1. No enemy should ever be irrelevant, that just destroys game balance.

2. DR systems do have mixed enemy types, and because DR actually forces weapons to be used in specialized situations, unlike DT, it makes mixed groups far more lethal.

3. Except DR isn't magical, its far closer to how armor actually works then DT. A giant sheet of 3inch thick steel will resist everything from a 10mm to an AMR far more then a leather suit, which is what happens in DR. In DT however, both leather and steel are treated as resisting everything the same.

4. The math above disagrees.

No, it doesn't. Game balance has nothing to do with this.

Why is weapon specialization particularly important?

Except your anology is nonsense because you can get needled to death by submachine guns that logically shouldn't have any penetrative effect under that system, which is actually not actually acting like armor at all, just magic.

Also, why do you keep talking like I didn't say bleedthrough should be removed?

-It does actually. Once you make low level enemies totally negate-able, you lose out on several gameplay possibilities, such swarm tactics that are commonplace, and deadly in many situations to even the best of armored foes.

-Because this is am RPG, and your choices should come with consequences and drawbacks. When you remove weapon specialization, you remove all point in having multiple weapon skills, as everything becomes equal in all situations.

-By that logic the NCR shouldn't have been able to beat the BoS at Helios one with their greatly under supplied soldiers.......yet they did, by swarming the hell out of them, and burying them under a torrent of attacks from rather [censored] weapons, which eventually managed to add up and crumple the BoS's armor.

Newsflash: we don't have multiple weapon skills now.

True, but we likely have multiple weapon perks. Like gun nut now effects regular guns, while the SCIENCE perk effects energy weapons, and melee damage is still STR controlled.

Same effect in the end.

Those govern crafting by all appearances, not damage. In Agility's perks all I see is Gunslinger and Commando so it's 1 v 2-handed, nothing else.

And we haven't really seen them to know their full extent either.

Regardless of if there are weapon skills/weapon specific perks or not, the specialization that DR creates is still there.

-Low dam/high DPS weapons, like the minigun, and scatter shot weapons, like the shotgun, are useful against the swarm of unarmored/low armored enemies like basic ghouls/raiders one faces.

-Medium dam/medium DPS weapons, like assault rifles and machine guns, are good for general combat against armored foes.

-High dam/low DPS weapons like the single shot rifles, are sniper weapons used for general high crit rate/sneak attack crits.

-Things like grenades and mines can be used against large swarms of unarmored/low armored enemies with great effectiveness. However, when facing more heavily armored enemies, one has to plant mines beforehand, and cant simply spam grenades, as the enemy will close the distance into the zone where you would take damage from those items before you can kill them with just grenades or mines.

DR makes weapons work only in specific ways/situations, forcing the player to actually have to make choices about what kind of weapons they are going to use, which of the various situations they are going to cover, how much of their inventory they are going to waste keeping all these weapons at once, how many points they want to put in each kind of weapon skill, etc. etc.

DT on the other hand makes basically everything that does even a moderate amount of damage work in all situations equally, destroying any sort of specialization, or need to think about what weapon you are going to use.

-Mines and grenades? DT resists so little of their damage you can just spam them without thinking and easily kill your opponent before they can get close to you!

-Low DPS weapons like sniper rifles? Use them in general medium/close combat! DT resist basically no damage so you never have to worry about not doing significant damage to your target!

-Assault rifles and SMGs? Totally have no unique combat situation because everything else works just as well in general combat!

Though I do think DT screwed over shotguns hard. Making them just completely useless. May have been weapons like the minigun though, can't remember, know it was one of those weapons.

Well now that's just not true because when enemies have high damage potential as well it's all about speed. I know I liked having an assault carbine that could dump 30 rounds in less than 2 seconds when I needed some quick penetration.

High damage potential only existed in NV because DT was utterly ineffective at actually lowering damage in any logical way.

Another symptom of the problem that is DT's poor math.

There isn't really a difference between high HP and high DR, and New Vegas enemies could have very high HP.

Which doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and it only symptomatic of poor high point scaling.

Skyrim thankfully did a lot to resolve this problem when it came to human enemies. Bandit chiefs for instance only have about as much HP as mid level Falmer.

Okay, but you're proposing to do the exact same thing, protracting combat by making every shot hit for less damage, with a pure, high, DR system.

Combat should be a question of "can you kill them before they kill you?" answered in as short a time as possible. If I see anything like a Super Mutant Overlord-level sponge before the game comes out I'm not buying it.

Combat should be a question of "is my weapon the right one for the situation" not about speed.

If your weapon isn't the right one for the situation you're not going to get speed. You're going to get dead.

Not always.

In Skrim for example, trying to use a sword on a dragon in flight is pointless. The right weapon in that case is a bow, regardless of how much damage it does.

So?

Fortunately, 99% of NV enemies can be killed with two shots (even in very hard) if you have the right gear/skill/lucky/ammo. I think the only exception is Graham, Lanius and that legendary Boatfly, I think is impossible to kill they under 3 hits. I could be wrong. Edit: Oh, and that giant roboscorpion too, maybe.

If F4 start with this to have enemies who have to take 40 shots to die, I'll put in very easy, simple.

Then when launch a mod that fixes this, I jump in.

More Health does not mean it's harder, it means it's more tedious. I do not want to see hitpoint sponges in Fallout 4. What I would like to see is a system where you could die in 3 hits and the enemies with some exceptions like Deathclaws also die in 3 hits. Would be better then oh let's give this bear 1000 Health to make the fight longer instead of properly balancing the fight. Albino Radscorpions made me uninstall Broken Steel because of it being a HP bot, that's how stupid the concept is.

I hope the guns feel more realistic next time around. Shooting somebody in the face should be death, but at the same time, things need to be challenging. If you lay a thousand rounds into a Deathclaw with a minigun, it should die.

The real problem that Bethesda has here is the basically impossible to balance open-world style. I don't envy them trying to work around you running across some amazing stuff early on that makes things easy. The fact is most of the enemies will not be difficult to fight after a while does kill the game for the challenge obsessed crowd, even on hard. They might have to do another year of balancing and changing values to get it right for them. Then there are like 80% of people who want a small or moderate challenge and entertaining gameplay and don't really care if their heavy armor stops ten more 10 mm bullets or not, as long as they survive a long time in it they won't notice.

There are the min-maxers, the casuals, the realistic obsessed crowd, the everything should be challenging crowd, etc. That is the real problem. They can't please everyone. So, prepare to be disappointed on the armor front, no matter where you fall. I often hear people complaining about how Bethesda let's modders 'fix' their games. [censored]. People want different things and they have to ship the game some time. They don't make it just to please everyone, they have to keep the lights on.

True, however this is again game balance, they make rapid firing weapons with stupid low bullet damage as else it would be too devastating.

However combined with DT it made them pointless.

Shotguns was better balanced, yes they also suffered from DT however you could use slugs. This is also realistic, you don't shoot somebody in armor with a normal shotgun shell.

Again game play balance trump reality, if they used real weapons stats both pistols and melee would be pretty pointless outside of special settings like infiltration. Various combat rifles would be the default weapons as they are real life, two niches would be machine pistols and riot shotguns would be nice against swarms and in close quarters. Sniper rifles and heaver machine guns in open areas.

Yes, this was a serious problem in Oblivion, at high level enemies got stupid amount of health, this continued to grow after both you and enemy had maxed out damage.

Now as you also had lots of health, good armor and heal over time in addition to heal 100 hp potions the enemy was not an real danger because he require say 10 hits to kill you, you needed 50 to kill him.

Solution in Oblivion was spells and weapons with weakness to magic+ weakness to element+ elemental damage.

Broken steel brought this to Fallout 3. Solution in Fallout 3 was sneak attack with shotguns who used the sneak attack critical multiplied by number of pellets.

Skyrim had some of the same, solved it by not putting much points into health, increase difficulty some and use improved weapons.

This let me take down most enemies fast but they was more dangerous, bandits with good bows was able to single hit to kill me.

They're not mutually exclusive...?

So your argument is essentially that a game should become super-easy while demanding min-maxing, and that's the mark of a good game? Dunno about you, but when games get too easy, I get bored. Playing Dead-is-Dead through Dead Money is a thrilling experience, doing the same in Broken Steel is just tedious and boring because my armor's so great that nothing will possibly kill me. Likewise, when a game demands the same gear gets used over and over, that reduces motivation to replay the game. Part of what keeps me coming back to New Vegas is I can design a character with the best stats in mind to use the Medicine Stick and then compare it to a character with the best stats for This Machine and compare how the two function in best-case scenarios. Playing FO3 for the thousandth time with that god damned Android's plasma rifle just isn't as fun.

Listen, there's realism, then there's game design. You can't sit here and argue "power armor should never provide full immunity" while arguing "orcish should get you killed cause it's made of objectively inferior materials." The first statement prioritizes gameplay over lore, the latter statement prioritizes lore over gameplay. The problem is the latter statement results in about 10 different weapon and armor types becoming absolutely worthless fairly quickly, with 90% of the game being played using the exact same gear: the gear that's DESIGNED to be used at the end. The game would gain far more replay value and diversity if each armor had something to offer, realism be damned. If I'm given a choice between "but how on earth does wearing elven armor increase damage to bows" and "elven is inferior, don't use it," then I'll take the first if breaking realism seems to be the only way to provide balance. (I'd imagine devs would want to attempt more realistic traits such as movement speed first, using the unrealistic when it's clear that's the only option)

And here you highlight the point you're completely missing that's flying high over your head: nobody is saying stats should become meaningless, people are saying different armors should offer different stats, not superior and inferior ones.

Your New Vegas example is flawed and untrue; stats for armor did not become meaningless, but rather Light armor quickly became god-tier because it offered the most unique stats while still offering a decent amount of defense. Light armor did it's job and offered different stats, the failure was that medium and heavy armor rarely did. Light armor offered movement speed, crit rate and crit resistance, while medium and heavy answered with nothing at all aside from more DT. Medium and heavy need alternative stats of their own to compete, with heavy potentially retaining it's purpose as best defense simply by offering modest DR alongside DT.

You want to talk meaningless? Every set of armor in Skyrim that's not the best, defense wise. THOSE are meaningless. Interestingly, with enough time and dedication, any armor in Skyrim can hit the defense cap. What becomes the thing that makes them different when they all hit the defense cap? Aesthetics. You wanna talk dress-up dolls? Look to Skyrim. That's what happens when you do not offer alternative stats for each unique set, and that's what happens when you're so shortsighted and blind as to think objectively superior stats should ever be a thing in an RPG.

And no, there is no progression. There's an illusion of progression. In Skyrim, I get a perk to give myself 20% more damage. Meanwhile, the enemies level up to gain 20% more defense? WHAT THE [censored] IS THE POINT? There's a reason refusing to level yourself in Skyrim is considered a legitimate strategy. Compare to New Vegas: at level one, I can tank a single hit from a Deathclaw at best, or die in a single hit. By the time I've hit level 50, I can tank up to three hits without the assistance of chems or armor. At level one, I lack any weaponry designed to take out a deathclaw, so it'd be unwise to fight one. By level 50, I'm wielding plenty of guns that can kill a deathclaw in a single shot. See that? That's progression. That means things are different, that means the game is changing and providing me with new, fresh content to explore and enjoy as I play it.

Medium armor being removed =/= it's worthless. Medium armor being removed = Bethesda can't be assed to balance it.

I am hereby convinced you haven't even played New Vegas. Or you are currently severely intoxicated. You even go on to argue Skyrim's DLCs aren't doing the exact same thing. It's insane to me that you're sitting here comparing New Vegas to an MMO-style game and complaining about it's level-scaled enemies, all while simultaneously defending two games that offer nothing but MMO-style gameplay and level-scaled enemies. Seriously, it's the EXACT same mechanic.

Really, I'm speechless. I'm absolutely speechless. I would love to hear you explain what makes a New Vegas DLC so different from Skyrim or FO3, or what about them is "MMO-style." As for enemies being stronger in Lonesome Road and "why," all the enemies encountered thrive in irradiated settings. Guess where you are.

The only conclusion I can draw from every point you've made is that you do not like your games to be challenging. You've both implied that there's nothing wrong with being stupidly strong to the point you can't feasibly die at the end of the game, and you've criticized New Vegas while praising Skyrim in a situation where the two followed the EXACT same god damned formula, the only difference being that Skyrim's DR system means you'll never die no matter what gets thrown at you, whereas New Vegas' provides more damaging enemies that demand more planning and aim.

Seriously, are you intoxicated...? Not two posts ago, you argued "no damage immunity should ever exist. That's bad game design." Here you are now, showing how because a 10mm will kill both a light armor and power armor foe at the same rate if both activate the 20% bleedthrough, that's bad game design? Do you not realize that you're changing your argument, being a hypocrite or attempting to have your cake and eat it too? You cannot have it both ways.

Your cited math also fails to get the point: Look at the amount of hits you can survive with DT, then look at the amount of hits you can survive with DR. Notice anything? I do. The DT system means the higher-grade weaponry is killing you in ~5 hits or less. The DR system means the higher-grade weaponry still needs 10+ hits to kill you.

Please list for us all the occassions where you've played a game where an enemy needed 10+ hits to kill you, and you died and thought "DAMN I DIED, THAT WAS HARD, NOTHING I COULD'VE DONE."

It's too slow. It's too slow for anyone with half a brain to realistically die. I mean let's put things in perspective here: the total amount of hits you can survive as a power armor'ed character using DT is equal to the gap between light armor and heavy armor in a DR system. The TOTAL survived hits is a mere fraction and a mere statistic under a DR system! That's ridiculous! Do you not see how this is a problem? How the scale is simply too big and how now gameplay is far too slow for the player to die?

Furthermore, there is no 1.33 hits. It rounds up. This means that Power Armor in New Vegas allows you to tank 2 more hits from an AMR than Light armor. Is this a meaningful gap? Absolutely. A headshot counts as two hits thanks to a x2 damage multiplier. If you get headshot twice in a row by an AMR and you're in Light armor? You're dead. Before you even really get a chance to possibly react (depends on what you're doing), you could be dead. Three headshots though? You're going to have time to react. The power armor can save your life.

Honestly, if you sincerely believe that power armor allowing you to survive 10 hits (aka 11 shots needed before you die) is neccesary, I suddenly understand which demographic all these streamlined games keep getting sold to. 11 hits. 11. That is enough shots that the AMR guy - the guy with the big honking sniper rifle that fires slow as hell - will need to stop to reload before continuing to shoot you in the face. And this assumes he lands every shot. It also means that even in hardcoe mode, the healing-over-time effect from stimpacks will easily exceed his damage output. (they max at 15 HP per second, though a perk and Arcade as a companion can increase that further) And keep in mind, we are citing the most damaging gun in the game. It only goes downhill from there, with only a couple DPS-focused weaponry possibly providing a slightly larger threat. The best weapon in the game on DPS is only going to provide a damage output of 78 damage per second, but this is a weapon never wielded by enemies, and again stimpacks will negate the vast majority of the damage, and AGAIN it's far too long for your character to feasibly die.

You cannot die. The game is holding your hand. That's exactly what a pure DR system is. That is not a real challenge or threat, that is an illusion the game is feeding you to try and make you feel amazing. That you fail to see through that smoke and mirrors, that is what's truly amazing to me.

Not trying to be insulting but I don't think you understand the math as to how DR works.

In your example above a low damage per shot/ high dps weapon will be better for everything in your DR system as long as it does more dps than your medium damage/medium dps weapon without taking into account ammo availability but just going with pure damage.

In a %DR system all that matters is dps - damage per second. That's it, no armor penetration required, no hollow point penetration malus, no damage threshold to be bypassed, no nothing except for whatever weapon can put out the most damage in the shortest amount of time. How is this even considered a choice?

The only weapons you would need are something with a scope for long range and then whatever does the most damage. In a hybrid DT/DR system you'd need the scoped weapon, something to penetrate armor and something to put out a lot of damage per second. The last two could be accomplished with switching ammo types from AP to HP.

In your system the only armor that is useful is max DR, every late game character will be in power armor without exception, unless they make a crafting system like Skyrim where everything can be smithed to the max.

In the math example you posted it only showed the two extremes of a 10mm and an AMR. If you look at a middle ground 50 point damage attack you get 50-19=31 damage to the light armor and 50-36=14 damage to the power armor. Here the power armor can take 2.2X the number of hits.

Also most here are advocating a hybrid DR/DT system where light armor has low DT only, Power armor has medium DT and medium DR, and Medium armor falls in between. It is how JSawyer set up his system in his FNV mod.

And Longknife has said it better than I could above anyway