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About this mod
The purpose of this comprehensive modification is to restore 100% deflection for Damage Threshold and re-introduce Damage Resistance as it functioned in Fallout 1, 2 and Tactics.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
What began as a small modification for restoring Damage Threshold functionality became, through necessity, a comprehensive balance mod primarily to restore a damage/armor system similar to classic Fallout. Due to this new damage system's radical dissimilarity to Vanilla New Vegas, a simple numbers tweak would leave the world entirely imbalanced and the gameplay far too easy. Pursuant to this, the NV Classic Rebalance mod significantly changes the way damage is calculated, the effects and stats of items and enemies, loot tables, spawns, and much more. The end result is a far more difficult game with a stronger emphasis on the RPG elements of classic Fallout titles, such as paying attention to resistances, health, and ammo types.
This mod was tested and developed internally by a team of about 8 people, and weapon damage was scaled by a professional military consultant. It is intended to be a Fallout 1/2/Tactics damage system emulator to increase the challenge and depth of combat, as well as make it feel more like an FPS.
Quick List of Critical Features:
* Much less HP for everything (including you)
* True Damage Threshold, making armor more important
* All items and chems have their place, and situational uses, most of which are necessary against some types of enemies (e.g. there are only a handful of ways to break through a Robot's damage threshold, energy weapons being the best)
* DR/DT values added to most creatures (no more "it's hard because it has a billion hitpoints" crap)
* NPC Followers rebalanced
* Stats and Skills account for a larger percentage of their affected game effects. For example, barter skill is weighted more heavily in calculating item costs. Endurance accounts for far more of your total Hit Points than Vanilla.
* All ammo types can be crafted, and Hollow Point isn't worthless anymore due to the more complex DR/DT system.
* Chems and Ammo are much more scarce.
* Weapon Damage no longer scales with skill for Guns or Energy Weapons. Instead, having a skill beneath the weapon's requirement results in significant, and erratic, weapon sway.
* Critical Hits are now calculated by a flat 1.5x multiplier, and a reduction to Damage Threshold for the target. Critical Sneak Attacks ignore much more DT than normal Criticals.
Important Notes:
It is not advisable to use this mod with an existing save-game due to balance issues, but won't cause any real "bugs" so to speak. It'll just be like cheating, in some ways, because Vanilla allows you to stockpile supplies much easier.
This modification is NOT compatible with pre-purchase DLC cheat-packs like the Caravan Pack, Mercenary Pack, etcetera. While these packs won't cause any bugs in the game, the effects of the equipment spawned from them will either be drastically overpowered, or drastically underpowered.
This modification's compatibility with non-balance mods is very high. New items, textures, and other changes that have a minimal impact on gameplay/damage/stats shouldn't cause conflict.
This modification's compatibility with other rebalance mods is very low, causing similar problems with them as the pre-purchase DLCs. FOOK, for instance, was found during preliminary testing to be fairly compatible, but many of the new items dropped into the game were either useless, or god-mode. If other mods of this nature are used, simply place NV Classic Rebalance in your load order either above or below them based on which you prefer to take priority, and expect most new weapons and armor to function in odd ways (New Armors are usually very weak, while new guns are usually extremely strong and have no skill requirements to use).
v1.3.3 Changelog
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Bug Fixes
v1.3.1 Changelog
========================
NPC/Creature Balance
Fiends and other raider types now have drug effects when you meet them sometimes, providing them with Med-X, Psycho, Turbo, and Buffout benefits. Fiends are much, much tougher and usually have multiple drug effects each.
Due to the critical hit calculation being changed, NPCs could not effectively land any criticals. This is now changed, allowing them to calculate superior damage on criticals once again.
Supermutant Masters are a little tougher to kill, and their melee ability is increased dramatically.
Nightkin no longer have any DT (an oversight in previous versions left them with 1 or 2), and the previous fix for critical damage has made them a lot more effective at dealing damage.
v1.3 Changelog
========================
NPC/Creature Balance
Loot tables for all NPCs changed to include higher level weapons, more effective ammo types, and higher levels/skill focus for the types of weapons they use. DT/DR modified for most enemies, making hollow points exceptional against most wasteland creatures and mercenary/low level raiders but nearly useless against armored opponents (HP ammo is your best friend against nightkin, but shit vs. armored supermutants for instance). Robots and other metallic enemies have no DR, but very, very high DT. Explosives do massive damage, but don't penetrate any resists, so if you want to use them against high level enemies you need to skill it really high and get some Demo Expert perks (in which case explosives will remain devastating throughout the entire game, limited in their power only by their weight and lack of supply).
Many NPCs now carry AP ammo, and will shred you even if you're in Power Armor. This is particularly true of NCR troopers.
Robots all use ammo that pierces some DT/DR, so you won't become immune to MkI Securitrons nearly as easily with their shitty 9mm guns. The MkII Securitrons are still pretty much the same... which is to say they'll destroy you.
Upgraded turrets are now far, far tougher while lower level turrets are still fairly weak. Mk VI laser turrets, for instance, are almost completely indestructible when pitted against small arms (takes about 100 AP 5.56 rounds to kill one), very resilient against most energy weapons (an upgraded gatling laser being pretty much the ONLY reliable way to even come close to killing them with guns) and have the sole weakness of being destroyed by zap gloves and EMP explosives (and even then, they're not pushovers). All turrets now fire rounds that pierce armor, making it impossible to ever be completely immune to most of them.
Some of the new vegas tribes are tougher, but they're still pretty weak because the area is supposed to be available to pretty much any level. So, ultimately, wiping them all out won't be as boring if you're higher level, but it won't be a massive "i have to reload a billion times" challenge either.
Chems
Stimpaks are far, far less common in all loot sources and shop stocks, in addition to being more expensive. Sarsparilla's healing is drastically reduced, and still remains a great way to keep yourself topped off for health but is no longer a reasonable replacement for stimpaks. A few chems have been balanced a bit more, especially energy drinks which now cause you to "crash" after the effect wears off, netting an increase in your exhaustion level after the effects wear off. One notable exception is tobacco, which you can just chew forever to stay awake. But its effectiveness in doing this is reduced a bit.
Crafting
Mods for Service Rifle added, mods for Hunting Rifle removed. Any weapons higher than the Service Rifle require shop-purchased mods. The amount of lead from breaking down bullets is also drastically reduced.
Energy Weapon ammo production rebalanced to require conductors and fission batteries for the upgraded ammo types (conductors for overcharge, fission batteries for max charge). Recycling now always requires a power source, and therefore can only be done in larger batches.
Weapon Balances
Unarmed weapons are pretty much crap now unless you skill unarmed up excessively. It still winds up being the "cheapest" and easiest way to kill things by end game, but is extremely limited early. Melee weapons are similar, but still much more effective early than unarmed and not quite as effective late. Nonetheless, melee and unarmed still make mince meat out of basically everything in the later stages of the game, and your effectiveness is limited by how difficult it is to survive a frontal attack on ranged enemies (especially if you wear power armor which slows you down, as opposed to being speedy).
Energy weapon ammunition severely limited in supply in the wasteland. Energy weapons are by far the most effective all around weapons now, cutting through DR/DT like it was nothing, and in some cases also doing exceptional damage. Science is now a requirement for making ammo to supply them, and it's probably a good idea to have some backups regardless.
Perk Changes
Plasma Spaz effectiveness increased.
New Perk - "Freeballer" - 3 ranks, min level 10, min agil 8. When wearing light or no armor, everything you do is increased in speed by 15% up to 45% at rank 3. This, in combination with travel light, and all of the equip/attack speed perks turns you into the fucking flash... if you wear light armor.
Misc Changes
Doctors no longer heal radiation, and radaway is more rare. Enjoy your built in biological flashlight.
Ammo loot amount has been reduced by about 33% across the board.
v1.3b Changelog
=================
This version isn't complete yet because no one has tested it. It probably needs tweaks of some kind.
NPC Enemies
* Now use different kinds of ammo, and if available will switch to AP/HP rounds according to their target's DT/DR. AP ammo is utilized pretty frequently by NPCs, let me know if it's too common.
* Monstrous humonoid enemies (Supermutants, Ghouls, Deathclaws, etcetera) all have DR and DT if they wear armor, and some have native DR/DT from thick/scaly skin respective to DR/DT. Most "monsters" or mutated animals have no native DR/DT, but have had their hitpoints increased along with their size to make HP ammo a lot more appealing for fighting them.
* Supermutant masters are extremely tough now, and should stay difficult for much further into the game. Supermutant Overlords are maybe a little too strong, but fuck it.
Misc Balance/Fixes
* Underwater breath lasts longer.
* AP ammo significantly less common in loot. All ammo significantly less common across the board.
* Critical failure on thrown explosives should no longer result in hovering projectiles.
* Arcade Gannon has some facial hair and a smirk now.
* Shop inventories have had most of their "ridiculously awesome" items removed, like thermic lances, ballistic fists, etcetera. They must be found out in the world.
* Unarmed weapons nerfed.
* ED-E's hitpoints and carryweight nerfed, DT remains very high. No DR. ED-E is extremely durable against small arms, but will melt to energy weapons and very high damage weapons.
Crafting
* You can now breakdown Spare Parts into Steel, a component of other items.
* You can now craft all weapon mods up through Hunting Rifle mods. Anything beyond that is still only available if bought, but I may add the rest of them to crafting soon.
* All armor piercing/hollow point rounds can now be created. Armor piercing rounds require steel, HP ammo is cheap and easy to create. You can also convert HP ammo to FMJ/Ball, and vice versa.
* You can now craft throwing knives from knives and lead, and throwing hatchets from hatchets and lead. Throwing spears remain, by far, the best throwing weapon but aren't craftable.
Ammo/Armor/Weapon Damage System Update
* DR/DT values of armors have been brought down to levels almost identical to fallout 1 and 2, though they scale up to higher maximum DT.
* Projectile speeds/gravity effect have been modified for all large caliber ammunitions (long distance shots on low velocity, high weight rounds like .45-70 require significant arcing to hit your targets).
* Weapons all scaled appropriately for roughly real life-equivalent damage, courtesy of Matriel. Ammo types for all weapons radically balanced for real world equivalence.
* Varmint Rifles now use a new ammo type, .14HMR, to keep them from being insane now that 5.56 has realistic damage. This round is superior to most small pistol rounds, comes in AP varieties, and is cheap.
* All energy weapon armor penetration increased. Enemies using energy weapons now sometimes use Overcharge ammo.
* High Velocity Missiles now act like giant, launched spears, and penetrate even the toughest armor doing massive damage. Most of their damage comes from the hit from the missile, however, and the explosive force of these missiles is fairly small by comparison.
Changelog v1.2
==========================
Quick Fixes
Turbo rebalanced (vanilla mode was retarded OP, wtf?).
Monster tweaks (not doing enough damage in some cases, or not piercing DT as they should).
A few ammo types have been tweaked.
Weight on some guns increased (will be changing all guns to "realistic" weight values soon)
"You have equipped faction armor" messages suppressed.
DT Reduced
Introduction of DR makes it too easy to become immune, or near-immune to damage, before Ammo DR-reduction exists, so DT is reduced across the board temporarily.
NPC Followers
Can now equip all faction armor.
Changelog - Version 1.1
=====================
Damage Resistance
Damage resistance has been added as a passive benefit to most armors, just like in Fallout 1/2. Now, if some one has 15DT/25DR (median armor resists) and you hit them for 35 damage (median damage from guns), you will wind up doing 35 - 15 - (35-15)*0.75 = 15 total damage, through all armors. With about 110 HP max for NPCs, this means you'll be 7-10 shotting the toughest, moderately armored NPCs with middling firepower. With the right ammo, skills, or weapons, 1-shots are pretty easy to get, but they should always take planning to get (hopefully).
Ammo types current do not, but WILL penetrate DR soon. DR penetration will be my primary "tweaking" tool, so give me as much niggling feedback as you can about what enemies "feel" too weak or too tough, which guns "feel" too weak, etcetera.
Damage Scaling by Skill
Removed for all guns, and heavily altered for Explosives and Melee/Unarmed. The explosives scaling is temporary, and will be replaced with a more interesting system, once the script extender is available. Currently, explosives have a chance to be "fumbled" when you throw them, causing them to just drop to your feet. This is kind of hokey since there's no script extender, but it's a good way to balance my method of keeping high damage for low explosives skill (so they're useful) without making putting points in the skill useless. At 50 explosives, you no longer fumble, but begin to gain even more rapid damage increases for points beyond 50.
Guns have a drastic, and through randomness eratic sway (no more timing your shots for the way it's moving), when your Guns/Energy Weapons skills are below the required skill for the gun. All guns have had their skill requirements tweaked. All guns do 100% of their max damage at all times, though, unless they are in poor repair.
Followers
All followers made more durable, and given a "magical 9mm" that shoots AP rounds in infinite supply. ED-E now has robot damage thresholds, but decreased hitpoints. So if you upgrade his armor on top of that, he'll be almost invincible unless you take him deathclaw hunting.
Crippled Limbs
Effects of crippled limbs tripled, broken legs make you move significantly slower (this was in the previous version, not noted).
Poison/Fire Damage Scaled
You won't get raped in half a second by poison anymore. The deadliest poisons now do 5 damage per second, while other poisons tend towards long durations with 2-3 damage per second.
Ammo Scaling
DT penetration for energy weapons is now a percentage base, rather than a flat number. This means EC Pack weapons won't be as rapey as they were before, and laser pistols/rifles will be viable for much longer.
Time Scale
Time now scales at 1 real world minute for 10 in-game minutes rather than 1:30.
Raiders
No longer suck, so be careful if you see some Jackals and think "hey, he's piss easy". They originally had 2 endurance and were level 5 (= 20 hp if they're lucky), they also had trash weapons and armor. These have all been significantly increased. Jackals are approximately 3-5 times more powerful than before. Vipers should also have better armor now, on occasion, along with better guns.
Ammo Scarcity
Vendors should now have less regular ammo types, leaving you to scrounge for most of it. Availability of ammo in loot tables is increased (mostly for AP/HP rounds), and the chances of you finding powder/casings/primers are increased. But breaking down bullets is still the best way to get primers.
Perks
Shotgun Surgeon DT penetration lowered to 7 from 15. It's still stupid good, but keeps you from one-shotting everything with 15 DR or less. Blowing away a deathclaw in one shot was a little goofy. Now, to penetrate armor you must use slugs (x0.5 damage, but they only fire one shot so all of that huge shotgun ammo goes into a single projectile), get a critical hit, sneak attack, or headshot.
Slayer!, SuperSlam, Commando, Gunslinger, Plasma Spaz, Run 'n' Gun, Rapid Reload, Pyromaniac, Quick Draw, Purifier, Piercing Strike, Ninja, Loose Cannon, Living Anatomy, Toughness, Kamikaze, and Hit the Deck all changed. Most for the better, others for the worse (mostly dealing with DT rebalancing).
Chems
Various drugs changed. Atomic Cocktail no longer restores a shitload of sleepiness. The Turbo effect of Turbo lasts about 3 times as long.
AP
Action points have been reduced similarly to carry weight - agililty now makes a bigger difference. Dumpstats in agility now result in VATS being completely useless.
Things to note:
Lack of skill progression on damage affects NPCs as well, so even low level NCR troopers with service rifles will be able to gun you down easily if your DT is under 20, and will still damage you as long as you're under ~28.
Details - Version 1.0
=====================
Damage Threshold
In Vanilla New Vegas, Damage Threshold (DT) is 80% damage reduction on the first X amount of incoming damage, rather than 100% as it was in FO1/2. Damage Reduction is a percentage reduction (impossible to ignore) for damage that makes it through threshold.
This mod restores 100% mitigation for DT, meaning that if you cannot punch through an enemy's armor you will not do damage to them. For this reason, all ammo has had its native penetration reviewed. Smaller ammo generally has native penetration, while larger ammo either loses DT reduction entirely, or actually becomes less effective against armor (eg .45-70). Energy weapons have the best armor penetration, but have had their damage reduced across the board.
HP Changes
Base hitpoints have been changed from 100 to 10, with 5 added per point of endurance, and 2 added per level. This means with 10 endurance, you'll max out at 120 HP... which is the lowest amount of HP you could even have in Vanilla, with 1 endurance at level 1. These changes are universal, and NPCs follow the same HP rules as the PC. Monsters, on the other hand, do not... and have been manually scaled back down to reasonable levels.
Hit point values of most things you can fight in the game are generally between 20 and 120, with Damage Threshold making up the majority of an enemy's "difficulty". There are exceptions though, for really large beasts and special NPCs.
Critical Calculation
Critical calculation is no longer static (number tacked on from the weapon's stats). Critical hits now can "blow past armor" like in Fallout 1/2. Critical hits all have a 1.5x damage multiplier, which can sometimes be influenced by the stats of the guns being used (they will say "Bonus Critical Damage" in their description in these cases). Critical hits also have a scaling penetration factor, completely ignoring weaker armors while negating increasingly smaller percentages of higher armor types. 30+ DT is reduced by 1/3 upon a successful critical hit, for instance, while 2DT is completely ignored.
Critical SNEAK Attacks have an additional 10 points of DT penetration.
NPC Followers
No longer have infinite ammo, or special weapons that can't break. You have to outfit them, although they do come with some basic junk to use. They also don't have ridiculous stats anymore, meaning they won't be killing machines that you just sit back and watch.
Hunger/Sleep/Thirst and Food
The rate at which most of these occur has been increased. Sleep deprivation will begin to accelerate once it is acquired, meaning you can't just ignore the first level of it anymore. Food no longer heals by default. Certain foods still have healing properties, but it isn't common.
Drugs
Most chems are far, far more useful now. Some have had their stats tweaked to be more useful, but in general the new DT system has simply made the game so frantic that you absolutely need the benefits they provide in difficult situations. All drugs are more expensive. Stimpacks are much more expensive, and far less common. However, they are now designed to slowly, but very significantly, heal you so you can recover after a firefight. They can be used during a fight as well, but probably won't stop you from dying. Superstims, by contrast, heal a fuckton all at once... but are hugely expensive, somewhat heavy, and prohibitively rare for constant use. They all have weight now, as well.
Weight
Base carry capacity is reduced from 150 to 75, with each point of strength now adding 15 carrying capacity instead of 5. In all, you could potentially carry more total weight with 10 strength, but it's more likely that you'll have a severely diminished carrying capacity. Ammo weight has doubled. All chems have weight. Most misc items have had their weights tweaked (usually down... spoons, for instance, weight 0.1 lbs instead of 1.0). Power Armor mitigates a portion of its own weight when equipped (less for scavanged power armor). Bottlecaps have weight (1000 caps = 1lb, not that significant).
Agility
Now has a much heavier impact on your speed, weapon steadiness, and reload speeds so it can't be used as a dump-stat for gunslingers, in conjunction with jamming changes.
Jamming
Weapons now jam on reload far sooner, and far more frequently. The jam animation is also affected twice as much by agility, meaning a person with low agility who jams in a firefight will probably be better off switching weapons.
Perks
Perks have been somewhat rebalanced for the DT modifications, and other perks have been made more useful because they were trash. An effort was made to make VATS-specific perks useful both in and out of VATS, although some of them are still VATS-specific. Example: Command Perk now increases your base fire rate a little, and significantly reduces bullet spread from weapons in its class, in addition to the VATS bonus.
DT Modifying perks have either been scaled down or up, depending upon how their associated weapons fit into the new system. Passive penetration for unarmed, for instance, was reduced from 15 to 5. While that might not seem like a lot, it's essentially +5 damage per hit on enemies with ~60 HP (majority of enemies are in this range) who have damage thresholds above 4 (almost all).
Super Slam, a perk giving you a "knockdown" passive, has had its base chance reduced from 30% to 3% since it was patently ridiculous just knockdown-locking everyone with a knife. This percentage is increased to 10% for slower, bigger weapons, and has an x3 multiplier for power attacks (9% knockdown with a knife power attack, 30% with a sledgehammer power attack).
Demolitions Expert has been reduced to a maximum of 2 ranks, from 3, with each rank adding 35% explosives damage from 20%.
Weapon Changes
The vast majority of weapons have had their damage moved more towards a median (high damage weapons nerfed, low damage weapons buffed), making ammo selection far more important. High damage weapons like sniper rifles should excel at one-shotting people to "open" a fight, but become far less useful during an actual fight because of their own fire speed. EC-Pack weapons (gatling lasers, laser tommy-guns, etcetera) completely ignore armor, and do low damage at a high ammo-eating speed... this probably means they will shred the vast majority of mid-high level enemies, but the ammo is very scarce. It should be tested, though... and high-HP enemies are their bane (deathclaws, for instance).
Explosives are useful for everyone now. Don't just throw them away. Specializing in explosives might also be viable, not sure, in theory specializing into explosives should only really allow you to do damage to high-DT enemies.
Many melee/unarmed weapons have been tweaked to have different reasons to use them - critical damage bonuses, chances, etcetera. Melee is probably pretty bad in the open now that you die really fast in firefights, but ambushing people around obstacles should work well. Melee now does more damage than anything else in the game... but it's probably impossible to use it as your only means of dishing out damage (much like any other type of damage). So you probably will want to carry around melee weapons at all times.
=======================
This mod was tested and developed internally by a team of about 8 people, and weapon damage was scaled by a professional military consultant. It is intended to be a Fallout 1/2/Tactics damage system emulator to increase the challenge and depth of combat, as well as make it feel more like an FPS.
Quick List of Critical Features:
* Much less HP for everything (including you)
* True Damage Threshold, making armor more important
* All items and chems have their place, and situational uses, most of which are necessary against some types of enemies (e.g. there are only a handful of ways to break through a Robot's damage threshold, energy weapons being the best)
* DR/DT values added to most creatures (no more "it's hard because it has a billion hitpoints" crap)
* NPC Followers rebalanced
* Stats and Skills account for a larger percentage of their affected game effects. For example, barter skill is weighted more heavily in calculating item costs. Endurance accounts for far more of your total Hit Points than Vanilla.
* All ammo types can be crafted, and Hollow Point isn't worthless anymore due to the more complex DR/DT system.
* Chems and Ammo are much more scarce.
* Weapon Damage no longer scales with skill for Guns or Energy Weapons. Instead, having a skill beneath the weapon's requirement results in significant, and erratic, weapon sway.
* Critical Hits are now calculated by a flat 1.5x multiplier, and a reduction to Damage Threshold for the target. Critical Sneak Attacks ignore much more DT than normal Criticals.
Important Notes:
It is not advisable to use this mod with an existing save-game due to balance issues, but won't cause any real "bugs" so to speak. It'll just be like cheating, in some ways, because Vanilla allows you to stockpile supplies much easier.
This modification is NOT compatible with pre-purchase DLC cheat-packs like the Caravan Pack, Mercenary Pack, etcetera. While these packs won't cause any bugs in the game, the effects of the equipment spawned from them will either be drastically overpowered, or drastically underpowered.
This modification's compatibility with non-balance mods is very high. New items, textures, and other changes that have a minimal impact on gameplay/damage/stats shouldn't cause conflict.
This modification's compatibility with other rebalance mods is very low, causing similar problems with them as the pre-purchase DLCs. FOOK, for instance, was found during preliminary testing to be fairly compatible, but many of the new items dropped into the game were either useless, or god-mode. If other mods of this nature are used, simply place NV Classic Rebalance in your load order either above or below them based on which you prefer to take priority, and expect most new weapons and armor to function in odd ways (New Armors are usually very weak, while new guns are usually extremely strong and have no skill requirements to use).
v1.3.3 Changelog
========================
Bug Fixes
- Availability of .17HMR ammo was erroneously reduced in shops, it should now be more prevalent.
- Commando and Defender Leather Armors were rated similarly to regular Leather Armor, and counted as Heavy Armor. They are now Medium Armor, with high DR values but low DT.
- Various clothing-level armor DT/DR adjustments.
- Fixed a crash associated with Steady Chem (Thanks to Rizzen203)
- Fixed multiple typographical/omission errors in weapon sway calculations, limb crippling effects, and various object effects (Thanks to da2pacalypse)
- Fixed an issue with 10mm guns not using 10mm AP ammunition correctly.
- Most DR values on creatures scaled to half, to compensate for a system bug doubling DR values applied to them.
- Raider Drug Usage overhauled, now handled by scripted effects. Fiends have highly potent drugs available, increasing their DR, Stats, Damage, Speed, and more if used.
- Weapons can now jam while firing, although rarely, if they are in very poor condition.
- Reduced effectiveness of Rad-X by 5 base points.
- Many loot tables tweaked to remove useless guns from late-game enemies.
- Critical Damage for NPCs increased (remains the same for the player)
v1.3.2 Changelog
========================
Bug Fixes
NPC/Creature Changes
Misc Changes
v1.3.1 Changelog
========================
NPC/Creature Balance
Fiends and other raider types now have drug effects when you meet them sometimes, providing them with Med-X, Psycho, Turbo, and Buffout benefits. Fiends are much, much tougher and usually have multiple drug effects each.
Due to the critical hit calculation being changed, NPCs could not effectively land any criticals. This is now changed, allowing them to calculate superior damage on criticals once again.
Supermutant Masters are a little tougher to kill, and their melee ability is increased dramatically.
Nightkin no longer have any DT (an oversight in previous versions left them with 1 or 2), and the previous fix for critical damage has made them a lot more effective at dealing damage.
v1.3 Changelog
========================
NPC/Creature Balance
Loot tables for all NPCs changed to include higher level weapons, more effective ammo types, and higher levels/skill focus for the types of weapons they use. DT/DR modified for most enemies, making hollow points exceptional against most wasteland creatures and mercenary/low level raiders but nearly useless against armored opponents (HP ammo is your best friend against nightkin, but shit vs. armored supermutants for instance). Robots and other metallic enemies have no DR, but very, very high DT. Explosives do massive damage, but don't penetrate any resists, so if you want to use them against high level enemies you need to skill it really high and get some Demo Expert perks (in which case explosives will remain devastating throughout the entire game, limited in their power only by their weight and lack of supply).
Many NPCs now carry AP ammo, and will shred you even if you're in Power Armor. This is particularly true of NCR troopers.
Robots all use ammo that pierces some DT/DR, so you won't become immune to MkI Securitrons nearly as easily with their shitty 9mm guns. The MkII Securitrons are still pretty much the same... which is to say they'll destroy you.
Upgraded turrets are now far, far tougher while lower level turrets are still fairly weak. Mk VI laser turrets, for instance, are almost completely indestructible when pitted against small arms (takes about 100 AP 5.56 rounds to kill one), very resilient against most energy weapons (an upgraded gatling laser being pretty much the ONLY reliable way to even come close to killing them with guns) and have the sole weakness of being destroyed by zap gloves and EMP explosives (and even then, they're not pushovers). All turrets now fire rounds that pierce armor, making it impossible to ever be completely immune to most of them.
Some of the new vegas tribes are tougher, but they're still pretty weak because the area is supposed to be available to pretty much any level. So, ultimately, wiping them all out won't be as boring if you're higher level, but it won't be a massive "i have to reload a billion times" challenge either.
Chems
Stimpaks are far, far less common in all loot sources and shop stocks, in addition to being more expensive. Sarsparilla's healing is drastically reduced, and still remains a great way to keep yourself topped off for health but is no longer a reasonable replacement for stimpaks. A few chems have been balanced a bit more, especially energy drinks which now cause you to "crash" after the effect wears off, netting an increase in your exhaustion level after the effects wear off. One notable exception is tobacco, which you can just chew forever to stay awake. But its effectiveness in doing this is reduced a bit.
Crafting
Mods for Service Rifle added, mods for Hunting Rifle removed. Any weapons higher than the Service Rifle require shop-purchased mods. The amount of lead from breaking down bullets is also drastically reduced.
Energy Weapon ammo production rebalanced to require conductors and fission batteries for the upgraded ammo types (conductors for overcharge, fission batteries for max charge). Recycling now always requires a power source, and therefore can only be done in larger batches.
Weapon Balances
Unarmed weapons are pretty much crap now unless you skill unarmed up excessively. It still winds up being the "cheapest" and easiest way to kill things by end game, but is extremely limited early. Melee weapons are similar, but still much more effective early than unarmed and not quite as effective late. Nonetheless, melee and unarmed still make mince meat out of basically everything in the later stages of the game, and your effectiveness is limited by how difficult it is to survive a frontal attack on ranged enemies (especially if you wear power armor which slows you down, as opposed to being speedy).
Energy weapon ammunition severely limited in supply in the wasteland. Energy weapons are by far the most effective all around weapons now, cutting through DR/DT like it was nothing, and in some cases also doing exceptional damage. Science is now a requirement for making ammo to supply them, and it's probably a good idea to have some backups regardless.
Perk Changes
Plasma Spaz effectiveness increased.
New Perk - "Freeballer" - 3 ranks, min level 10, min agil 8. When wearing light or no armor, everything you do is increased in speed by 15% up to 45% at rank 3. This, in combination with travel light, and all of the equip/attack speed perks turns you into the fucking flash... if you wear light armor.
Misc Changes
Doctors no longer heal radiation, and radaway is more rare. Enjoy your built in biological flashlight.
Ammo loot amount has been reduced by about 33% across the board.
v1.3b Changelog
=================
This version isn't complete yet because no one has tested it. It probably needs tweaks of some kind.
NPC Enemies
* Now use different kinds of ammo, and if available will switch to AP/HP rounds according to their target's DT/DR. AP ammo is utilized pretty frequently by NPCs, let me know if it's too common.
* Monstrous humonoid enemies (Supermutants, Ghouls, Deathclaws, etcetera) all have DR and DT if they wear armor, and some have native DR/DT from thick/scaly skin respective to DR/DT. Most "monsters" or mutated animals have no native DR/DT, but have had their hitpoints increased along with their size to make HP ammo a lot more appealing for fighting them.
* Supermutant masters are extremely tough now, and should stay difficult for much further into the game. Supermutant Overlords are maybe a little too strong, but fuck it.
Misc Balance/Fixes
* Underwater breath lasts longer.
* AP ammo significantly less common in loot. All ammo significantly less common across the board.
* Critical failure on thrown explosives should no longer result in hovering projectiles.
* Arcade Gannon has some facial hair and a smirk now.
* Shop inventories have had most of their "ridiculously awesome" items removed, like thermic lances, ballistic fists, etcetera. They must be found out in the world.
* Unarmed weapons nerfed.
* ED-E's hitpoints and carryweight nerfed, DT remains very high. No DR. ED-E is extremely durable against small arms, but will melt to energy weapons and very high damage weapons.
Crafting
* You can now breakdown Spare Parts into Steel, a component of other items.
* You can now craft all weapon mods up through Hunting Rifle mods. Anything beyond that is still only available if bought, but I may add the rest of them to crafting soon.
* All armor piercing/hollow point rounds can now be created. Armor piercing rounds require steel, HP ammo is cheap and easy to create. You can also convert HP ammo to FMJ/Ball, and vice versa.
* You can now craft throwing knives from knives and lead, and throwing hatchets from hatchets and lead. Throwing spears remain, by far, the best throwing weapon but aren't craftable.
Ammo/Armor/Weapon Damage System Update
* DR/DT values of armors have been brought down to levels almost identical to fallout 1 and 2, though they scale up to higher maximum DT.
* Projectile speeds/gravity effect have been modified for all large caliber ammunitions (long distance shots on low velocity, high weight rounds like .45-70 require significant arcing to hit your targets).
* Weapons all scaled appropriately for roughly real life-equivalent damage, courtesy of Matriel. Ammo types for all weapons radically balanced for real world equivalence.
* Varmint Rifles now use a new ammo type, .14HMR, to keep them from being insane now that 5.56 has realistic damage. This round is superior to most small pistol rounds, comes in AP varieties, and is cheap.
* All energy weapon armor penetration increased. Enemies using energy weapons now sometimes use Overcharge ammo.
* High Velocity Missiles now act like giant, launched spears, and penetrate even the toughest armor doing massive damage. Most of their damage comes from the hit from the missile, however, and the explosive force of these missiles is fairly small by comparison.
Changelog v1.2
==========================
Quick Fixes
Turbo rebalanced (vanilla mode was retarded OP, wtf?).
Monster tweaks (not doing enough damage in some cases, or not piercing DT as they should).
A few ammo types have been tweaked.
Weight on some guns increased (will be changing all guns to "realistic" weight values soon)
"You have equipped faction armor" messages suppressed.
DT Reduced
Introduction of DR makes it too easy to become immune, or near-immune to damage, before Ammo DR-reduction exists, so DT is reduced across the board temporarily.
NPC Followers
Can now equip all faction armor.
Changelog - Version 1.1
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Damage Resistance
Damage resistance has been added as a passive benefit to most armors, just like in Fallout 1/2. Now, if some one has 15DT/25DR (median armor resists) and you hit them for 35 damage (median damage from guns), you will wind up doing 35 - 15 - (35-15)*0.75 = 15 total damage, through all armors. With about 110 HP max for NPCs, this means you'll be 7-10 shotting the toughest, moderately armored NPCs with middling firepower. With the right ammo, skills, or weapons, 1-shots are pretty easy to get, but they should always take planning to get (hopefully).
Ammo types current do not, but WILL penetrate DR soon. DR penetration will be my primary "tweaking" tool, so give me as much niggling feedback as you can about what enemies "feel" too weak or too tough, which guns "feel" too weak, etcetera.
Damage Scaling by Skill
Removed for all guns, and heavily altered for Explosives and Melee/Unarmed. The explosives scaling is temporary, and will be replaced with a more interesting system, once the script extender is available. Currently, explosives have a chance to be "fumbled" when you throw them, causing them to just drop to your feet. This is kind of hokey since there's no script extender, but it's a good way to balance my method of keeping high damage for low explosives skill (so they're useful) without making putting points in the skill useless. At 50 explosives, you no longer fumble, but begin to gain even more rapid damage increases for points beyond 50.
Guns have a drastic, and through randomness eratic sway (no more timing your shots for the way it's moving), when your Guns/Energy Weapons skills are below the required skill for the gun. All guns have had their skill requirements tweaked. All guns do 100% of their max damage at all times, though, unless they are in poor repair.
Followers
All followers made more durable, and given a "magical 9mm" that shoots AP rounds in infinite supply. ED-E now has robot damage thresholds, but decreased hitpoints. So if you upgrade his armor on top of that, he'll be almost invincible unless you take him deathclaw hunting.
Crippled Limbs
Effects of crippled limbs tripled, broken legs make you move significantly slower (this was in the previous version, not noted).
Poison/Fire Damage Scaled
You won't get raped in half a second by poison anymore. The deadliest poisons now do 5 damage per second, while other poisons tend towards long durations with 2-3 damage per second.
Ammo Scaling
DT penetration for energy weapons is now a percentage base, rather than a flat number. This means EC Pack weapons won't be as rapey as they were before, and laser pistols/rifles will be viable for much longer.
Time Scale
Time now scales at 1 real world minute for 10 in-game minutes rather than 1:30.
Raiders
No longer suck, so be careful if you see some Jackals and think "hey, he's piss easy". They originally had 2 endurance and were level 5 (= 20 hp if they're lucky), they also had trash weapons and armor. These have all been significantly increased. Jackals are approximately 3-5 times more powerful than before. Vipers should also have better armor now, on occasion, along with better guns.
Ammo Scarcity
Vendors should now have less regular ammo types, leaving you to scrounge for most of it. Availability of ammo in loot tables is increased (mostly for AP/HP rounds), and the chances of you finding powder/casings/primers are increased. But breaking down bullets is still the best way to get primers.
Perks
Shotgun Surgeon DT penetration lowered to 7 from 15. It's still stupid good, but keeps you from one-shotting everything with 15 DR or less. Blowing away a deathclaw in one shot was a little goofy. Now, to penetrate armor you must use slugs (x0.5 damage, but they only fire one shot so all of that huge shotgun ammo goes into a single projectile), get a critical hit, sneak attack, or headshot.
Slayer!, SuperSlam, Commando, Gunslinger, Plasma Spaz, Run 'n' Gun, Rapid Reload, Pyromaniac, Quick Draw, Purifier, Piercing Strike, Ninja, Loose Cannon, Living Anatomy, Toughness, Kamikaze, and Hit the Deck all changed. Most for the better, others for the worse (mostly dealing with DT rebalancing).
Chems
Various drugs changed. Atomic Cocktail no longer restores a shitload of sleepiness. The Turbo effect of Turbo lasts about 3 times as long.
AP
Action points have been reduced similarly to carry weight - agililty now makes a bigger difference. Dumpstats in agility now result in VATS being completely useless.
Things to note:
Lack of skill progression on damage affects NPCs as well, so even low level NCR troopers with service rifles will be able to gun you down easily if your DT is under 20, and will still damage you as long as you're under ~28.
Details - Version 1.0
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Damage Threshold
In Vanilla New Vegas, Damage Threshold (DT) is 80% damage reduction on the first X amount of incoming damage, rather than 100% as it was in FO1/2. Damage Reduction is a percentage reduction (impossible to ignore) for damage that makes it through threshold.
This mod restores 100% mitigation for DT, meaning that if you cannot punch through an enemy's armor you will not do damage to them. For this reason, all ammo has had its native penetration reviewed. Smaller ammo generally has native penetration, while larger ammo either loses DT reduction entirely, or actually becomes less effective against armor (eg .45-70). Energy weapons have the best armor penetration, but have had their damage reduced across the board.
HP Changes
Base hitpoints have been changed from 100 to 10, with 5 added per point of endurance, and 2 added per level. This means with 10 endurance, you'll max out at 120 HP... which is the lowest amount of HP you could even have in Vanilla, with 1 endurance at level 1. These changes are universal, and NPCs follow the same HP rules as the PC. Monsters, on the other hand, do not... and have been manually scaled back down to reasonable levels.
Hit point values of most things you can fight in the game are generally between 20 and 120, with Damage Threshold making up the majority of an enemy's "difficulty". There are exceptions though, for really large beasts and special NPCs.
Critical Calculation
Critical calculation is no longer static (number tacked on from the weapon's stats). Critical hits now can "blow past armor" like in Fallout 1/2. Critical hits all have a 1.5x damage multiplier, which can sometimes be influenced by the stats of the guns being used (they will say "Bonus Critical Damage" in their description in these cases). Critical hits also have a scaling penetration factor, completely ignoring weaker armors while negating increasingly smaller percentages of higher armor types. 30+ DT is reduced by 1/3 upon a successful critical hit, for instance, while 2DT is completely ignored.
Critical SNEAK Attacks have an additional 10 points of DT penetration.
NPC Followers
No longer have infinite ammo, or special weapons that can't break. You have to outfit them, although they do come with some basic junk to use. They also don't have ridiculous stats anymore, meaning they won't be killing machines that you just sit back and watch.
Hunger/Sleep/Thirst and Food
The rate at which most of these occur has been increased. Sleep deprivation will begin to accelerate once it is acquired, meaning you can't just ignore the first level of it anymore. Food no longer heals by default. Certain foods still have healing properties, but it isn't common.
Drugs
Most chems are far, far more useful now. Some have had their stats tweaked to be more useful, but in general the new DT system has simply made the game so frantic that you absolutely need the benefits they provide in difficult situations. All drugs are more expensive. Stimpacks are much more expensive, and far less common. However, they are now designed to slowly, but very significantly, heal you so you can recover after a firefight. They can be used during a fight as well, but probably won't stop you from dying. Superstims, by contrast, heal a fuckton all at once... but are hugely expensive, somewhat heavy, and prohibitively rare for constant use. They all have weight now, as well.
Weight
Base carry capacity is reduced from 150 to 75, with each point of strength now adding 15 carrying capacity instead of 5. In all, you could potentially carry more total weight with 10 strength, but it's more likely that you'll have a severely diminished carrying capacity. Ammo weight has doubled. All chems have weight. Most misc items have had their weights tweaked (usually down... spoons, for instance, weight 0.1 lbs instead of 1.0). Power Armor mitigates a portion of its own weight when equipped (less for scavanged power armor). Bottlecaps have weight (1000 caps = 1lb, not that significant).
Agility
Now has a much heavier impact on your speed, weapon steadiness, and reload speeds so it can't be used as a dump-stat for gunslingers, in conjunction with jamming changes.
Jamming
Weapons now jam on reload far sooner, and far more frequently. The jam animation is also affected twice as much by agility, meaning a person with low agility who jams in a firefight will probably be better off switching weapons.
Perks
Perks have been somewhat rebalanced for the DT modifications, and other perks have been made more useful because they were trash. An effort was made to make VATS-specific perks useful both in and out of VATS, although some of them are still VATS-specific. Example: Command Perk now increases your base fire rate a little, and significantly reduces bullet spread from weapons in its class, in addition to the VATS bonus.
DT Modifying perks have either been scaled down or up, depending upon how their associated weapons fit into the new system. Passive penetration for unarmed, for instance, was reduced from 15 to 5. While that might not seem like a lot, it's essentially +5 damage per hit on enemies with ~60 HP (majority of enemies are in this range) who have damage thresholds above 4 (almost all).
Super Slam, a perk giving you a "knockdown" passive, has had its base chance reduced from 30% to 3% since it was patently ridiculous just knockdown-locking everyone with a knife. This percentage is increased to 10% for slower, bigger weapons, and has an x3 multiplier for power attacks (9% knockdown with a knife power attack, 30% with a sledgehammer power attack).
Demolitions Expert has been reduced to a maximum of 2 ranks, from 3, with each rank adding 35% explosives damage from 20%.
Weapon Changes
The vast majority of weapons have had their damage moved more towards a median (high damage weapons nerfed, low damage weapons buffed), making ammo selection far more important. High damage weapons like sniper rifles should excel at one-shotting people to "open" a fight, but become far less useful during an actual fight because of their own fire speed. EC-Pack weapons (gatling lasers, laser tommy-guns, etcetera) completely ignore armor, and do low damage at a high ammo-eating speed... this probably means they will shred the vast majority of mid-high level enemies, but the ammo is very scarce. It should be tested, though... and high-HP enemies are their bane (deathclaws, for instance).
Explosives are useful for everyone now. Don't just throw them away. Specializing in explosives might also be viable, not sure, in theory specializing into explosives should only really allow you to do damage to high-DT enemies.
Many melee/unarmed weapons have been tweaked to have different reasons to use them - critical damage bonuses, chances, etcetera. Melee is probably pretty bad in the open now that you die really fast in firefights, but ambushing people around obstacles should work well. Melee now does more damage than anything else in the game... but it's probably impossible to use it as your only means of dishing out damage (much like any other type of damage). So you probably will want to carry around melee weapons at all times.
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