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
2 comments
I've been playing on Normal, and have been instakilled multiple times in later levels with over 200 health. Just now, a raider with a plasma rifle killed my 225 health character with 13 DT with one shot. I've had the same thing occur with a raider wielding a laser rifle at a similar level.
1. Damage already tends to trend higher than expected because the AI prioritises headshots on the player; apparently, it determines that the ×2 damage modifier makes it an optimal target. Some debate about whether this applies in vanilla, or if you need mods like BLEED to get this result.
2. IF the VW damage adjustments are applied on top of limb damage multipliers, then a normal difficulty head shot will already deal 4× base weapon damage. If a plasma rifle deals ~40 damage normally, a VW headshot can be assumed to deal 160 damage - and much more on a crit.
3. If you have "bLocalizedDTDR = 1" in your jip_nvse.ini file, head shots only apply the DT/DR you get from headgear. If all your DT/DR comes from body gear, head shots will ignore that.
4. Plasma rifles get bonus crit damage. Nasty.
Good news is there may be a fix for this. I'd use the "JIP Localized Damage Fix" mod by Sweet6Shooter with some tweaks. It's meant to solve a slightly different problem by changing all the player's body part damage multipliers to ×2 so that the AI doesn't exclusively target your head, but you can adjust that mod's .ini file to lower those modifiers a bit (unless you're a masochist). Personally, I'd take the average damage multiplier across all body parts, treating each pair of limbs as a single unit - so with 4 body parts (head, torso, arms, legs), 3 of which have ×1 modifiers and 1 of which has a ×2 modifier, I'd change them all to a ×1.25 modifier. That way, you're theoretically taking about the same amount of damage on average as you would before if the AI had picked body part targets at random (rather than focusing on head shots), but the damage will be a little more even over time (so fewer 1-shots from full health).
I can't guarantee this tweak will work as intended - can't say for sure without knowing how VW makes its damage adjustments - but it might be worth a try.