No matter what DT you have a certain amount of damage still gets through.
Example: You have 100 DT
The Enemys weapon does 100 DAM
You should negate it completely,but 20 DAM still gets through and hurts you.
To elaborate a bit:
If an attack would be completely blocked by your current level of DT, then 20% of that damage is applied anyway. If the attack exceeds your current level of DT, you take damage equal to the amount by which your DT is exceeded.
For example:
50 DT, attack of 50 = you take 10 damage
50 DT, attack of 60 = you take 10 damage
50 DT, attack of 75 = you take 25 damage
and so on.
Since PA has the highest DT values it blocks the most attacks, which means that the bleed-through effect has a disproportionate effect on its performance due to the sheer number of times it will apply. Where this gets ridiculous is in cases like the following,
50 DT, attack of 20 = you take 4 damage
50 DT, attack of 10 = you take 2 damage
which are common damage values for automatic weapons with high rates of fire. Sure, you're not taking much per hit, but there are a
lot of hits coming your way when facing these weapons and they add up quickly. Add in the fact you're usually outnumbered at least 3:1 in battles with NPCs, and it can get ugly rather quickly.
Removal of this effect enables PA to block almost all small-arms fire, in accordance with its design. High-tier weapons will still get through, as is
their design intent, so this change alone does not cause PA to make the wearer unstoppable. It's in considering the addition of DR where things get tricky; as it's applied before DT, even small (say, 10-15) amounts of DR can have a much greater effect than the numerical value would seem to indicate they should. Were the order of operations reversed it would be easier to assign appropriate levels of DR:
Current order- 50 DT, 20 DR, attack of 100 = you take 30 damage ((100*0.8)-50)
Reversed order- 50DT, 20 DR, attack of 100 = you take 40 damage ((100-50)*0.8)
As you can see, the second method would allow for higher levels of DR when reaching any given target point, thus you could actually give PA the values it's meant to have. As things are now, DR values above about 30 or 40 will break the game as far as combat is concerned if PA's DT is raised to 50 or more.
All of this being the case, I would prefer to see a revamp of the DT/DR system in LR rather than seeing more Power Armor; as that's not going to happen (they'd have to rewrite basically the entire combat engine), then I wouldn't object to a new suit of the stuff
provided it makes sense for the setting.