Fallout 4

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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I dunno about that (getting rid of all Jet/Chems). I use chems a lot and pretty much all of them as I never use Power Armor (yet). Some fights are clearly meant to be impossible or nearly impossible without Power Armor if you're not cheesing it some other way. The only truly OP weapon I have is the rifle and I haven't found anything that has needed its use yet.

Like the Devil quest where you fight a Deathclaw in a tiny ass room. To do this the proper way I don't see how you could not die unless you were power armored up and possibly set up a ton of mines to bait it into. Armor mods can make just about any modular armor piece incredibly strong too. I think I have 110/110 on my modded up set at the moment.

For the Kellogg fight I slammed Psycho and used the Alien Blaster's insane ROF to kill him before he could activate his stealth boy.
 

Tenks

Bronze Knight of the Realm
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Also....I could recommend everyone play this on Survivalist, or at least the next one down (Very Hard?), unless you are just trying to get through the game and see the ending, which I understand. My friend is playing this on Normal, and he doesn't understand how I keep running into so many Legendary creatures. Literally it seems like every building has at least one if not two in them, staring at around level 15 or so. Plenty in the open world as well. I'll ask him how he handled the Legendary Glowing Ghoul from the Med-Tek building....and he has no idea what I'm talking about.

It does make the game a million times more frustrating also. Things can kill you in seconds. I've been cheesing it by clearing trash, then taking pot shots at the Legendary mob, then running away until they reset agro, then quick-saving, then rinse/repeat until they are dead. You don't have to do this on every Legendary or Skull mob or course, but some of them are just crazy tough, and ammo becomes an issue.

Granted probably 90% of the drops are garbage, but hey, at least you are getting drops.
Can anyone else comment on this? I'm playing on Normal and wonder if I should reroll now to a higher difficulty.
 

DrLifetilt_sl

shitlord
230
1
Once you stockpile fusion cores and field power armor for hours game becomes ez mode. From my experience so far a fusion core can give you an hour in power armor.

I also find that Grape Mentats (+5 cha for 8mins) trivialize Charisma as a speech stat, such a bad design decision. You still need 6 Cha if you want Local Leader, but absolutely no need to go above that if you want it for speech checks.
 

Caliane

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you dont need to reroll, just turn up the difficulty in the main menu.

And yeah, i would say survival is the way to play. Barring OP weapons, and possibly op builds, it feels at least a little dangerous. I am quick loading ALOT... My build is not super heavy combat though. 4 end, 6 per, 5 agil base. at 9 cha, 8 int atm.
the slow healing is pretty huge. forces me to retreat, hide and plan, with my low end, and no power armor for sure. I can't just spam healing, even with 100+ stimpacks.
I use chems only once in a while, again tactical, not spamming. But honestly have enough I could spam them.
 

hodj

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I am disliking how CLEARED areas will remove the tag eventually.
Everything respawns after a few days, just like in Skyrim. This is, again, intended so that you can play indefinitely.

It means you can collect all the scrap again, kill most of the mobs (no named ones/quest ones though) etc.
 

Caliane

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Everything respawns after a few days, just like in Skyrim. This is, again, intended so that you can play indefinitely.

It means you can collect all the scrap again, kill most of the mobs (no named ones/quest ones though) etc.
its a bit of a shame named npcs don't respawn with rng names, and looks.
Captain bridget.
Sargent hammer.
Lieutenant brings a nuke to a knifefight.
 

VariaVespasa_sl

shitlord
572
5
Everything respawns after a few days, just like in Skyrim. This is, again, intended so that you can play indefinitely.

It means you can collect all the scrap again, kill most of the mobs (no named ones/quest ones though) etc.
Just as well too- steel is a constant problem for me till my bases are all forted up. Rah rah Corvega plant!
 

DrLifetilt_sl

shitlord
230
1
Can anyone else comment on this? I'm playing on Normal and wonder if I should reroll now to a higher difficulty.
I have no idea how Normal is, but on Very Hard i know that i expend a lot of ammo (mainly because i chose to go the Auto weapons route). Nothing bad, since i can buy ammo at vendors. Fights can be easy to very tough, depending on if you are wearing Power Armor and the choice of your companion, some of them are useless in combat and do close to no damage. I get a lot of skull mobs in key quests, but they are doable. Chems can be very helpful. I also get a million legendaries (sometimes both a legendary and a skull) and while most of time they do drop crap you will get some very good items out of them. At lv21 all my equipped items save the helmet are legendary with some very nice effects, some of those are easily worth 2 perk points. As said, a few of those effects can even break the game and make it too easy, i haven't got one of those though yet.

I also caved in and got Awareness as a perk, i know it doesn't fit with minmaxing and such, but the info is useful to me. Basically you get lvl and resistances info in VATS and it helps me to gauge the difficulty of the fight and if i should expend my good ammo or not. You can also see that the level of mobs is all over the place, you have groups of super mutants ranging from lv10 up to lv35 for example.
 

Tenks

Bronze Knight of the Realm
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I may just bump it up to one after normal. I don't like min/maxxing combat stats in games like this since I spend so much time busting open locks and stealing from people.
 

Phazael

Confirmed Beta Shitlord, Fat Bastard
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Adhesive and Oil are my major bottle necks, though I am not doing the high CHA thing. My ODC has me carpet farming my way from the north part of the map and heading south, intentionally ignoring Diamond City for now. Sanctuary is a veritable fortress at this point, though, with roof mounted laser turrets everywhere.

As for breaking the game, any fight that allows stealth to be a factor is immediately trivial once you hit Gun Nut 3 and a descent level of sneak. I have suppressors on all of my main guns now and its just ridiculous how easy it is to take apart a building with sighted aim. Stabilize mods on the arms can negate the need for holding breath, as well. For trash clearing, a modded up silenced 10mm is perfect (I have the one that ignores 30% of armor) since a single head shot in vats or two is enough to drop most normal patrollers. I realized that wearing Powered Armor would actually make the game harder at the point where I took down an entire building of Super Mutants without being spotted once. I think I will purposely avoid stealth next time I play this, because it breaks the game worse than anything.
 

Caliane

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Just as well too- steel is a constant problem for me till my bases are all forted up. Rah rah Corvega plant!
steel is a problem.?! whaaaa?

guns, metal armors.. cars EVERYWHERE. salvaging houses in sanc. steel is like everywhere.


Copper is my weakpoint. constantly checking vendors for it. I like lights, power, and water pumps.
Even adhesive I have over 150, despite modding quite often.
 

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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Pickpocketing is pretty worthless for anything other than stealing Fusion Cores out of power armored thugs. The Ammo and Cap finder perks negate ANY of what you could pickpocket out of people... sadly.

Robot Hacks are fucking cool though. I am going to attempt to hack an Assaultron and Sentrybot with the help of a Stealth Boy.
 

Vorph

Silver Baronet of the Realm
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It might not be nearly as useful, but I think melee with reduced VATS gear and a reduced VATS weapon would be extremely powerful since they don't consume ammunition. That's balanced by the fact that VATS sucks now though, lol. If you had infinite VATS with melee I still think you'd die against tough mobs.
VATS doesn't suck at all though. It just requires a few perks and some extra PE (assuming most people stop at 4 for Locksmith, leaving them with shit for accuracy in VATS). It's even better if you use the mod I linked yesterday that puts VATS back to pausing the game while you select targets. Seriously, fuck whoever thought that change was a good idea.

Bethesda is notorious for bad balancing, but I think they've outdone themselves. The weapons that are obviously broken:
-Double barreled shotgun with unlimited ammo capacity (mine shoots 12.5 shells a SECOND)
-Shotguns with any kind of bullet effect (6 pellets per shell).
-Fast firing guns with bleed (bleed stacks and ignores enemy armor mitigation)
-Fast firing guns with other bullet effects
-The double firing weapons

Balancing those is just as obvious:
-Make unlimited ammo capacity only available on guns it makes sense for (everything but double barreled shotguns!)
-Reduce the effect of bullet effects on shotguns
-Make bleed not stack
-Make weapon effects tied to weapon damage rather than constant. So weapon effects aren't useless on bolt action rifles and OP on fast firing ones
-Remove the double firing weapons, it's dumb anyway.


I'll probably store my broken weapons and use normal ones, much like I did in Skyrim where in my first playthrough I exploited the circular crafting system to make some god-gear and then stashed it and eventually ran around with basic leather armor and no shirt like a true blooded viking.
I tend to agree that adding in "magic" weapons was a pretty silly design decision. Even that explosive shotgun I have breaks the game, since I decided to try a dense armor mod on my chest and found out that it prevents almost all explosive damage. It may actually be ~15 DT rather than X% DR; I need to test further to see if enemies with rocket launchers can still kill me. The shotgun seems to do literally no damage to myself anymore though.

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Edit: For mats, aluminum and oil are the big ones for me. Constantly out of that shit no matter how much trivial junk I pick up. Leather is probably #3, every time I get new armor I'm out of leather again, but as long as I tag it and pick some stuff up I can stockpile enough before the next time I find an upgrade. Scrapper is fucking worthless--anyone still early in the game, DO NOT waste even one perk on it. The one and only thing it gives that is actually scarce is aluminum, but breaking down guns doesn't give anywhere near enough of it to justify the weight when you can just go pick up cans instead.

Can you "snake" around the perk tree or can you only move down columns?
You can take any perk that you meet the SPECIAL requirement for. Higher ranks of each perk also have level requirements.

And you really should at least try playing on Survival. I can't imagine how easy the game must be on anything lower.
 

hodj

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Can you "snake" around the perk tree or can you only move down columns?
I dunno what you mean. You can unlock any perk you have the SPECIAL score for. You don't need to purchase the perks that come before that perk in the tree to do so.

So if you have a 4 STR, you don't need to unlock the first three perks in that tree to unlock the perk that requires a SPECIAL score of 4 to unlock.

VATS doesn't suck at all though.
It really doesn't. Tuco keeps saying this, but its simply fucking wrong.
 

hodj

Vox Populi Jihadi
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Lol sounds like I need to reroll my character then
Yeah if you've been dumping perk points into lower tier skills you didn't want in order to unlock higher tier perks, you could consider rerolling.

It really doesn't matter that much though, because if you play long enough, you should unlock everything anyway.

Just depends if you want to play a gimped character until then.
 

Big Phoenix

Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
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trying to decide if I should save of kill lorenzo cabot. The rest of the family seems like pompous assholes and probably deserve to die for what you will find out about them later I assume

My condo;

rrr_img_116092.jpg
 

Tenks

Bronze Knight of the Realm
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Since I'm going to reroll tonight can anyone help me out on my initial SPECIAL allocation for a sneak/sniper?