Has anyone tried playing Dead Money with the Heartless perk to see if you still get poisoned by the gas cloud? I'm going to start a new character and play OWB and then go into Dead Money to find out. I'll post here when I'm done.

Its not poison. It just errodes everything it touches.

Yes, but when you're inside the gas cloud it specifically says on the pop up message that you're being poisoned.

Yeah, the cloud is a form of rust, hence the redness.

Just based on the programming complications and common sense, I seriously doubt that perk works against the cloud. There's a difference between a Cazador poison and a rust-polluted cloud eating away at you. The heart implant would probably filter out a poison like that of a cazador because the cazador poison goes into the blood stream directly. The Cloud however just eats away at you and gets into your lungs. No way the heart implant could filter that out.

Poison is versitile, in the effect that it can have two totally different meanings:

1.) Poison of the blood; the poison courses through the blood stream, with the capability of effecting every major organ in it's path.

2.) Poison of the flesh (for lack of better terms); the posion corrodes, or eats away, at whatever it touches, the most common form of this type of poison is an airborne solvent.


The perk only, or at least should only, effect Posion's of the blood, mainly because it's the heart, it moves the blood throughout your body, which makes sense for blood-rooted poisons to be filtered out. For something like the cloud to not effect you, you'd need some sort of filter for your epidermis and lungs, though, taking into account the nature of The Cloud, creating this would be virtually impossible.

The perk will not work against the Cloud.

Despite what the alert message tells you, the Cloud is not a poison; rather, it's a 'damage health' effect controlled via script and cannot be blocked or resisted in any way.

I thought much the same way the OP currently is after my first run through Dead Money, so I examined how the Cloud functions in the GECK and that's when I discovered this. By the way, a similar method is used for the constant damage effect that is active when hardcoe mode is on; however, the damage rate is much lower than that of the Cloud so +regen effects will actually be useful against it.