So.. they both svck, for the same reason?

No, he was complaining that DR svcks because only DPS matters.

I was saying DT svcks because only DAM matters.

Well you see, with DR sometimes you need max DPS to more than one target.

Why is it important that weapons have a role? Who are you to tell the player what they should be using? How does that make the experience more rewarding for them?

In a system with only DR then only damage per second matters. This is the system that you are advocating for.

The system I want is what J Sawyer had in his mod for FNV both DR and DT. In this system enemies who have 0 DT are susceptible to high dps weapons like submachineguns. Enemies with high DT require AP rounds or bigger single shot damage. In this system weapons have a different purpose depending on what you are facing. Armor has differing roles - light is fast with low DT, Power armor is slower with high DT and medium DR, medium armor lies in between.

I am not advocating a pure DT system but a hybrid.

A pure DT system still can have high DT/low hp enemies that need AP or damage and they can also have 0 DT enemies with a huge mass of hit points which would be most susceptible to a high dps weapon. A pure DR system is the same as everything just having more hit points.

And PL and MZ.

What I'm gleaning from this thread is that DT and DR both svcked in their implementations, and for some reason percentage-based damage reduction is a deal-breaker?

The only notoriously damage spongey enemies we had to deal with in Fallout 3 were added by DLC to add more "challenge" for high level players; and those enemies didn't have any DR to begin with, they just had a ridiculous amount of health. In the base game I remember Super Mutants being a pain in the ass to take down, but I never felt like they were unreasonably tough (and I liked that Fallout 3 was unexpectedly difficult the first time I played it).

DR alone absolutely svcks.

DT alone functions fine, it's simply that it's not perfect. DT alone has the effect of favoring light armor. A mix of the two (with low percents on DR) would do fine.

For the second part of your post, DR and tons of HP can function the same. HP can function the same as any kind of defense, really. The main difference though is that in FO3 when you have capped DR, you cannot [censored] die. Seriously, you just can't die. It would either take a rather large explosion or extreme degrees of negligence to kill you. A pure DR system is a large part of the cause of this. Comparatively in New Vegas, if you get the maximum possible DT (I believe while wielding explosives you can get your DT as high as 60-70), you can still very realistically die to certain foes. FO3 sees a point in gameplay where challenge is dead, NV only sees the challenge diminish as you get stronger, but the game continues to try and throw new scenarios at you to provide challenge. (for example the mines in Lonesome Road, the poison on Tunnelers and the Deathclaws there hitting twice as hard)

The main issue is two-fold:

1) Pure DR means we can probably expect challenge to become rather dull once you get the best power armor.

2) Battles can get tedious. For example in Skyrim, Bethesda mostly sought to balance out the enemies by....giving them more health. The problem is if DR goes too high, no amount of health will make dragons challenging, merely tedious. They also can only up their damage so much before is has the effect of REQUIRING you to wear the best armor if you hope to survive.

Wow...

This, however you still take impact of weaker weapons, more so if it hit unarmored parts

But yes DT balance things heavy armor give protection against weaker weapons but heavy punches trough.

I'd like if armor had different protection for each body part. I mean, in New Vegas, some of the best armors left portions of the body unarmored, but damage to those limbs (or the head on a target without a helmet) is reduced because of the armor on their torso.

Skyrim also introduced ways of bypassing percentages of DR, like the Bonebreaker/Skullcrusher perks and Dawnguard's enhanced crossbows. Don't forget that you need to invest in magic resistance, too; maxing out DR will still get you destroyed by powerful mages or Dragon's breath.

Now, I'm not saying I'm against the concept of DT, as long as it doesn't make weaker weapons utterly useless. I just think people are wholly overreacting to the concept of DR. What Bethesda should do to mitigate bullet sponginess is give us ways to bypass DR, separate DRs for weapon types (we have just as much to hint that energy weapons have their own resistance), separate ratings for each armored limb, and actually give enemies more DR instead of just more health so that there's something to bypass.

Hybrid system of DT/DR would be best.

What no one has brought up yet, is the new energy type of damage.



IIRC, we see that standard guns have high dam/low end

Laser has high en/low dam

Plasma is an even hybrid.




Hopefully with the system in place we pick our weapons based on what we are fighting

Lasers/high dam guns vs power armor

Low dam/high DPS vs squishies

Plasma being good vs both, but not the absolute strongest.


Perhaps we will see light armor being more resistant to energy weapons

I have yet to see what will happen.

So I'm doing a DUST playthrough of NV and have managed to get myself a suit of T-51b.

I've set DT bleed-through to 1% and power armour gives me DR of 20% in addition to DT.

What I've found is that regular cannibals and tribals are completely trivial now. They can do no damage to me and I can easily destroy them at any pace I please. Patrolling NCR troopers also suffer the same fate.

And know what? It's fun. I've earned my power armour by surviving long enough to get it and it lets me completely ignore common enemies with junk weapons.

However, if I try and attack any sort of decently defended area like pretty much any NCR camp, I will get destroyed by a single shot from a sniper or hunting rifle. Unarmored, a single 9mm to the head will end me.

It feels rewarding and natural, there's still immense challenge left in the game and it makes sense. If I was still getting destroyed by some cannibal with a 9mm while in power armour, why would I ever want it?

Anyways, the point of all that rambling is I think a DT/DR system would work best, but actual HP needs to be looked at too. And having low-level trash enemies being completely made useless by end-game armour isn't bad game design, it's progression.

Well they seem to be diversifying damage types rather than DR/DT, so its probable that each damage type interacts with damage resistance differently. But then to be the most effective player you'd need to carry armor for each situation, which is less than ideal.

DR's fine, I don't have an issue with it over DT. I just hope with Vat's it's not going to be 75% again but with it being slowmo instead of pause, I don't see a DR being the case for Vats.

Going to be another mind numblingly easy Bethesda game where you gotta wait for difficulty mods

I basically agree with you on this. However there should still be some exceptions, some weakness of some kind both for realism and for the sake of game play. For example my Skyrim combat overhaul mod does all this with armor and arrows but there is still always an opportunity for an arrow to hit a gap in the armor thus ignoring it.

In my mod this is NOT a dice throw but rather calculated in real time from various factors unique to each situation for each attack. However I would live with a dice roll for Fallout rather than not have it at all.

I honestly wonder about what version of Skyrim you played because, unless you purposefully avoid getting better weapons, legendary dragons should be no more difficult to kill then normal dragons were at the very beginning of the game.

That's one of the biggest pros of the % based DR system, it scales along a constant curve. Similarly, weapons also scale along a roughly similar curve. Unless you purposefully gimp yourself, the hardest things at max level should be no harder then the hardest things when you were at level 1.

Also, you should be required to wear the best armor in order to survive the hardest fights. Something leather armor SHOULDN'T protect you at all from an AMR, and it should require something like power armor to survive it.

That's basic game design 101, and a consistent red in... well... basically every game ever made.

Fallout was an RPG last time I checked, not a doll dress up sim. Armor stats should matter, and they really don't with DT, they do in DR however.

Why should things not get harder? How is that "basic game design"?

Huh?

Here's my totally not biased argument: I want to be OP, FO3 had DR and I was OP in it, NV added DT and I wasn't OP in it, therefore I want FO4 to have DR only so I can be OP in it

And also, what the pro-DR people said, some of those are arguments I have too

Yeah, I have to agree with this. The New Vegas system was flawed, but we need to improve upon it instead of scrap it.

There's no reason I should be able to kill someone in power armor using a steak knife. That's just silly. Something like that should make me run in fear, desperate to escape, scrounging for any decent weapon I can find while my enemy closes in on me. At the very least, I should have to damage the armor's durability before I can puncture it and do some damage.

Why shouldn't things get harder? Your system is the Oblivion system: anti-progression. Nothing ever changes. If enemies and areas become more difficult, I'd rather it be that they're more dangerous, not more durable, requiring strategy and thought, not a hotkey.

That doesn't really prove anything. Again magic is a DR system, and again you can get it as high as 80%. If you 80 both physical and magical, you will never die.

The Bonebreaker/Skullcrusher perks are actually pretty worthless. I'd advise you to look up what exactly they do, because the effects are so minimal they practically don't even matter. We're talking subtracting like 50 DR off a score that totals up to 500 and has diminishing returns, meaning you're lucky if you do 1% more damage.

Directly bypassing DR is also tricky. Who here actually likes the Super Mutant Overlords and Swamp Folk in Point Lookout who can bypass the vast majority of your defense and you can't do anything about it? I find it absolutely irritating, because it means you're given no means to actually defend yourself and all the defense you've built up means squat.

The fights are tedious, plain and simple. They drag on much longer than they need to. It's easy to argue "get better weapons," (which isn't my case) the issue being that better weaponry demands your character use Smithing and Enchanting, which kinda messes with roleplay.

And it's not basic game design 101. This is an RPG. RPG is all about choice and consequence. And no, not "I'm roleplaying an orc and using orcish armor, therefore I should die constantly for refusing to use daedric" kind of choice and consequence, but rather "I'm using orcish armor, which penalizes my bow draw speed and damage but increases damage with blunt weapons while also giving a nice HP bonus." When something is completely obsolete, then what good is it? What purpose does it serve? A miserable, pathetic purpose, that's what.

I also love how this argument conveniently changes around these forums however it needs to in order to defend Bethesda.

"80% DR is faaar too high and makes the game stupid easy."
"That's your fault for not roleplaying and for purposefully min/maxing your character. Of course it's easy."

"Enemies have waay too much health, causing already-decided and easy battles to drag on much longer than neccesary. More HP =/= more challenge, it just means more time wasted."
"That's your fault for not using the best weapons.

So which is it?

At any rate, best game design is when as many resources are seeing viable use as possible. Iron and Steel weapons in Skyrim for example are bad game design because the only purpose these serve is to be starter gear that's eventually replaced. Having a system where Light armor offers faster movement and more crit/crit protection while power armor is better protection and medium is a mix between the two? That actually encourages character diversity and reinforces replay value and RPG mechanics.

I'd also disagree with "the game is just as challenging as it is at level one" as being an example of good game design. I consider that awful game design. I am a human. I'm a sentient being. I learn and adapt. After 20 levels, I'll be better at the game. If the game does not adapt as well and become more difficult to a reasonable degree, then I'll just get bored. Imagine how flat and dull Lonesome Road would've felt if it had no tunnelers, no "instant" detonation mines and normal deathclaws alongside marked men with modest weaponry. The entire point was "this is the last journey, you better be prepared" and thus the game seeks to challenge you. Almost all games will do this in their final stages. You've done nothing but say "this is basic game design 101 " when wtf the vast majority of games on the market are a testament against your rather bold claim.