So I took another look at the E3 presentation, and I noticed http://puu.sh/iCuHN/827f84eaf2.jpg, specifically http://puu.sh/iCvVr/d5e2ae91b8.jpg, and also http://puu.sh/iCuNm/8188a6a0b1.jpg.

From that, it seems Fallout 4 will make the distinction between physical and energy damage, not only in how they are influenced by perks, but also how they are dealt and mitigated.

Some weapons seem to be dealing only one source of damage, and others a bit of both.

At the same time, armour seems to provide resistance against those both types of damage, although all types of Power Armour shown have higher physical than energy (energetic?) resistance.

So maybe this is Bethesda's way of mixing it up for the enemy types, with some sporting heavy armour being more vulnerable to energy damage, while lightly or unarmoured foes could be weaker against solid projectiles.

Plasma weapons, or generally mixed damage type weapons could provide good all-rounder weapons. Not to mention possible vulnerabilities of synthetic enemies etc.

Furthermore, some armour might offer more of an advantage against certain factions, if said factions are known for overly relying on one particular type of weapon.

It could also mean that they want us to use both energy and solid projectile weapons, which might tie in with the removal of skills, which will maybe not allow us to specialize in a particular weapon category AS MUCH as before.

I haven't seen this mentioned in the latest discussions, so I thought I'd just leave this here. Maybe I'm just wa-a-aaay too late one this and it's already an old hat, who knows^^

edited for typos

I hope so.

That DR system in FO3 is garbage.

True enough^^
Here's to hoping we get a little more subtlety.

That is absolutely epic.

I have not seen a thread on this yet. This is amazing. Very good job bringing this to my attention.

I really like this idea and this would make preparing for battles much more interesting. Also, not relying on the same weapon the whole time your're playing seems great as well.

Yeah, I liked the way damage was handled in NV much better than 3. I mean, seriously, in 3, you could kill a man wearing powered armor with a .22 pistol, when in all reality, you could fire thousands of rounds, and just scratch the paint a bit.... the guy inside may not even notice.

NV has this exact same problem.

In fact, it actually has it worse then Fo3 because of how DT works making PA not offer any more damage negation then even stuff below combat armor.

Um, no. If you didn't do enough damage to get past the damage threshold, you didn't do any damage. PA also had a alot more health than any other flavor of armor.

Um, yes.

Kinda incorrect there, if you could not crack an enemy's DT it still got 20% of the damage pushed through so when faced with slow burst damage DT was great but against high fire rate average-weak hits it could tear through still.

This actually worries me a little bit. Here's why. For those of you that played games like Dark Souls, you know that split damage is weaker because you have two different resistances acting upon it. For weapons that would likely have both energy weapon and ballistic weapon damage (like the Gauss Rifle, my favorite gun ever), it might be inferior to a weapon that should by all rights be weaker (like a sniper rifle). All speculation, of course.

That'd be pretty cool. I always though that they were going to stay with the simple single damage type and just alter the methods of mitigation or avoidance. Having multiple damage types could make for interesting choices and customisations for various armours and weapons.

That's a really good point. They would need to actually make the total damage dealt by mixed type wepons quite a bit higher to account for the double reduction.

In what we see with the Power Armour from the showcase, with both resistances being pretty close to one another, that would mean that mixed type weapons with the same base damage would be less effective.

They'd have to change something to how DR/DT works in order for it to work properly, and I'm not sure they're thinking that far ahead...

Exactly. If it's a flat percentage, then it's fine. But if it's the DT system? That could be trouble. I loved the DT system, but it had its flaws, namely that it made slow, high damage weapons preferable to, say, automatics because autos did next to nothing against anything with any armor. Now, it may end up affecting both autos and certain high damage weapons, making weapons like an antimateriel rifle preferable to a gauss rifle.

So what would you propose?
A return to damage how it was dealt in the first installments, with mixture of DT and DR?

If we get something akin to DT, maybe only the weaker resistance blocks damage until it goes thourh, with the rest of the damage, mixed or not, being dealt?

I'm a bit conflicted on this, because I don't see how they could make this properly balanced in a logical and easily understandable way, without making it too comlex for people to understand...

I always regretted that single damage builds were so superior in DarkSouls compared to combined damage types.

You've got trust that they will balance it. Say a Laser Pistol does 5 En.Dam. 10mm Pistol does 5 Bal.Dam. then the Plasma Pistol would do 2.5 En./Bal.Dam. This way it does a total of 5 Dam. same as the other 2 pistols. If you're shooting an enemy in scant armor, such as a Raider or Super Mutant, it will probably do full damage, excluding their natural resistance. Now the thing that makes mixed Dam. weapons more effective here is that some enemies will be in Leather which we can assume absorbs more En.Dam. so your Laser Pistol is going to be ineffective, but you've majored in Energy Weapons so your 10mm Pistol is ALSO ineffective. This is a great opportunity to whip out that shiny new Plasma Pistol and blast that guy to smitherines with the associated Bal.Dam.

So I went through a few examples just to see how different damage and resistance types might work, and here are some thoughts on the situation:
I'm going to use the same colour coding as Robotoh above, with the addition of orange used to refer to mixed damage in general:

For my examples, I'm using a Laser Pistol, a 10mm Pistol and a Plasma Pistol, giving them all a total damage of 10, meaning respectively 10 Energy, 10 Physical, and 5 Energy + 5 Physical damage.

If we use a system relying on DT like in Fallout New Vegas:
Against different armours possessing 5DT En, 5DT Phys, and 2,5 DT En + 2,5DT Phys respectively.

Then the the single damage weapons always outperform the Plasma pistol: while the plasma pistol does a steady 5 dmg, mixed or otherwise, the other weapons can go anywhere from 5 to 10 damage.

I then assumed assymetrical DTs for armour, like 3DT Phys. + 6DT En. ; 6DT Phys + 3 DT EN ; and in-between the two 4DT Phys + 4 DT En

In this scenario, Plasma wepons are completely outperformed, dealing vastly inferior damage in every case, sporting a sub-par 2 dmg in every category, while the other weapons ranged from 4 to 7 damge.

A fix for this situation would be to multiply the total damage dealt by Plasma weapons by 1.5, which would then in every case, put them in-between the damages for either purely physical or energy type weapons, meaning a range of 7,5 to 10 in the first example, and a range from 6 to 7 damage in the second example. This would put Plasma weapons a bit above middle-ground, giving them a damage output in-between what can be achieved by either Physical or Energy weapons, while being a tiny bit better against armour with equally distributed DTs. However this would only work for DTs that would soak up around 50% of an incoming shot. With damages per shot vastly surpassing the DTs of different armour, Plasma weapons would become vastly superior to any other weapon out there, simply because the DT wouldn't be able to block enough of the damage, and Plasma/mixed damage weapons woud then have up to 1.5 times more damage than any other pure damage weapon. On the other hand, Plasma weapons would become ridiculously weak against armour with high DTs in both categories, as for example Power Armour. This would, without further tweaks, make mixed damage type weapons the best single shot weapons by far, while making them pretty bad for rapid fire weapons. Either way, the balancing of different types of damage and mixed damage is quite difficult with a DT based system.

If however we assume a system based DR like Fallout 3:
Assuming a DR of 60% for either only Energy, only Physical, and both damage types, then again Plasma does more damage than a poorly chosen weapon, and exactly the same amount of damage than either against armour possessing equal DR for both types of damage.

With assymetrical DR, meaning 60% Physical and 80% Energy or the other way around, then Plasma lies again in the middle ground, dealing always more than a poorly chosen weapon, but less than the optimal one.
All in all, a system based on DR would allow to place mixed damage weapons in between Laser- and Physical-based weapons, allowing for an easier balance of power levels.

And with a system using both DT and DR... well I haven't come to that just yet, since I'd need to compare DPS and Damage per shot etc.
Obviously, balancing with a combined system plus different damage sources will be quite tricky, having to deal with mixed damage types going from sub-par to grossly over-powered, and the balancing of DR.

tl;dr: Mixed type weapons COULD work with a DT based system, but would require quite a bit of balancing for the weapons not to be either underwhelming or too powerful.

The system is most easily applied to a DR-based damage system, with all the disadvantages such a system entails (meaning DPS becoming the determing factor for weapon power).
In consequence, we might see a return to a DR-based damage system in Fallout 4, since it would be easier to integrate different damages and damage resistances.
I will not discuss which system would be better game-play-wise, or if a hybrid system would be best, since the pros and cons of DR vs DT are being discussed thoroughly in other threads.
All this of course does not account for possible perks and how they will modify damage, so keep that in mind.
I'm just excited they decided to mix it up some and allow what might even become tactical combat and preparation.

Edited for typos