 without the power armor.

How many are available with those stats off vendors? 2-3? Something like that. Then it's luck on the rest.

Console commands can, of course, grant you the items you are looking for. Then again, console commands can attachmod the legendary traits to Power Armor, too, if you're comfortable with that route.

On top of that, the knuckles of your power armored fists are not as high damage as something like the Furious Power Fist that Swann drops, which cannot be equipped in PA. OTOH, we most certainly can equip a Super Sledge, and those do a rather prodigious amount of damage (and can stun with the right mod - which can be more deadly than any damage value).

So, yeah, you can pump up the numbers a bit higher outside the PA, but it's not easy to get the gear, and there is a fairly high durability dropoff. At the same time, if you're using mods or console commands to give yourself the equipment, why aren't you just attaching the legendary traits to the power armor pieces?

All of the above, though entirely discounts the additional damage from Pain Train. While, no, it doesn't work on robots or gargantuan enemies, it hits devastatingly hard, sends the enemy both flying, but putting them down on the ground, and can often lead to them being killed before ever getting up. When pumped up on chems, more than once have I just flat out killed people with shoulder blocks or by landing on them with Pain Train. You cannot do that outside of PA.

you guys I think that dog is talking to me O_O I have got to lay off the psyco jet and the Day Tripper.


Unarmed weapons are brass knuckles, boxing gloves, power fists, and the lovable Deathclaw Gauntlet

Why the heck did they decide to call them "Unarmed" "Weapons" total oxymoron . . . why not just "Fist Weapons" or "Fist/Paw/Claw" weapons?

@Asmodai: ah thanks for clarifying that. So arguably PA is a bit "underpowered" when it comes to melee or unarmed combat.

In my mod(s), I intend to:

1. Make it impossible to sneak in PA, and make the Stealth Boy module much more costly in terms of materials and fusion core use. With Stealth Boy running 1 100% fusion core should last maybe 50 seconds. The fact it is more-or-less an equally valid option to sneak in Power Armor as it is to sneak outside power armor is annoying to me.

2. Make Power Armor a more durable (30% across the board?), but also cost a LOT more to repair (300% across the board?)

3. Make the power armor frames lootable (sure someone has already done this) and (if they are not) make them degrade with damage (same for all armor and weapons)

4. Make Fusion cores about 50 times more expensive to buy from vendors.

5. Give a large boost to heavy weapons use while wearing PA (not sure the proportion). Maybe a 2x multiplier of current Heavy Weapons Perk? That way it gives a bonus only to characters who already have at least some Heavy Weapons perkage.

6. Make all clothing and PA effects stack.

Those were the ideas I had prior to reading this thread. And now I'm thinking that modding the effects on STR and/or melee might need to be considered? Actually just stacking clothing perk buffs with PA STR buff will accomplish that to a considerable degree.

At a more advanced level, making objects like cars throwable while wearing PA and with a sufficiently high aggregate STR would be neat. The ability to rip doors off of hinges and stuff like that would be very cool but I doubt I'd have the skill to ever implement something that complex, at least in the short term.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

ADDIT: actually tempted to imagine some kind of changes to use of scoped weapons while wearing power armor. Something just doesn't seem quite right about using a scoped weapon, or really, doing anything other than "shooting from the hip" while wearing power armor. it just doesn't seem right to be able to tilt one's head into one's shoulder enough to be able to effectively use a scoped weapon.

One idea that occurs to me that would achieve the overall effect I'm seeking (to make PA even "more powerful" but also simultaneously "more costly and constrained"): any use of "aimed firing" of a rifle in power armor depends on installing a (HIC) "HUD Interpolator/Calibrator" optics device onto the weapon. This would take the place of the standard optics (although mods that allow combination of CQB and long-range optics on one weapon would also be of interest to me) slot, and make the weapon less useful while not wearing power armor (hip fire only). The HIC would include "High tech gyros, spatial anolyzers and optical projectors . . ." which would make it possible to do both cheek aiming and scope aiming of the weapon while wearing power armor.

Pistols, missile launchers, and mini-guns would be the exception: with what the game calls "aimed firing" being available for all of them even without installing a HIC. To use scopes on pistols would however require a HIC be installed.

This seems like it will be a more complicated thing to mod, given it will change the user modes available depending on being in a Power Armor Frame or not, but I might try it.

because Hand 2 Hand was oblivion and marowind and they did not like it for some unknown reason so they changed it to confuse people.

One thing I will say about wearing PA so far on this toon...is that enemies know when you are wearing it. I was called "metal man" by a Raider just the other day.

PA does have extra options when it comes to melee.

Pain train and Jetpack + Vents into a battle can do healthy amounts of damage, plus pain train is amazing at CC.

More heavy weapons to go with PA will be SWEET once the weapons mod makers get rolling!

Has anybody used that "Vented Explosive Landing" mod or whatever it is called? I installed it and the Jetpack and played with it a bit, but found the Jetpack seemed rather stupid given it uses AP + fusion core instead of only fusion core, else fusion core + some other ammo source like flamer fuel.

That is another thing I'd consider changing: Add in a new type of ammo: "Jet Pack Fuel Cell." The ingredient for one might be: 2000 Flamer fuel + 100 Nuclear Material + a fusion core? The jet pack would run off of that entirely and one might provide enough fuel to stay aloft for a full minute? Maybe two minutes?

I have 19 str and 19 end. I get in pa with military paint +2 str, motion assist servos +2 str, all the mods whatever and my str drops to 15 and my dmg goes to [censored]. Supersledge goes from 270 +41 to 150+30. Unarmed in PA does less damage (200)than brass knuckles(250). I also lose a ton of hp from losing 7 end. So would you rather be doing, sprinting around high on drugs one shotting everything in slow motion or lumbering around getting shot in your expensive armoured baby-man machine while you feebly slap at a mirelurk? PA is good for exploring the lake bottom or jetpacking around but terrible for anything else.