I heard a claim on one of my mods' comment pages that apparently DT is weighed against weapon damage before any ammo damage multipliers are applied. Curious, I did a test.

http://img405.imageshack.us/img405/5331/dttest1meetmrbackstop.jpg. Note that I SetAV'd his Damage Threshold to 115.

http://img138.imageshack.us/img138/9486/dttest2meetmrgaussrifle.jpg Note that I currently can do 115 damage with it.

http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/6893/dttest3controlshotstdmf.jpg. I aimed at Mr. Backstop's torso, which has a damage multiplier of 1x (IE: unaltered). Note the Red Shield, indicating full "nullification" of the damage (a little always gets through).

http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/5733/dttest4aloadedwithmaxch.jpg, now indicating it's loaded with Max Charge cells. Note the boosted damage, now at 201.

http://img44.imageshack.us/img44/5353/dttest4bmaxchargeselect.jpg, also showing I have MaxCharge cells loaded, and also the expected effect to damage: 1.75x.

http://img811.imageshack.us/img811/3053/dttest5notpenetratingdt.jpg. Note that there is still a Red Shield. Despite apparently doing 201 damage, I did not penetrate DT, which I should have by a margin of 86 damage, which is more than enough to remove any "close call" margin of error in calculations.

My tests hold the claim that damage multipliers mean nothing to damage before reduction due to DT to be true.

While this is not an issue for Hollowpoint rounds for guns, which are already not meant to be used against armor, this effectively shows that Energy weapons are nerfed by a bug, since there's no way to overcome DT by loading heavier-charged ammo.

These screenshots are unaltered from their raw BMPs with the sole exception of being JPEG-compressed.

Thank you for your testing. This is very interesting (and depressing; but interesting).

While this does make it so that energy weapons svck even more, it's also a good thing since it allows you to create weapons that deal high damage to flesh even though they svck against armor (or deal really low damage to flesh even though they easily penetrate armor). See GURPS wound modifiers and armor divisors for another example of how this works well.

*wth? this has happened twice now.*

Haha! OC/MC ammo is broken it seems. Almost makes me happy after my beloved lever action weapons where taken away from me on PC.

In my opinion, Obisidian messed up severely when it comes to energy weapons.

Again it's just my opinion please don't flame me for it.

A "good thing" would be if we had the option of reversing the order of operations on ammo types: damage bonus first, or DT reduction first. For munitions which are meant to out and out do more damage, damage bonus should be first, while DT reduction first should only be for munitions which are disproportionately affected by armor.

It's not bugged. It's just that the formula is applied differently. Any additional damage you get because of ammunition is added AFTER Damage Threshold is subtracted.

Let's say a gun does 100 damage per shot, and is loaded with ammo or cells that say increases damage by 50%. This does not necessarily mean the gun will do 150 damage each shot.

If a target had a DT of 20, it will be subtracted from the shot, doing 80 damage instead, and THEN the damage bonus is applied, which for our example would be 40 more because it was reduced to 80, for a total damage of 120.

The fact that the weapon readout in the Pipboy lists a higher damage indicates that it is a bug.

Okay, I will grant you it's either the readout that's bugged or simply misleading. Otherwise, here's what I suggest you do:

Set Mr. Backstop's HP to 100, then set his DT to 65
Do a "control shot" with normal ammo. His health bar should be half gone.
Now heal him back up to 100 HP. Put overcharged cells into your gun.
Shoot Mr. Backstop again and most (87.5) of his hit points should be gone.
If his hit points only drop halfway again, then I will concede that you are right and I am wrong.

EDIT: I also believe the Living Anatomy perk will give you an exact numerical count of how many HPs he has left - but I've never taken the perk before.

My test was not on the game balance ramifications of this problem, my test was to ascertain that it existed.

I can already surmise that whatever base pre-MaxCharge-multiple damage overcomes the DT will be multiplied.

However, this doesn't really affect guns that do as much sheer damage as the Gauss Rifle (seriously... what out there would have enough DT to significantly impede a Gauss shot?). the problem is small guns. Load Overcharge Small E-Cells into your laser pistol to overcome the armor of low-level legionnaires? Not happenin'. You're now wasting even more cap value in ammo on your target.

Even worse problem... You encounter a Giant Radscorpion. Your plasma rifle's barely denting it, so you load up some Overcharge MF cells to do just a little more damage. Except that you don't because you're still seeing the little red shield.

Even if you're barely overcoming DT by, say... 4 damage (lessay 20 plasma rifle damage vs 16 DT). You load up Overcharge cells, and you're now doing... woo, 5 damage. :glare: And now you're wearing your gun out half again as fast, all for one piddly point of damage.

If it worked as advertised with the damage listed in the PipBoy, we'd be doing 9 damage after the DT got its cut.

That is a problem, but it would also make me think that Guns ammo multipliers work the same way, no? Not the -DT modifiers, but stuff like JSP Hand Load should be similarly affected.

Yes I realize and I was a bit disappointed when I realized my Sniper Rifle wasn't doing the advertised 90 base damage instead of 60 base damage due to the hand-loaded ammo I was using, too. But my first thought was: "The damage display is misleading" as opposed to "ammo damage multipliers are bugged." Because we can't know for sure if the developers intended it this way unless J.E. Sawyer himself shows up in these forums again and reads your post, and then responds.

I don't believe it's a bug because of my knowledge of how firearms work in real life, and granted Fallout has never adhered strictly to reality but in New Vegas they at least give a nod to it given the way Damage Threshold intereacts with the base damage of a gun. In the case of damage multipliers, let's take my own hand-loaded ammo for example: hand-loaded .308 JSP (jacketed soft point). The implication for hand-loaded rounds is that you put more gunpowder in the casing, which means when the bullet is fired it's going to travel at a faster velocity and therefor do more damage when it hits the target, hence the +50% damage bonus. However, the tip is also "soft", meaning that if there is armor strong enough the bullet is just going to flatten up against the armor and not penetrate, which in Fallout's case would represent the damage subtracted from the base before the remainder is affected by the damage multiplier.

Given how much Sawyer talked about his knowledge of real-life firearms and all the loving research and attention guns got in New Vegas leads me to believe this is what they intended. I will agree with you that the display is either bugged or just plain misleading (which they could have done for the sake of simplicity), but I hate to burst your bubble and say that I don't think it's a genuine bug with the way ammo damage multipliers themself are supposed to work.

I don't follow? 4 damage +75% would add 3 for a total of 7 damage?


I still don't follow? 75% of 20 is 15. 20+15=35. 35-16 (DT) = 19 damage?

EDIT: Oh I see where I got confused. I got "max charge" mixed up with "overcharge"

Anyhow, thinking on it now, I can understand why the PipBoy damage is misleading: The PipBoy has no idea WHAT you're going to shoot at, so it assumes an unarmored target.

@MadCat221

Want too see something that'll really annoy you. Land a sneak attack with a brush gun firing HP ammo on Mr. Backstop. Something is forked with the way DT is being applied.

It's still a major kick in the nuts for energy weapon users though. Thanks to you I can now understand why it works like that, but from a gameplay balance perspective it's insane.

Energy Weapons may svck in NV, but I'll mod it, that way they can be useful. In lore they'll always have a place by my heart.

Which is all well and good for bullets and their realism. There is no basis in realism for energy weapons as they're portrayed in the Fallout universe (if it were, plasma weapons would be absolutely useless against the all-ceramic Advanced Power Armor Mk2 in FO3). So we're left with gameplay considerations. And with the setup it has now, energy weapons get the short end of the stick again, since there's no ammunition alternative that adds the whopper -15 DT that armor piercing bullets have.

Also, I said Overcharge in my example, not maxcharge. Overcharge has 1.25x.

It does exactly that. It shows HP bars and a numerical HP:xx DT:xx readout in red.

Hmm well I can 2 shot regular deathclaws non critical with a fully repaired YCS/128 with MC Macrofusion Cells on x360 normal difficulty. Dunno how that compares to your theory though

Alternatively, I can use the console command "GetAV health".

Which reveals that both the Maxcharge and Standard shots reduce Mr. Backstop's health from its max of 720 to the residually damaged value of 697.20. I don't even get a Maxcharge multiplier on it.

The conclusion I have is still "Damage multipliers are bugged in regards to DT".

This I can agree to. Perhaps the devs, instead of giving it a damage multipler alone, should have mixed in a -DT effect with coupled with a damage multiplier for maxcharge/overcharge ammo?

Nice argument, though it makes my brain hurt.

You can already do this by adding a corresponding DT modifier as well as the damage modifier. If you want a weapon to penetrate 175% of normal DT as well as do 175% more damage after DT, apply a DTx(1/1.75) modifier (multiply DT by 0.57) as well as the damage multiplier.

Critical hits really do weird things to the numbers. I was just trying out sneak attacks. Using a 9mm pistol (12 damage) against a target with a DT of 10: using ball ammo the sneak-attack-critical damage was about 36, and using hollow points it was about 12. (???)