Do you use it?

Do you find it useful?

How do you like it?

I don't want to start a debate on whether Awarness is better or not than a damage increasing perk, thanks...I just wonder what people's experiences are with this perk.

Never used it. I wonder too.
I don't care what it is or what it's defenses are?
I'm pretty much going to ballistic it into the ground.

Actually, it's a fine perk. There are plenty of others that are far more useless. It may mean more if you are playing on the harder modes. Knowing which type of weapon will do more damage can be the difference between your enemies being defeatable ammo sponges or invincible ammo sinks.

I like it.

If I know which weapon will kill the fastest: win...

But there are only so many types of enemies, so it looks like before long you would just "know" what enemies are resistant to what kinds of damage and Awareness loses all its usefulness entirely. Plus, I'm not sure I want to do the math to determine whether my ballistic rifle with massive damage bonuses (Two Shot, sneak attack, Psycho, etc) would be more or less effective than an unmodded bare-bones laser rifle that does less damage but to which the foe is more vulnerable.

Like, say the foe is 50% resistant to ballistic. I do 300 points of ballistic damage (making up numbers)... he would only take 150pts... but my laser weapon only does 100 pts of damage. He has no resistance to lasers, but I still only do 100pts of damage, so even though he is more vulnerable to lasers, the ballistic weapon would still be the preferred choice. I'm not eager to do math 'on the fly' like that, so I'll likely just stick with my favorite weapons. In which case, knowing the vulnerabilities of a foe becomes pointless.

I would imagine its also highly useful with Charisma's intimidation/whisperer perk that depends on you being a higher level.

I think it's a really good perk for an early game sneak-build player. Sniping with an ineffective weapon blows your cover, and if you get caught at close range, you want whatever you shoot with to work fast.

Getting info on damage resistance is useful to some degree, but with human enemies you can easily determine that already based off of what they're wearing. Leather armor means energy resistant, metal means ballistic and so forth. One should already know this info if they have ever worn armor. The perk is already unnecessary for half the enemies in the game. As for every other enemy, well, just use common sense. Radiation damage is obviously not effective towards everything that isn't human, poison to radscorpions, robots are weaker to energy, etc. But even then, these are resistances that are very specific to only certain enemies. Most take damage from ballistic as much as they do with energy regardless. And honestly, in how many combat situations do we actually consider how resistant an enemy is to a specific damage type anyway, and how much of a difference did that consideration make? We're just going to shoot them regardless with whatever weapon has the highest damage and it won't matter how resistant they were. So why bother knowing the specific numbers behind it?

When it comes to allowing you to see what level an enemy is, the game already tells you when an enemy is a significantly higher level when there is a skull next to their name. Besides that, you should be able to tell how dangerous an enemy is just by looking at them. If it's a mole rat, kick it aside. If it's a Deathclaw, be wary. Simple as that. Only use I see in seeing their level is knowing what you can intimidate with the Intimidation perk.

So in my opinion, the perk is far from essential, but not necessarily a good enough convenience to have either.

Missle launcher kills everything.

All joking aside, I see it as a useful perk for a sneaky rifleman type character. It's probably a good idea to have a good energy weapon and good ballistic weapon on you all the better if you know exactly when to use it.

It's one of those perks that become less useful as you gain power. I guess it's still somewhat useful, but the information is certainly less important to surviving any particular engagement.

How many RPGs have an "anolyzer" kind of perk/item like this? It's always a convenience, never essential. Personally I wish it also told us their exact amount of health, but whatever, I still think it's worth a perk point.

I thought long and hard about getting it and only at the last minute realized that I only ever carry around ballistic weapons, so I could never exploit a particular weakness anyway.

On a replay, I could see it being useful for a scrounger-type character who didn't make his own mods or build settlements. Making each shot really count would be important to that setup, and ammo would be a problem early on which would encourage carrying multiple backup weapons.

The Awareness perk of the original games was actually quite specific with its information, from telling the exact hit points of the enemy, the weapons they possessed, their wounds, etc. And although part of the reason why it was so useful in that regard was because the limited visuals of those games, it was still an actually useful convenience, if not more than just a convenience in how helpful it was with showing the specific hit points.

The perk in Fallout 4, where it just shows damage resistances that are not only easy to determine already through just looking at the enemy, but also don't matter in the first place, it sort of fails at being even a convenience you would want.

Not saying one game did it better than the other, its just that this kind of perk or ability has become unnecessary in modern RPGs. To the point all it can do is show specific damage resistance numbers you didn't need to know anyway.

I tried it on my first run-through, but I definitely fell under Sorpaijen's statement. I always had a ballistic weapon of a type (pistol, shotgun, or rifle) that out-damaged any equivalent energy weapon so much that the resistances didn't really matter. Granted, if I'd invested in Gunsmith and Science equally, things might have been different, but Science was a bit out of my character's reach. Not to mention that the character definitely wasn't a scientist, RP-wise...

Thanks for all comments so far. I agree it's probably more useful for early level gameplay or play on higher difficulties, but of course it's purely optional to choose.

Personally I chose that perk but had to re-load after 1 hour since I'm usually playing a rifleman/gun-character anyway, and found most of the info uneccessary for me. Of course I knew this beforehand, but had to give it a try, just out of curiousity.

Actually I felt that all the info took away some of the mystery of travelling the Commonwealth; I'd rather not know that that ghoul is only level 3...I just imagine my char has grown super-powerful I found I prefer to leave some mystique about my enemies power. I also found it a bit distracting to have all the numbers on the screen instead of only their name and red health bar, when all I really wanted to do was to just finish off the enemy. I already have VATS to tell me how much damage I'm going to do, and that red skull over their head if they are way above my level.

I might choose it again if I up the difiiculty later, though. Maybe it would be a more attractive perk to choose if I could easilty turn on and off the Awareness info in the Pip-Boy or in-game menu.

A couple of good high damage shotgun blasts to the knee, esp if legendary weapon drop that does additional limb damage, and I do not care what your resistance is, you are going down!

That is how I make my Fallout 4 Wasteland livin'.......knee capping fools!

Yeah, there's that...