I already modified the service rifle in my game to have a bit more damage, and it made a decent difference (but not overpowered). I'm not sure about RoF vs. lower dmg tho, the only time I messed with that was when making a separate twink rifle for Boone once.


But you can use ammo piercing with the service rifle.

Yes, the changes make it sound like NCR will be buffier....and it's possible it'll work out that way. But all I can say is that my own minor tweaking experiments + watching what happens with Increased Spawns makes me doubt that the minor change to service rifles actually entails a "NCR buff." (reg. NCR NPC's, for example, do not use ammo piercing) The regular NCR were already weak when it came to encounters with other NPC's, particularly Legion.

The NCR troopers will still be one shot kills with a trail carbine. Even a 16" naval rifle won't do them any good since it'll be impossible to shoot it once.

:rofl:
Yeah, exactly. In terms of player vs. NPC, none of these changes are going to make NPC's much harder than they currently are in the vanilla game. Slightly more challenging here and there perhaps, if they can do more dmg. to you, but first they have to hit you...

...I should also be fair and say that my feelings about weapon difficulty/tweaking experiments are likely a bit skewed since I play on Very Hard, which changes things a bit. I don't test on Normal.

The Legion, to show their toughness and training, should have some sort of inherent +5 DR, and the Veterans should use Trail Carbines, Fire Axes, etc.

I thought that gun was cool the way it was. I m not trying to harp on this patch, I just don t understand why they would do all this when the could have raised a lot of the NPCs stats.

I'm glad that That Gun got buffed a little bit (increase dmg but drop rof.) It fires a 5.56 rd. and is a one of a kind "unique" weapon in this game that costs a bundle. It should never, ever, be out classed by a bottom tier revolver. I also feel that the buff makes up for it not qualifying as a concealable weapon while the 10mm pistol and .357 revolver does. Hell, even with the long barrel the .357 gets thru.

Just my opinion.

I hope.......they have like 48 gun skill and a service rifle that is on the fritz. I woould just have liked to see them get 68 gun skill and a 3 quarter repaired weapon. Rangers should have 82 gun skill vet rangers should have 95 IMO. bos and enclave 90 - 100 ew

Then you d need to watch out

Yes to the bugs statement.....

CL hits me with cr I lose 4hp vet legionaire hits me with cr I lose 12hp

I look at their guns they have l< that much life in them.. I fully beleive weapon condition totaly means something to NPCs

It's been a while since I played with this kind of stuff, but I believe FlyingBuddha is correct about armor.

Weapons are a little different...companions will consider weapon condition in terms of equipping it themselves. However, I'm not sure non-companion NPC's do this. My understanding based on what I've read/seen is that NPC's weapons are in full condition when they start, but when the die, they're altered to be in a certain minimum low condition when you loot them. (if you've also caused damage to the weapon from your gunfire, the weapon will be further damaged/in even lesser condition) If this is the case, it's probably done to prevent the player from easily gaining tons of full-repaired weapons just by one-shotting NPC's. In short, if you're "looking at" npc weapons by looting their corpses, that's not indicative of what condition it's in when actually being used by the NPC. Edit: If you're looking at weapons via targeting them in VATS, and they're in bad repair before you've ever taken a shot at them, that could mean something different. I don't use VATS so I don't notice/remember if that's possible.

As to whether damaged weapons = lesser fire damage via NPC, I'm not sure. I think it might for companions (emphasis on might, they could just be scripted to reject low condition weapons while still doing full dmg with weapons above that point), but not sure about base NPC's.

Ok I hunted around the GECK and think I found the parameters for NCR troopers...their inventory "loot" is definitely rigged where the weapons as "loot" will be degraded by 30-60 percent. I can't yet figure out whether they're actually in such condition when being initially used by the NPC itself tho. Going to run a couple tests if I can make them work...

I am not sure if it is a buff after all. When I use That Gun, I just unload all rounds quickly, knowing by the time I train on another target the gun is full, while Lucky I can't really do it.

Besides, I doubt the patched version would pack more punch than a .44 Magnum

Overall I am liking the changes. Lever Rifles needed a nerf. 308 JSP needed a nerf. I would have liked the DAM for the Sniper Rifle to go up a bit.

Explosives needed a boost. I am just hoping that it is a big boost and they fixed the problem where the DAM for a direct hit was not applied except in VATS. Also, hope they increased the range. If not a mod will do.

And EW changes sound good.

As for wanting major gameplay changes - eh, it is a patch. I would not expect some big undertaking to make the game harder. The game was designed to be easy and it is. Now MODS can change the design.

I dont expect games to be hard, but neither easy, but challenging

Throw a fully repaired one on the ground and shoot them, that may tell you if they want better conditioned guns. losing 12hp from a vet legionaire cr on hard hardcoe tell me that there weapon is junk. Also thier low amount of return fire tells me this as well.

*tosses hands* - npc's in VATS do show the "loot" condition status, but in terms of dmg, without a console command to see weapon dmg listed for npc's (like we can see for us when we hover over a weapon) it's too difficult to tell via debug text. I gave Boone a damaged 10SMG and when he shot giant fireants his 1 hit dmg would be 8 (close to expected w/the damaged smg), which seems about right. But he also did crit- dmg numbers that seemed kind of high & fluctuated more oddly than I see typically see w/fully repaired weapons. Dunno, math eludes me.

Also, if you use the getav console command, it does show companions as having a lowered DT while wearing damaged armor. So either the DT that the console shows is inaccurate/not applicable for companions & it's like FlyingBuddha said, or it actually does have an effect. Hm. Ah well, doesn't really matter much anyway. Idle curiosity killing the cat's time...


I might try that later for kicks. It's a decent point. I think I did once see a NCR trooper pick up a badly damaged flamethrower and use it, but I have no idea if it was a preference/more damage thing or if his own weapon was destroyed so he went for it.

Is no one else disappointed that the Plasma Caster didn't get an accuracy boost? I sure am, was hoping for the spread to drop down to 0.2 or at least 0.3.

7.62x54R is pretty much equivalent to .308, aka 7.62x51. And it ain't modern, it was state-of-the-art back when Russians referred to their leaders as the Royal Family.
And I wouldn't say "only" for .308. It's a hell of a cartridge.

No it is fine the way it is IMO. Followers use it well in doors lol

Frankly, I don't know. My first (and only so far) energy weapons character was more of a sniper build. I didn't use any of the energy heavy weapons. My current PC is using energy and just picked up the caster last night. The way my playthrough is progressing, I'm not sure if I'll see any heavy combat soon, but when I get the chance I'll give it a real good spin to see how it is. Plasma weapons are usually kinda spotty for me anyways, since I rarely use vats, but maybe it will surprise me.

I do think the patch has helped me make up my mind about my next PC. It looks like another explosives run might be interesting. My last one focused on the grenade lauchers, but I can see a missle laucher/demolition build in the works soon. Maybe that would be a good focus for my "mid-life crisis milquetoast" character. He can get a sense of self-esteem by the use of powerful explosives.

-gunny out.

gunny, If your guy doesn t have high str and ew it shoots sraight up at the ceiling lol Cass is a beast with in doors, so I would figure arcade gannon would seriously crush people with it.

what do they mean when they say the assault carbine will be more accurte across the board?

Accurtzy means how good a weapon puts the projectile on the point that you put the sights. :hubbahubba:

Seriously, though, what Jason means is that the number in the GECK, spread, which governs just how far the projectiles of any weapon radiate out from the boresight line will be reduced significantly "across the board", which means it will apply to all fully automatic weapons, eg: SMGs, MG, etc... In gameplay layman's terms this means that more of the bulllets you shoot from these guns will actually fly straight and hit what you're aiming at, rather than magically fly off sideways and only waste ammo. Got it?

-Gunny out.

yep, thanks