Survival is getting quite a chore if Raiders don't die with a single Sneak Attack Headshot with a .308 caliber sniper rifle. I emptied more than 400 rounds of lead into a Deathclaw and it is still standing! How can anything (not that gargantuan in size) physically sponge that much 5mm supersonic hot lead and still charge at me!?

I understand the increase in enemy HP but lowering my damage by half at the same time is really frustrating!

I play on survival because I really like the idea of being killed easily as I'm a human afterall and i really need to take cover and not get shot that often, also the fact that healing items take longer which makes playing the game a good challenge. But, please remove the bullet sponging enemies; at least remove player damage penalty (0.5x damage to enemies is frustrating). A good mode (like a totally separate mode) would be to put both player and enemy damage really high without increasing HP for both. This way, its a kill-or-be-killed thing.

I'm sure Bethesda (*wink *hint*hint) can work around the difficulty like making each step increase a change in enemy HP as well as damage output.
For example:

V.easy: 2x dmg output to enemies | 0.5x dmg output from enemies | 1x enemy HP

Easy: 1.5x dmg output to enemies | 0.75x dmg output from enemies | 1x enemy HP

Normal: 1x dmg output to enemies | 1x dmg output from enemies | 1x enemy HP

Hard: 1x dmg output to enemies | 1.25x dmg output from enemies | 1.25x enemy HP

V.hard: 1x dmg output to enemies | 1.5x dmg output from enemies | 1.5x enemy HP

Survival: 1x dmg output to enemies | 2x dmg output from enemies | 2x enemy HP

I hope there is an update about this soon

Lol i had hoped to see less bullet sponging as well.

My hunting rifle legendary shoots two bullets at once. Fully upgraded to 50 cal rounds.

Over 75 hours in and this is my strongest weapon. Now close range sneak shot still requires multiple shots per target.

Also a fun one Alpha Death claw verse 4 prong rocket launcher and legendary fat boy still takes an insane amount.

Because "it just works"

Instead of making ammo and good weapons more scarce and requiring food and drink and sleep to survive, Beth takes the easy way out and just makes enemies take 200 bullets to the face to die, while you can die from a single bloat fly in 3 seconds.

That's it! Next!

Survival COULD have implemented more dangerous radiation, weapons and armor degrading just like the power armor, scarcer ammo and food, ammo weight and a plethora of other things. However from what I saw when I tried it all they did was just add an extra zero to the health values of enemies. Its lazy and indefensible.

Yeah, unsurprising Bethesda's difficulty methods haven't changed at all once again. Apparently more health means "challenging".

I personally like sticking with at least hard mode. It's a good balance of both offering a challenge yet being reasonable with enemy health.

heh even on normal gameplay shoot someone with a .50 cal sniper rifle should make their head explode. Specially when they are 10 level below you and only wearing a fedora, but when they shoot you your health drops like a rock.

Not all enemies heads are the 'weak point' I've found shooting a deathclaw in the belly does far more damage than a headshot.

I am playing on survival with an intelligence based character, almost no bonuses to combat, and I don't use chems. That's my "hardcoe mode" equivalent. I found the difficulty to be pretty good, and I am certainly leveling slower than I would be normally. Pretty soon I will need to pick a class of weapons and start getting some damage boosting perks. My toughest fight so far was versus a really beefy glowing one. It moved really quickly and could shred me in six seconds of melee. I eventually had to set up a minefield to soften it up, send my companion in to distract it, and still had to put about fifteen shotgun blasts into it before it finally died. I could easily lower the difficulty, but I find it pretty satisfying to beat an encounter that's fairly tough. My second character will be a high luck/agility sniper and I'm sure survival difficulty will be a ton easier with that setup.

Just mod it away. There are several good mod options on nexus to fix the bulletspoonge.

"Survival" mode should be more about requiring food and water in order to live, just for starters. Tougher opponents is fine, and so on. But the emphasis should be on, well, survival. In my opinion.

FWE and/or ART style mod options, please - ASAP!

Yeah thats my main gripe about survival. I unloaded two clips of a 10mm gun in a guys chest and unarmored head to kill him.

I agree.

I love the healing rate of survival, but having to unload an entire clip into an unhelmeted human's head to stop them doesn't sit right with me. I've been jumping around between hard, very hard, and survival to find what feels right. I find hard to easy, and very hard feels pretty good though still a touch to bullet spongy. Just right for me would be about 85% of the way between hard & very hard, with the survival healing rates, and maybe increase the chance of enemies using grenades just slightly.

... eagerly awaiting the creation kit.

Yah I hate Spongy-Raiders too. I currently play at Survival with PC damage 1x and NPC 1.5x and it is sooooooo good. No more bullet sponge, I can survive a sneaky hit but barely and I keep the slower healing part of survival.

Thanks for pointing this out! Didn't realise there were these types of mods already.

http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/333/?

Use a gauss rifle. You can purchase one via a level 4 weapons vendor in your settlement. Ive two shotted a deathclaw on survival with one. Behemoths 3-4 shots.

I'll be *that* guy to bring down the mod hype here. Many mods are already out and can be used. But be careful, as usual. As it always happen with mods this early after a release, we'll find out that most of them will eventually corrupt your save game. We don't know exactly what was changed in the esp data so we're going in semi-blind here. We have no official help, we use old tools made for past bethesda's games to make them.

Do not use mods (esp!, textures are fine) if you want to keep your savegame.

Just a friendly reminder

I play on survival and I still one-shot most enemies aside from bosses? Especially with a sneak attacks.

You need to tweak the difficulty depending on your level and you can ~mostly~ avoid bullet-sponging.

As long as the erlenemies arent as spongy as ghoul reavers and albino scorpions i dont mind it.

I'm playing survival stealth/sniper build and I don't find anything bullet spongy other than enemies that should be. I 1 to 3 shot almost everything. Might be my high damage build or weapons. At the start things seems to eat a lot of bullets but once I got some rifleman, ninja, and bloody mess perks everything dies very quickly.

Dabbling with the console to modify global variables..

Variables

fDiffMultHPbyPCSV - read: float, Difficulty Multiplier HP By Player Survival

fDiffMultHPtoPCSV - read: float, Difficulty Multiplier HP To Player Survival

Syntax

setgs fDiffMultHPbyPCSV

setgs fDiffMultHPtoPCSV

Note: can use the command getgs to view the value

The last letters of the variable represent the difficulty. In the example above SV stands for survival mode. Other variables exist for the other diffulcties

...VE - Very Easy

...E - Easy

...N - Normal

...H - Hard

...VH - Very Hard

Still experimenting with what values feel right for me.

Note: Default for survival is

fDiffMultHPbyPCSV = 0.5 (you do half damage)

fDiffMultiHPtoPCSV = 2 (you take double damage)

the enemies dont have more hp in higher difficulties, you just do less damage and take more damage

Nothing has really become a bullet sponge for me unless it was apparent that I shouldn't be able to kill it so easily.

And fortunately, there's already mods for this. I might tweak damage dealt so that it feels slightly more realistic.