Remember when I said I wasnt gonna buff the standard tesla rifle barrels? They are now almost 4 times better. Whoops. I went from being unable to kill a standard feral ghoul, to incinerating it in seconds with the auto barrel.
I spent 3 hours testing, tweaking, and repeating, pitting the tesla rifle and all its barrels against the laser rifle and laser musket. Is it a viable weapon now? Yes. Is it fun? Yes. Is it overpowered? ...maybe? With fallout 4, changing a gun sometimes changes things more long term than you at first expect, it definitely felt balanced when I was testing it against some ghouls in the glowing sea over and over. The lobbing barrel also got some biiig tweaks. Check out the weapon section in the description to see more detailed....details.
Also some small changes to the laser musket and harpoon gun.
At this point, there's only 3 guns (keyword here is GUNS) I haven't touched...last time I tried to balance the gamma guns barrels, it eviscerated all my test enemies...so thats probably fine. (Dont underestimate that Artifact barrel you get from Cabot, it has high stun, does raw physical damage, and can penetrate armor...like, not DR, the armor protecting sentry bots fusion cores, or mirelurks bodies. The Zeta barrel is actually more a plot weapon, it does extra damage to Lorenzo.)
The Thirst zapper I just haven't used enough, or felt was underpowered enough to touch, and the syringer...I dont want to, but I probably will...someday.
I doubt this is somthing you could do. But I'd honestly balance pipe weapons to have abysmal accuracy even from the first shot. Like unless you're using a long barrel hitting somthing outside of 50m is more down to luck than aiming.
It would make sense from a lore perspective, these weapons being smooth bore and with wider barrels
I mean I probably could, but I don't think I would.
Realistic, yeah. But not fun. If I debuff the pipe weapons too much, nobody would bother even using them. Especially when the early game gives you a 10mm and a Minigun, and its very easy to get a double barrel and hunting rifle in concord. You can comfortably ignore the pipe guns so its not like you are forced to use them, so they still need to be a somewhat viable option early on.
Also the pipe weapons are the most used weapons by NPC's in the game, Raider's, Super Mutants. If you've ever taken out the eye stalks on a Mr. Gutsy, you know how much a severe accuracy debuff can render an enemy helpless. It would make certain enemies disproportionately too easy.
From a realism POV, yeah it is silly. But video games aren't always meant to be realistic and when they are, they pick and choose what they take.
From a game balance POV, that is a very different set of balancing that imo, is something that has to be thought about when you are designing the game in the first place. Since fallout is an RPG (and should always be an RPG first and foremost, before being things like a shooter), most players are always going to gravitate to pure DPS for fast, optimal kills (especially since most combat is in close quarters as you explore "dungeons"). Something like that is more befitting of a milsim or other games that want to take a more realistic approach to design.
Not to mention that any changes to damage effects enemies and a change like that would make enemies with full-auto weapons a complete nightmare to deal with.
I think I have seen a couple mods that do this, but they are usually total conversions for a more "sim" approach to the entire game because they would kind of have to be.
Hi, im new to fallout 4 and modding. is this compatible to "Better Locational Damage and Optional Gameplay Overhauls"?
i read the compatibility description and i dont think i understand it all completely and i lack the experience to feel or know if the mods are working or not if both are installed.
The stated goal of this mod is to bring the weapons more in-line with one another, rather than having a plethora of useless weapons nobody actually uses. In order to do that I have two options, buff the under-performing guns, or nerf the good guns people actually use. The latter would have just made the game tedious, especially when dealing with damage-sponge enemies in the dlc's. I opted for the former.
A lot of weapons were severely underpowered. There is never a reason to use the Submachine gun, never a reason to use a splitter barrel to make a gun less accurate for literally no benefit. The broadsider was a joke, the .44 magnum couldn't hurt a fly. Explosive weapons relied solely on a oversight in perks, requiring 9 ranks of perks just to be decent. Alien blaster was just a fancy laser pistol, etc.
This isn't just a blanket buff to all guns (I specifically made this mod because other mods I found did just that) but most of the guns I did mess with were buffed because that was just the more logical choice than a ton of blanket nerfs.
If you think the weapons do too much damage, then there's mods out there that let you adjust incoming/outgoing damage multipliers across the board and the way I made this mod, means these tweaks should keep the weapons in-line with one another and filling the same roles/niche's regardless of your difficulty/damage settings.
To further back Zaayl here, have you played to high level content, at all? A dead give away to any player who played this game, and to min-maxers like me who have used this mod to balance vanilla weapons without installing the over-clunky weaponsmith extended(which, btw, ups all weapon damage a bunch). Most weapons cannot even damage some high level enemies due to insane armor and the weapons just not having enough damage, even with this mod and unofficial patch(which LOWERS the armor of one enemy even!) and still many guns don't have the penetration to do enough damage to certain enemies even with max perks.
When you complain weapons being buffed or doing to much damage, it shows you don't know a thing about high level fallout 4 gameplay.
Finally some good mod that leaves no obsolete weapons. Since the game isn't getting updates like an online game, trash weapons are going to stay trash and best ones stay the best so this kind of mods are invaluable when done right and this mod did just that.
I don't know how to feel about the rocket launcher. Its damage is pretty ridiculous. Both making the game a bit too easy once you get it with some rockets, while also instantly killing you if you're against it or are too close to the blast radius. Even with great armor the defense isn't counted for self damage.
Sure you could argue this gives some encouragement to use the weapon in survival mode since rockets are heavy, but I'm just saying for very hard it feels off.
Everything else, minigun, double barrel shotgun, etc. Good stuff! Especially the submachine gun!
I primarily play survival mode, so I did prioritize that, as indeed, its powerful but you can only carry a handful of rockets at a time.
Honestly imo, I think the problem isn't how strong it is, its how easy it is to get missiles, what with ammo boxes frequently spawning with 4 missiles or 4 mini nukes all over the world. So in non-survival gameplay, you can fire hundreds. Its basically impossible to balance the two modes due to this discrepancy.
Maybe one day if I come back to this, I might look into making an optional module that reduces the lvlist loot for missiles so you find 1 instead of 4 at a time.
Pistol build. I noticed that you boosted the base dmg of the pipe revolver so that it hit harder than the 10 mm (which would remove the point of the revolver)- great move. But then boosted the dmg of the 10 mm so it was closer to that of the Deliverer... Meaning, the 10 mm and the pipe revolver now have the same dmg again, making the revolver pointless. Maybe rather than that, perhaps reduce the Deliverer dmg. Surely a .45 revolver would hit harder than a 10 mm anything? Just at a much slower rate of fire, so it becomes more your weapon for dealing with high armour targets before you get enough .44 rounds to do the same with a heavier revolver. You use the 10 mm for general combat and pull out a revolver for high dmg resistance targets. Less DSP, but gets through the armour?
When I said "Current" 10mm, that was in reference to the 1.0 version of the mod, ie the 10mm post-buff. Pipe revolver was buffed in the 1.1 version of the mod after I noticed this exact problem.
(For reference, the vanilla Deliverer does 25 base damage and vanilla pipe revolver does 24 and vanilla 10mm does 18. I believe I nerfed deliverer to about 23 damage with a small fire rate boost, buffed the 10mm to 25 and then in 1.1 I buffed the pipe revolver to around 30 iirc)
The 10 mm and the pipe revolver do the same damage for me, so I think another of my mods may be overruling it. I will investigate. Thank you for clarifying.
I like the sound of these changes, I have but one suggestion. Bleed and burn effects.
I find that the bleed effects on ranged weapons makes them so overpowered, that at level 8 I can bring down a Matriarch Deathclaw if I don't let it hit me, with a bleed pipe pistol. As such, if I get a bleed ranged weapon, I scrap it as it breaks the gameplay experience for me.
Burn weapons on the other hand seem to have the opposite effect, ie burn mod for laser rifle. Each shot resets the burn, rather than adds additional burning, and unlike bleed with ignores armour, burn dmg is reduced by energy resistance. The combined effect of this is that burn damage from the weapon mod or legendary effects is negligible. There are mods which change this, but they often let burn ignore resistance, and let it stack - at which point it becomes as ovp as the bleed damage. If its something you plan on looking into, and making bleed and burn immersive and make a bit more sense, that would be great, as I don't think many others have bothered.
Its a tricky conundrum because bleeds entire gimmick is that it stacks, take that away it becomes the same as poison and fire. The problem with stacking DoTs is that its going to be broken on high fire rate weapons pretty much no matter what. (One of the reasons I personally don't play with popular mods that let you swap legendary effects around or craft them, too much temptation to make busted OP weapons, RNG is really the only "balance" for certain combos)
Bleed does relatively low damage, has a fairly short duration, getting it to feel somewhat balanced without nerfing it too hard would take a lot of tweaking and testing, hours that right now I don't really have to spend.
Fire could definitely do with a damage buff but thats if I ever get back into modding (Don't even have Bethesda.net installed on the PC right now, let alone the CK)
So I don't disagree, but I also just don't really have the time or interest right now.
Huh, Im pretty particular about balance changes - this is probably the first rebalance Ive seen for any Bethesda game where I agree with every single change! Nice work and well explained reasoning!
120 comments
Whoops.
I went from being unable to kill a standard feral ghoul, to incinerating it in seconds with the auto barrel.
I spent 3 hours testing, tweaking, and repeating, pitting the tesla rifle and all its barrels against the laser rifle and laser musket. Is it a viable weapon now? Yes. Is it fun? Yes. Is it overpowered? ...maybe? With fallout 4, changing a gun sometimes changes things more long term than you at first expect, it definitely felt balanced when I was testing it against some ghouls in the glowing sea over and over. The lobbing barrel also got some biiig tweaks. Check out the weapon section in the description to see more detailed....details.
Also some small changes to the laser musket and harpoon gun.
At this point, there's only 3 guns (keyword here is GUNS) I haven't touched...last time I tried to balance the gamma guns barrels, it eviscerated all my test enemies...so thats probably fine. (Dont underestimate that Artifact barrel you get from Cabot, it has high stun, does raw physical damage, and can penetrate armor...like, not DR, the armor protecting sentry bots fusion cores, or mirelurks bodies. The Zeta barrel is actually more a plot weapon, it does extra damage to Lorenzo.)
The Thirst zapper I just haven't used enough, or felt was underpowered enough to touch, and the syringer...I dont want to, but I probably will...someday.
Unless you're referring to the pipe rifle .50 mod in which case: Because the pipe guns are meant to be a bit shit.
It would make sense from a lore perspective, these weapons being smooth bore and with wider barrels
Realistic, yeah. But not fun. If I debuff the pipe weapons too much, nobody would bother even using them. Especially when the early game gives you a 10mm and a Minigun, and its very easy to get a double barrel and hunting rifle in concord. You can comfortably ignore the pipe guns so its not like you are forced to use them, so they still need to be a somewhat viable option early on.
Also the pipe weapons are the most used weapons by NPC's in the game, Raider's, Super Mutants. If you've ever taken out the eye stalks on a Mr. Gutsy, you know how much a severe accuracy debuff can render an enemy helpless. It would make certain enemies disproportionately too easy.
From a game balance POV, that is a very different set of balancing that imo, is something that has to be thought about when you are designing the game in the first place. Since fallout is an RPG (and should always be an RPG first and foremost, before being things like a shooter), most players are always going to gravitate to pure DPS for fast, optimal kills (especially since most combat is in close quarters as you explore "dungeons"). Something like that is more befitting of a milsim or other games that want to take a more realistic approach to design.
Not to mention that any changes to damage effects enemies and a change like that would make enemies with full-auto weapons a complete nightmare to deal with.
I think I have seen a couple mods that do this, but they are usually total conversions for a more "sim" approach to the entire game because they would kind of have to be.
i read the compatibility description and i dont think i understand it all completely and i lack the experience to feel or know if the mods are working or not if both are installed.
thank you in advance.
The stated goal of this mod is to bring the weapons more in-line with one another, rather than having a plethora of useless weapons nobody actually uses. In order to do that I have two options, buff the under-performing guns, or nerf the good guns people actually use. The latter would have just made the game tedious, especially when dealing with damage-sponge enemies in the dlc's. I opted for the former.
A lot of weapons were severely underpowered. There is never a reason to use the Submachine gun, never a reason to use a splitter barrel to make a gun less accurate for literally no benefit. The broadsider was a joke, the .44 magnum couldn't hurt a fly. Explosive weapons relied solely on a oversight in perks, requiring 9 ranks of perks just to be decent. Alien blaster was just a fancy laser pistol, etc.
This isn't just a blanket buff to all guns (I specifically made this mod because other mods I found did just that) but most of the guns I did mess with were buffed because that was just the more logical choice than a ton of blanket nerfs.
If you think the weapons do too much damage, then there's mods out there that let you adjust incoming/outgoing damage multipliers across the board and the way I made this mod, means these tweaks should keep the weapons in-line with one another and filling the same roles/niche's regardless of your difficulty/damage settings.
When you complain weapons being buffed or doing to much damage, it shows you don't know a thing about high level fallout 4 gameplay.
Sure you could argue this gives some encouragement to use the weapon in survival mode since rockets are heavy, but I'm just saying for very hard it feels off.
Everything else, minigun, double barrel shotgun, etc. Good stuff! Especially the submachine gun!
Honestly imo, I think the problem isn't how strong it is, its how easy it is to get missiles, what with ammo boxes frequently spawning with 4 missiles or 4 mini nukes all over the world. So in non-survival gameplay, you can fire hundreds. Its basically impossible to balance the two modes due to this discrepancy.
Maybe one day if I come back to this, I might look into making an optional module that reduces the lvlist loot for missiles so you find 1 instead of 4 at a time.
I noticed that you boosted the base dmg of the pipe revolver so that it hit harder than the 10 mm (which would remove the point of the revolver)- great move. But then boosted the dmg of the 10 mm so it was closer to that of the Deliverer... Meaning, the 10 mm and the pipe revolver now have the same dmg again, making the revolver pointless. Maybe rather than that, perhaps reduce the Deliverer dmg. Surely a .45 revolver would hit harder than a 10 mm anything? Just at a much slower rate of fire, so it becomes more your weapon for dealing with high armour targets before you get enough .44 rounds to do the same with a heavier revolver. You use the 10 mm for general combat and pull out a revolver for high dmg resistance targets. Less DSP, but gets through the armour?
(For reference, the vanilla Deliverer does 25 base damage and vanilla pipe revolver does 24 and vanilla 10mm does 18. I believe I nerfed deliverer to about 23 damage with a small fire rate boost, buffed the 10mm to 25 and then in 1.1 I buffed the pipe revolver to around 30 iirc)
The 10 mm and the pipe revolver do the same damage for me, so I think another of my mods may be overruling it. I will investigate. Thank you for clarifying.
I find that the bleed effects on ranged weapons makes them so overpowered, that at level 8 I can bring down a Matriarch Deathclaw if I don't let it hit me, with a bleed pipe pistol. As such, if I get a bleed ranged weapon, I scrap it as it breaks the gameplay experience for me.
Burn weapons on the other hand seem to have the opposite effect, ie burn mod for laser rifle. Each shot resets the burn, rather than adds additional burning, and unlike bleed with ignores armour, burn dmg is reduced by energy resistance. The combined effect of this is that burn damage from the weapon mod or legendary effects is negligible. There are mods which change this, but they often let burn ignore resistance, and let it stack - at which point it becomes as ovp as the bleed damage. If its something you plan on looking into, and making bleed and burn immersive and make a bit more sense, that would be great, as I don't think many others have bothered.
problem with stacking DoTs is that its going to be broken on high fire rate weapons pretty much no matter what. (One of the reasons I personally don't play with popular mods that let you swap legendary effects around or craft them, too much temptation to make busted OP weapons, RNG is really the only "balance" for certain combos)
Bleed does relatively low damage, has a fairly short duration, getting it to feel somewhat balanced without nerfing it too hard would take a lot of tweaking and testing, hours that right now I don't really have to spend.
Fire could definitely do with a damage buff but thats if I ever get back into modding (Don't even have Bethesda.net installed on the PC right now, let alone the CK)
So I don't disagree, but I also just don't really have the time or interest right now.