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Vicious Wastes' goal with combat is to add contrast to the difficulty curve where there wasn't before. Taking cues from Fallout 2, the early game is where you will struggle the most, and by the end of the game you will be very powerful, but not a demigod as you would be by the end of Fallout 3 and New Vegas.
When determining how high to set the damage, all of the initial playtesting was performed with unarmored, companionless characters. Damage was balanced so that it felt reasonable for naked, solo characters to complete all of the vanilla game and DLC content on Very Hard difficulty.
DIFFICULTY SETTINGS
Difficulty Settings in Bethesda games (and therefore New Vegas) focus on making enemies deal more damage, and endure a lot more damage. Vicious Wastes tends to lean towards keeping the player powerful, and the enemies even deadlier to account for their poor AI, equipment, etc.
Below is a table demonstrating how Vicious Wastes primarily modifies damage:
On Very Hard, the baseline difficulty in Vicious Wastes, you will deal three times more damage than you would be dealing in the vanilla game. Conversely, enemies will deal 50% more damage compared to vanilla.
Paired with this, limb and sneak attack damage have been altered as well. Headshots are most effective against humanoids, but hitting arms and legs deals the least damage to total health. Creatures and robots have a wide variety of limb damage multiplier combinations, so we can't get into that here.
NOTE: Difficulty damage multipliers only affect the damage after all other damage calculations. It modifies the small amount of damage remaining that comes through armor, not before.
SO, HOW DOES IT AFFECT SURVIVABILITY?
There is a misconception that Vicious Wastes' damage is extremely high, often to the point of insta-killing the player, and even worse, making armor useless. I would like to clear up some of these claims.
Below is a number of examples of using average characters with 5 Endurance at various level thresholds. All of the following examples assume Very Hard difficulty, weapon at full condition, and the attacking NPC has 100 in the relevant weapon skill.
Damage during actual gameplay will be significantly lower due to NPCs having poor accuracy and generally low skills, but I used the base damage values to really demonstrate that damage isn't that high.
As you can see, you can die very quickly while unarmored and by specializing your character poorly, but survivability is very reasonable for an average 5-Endurance character -- armored or not. Damage is just high enough to give value to the previously marginalized Life Giver, and add lots of value to Buffout, Med-X, Sierra Madre Martini, and Black/Blood Sausage
SINCE DAMAGE IS HIGHER, IS A MELEE/UNARMED PLAYSTYLE USELESS?
This is an issue that just about every damage rebalance mod suffers from, but I've gone through a great deal of effort to keep Melee and Unarmed as a valuable playstyle.
Some of these changes include:
- Ammunition is much more rare and expensive to supply yourself with, compared to the vanilla game
- Ranged weaponry now makes use of Perception in order to be accurate, just like melee and unarmed has its own associated attributes
- Targetting non-vital body parts will deal notably less damage; Melee and Unarmed don't have this worry.
- Psycho (Slasher, Yao Guai Meat, etc) no longer affect ranged weapon damage
- This brings the damage potential to a much more reasonable level instead of ranged weapons outclassing melee in all scenarios
- This brings the damage potential to a much more reasonable level instead of ranged weapons outclassing melee in all scenarios
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